scottLobster

Well if you have the time and money to do a full security audit of these new libraries you're rolling, more power to you. And you excluded a lot of stuff I was thinking of, so that changes the argument. If these are non-critical dependencies then sure, do whatever you like.

> We like to optimize for actually keeping our customer’s data safe, rather than covering our butts :)

If you have the budget to back that up I'm jealous. Otherwise, pride cometh before a fall. I'm curious how you conducted that risk analysis. Just because a common COTS library has more documented vulnerabilities doesn't inherently mean your hand-rolled option has less, and the difference would naturally vary from library to library.

For my part I work in defense, and our customers prefer to hear that we're using industry standard libraries and have tons of questions if we're rolling our own stuff (first of which is "why are you wasting our time and money reinventing the wheel?"). It reduces liability for them as well, they can tell their higher-ups that they approved proven, industry-standard solutions as much as possible and they're only paying us for our unique expertise.

And rolling your own introduces brand new security holes. You're arguing security through obscurity, which is a particularly dead concept in the age of AI.

Also, you clearly don't work with products that have any sort of serious corporate liability. Being able to blame a supplier/library is almost always preferable to assuming the liability yourself

They don't have to. This particular train explodes on its own if it drop below 100 mph.

Even tepid regulation will destroy the "our TIA is the entire observable universe due to the potential of self replicating AI probes so we totally deserve 10 trillion dollars in investor capital" trade

> No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.

Yes, and humans evolved in an environment of resource scarcity. Literally every instinct we have, including addiction and every psychological condition we categorize as mental illness, is tuned to that.

We are not biologically equipped for a post-scarcity environment, and to thrive in such an environment without destroying it would take a monumental cultural adaptation that not many would be capable of. Children is a bad analogy, because even children have forms of material scarcity guiding them. The reason to grow up at all is to be able to provide for yourself. Everyone is jealous of the "rich kid" in school.

Beyond the theory, see the global transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture. It was insanely violent despite the overall growth in material resources and took thousands of years to truly stabilize into what we'd call civilization, and that civilization was plenty violent all on its own.

Ironically, if we ever did get a material utopia, part of it would have to be manufactured scarcity just so we don't all go insane. And now imagine what the predators amongst us would do in such an environment, their utopia is destruction of others, and they'd have all the resources they'd need to do it.

Agree to a point, but I don't think it would be the majority. It would be a minority of people who subscribe to philosophies that provide meaning and motivation to life beyond hedonism and material gain. The rest will be happy, or at least resigned, to vegetate in endless endorphin loops.

It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition. Some sort of technological singularly would simply be an amplifier of our current dysfunctions.

To some extent it would be the apocalypse. The motivated people would band together and live in physically secure communities, while the nihilists form what amount to a vast expanse of homeless encampments and wallow in their addictions, occasionally making poorly coordinated attacks on the gated communities to dry and drag the motivated people down to their level out of spite.

Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty

More like humanity still has plenty of problems worth solving, and most people aren't so high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as to ignore them.

If someone handed me 50 million dollars today I'd probably "enjoy learning" a lot more, like when I was a child and all my material needs were met so spending time learning obscure facts about dinosaurs didn't have a marginal cost.

As a FF user, I've had to fall back to Edge/Chrome many times because some obscure hospital telehealth portal or bank website or whatever has issues.

I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla

I tried a couple of times to post questions on SO. Every time I followed the instructions, searched first and didn't find an answer, spent the better part of an hour composing the best possible question and simplified examples...

All to have my post locked/marked/closed/whatever either as a duplicate (it wasn't) or some other bullshit.

Call it a skill issue if you want, but I was going there for help at the time and just got the door slammed in my face repeatably with no guidance as to how to stop that from happening. The gate-keeping was simply insane, and it's clear I wasn't the only one that decided it wasn't worth the time.

And while they claim to be peaceful, the underlying argument is that human life is the problem to be solved, and if you believe in increasing living standards or having children you're the enemy.

Hard to see how that stops at halting powerplant construction. Theses people would accidentally cause a famine with their agricultural policies and look upon the starving children as "progress", even if they're socialized enough to never say it out loud. Scary shit.

Yeah that's my point. Sooner or later a human is going to have to go hunting "inside the box", and those humans will have to be capable of doing so competently.

I'm not seeing post-AI training of juniors handled at all, anywhere. The closest thing is what my employer does where for liability reasons every command executed by an AI agent, even as simple as an ls, has to be manually approved by the developer. This has the side effect of walking you through the AI's analysis, which can be quite educational.

Given the general culture of corporate cost-cutting (the whole appeal of AI is it doesn't need a benefits package), it's possible we're heading into a future where people trained pre-AI turn into a dedicated guild of professional troubleshooters, demanding fat paychecks to parachute in and put out fires when a company's giant blob of agents fails and their in-house staff lacks the deep knowledge to figure it out.

You just stated the reason why engineers have a hard time getting hired as baristas when they're laid off.

The hiring restaurant knows you can and will walk as soon as you land another engineering gig.

And how will you have the skill to go hunting inside the box if all you ever do is high level systems work?

Even if you're relying on extremely thorough test and validation, well someone who understands things at a low level has to write said tests and validations.

So long as humans are legally liable, this approach will only work until someone gets sued. Which means human experts will need to still exist and be trained, perhaps their training will just have to be more explicit rather than gained through the act of building products. Companies will hate this.

I wasn't "exploring" in the spiritual sense or "talking", I was brute-force-searching the entire map to find whatever stupid magic button or item or conversation the devs were forcing me to have so I could keep playing the game.

Completely immersion breaking.

> but there's really a way in which "figure it out yourself" and/or read the guidebook/talk to people was better.

Going to have to disagree on this one. Perhaps if you have an extremely well architected game that will organically guide a lost player in the right direction it can work, but I have many painful memories of just blindly exploring entire maps and clicking on every NPC because the obvious route of progression wasn't doing anything. Sometimes it would be an actual quest bug and I'd just be wasting my time.

Particularly in large open world games like GTA/Witcher 3/etc, quest tracking of some sort is mandatory.

And DOGE decided to deal with that cancer by blasting it with a shotgun and leaving the patient to bleed out

Not when it's below freezing and/or raining outside

We used the firefighters busting it out as an excuse to put in a stove insert. Much more heat, just as good ambience.

Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job.

Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)

Counterpoint example, I've yet to do grad school but I did take some graduate level classes as technical electives my senior year. While they were the most interesting in the abstract, the professors that taught them also seemed to assume that interest alone will drive you and you therefore need less structure. I found this lack of structure extremely annoying and difficult to mange, expectations were always vague. What's the point of the professor if I have to define everything myself? I ended up saving everything to the last minute as my more structured undergrad classes demanded more immediate milestones, which just produced a ton of stress and some shock when I ended up with a B in Compiler Design when I was hoping to just barely scrape by with a C- or something, given the relative lack of time and effort I'd put into it.

Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.

Ha, in the US but I had an issue with my chimney where there a strong smoke smell in the basement and an inexplicable hot spot on the back of my fireplace (no fire had been lit recently, and what creosote there was wasn't ignited). Not knowing what else to do, I called the fire deparment's non-emergency line and explained the situation.

They sent THREE full fire engines with sirens blaring and like 30 guys in full gear to my house, chief came out too. All to smash out the back of the fireplace and dispose of some smoldering embers that had collected behind it.

Seemed like an overreaction, now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise. Granted I'm also just some goober on the phone, they're under no obligation to assume I've reasonably assessed the situation.

Re the "fire": Turns out the original builders of my chimney skimped on bricks, and left a gap between the back of the fireplace and the exterior wall that shouldn't have been there. We were using the fireplace on the weekends, so some embers that cooled on their way up the chimney and fell back down collected in the gap, and decided to cook off a couple of days later. Weather was getting warmer, so instead of going up the chimney the resulting smoke down-drafted back into the house.

Buying lots of stocks, owning my home, maxing out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA as opposed to funding more short term priorities, with the idea that my retirement account isn't just funding my retirement, but possibly buying my kids houses as well. Would like to start a lifestyle business when the kids are older. Looking after my health so that I have more time out of the hospital. When my kids are old enough I'll teach them the absolute necessity of making money and every way I can think of to do that, that whatever they do when they grow up they have to be willing and able to do the version of it that makes money. If they love dance, they better be prepared to be dance instructors and open a studio or savagely commit to going pro, or be prepared to do something else to pay the bills and keep it as a hobby.

We've been financially fortunate enough to be in the top 25% of US households, and even I'm living the reality where I can't afford what my dad could afford working effectively the same job at the same age. Looking out at the world I see little reason why that trend should reverse, it'll have to get a lot worse first.

If I'm right I have a good shot to keep my family on the better side of this shitty transition, and if I'm wrong then my kids will have even more freedom than average, at the cost of a slightly more humble present. Probably won't step on a plane much over the next 2-3 decades, and that's fine.

If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.

I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.

That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.

Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.

I dunno, my parents were correct about my STEM education that was basically shoved up my ass as soon as I showed any science/engineering aptitude.

I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?

!!!HN Trigger Warning!!!

Perhaps Palo Alto isn't representative, and in fact might be doing some things wrong?

Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.

"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.

Odd that you mention that, China is afraid of exactly the opposite. Their systems are so centralized for surveillance purposes that an AI seriously breaching their systems could destroy their control.

Well yeah, abuse can happen. But the general principle of some people paying higher premiums than others because they're higher risk isn't a bad one.

If we mandate that insurers keep premiums equal for everyone, get ready for a lot of people to have zero access to insurance as they're deemed too risky to cover.

So we're talking about the complete destruction of the consumer economy.

Hard to see how Google or Facebook keeps their advertising models in that environment. There aren't enough construction workers and data scientists to buy everything.

Honestly I'd report it to the state insurance commission. Did they call out any specific issue with the roof at any point? Some kind of new code they were mandating an upgrade to or anything?