mmcdermott

This is also why legal action must be taken against OpenAI for the Hugging Face incident, as well as any similar incidents. Their computer, their programs, their responsibility.

I've never gotten a lot of mileage out of treating tests as documentation. It is getting worse with how many people just tell the LLM to produce tests matching the code.

> Technical debt is nearly a nothingburger now. If you went in the wrong direction, just... change the code to go in the right direction.

Uncharitable though it may sound, what I hear reading this is "Tell me you've never worked on a large system without telling me you've never worked on a large system."

The deeper the concentration, the fewer words I want - or at least words I understand. Classical music with words I don't understand can also work quite well. There also seems to be a vague point where I have heard the lyrics so many times they stop being distracting.

I prefer silence but generally use music to focus. My choices aren't usually music or silence in practice, but music or office background noise.

Since my ordered ranking is Silence, then Music, with Office Noise last, music it is.

Perhaps, but it is also the way in which LLM providers eat their seed corn. If everyone publishes less because the only one to consume it will be an LLM gives no credit, then LLMs will lose training material over time.

Slavery was a controversy from the beginning that finally bubbled over into the Civil War. It was not, as this question seems to imply, a near universally approved of practice where a few just didn't happen to need slaves.

That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.

Spite & Malice was always one of my favorites.

I think what gets most people is the double standard.

IP should either exist for everyone (which would cripple LLM providers) or no one, in which case the Pirate Bay and shadow libraries should be fully open.

Even if we accept that, the millions dead and incalculable human suffering incurred by the attempts is more than reason enough to stop trying.

There was no greater cause of human suffering in the 20th century than the worldwide attempts to build communist governments.

> Oh, they love to do precisely that.

I think it's been pretty well established that most legislators do not take the time to understand the details of bills prior to voting.

Moreover, these articles refer to an attempt to question how grant money already given (and presumably spent) was used.

Scrutiny is an inherent part of the powers of the purse. I.e. "we gave you $100 million to provide disaster relief, economic development in our sphere of influence, etc - what did you do with it?"

It's fair to want to retain the spending being questioned, but Congress is explicitly responsible for this function.

> something a congressional rep is deciding on.

Congress does not, by and large, get down to that level. They are typically approving a line time that encompasses a form of lump sum (i.e. "$100 million to NSF across these categories").

You can see the budget request here: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2026

Defense spending would typically be a gruesome bidding process.

But either way, your proposal must at some point speak to something a generalist would understand. And that is how it should be - anything else is taxation without representation.

Deep expertise is not a blank check for funding. There is only so much money to go around and at some point you have to articulate your value to those paying for it (in this case, the tax payers and their representatives).

Yes, this means a high level summary generally focused on ends rather than the gory details of the means.

An expert acting in good faith should be able to provide this or, in the spirit of the Feynman technique, I would argue they aren't much of an expert at all.

This is the big one for me. I have no inherent problem with bigger budget stuff, but it is seldom about the things that interest me.

If it was a digital transcript service alone, yes, it is a success.

Claiming that the transcripts were generated by a nonexistant AI is fraud and should be treated as such.

Eh - if you extend this mode of thinking to all of your purchases, you would have to withdraw from nearly all economic activity.

I didn't say anything about Inconsistency, so I will set that to the side.

My entire point is that these things are seldom so black and white as put forward. The US administration has a self serving answer, but so do the French and this anonymous scientist. Which do you think is less professionally damaging for a European, being denied entrance due to views on American politics or being denied based on mishandling of classified material?

In an ideal world, I would prefer to see any mishandling of classification prosecuted, that seldom is how it works.

Without knowing a timeline, it isn't even clear which administration was running things under which events.

That's a false dichotomy. The severity depends on what the individual attempted to remove. Nuclear secrets might be unacceptable to allow him to leave. Something more administrative might not be worth the jurisdiction hassle to prosecute but still get the individual flagged against re-entry.

None of the articles I found went into more detail than the NY Times one. What they all say in common is that the French researcher was denied entrance. If the US version is true (and I can't be sure either way), then the presupposition would be that individual was already on a DHS list, not that customs necessarily found it.

As for whether they knowingly let a spy leave, that would depend on a full timeline.

> the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.

This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.

I see one key difference. Teaching code should be stripped down to only what is required for what is being taught. Everything else must go.

You can see this dichotomy in Scheme. Versions <= 5 were teaching first, everything else second. Versions 6+ tried to do both.

You can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and all such things without submitting them to a human censor (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/p... for this usage).

> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.

Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?

One major failing of WebDAV for these use cases is that the spec requires you to `PUT` the whole resource/file in order to save changes. This isn't too bad when the individual files are small, but as your single file apps grow, this means a lot of data transfer without the comforts of differential uploads.

> One of my own pet peeves in Forged In Fire was that every contestant would submit Damascus (-style) blades for their final showdowns. It just wasn’t necessary and often just looked trashy.

Agreed. There was a much smaller emphasis on Damascus steel in early seasons. If you go back and rewatch you can see the frequency pick up as they praised and required Damascus more and more.

I didn't read the actual filing, but the linked article days that Android is excluded, but implies it could be included later:

> While the government isn’t going as far as to demand Google spin out its Android business, it’s leaving the option open.

> A friend suggests doubling the number and increasing to the next unit — hours become days, days become weeks, etc.

I don't know. Going from 8 hours => 16 days seems like quite the markup.

To add to this, it is revealed in Hitchhikers that dolphins are super intelligent extraterrestrials. "So long and thanks for all the fish" is the superintelligent dolphins farewell to the last of earth/hummanity.

> Professional Engineer licensure to be able to actually charge for software (this carves out exception for FOSS and freeware) could raise the costs enough to make this kind of software engineering viable.

You would almost certainly see an increase of in-house software developers and consultants where the code is never charged for, but is developed as it always has been. A few big companies like Microsoft and IBM would get certified and smaller software companies would be driven out of existence entirely.

There would definitely not be a golden age of rigorous software.