hackermatic

I credit a lot of my worldview and politics to the fact that I have a lot of friends who are poor and/or have chronic health conditions, and that I have to contrast that with my well-paying and secure tech job and other institutional advantages.

I've been with them on the phone and in waiting rooms, seeing firsthand how they have to navigate systems (both public and private) that are set up to fail -- public benefits systems that randomly corrupt their information and require them to prove they aren't defrauding the government, mental health hospitalizations that leave them more traumatized than when they entered, abusive bosses who take advantage of their precarity, systems that would leave me as an able-bodied/able-minded person absolutely exhausted and demoralized. And most of the time, all I can do is hug them, and send them money when things break down worse than usual.

It keeps me humble, and angry, and with a real sense of survivor's guilt.

To summarize this essay, the thesis and most of the arguments of Marc Andreesen's manifesto are hypocritical.

A fitting rebuttal to Andreesen's manifesto is Erin Kissane's recent series about how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar. "Trust and safety" as enemies, indeed. https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

> Learning to fly a Jetson ONE takes about five hours of training, D'haene tells Axios. The pilot uses intuitive joystick controls to go up or down and to accelerate and steer, while the flight computer handles the complicated stuff — like keeping the aircraft stable.

Sure, and I learned how to drive a car in 10 minutes in a parking lot, but learning to do it safely, in a real environment, around other cars and people, was and still is the hard part.

Now try doing that in three dimensions instead of two. I don't think flying cars should be allowed until they can be fully autonomous.

1. Long Length

2. Complex

3. Random

This blog post is an ad for Bitwarden, but the principles are sound, and any good password manager will help you achieve them.

This will still use Starlink satellites, so it doesn't clear up the issue of whether Musk will be able to shut down US military communications that he doesn't like.

> The deal, with a ceiling of $70 million will “provide for Starshield end-to-end service via the Starlink constellation, user terminals, ancillary equipment, network management and other related services."

https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1707138990422298826

Yes, so I get 80% of the normal salary for my role, but the same benefits package (insurance, 401(k) match, etc.).

I have a four-day, 32-hour work week, and I am less productive, but that was the plan up front and I'm very okay with that (and luckily, so is my management).

I wanted more personal time, and I also needed more time to take care of my physical and mental health with appointments -- which all of my providers schedule during the 9-AM-to-5-PM period anyway -- and simple rest and relaxation. If I didn't have this schedule, there's a good chance I wouldn't still be at this current job or would have burned out earlier in general, and my contributions are valued, so it works out well for all parties involved.

But I don't think you have to justify it so concretely or morally -- you can just want to do a day's less formal work, or want to work toward a society with less work and more leisure time! The 40-hour work week is arbitrary, anyway.

Dividing by zero was a lot more exciting on those mechanical calculators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU9ICaPZUCg

One of the things the Cold War taught us is that we almost destroyed the world with nuclear weapons several times because of accidents and misinterpretations, by both humans and computers. Having a human in the loop who was willing to say "no" or "wait"[0] may be why we are still here having this discussion today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Then he should resign from the Coinbase board of directors and the Thistledown Foundation. Shopify requires his "unshared attention."

Your TLS (HTTPS) certificate is misconfigured, so I get a browser security warning when I attempt to click the link. The certificate is for firebaseapp.com and *.firebaseapp.com but needs to be for scavinge.com.

A couple quick ideas for political activism against autonomous weapons:

The "Stop Killer Robots" campaign: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/

Asking your nation to support the upcoming UN General Assembly resolution against autonomous weapons: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/news/unga-resolution-on-aut...

And having personal conversations with your friends in technology and defense industries who may contribute to these technologies.

It feels like the people who develop "search results to GPT" or "random website to GPT" features should know better by now.

Another good source for current news on COVID is the People's CDC weekly weather reports: https://peoplescdc.org/weatherreports/

> Instead of the exception, labour shortages could become the norm.

They have already become the norm since COVID without labor activism. A lot of nurses haven't gone on strike, just left the profession. There aren't enough mental health practitioners or other medical specialists (and in my experience before COVID, waitlists for experienced providers were already 1-6 months, whether in private practice or in hospital systems). Several restaurants I've been to lately have had open tables but an hour-long wait to be served because there aren't enough wait staff or cooks.

Some of this is people burning out or switching to jobs with better pay and benefits. But millions of people are also disabled because of Long COVID: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-data-shows-long-covid...

I was asked to help evaluate a couple code-generating LLMs at work, so I set out to build a couple toy apps in languages and frameworks I wasn't very familiar with.

My experience was that it was about as useful as searching Google and Stack Overflow without knowing what a good answer looks like. You copy and paste a lot of code, a lot of it works, but inevitably, something breaks and you have no idea why. So you still have to go back to "the hard way" of reading the documentation and building an understanding.

I'm sure things will improve over time, especially for products built specifically for code generation, but my first and second impression is that so far, LLMs don't actually lower the bar for junior programmers.

This could be an important update to prevent phishing attacks with document attachments that contain malicious .webp images. I haven't seen one of those yet, but a non-weaponized, proof of concept malformed .webp is out there along with a detailed technical writeup, so it's only a matter of time: https://blog.isosceles.com/the-webp-0day/

Related discussion from the Epic Games layoff side of things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37692372

It's a fantastic museum, because they not only have this, but the Spruce Goose, the largest wooden airplane ever built (and it is massive)! https://www.evergreenmuseum.org/exhibit/the-spruce-goose/

> Within those 6,000 files are supposedly a bevy of documentation, including unknown “build log files,” a swath of Java resources, and HTML data.

It sounds like they compromised a backwater CI/CD system or something.

As in, API calls to generate secrets, change permissions, and so on

I like that you call out that this is mediocre even by compact car standards. We've lost so much fleet fuel efficiency because of SUVs and trucks, but there's no reason why a compact shouldn't be at least 50mpg.

I was really interested in the Chevrolet Spark until I realized it only gets 29 city/38 highway. I really don't understand how it's that bad.

Have you built out the backend functionality to support those features? Doing those right is the hard part; after that, it's just a regular front-end development problem.

My perception of the history of long-distance American railroads (not ones that were built for a specific task like connecting a mine to a market) is that many of them -- maybe even most of them -- were failures in their first iteration. After going bankrupt and ruining a lot of investors, others bought the assets at fire-sale prices, and the opportunity to avoid the massive capital outlay of actually building the lines is what made them profitable in the long run.

It's hard enough for me to verbalize complicated or emotional thoughts -- not worrying about how I appear to the other person on video or in person lets me focus a lot better. Sometimes they need to be able to see your face for the message to really get across, but sometimes they don't.

That's what I've noticed, too -- even casual trail walkers are much more likely to greet you and smile.

> "I like climate but I don't want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living."

Living with "fire season" and months of haze each summer has already reduced my standard of living.

You can tour a few decommissioned or training missile silos in the US: https://www.afmissileers.org/Tour-a-Missile-Silo

I've been inside the trainer silo at Ellsworth Air Force Base as part of a visit to the South Dakota Air & Space Museum. It's a fascinating and eerie experience, especially because there is actually an inert missile still in the silo.

The cultural differences about this are vast even in the United States. In the part of the Midwest where I grew up, strangers would come up and offer compliments about your outfit or car, make friendly small talk in the grocery store checkout line, or at least offer a quiet "hi" and smile when passing on the sidewalk. In the Pacific Northwest, we try not to even look at each other when passing, although people are friendly when something does get us talking.