munk-a

I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.

Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.

Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.

Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.

They kind of do, though, their sales have been dropping year over year during an extreme fuel crisis - and Chinese EVs are coming for their lunch.

I'm not certain how early you saw the internet - but a lot of people threw up websites hosted on consumer quality computers sitting in the corner of their room. Don't underestimate people.

Not at all, a few people pay to make it available as a service to others because they want it to exist. It's like this website - there are no (traditional) ads and most of us have paid nothing to use it. A small expenditure creates a good community for technical discussion that the hosts value existing and for being able to occasionally promote their ventures on.

Oh darn, maybe we should just ban the entire online advertising industry. Gosh, what value we'd lose if we couldn't have our personalized attention destroying glitter boxes.

My opinion on web infra patronage has shifted over time, I used to generally accept that for small websites to exist advertising was a necessary evil since they were too niche to have a real revenue source. Then I ran one and I realized that there's far more labor costs involved in maintaining a site than infra costs and that for niche hobbies and communities ten bucks can just find its way into a central pot every month to keep the lights on by those with a bit more to spare.

I am now of the opinion that web communities can survive in the same way arts and other liberal pursuits have always survived. People with a bit more to spare put more into the pot to create the community they want to exist in and "freeloaders" is an alien concept to the genuinely interested since that money is being spent to create a place where meeting can take place without a financial requirement.

Before the tariff spree and general unpredictability the US could likely have muscled most of the rest of the world into following suit - now, not so much.

The goal is personal wealth - and scaring nations to the point of diverting even more wealth towards your coffers because of a perceived existential risk.

Wealth accumulation via scare tactics is a classic move of defense contractors and AI firms are quite capable of running the same playbook.

I consider "Create a throwaway" to be in line with the guideline posted above. It does violate it literally but not in spirit - the guideline is not to use an API key with the ability to draw unlimited or a very large amount of funds.

> It’s 20% more effort than writing Python or Typescript

I'd disagree with this point, there is more typing involved with a first draft of code than Python or Typescript, that's certainly true, but if we bring all the tools (e.g. docblock comments for "type declaration") that are habitual to make up for the shortcomings in most developer's minds then that gap shrinks and, imo, ends up swapping. It's cheaper to have automatically enforced and consistently maintained checks than moving that information out of band and the resulting code in a strictly typed and memory enforced language ends up removing a significant cognitive overhead when reading and maintaining the code.

I have a strong aversion to boilerplate code so it's important to try and allow terse expressions when possible - but unstated assumptions are worse than overstated assumptions.

Ah, so this article invalidates all of the safety guarantees of rust? Since one hole was found the entire boat is shot and should be left at the bottom of the harbor?

C++ has a terrible reputation which is well associated with, say C++98, if you have a good linter you can bop people on the head for using news anywhere outside a few limited locations where you consider it warranted. All working environments have language features or even programming paradigms that are considered detrimental to code ecosystem health and fighting against these is an organizational lift when working in any programming language. Full type security doesn't mean someone can't create an overly generic object and just start breaking code contracts across the code base. C++ has an awful lot of footguns and more warts than most but it can be made to be sane for development and the new language features really bring it on par with other modern languages.

I have worked in C++ (primarily within the Qt framework which pushed hard into const refs instead of pointers) and it's fine. I've also worked in PHP which can also be fine. Rust isn't something I've worked at scale in but it certainly is very attractive if I ever jump to an org working in it - but even in Rust you'll want to restrict style divergence and bad patterns with linting.

Most libraries could secure specific books if you needed them and they weren't stocked at that specific location. It was very dependent on the library but your local librarian would know the process for your specific location.

It's dependent on the minerals being prospected for and the mining techniques as well as general awareness and regulations that were in place during operation. Yellowknife has a huge ecological issue due to Arsenic being actively used in Giant Mine[1] but that was introduced to ease mining (mercury is also commonly used for gold extraction and purification, though occasionally offsite). So it really depends on the mine. Mines are never good for the environment but how toxic they are will vary.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine

It's like the Facebook -> Meta rebrand, Facebook was a dirty word at the time while Meta wasn't (gosh that didn't last long though) so it was an attempt to try and get rid of the accumulated negativity and hope that searches for the topic of Meta only returned bland and positive results instead of dredging up the many ongoing court cases.

Let's not confuse an ethics team with HR. The later exists to ensure proper legal adherence with a varying degree of benefit to the employees. The former[1] is an electively instated position that usually has a dual mandate somewhere between the polls of "Make leadership confident that teams don't make them lose sleep" and "Make teams confident that leadership doesn't make them lose sleep" (usually leaning strongly towards the second) as a sort of employee moral assurance team. I don't disagree that the ethicist is partially there to justify actions but they're mainly there to be seen as an obstruction to particularly egregious actions so that, if, for instance, you have a boring data center maintenance job, you can have the belief that nobody is using the product of your labor to for something heinous. The efficacy of such teams is quite questionable but there is some logic in assigning the job of worrying about ethical considerations to one person that can shove their nose in every crack and cranny so that every individual employees can talk to/lean on that person instead of needing to go to such lengths themselves if they feel compelled to do so.

Most people don't like to do evil (even if the money is good) so allowing an economy of scale around morale reassurance is rational. This obviously breaks down if the company is seen to hide things from that department or if that department is clearly, themselves, unethical. The first of those conditions are why ethics departments at Meta and OpenAI have very little efficacy.

1. Outside of extreme circumstances where it has been mandated to be a specific regulatory board because of past actions or fear of future actions in which case it's better viewed as part of the bureaucracy of the governing body (usually the state, sometimes a shareholder or other concerned party).

Lets assume one of two worlds - one where AI is constantly improving and one where the tooling is a dead end. In the first world the AI generated comments are no better than the commentary that would be generated in the next six months - in the second world the AI generated comments will obscure the human written comments.

In what world are AI generated comments actually value adds?

In this context they're not the same thing. Calls from companies legitimately operating in the country need to obey laws or face enforcement (ideally, unless the government is asleep at the wheel) while calls from scammers outside of the country are breaking a bunch of laws anyways so who cares about violating a do not call list.

I consider marketing is a plague on attention and view it highly negatively - but in the case of tools to reduce unwanted phone calls there are some real differences in what's available to legitimate vs. scam callers and a do not call list can only ever be effective against people working within the system.

It suffers from an ends-justify-the-means trap where bad actions in the short term with the long term goal of good actions are justified by the fact that you, the actor, know your philosophy is the best way to enact positive change.

I'm happy to try and get already wealthy individuals on the train of effective altruism but it has been used to justify wealth concentration far too much and, to be honest, spreading money around is one of the most effective ways to enact real positive changes in the world since individuals know their own situations the best.

Moving elements on screens is viewed as slick but is also a strong statement that the website knows how it is best to consume itself and depriving the user of the control over how to interact with it. I think there's been a big misunderstanding from UX designers about what features users actually value over time and too great a reliance on short window A/B UX comparisons where the cool effect of animations has not yet worn through.

This is also complicated by the fact that _all UX changes are bad_ until the users get used to them. So if you genuinely believe you're providing a better UX you do need to ignore the initial wave of negativity - which makes it difficult to tell knee-jerk reactions from genuine criticism if you're glossing over the results.

This is probably (if the business here is large enough to support it) an excellent area for a tailored model instead of a general purpose LLM. A lot of the context around medication comprehension is going to be rather universal to pharmacies and other HCPs so ideally that information would be baked into the model itself with the actual user supplied context mostly being focused on business specific logic. The commodity LLMs are just an amalgam of a hammer welded to a screwdriver, a car, a compass and a toothbrush - more specialized models, with more specialized testing and offered by a company specialized in the field would possibly offer a decent customer experience here?

With something like healthcare though I'll remain eternally skeptical that anything other than a licensed expert will be palatable to the public.

There were some brief excellent years in the nascent days of the blogosphere where stories that CNN would miss (especially stories about marginalized groups) managed to get widespread attention and the compensation to journalists held up. But where we are today in terms of news compared to the 00s or 90s (even with all the retrospective knowledge about journalism catastrophes like NYT's coverage of the Iraq War) is so much fundamentally worse.

Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.

Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.

> If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?

It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow.

My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.

It can happen - and companies can recover from that. But that's wasting a whole lot of money and a lot of executives will sunk cost fallacy themselves into continuing when that may be the much saner decision.

I didn't mean to imply that all companies that went hard into AI will die - just that a lot of companies that follow the trend may not realize the true maintenance costs and of those that did misguidedly follow the trend I'm sure some will luck or manage their way out of disaster for various reasons.

Drug names are frequently BS loaded with strange consonants without singular pronunciation guidelines (sadly English isn't German) so humans already have a lot of variation in how things are pronounced - models then need to comprehend those variations, regional dialects (like those fuggin' ahs from Boston).

It ends up being quite a lot of variation.

As some examples: Wegovy, Ixempra, Qvar, Keflex

This, I suspect, is exactly like offshoring - and a lot of companies died during the offshoring fad because their software products become full of low quality merges and feature improvements that the company couldn't afford to fix or remove by the time they realized there was a problem. That remains my primary concern with AI code generation - well established codebases might become full of slop to the point of being unusable without a clear path back to maintainability leading to company death.

Oh, then Elon beat you to it.

If the Murakami was undertranslated then how will having more translations that crowd out the potential revenue of future translators help produce better quality translations?

If this ruling results in Meta fully withdrawing from New Mexico because it's unlikely they'll actually net on a per customer basis than nothing of value will be lost.

I am nuanced enough to appreciate that these qualities are present in the products being produced and still not buy from this producer because of their industry ties. Hopefully someone without such ridiculously unpalatable PR is able to copycat their design and sell a competitor - and hopefully the lead they've laid sets the standard for easily replaceable parts for the market (though, I'd mention that retro gaming hardware is intentionally made to be as modular as possible in most circumstances anyways).

> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded

I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible...

Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor.