pphysch

The autopilot analogy is good because level 4-5 are essentially vaporware outside of success in controlled environments backed by massive investment and engineering.

How is it conceptually different? RDBMS ORM-based web frameworks (with built-in Admin GUIs) ate the web-oriented crowd, and the rest are happy managing their data in Excel. That doesn't leave much room for MS Access.

> MS Access for the web with an SSO

This is essentially Rails and Django and so on

Snowflake and Databricks provide data storage and pipeline features and therefore have extraordinary lock-in potential, which allows them to have sustainable business models.

GPU compute is essentially fungible. That's quite a stretch to compare those business models. Snowflake and Databricks don't necessarily have the best "value-add" and they don't need to.

Israel was car bombing Iran less than a year ago, with the open intention of destroying the state through terrorism. Yet violent agitation is a bridge too far?

What is "going after [...] the people who vote" supposed to mean?

There are many reasons why you can have violence in the streets, especially in a climate of enormous foreign manipulation. An enemy state was setting off car bombs just a year ago...

Is the Hash Index method strictly superior to creating a unique "hash" column and precomputing the hash in the application or query?

The microeconomics of that decision are poor for the company, but the macroeconomics are great. But the macro angle has been reduced to "Fed interest rate" in America.

"China bots everywhere" or generally making renewable energy seem like a nefarious foreign plot is itself a big oil talking point. When your argument can't stand on the facts, deploy the Big Bad Bogeyman.

That would be nice. It looks more like the early 1900s with naked imperialism and crony capitalism right now. Possibly staring down the barrel of a 1930s economic collapse.

The minmax representation makes less sense if you are frequently updating the 3D objects position, no? You really want both representations available.

It make sense to generate the bounds JIT when you are actually building an octree to test collisions. Assuming you have a nontrivial amount of objects.

The obvious problem is that Grok is also distributing the illegal images.

This could be easily fixed by making the generated images sent through private Grok DMs or something, but that would harm the bottom line. Maybe they will do that eventually once they have milked enough subscriptions from the "advertising".

An AI-enabled developer is still a full-time job that requires SWE expertise. I think the quoted portion is correct, but it will be a gradual change as CTO/CIOs realize the arbitrage opportunity in replacing most of their crappy SaaS subscriptions with high-velocity in-house solutions. The savvy ones, at least.

European software industry is so interesting because my impression is that the (Western) OSS sector is largely supported by talented European developers. Just a vibe from interacting with hundreds of successful OSS projects.

Europe clearly has endemic talent, and I'm not even sure it's a funding problem rather than an organizational/leadership one. They could throw money at developers who already have decent if humble QoL, or they could bring them together to build large systems that can compete with American big tech.

You mean base64? 10 digits is only 10 billion addresses

Predatory loans were maligned as "usury" long before "rent-seeking" or Scary Marxists came along. For good reason. They're bad for society and the economy writ large.

Which is rarely longer than a year, and many people go month-to-month, if they even have a contract.

Yep. The initial marketing video makes it seem like a "brain+motor" super-brick that can somehow turn minifigs into robots and autonomously drive vehicles. But no, it's just a speaker + couple LEDs and a proximity sensor.

It's still a neat toy, but way oversold.

To be clear, the SMART brick is not much of a "programmable logic toy", topping out at "if near X, play U sound".

Your last paragraph is spot on though.

Destroying the fabs would hurt the West a lot more than China, which is rapidly playing catch up (while US and EU are not).

The other glaring flaw in this pop-geopolitics narrative is that China already has enormous economic leverage over the West, even without the chip supply chain.

A lot of the changes you are referring to were probably implemented by Lina Khan's FTC.

Guess where Lina Khan is now.

Why would Taiwan destroying its own assets disincentivize annexation goals that have existed long before computer chips were produced there?

> Part of my problem is that the ecosystem is big. There's too much to learn: OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Zipkin, Micrometer, eBPF, auto-instrumentation, OTel SDK vs Datadog Agent, and on and on. I don't know, maybe I'm biased by the JVM-heavy systems I've been working in.

We've had success keeping things simple with VictoriaMetrics stack, and avoiding what we perceive as unnecessary complexity in some of the fancier tools/standards.

The same applies to Universities and "democratic" institutions.

Nor is it The Atlantic.

> There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another.

Beyond being self-contradictory (CIA is passive but also they interfere on key issues) this is just false. The West has spent a lot of (covert) resources undermining China in the past decade in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, trade and tech wars, COVID, and so on. All attempts which have failed dramatically, perhaps partly due to the lack of IC penetration into society and government.

The West hasn't stopped interfering in Iran though. They did massive terrorist attacks there just a year ago. Israel would openly salivate at the prospect of destroying Iranian agriculture and water supply.

China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...

On the contrary, being able to access (largely/verifiably) correct solutions to tangible & relevant problems is an extremely great way to learn by example.

It should probably be supplemented with some good old RTFM, but it does get us somewhat beyond the "blind leading the blind" StackOverflow paradigm of most software engineering.

Oh no, not the Used Cooking Oil. Thank you DoJ for keeping our streets safe.

Seriously though, what's the usual lifecycle for those waste oil tanks? Will the owner sell the contents to a recycler when it's full?