nickdothutton

Better to have smart bombs than dumb ones. Or rather, better to have 1 smart bomb than 1000 dumb ones spread across an entire city in order to pick off the particular building, vehicle, or person you want.

POC of GTFO should apply to AI models too, or the false positive rate will overwhelm.

What a great article. Several years ago I wrote a (far inferior) post along similar lines, using a famous railway/bridge disaster[1]. Study of these kinds of engineering failures, even those from hundreds of years ago, are so revealing. I'd lay money on similar reports from the days of the ancient Egyptians as being just as valuable.

[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/the-age-of-invisible-disasters/

Hard to imagine now, but this was a huge turning point. A genuinely powerful CPU in a "Pee-Cee" available for less than RISC workstation money. I had to wait a while, mine was an AMD DX2-66 since I didn't have a budget for Intel... add Slackware... and countess hours messing with XF86config and I had a poor-mans Sun workstation.

These are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.

I use a separate user account per project on my local machine (not in sudoers), which I ssh to, and also runs tmux. If I need claude code in windows, then I run a VM. The performance and (in)convenience cost of this to me is minimal. I started working this way in order to limit the "blast radius" when claude went on a dependency binge within a project.

"Gradually, then suddenly", as someone once said.

Title is wrong, should be "New form of cancer discovered".

When I got started, the NSFnet backbone was a bunch of IBM RS/6000 systems with comms cards. There were no routers.[1]

[1] https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/

Recently working on implementing a "MS Teams for the terminal" (video conf, audio, chat, file sharing, recording, etc, the usual things you would expect). Linux and Mac, FBSD and others to follow. Prior to the 1M context window I found I had to restrict myself to specific functionality/areas of the codebase. I'd gotten lazy anyway so this was no bad thing. Reduced the "vibe" quotient of the AI coding.

I wish someone would build a LinkedIn that was actually good. That you could actually do business over, and no I don't mean spam people with you BS cold emails which must have a 10000:1 success rate. I wrote a bit about this almost a decade ago and there is nothing.[1]

[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

xv was fast, stable, had a good interface, and useful far beyond the normal lifespan of such a piece of software. Used it all the time in the early 90s.

Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.[1]

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

I wonder if you could do a good Atari Gauntlet clone as a terminal only game.

I occasionally "joke" that it was 9-11 where we shifted timelines to the alternate universe. 1 minute Fukuyama announces the end of history and our future will consist of abundance and TV and shopping, the next...

Ah great another reason to add to the many reasons not to use this OS. Semi serious question, is Apple looking to dump its existing customer base for a new, perhaps consumer not pro-sumer one?

This is what specifically caused me to make the late stage empire comment. When the flip comes, you know you are in that phase. Speaking as a Brit. Other indicators are loss of reserve currency status, inward looking elite factions (can be of any party, it is not a partisan matter), and a few other things. One might have said “changed from creditor to debtor” but almost everyone is these days!

The Iran war has demonstrated the US cannot adequately defend its allies in the region, regardless of bases, whose existence was predicated on them having that capability. No?

All the current conflict has done is make obvious that reality.

I think there is a pretty good chance US is in the late empire phase. This is not about a single President or party, or even single geopolitical event/development.

From memory, it very much mattered on your choice of serial card/controller. High quality, high speed, (and high price) cards had their own buffers and better drivers resulting in fewer interrupts and more efficient use of host resources when supporting multiple concurrent file transfers at line speed. Being able to drive the modem-to-host connection faster than the modem connect speed was also helpful for modem protocols with compression.

Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.

Eizo EV3285 and MkI eyeball probably ruined by years of screen time: 0.0052 https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AgcgKP__PX8P

Given the high cost of professional textbooks and my modest means as a youngster, FidoNet and BBS provided me with access to a wealth of knowledge, software, and friendly expertise. Sometimes the first dreams of something new are the most vivid.

These big headline "UK investments" are always and without exception not what you might think they are. When you drill into them, which companies, what was bought, where was the profit realised, what actual _real_ R&D was funded? They balloons are easy to burst. No need to even get as far down the funnel as what products/services were brought to market, what was their adoption, and what shareholder value was created. I have seen almost 30 years of it now.

Partly it's because politicians think every dollar (pound) "invested" is the same, whether it goes on bricks and mortar or silicon or software.

UK has some of the highest priced electricity for industrial use on the planet. A result of deliberate policy choices. Who in their right mind would want to grow a vast datacentre estate there?

From great constraint springs great creativity. Brought back fond memories of the BBS scene in the 80s. Thanks to any USR people who may be reading this, my HST (with sysop discount) opened up a world to me.

"As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."

Fortunately, at least in my time, this was part of the curriculum in UK schools, and we had an exceptional English teacher. Like one of the other commenters here, I'm a science and numbers man, but can recite this poem still. Perhaps it was particularly memorable as I have an ancestor who occupies Sanctuary Wood as a consequence of a gas shell.

I'll try not to be too flippant but... he thought the US ever _wasn't_ an oligarchy?

Worked on a de-anonymiser in the 90s for identifying banned users and banning their newly created ban-avoidance accounts. Worked based on triplets of words. Worked surprisingly well, so this does not surprise me.

In large companies, especially those which do not depend on especially talented or specialised workers, HR is very much just a "people risk" department. People are an input, with them comes some risk, like tonnes of coal which might cause pollution, or sacks of ingredients which might go off and poison customers. Over many years I have come to understand this is how BigCo HR operates.

The risks might be different, they might be a bully, they might do bad work, they might be dishonest, or even just screw up (honestly) when under pressure, it's all risk to HR. I decided not to be an employee of such companies 20+ years ago, although I am not in the "commodity employee" set.

Feel free to adopt your own mental models.

Certainly. Indeed the trick is to wrangle London wages while based somewhere with less crime, more trees, a pollution-free waterway, and less traffic!

Edited for typo.