sealeck

I'm unconvinced Twitter is a very good medium for serious technical discussion. I imagine a lot of this happens on the sidelines at conferences, on mailing threads and actually in organisations doing work on AI (e.g. Universities, Anthropic). The people who are doing the work are also often not the people who have time to Twitter.

The Putnam and IMO are quite different. I would suggest the IMO is probably harder...

My claim is that at a system-level, judges in the US have more power to interpret laws. Your claim is that "in each individual case, the median amount of interpretation is lower in the US than the EU". But you also concede that this is because the judges rely on the interpretations of _other_ judges in cases (e.g. if the Supreme Court makes a very important decision which clarifies how a law should be interpreted, and this is then carried down throughout the rest of the justice system, then this means that there has been a really large amount of interpretation).

> I judge people's trustworthiness individually and not solely by the organization they belong to

This is certainly a courageous viewpoint – I imagine this makes it very hard for you to engage in the modern world? Most of us are very bound by institutions we operate in!

> I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad... all the actual educated takes are on X

Almost every technical comment on HN is wrong (see for example essentially all the discussion of Rust async, in which people keep making up silly claims that Rust maintainers then attempt to patiently explain are wrong).

The idea that the "educated" takes are on X though... that's crazy talk.

> This is European law, not US. Reasonable means reasonable and judges here are expected to weigh each side's interests and come to a conclusion. Not just a literal interpretation of the law.

I think you've got civil and common law the wrong way round :). US judges have _much_ more power to interpret law!

https://ln.ht/ isn't bad

When was the first ETF released? (Hint: late 1900s).

Credible reporting based on what institutions the banks have tried to offload the Twitter debt to have said.

Have you considered why investors were bidding something like 60 cents on the dollar right until Trump's election? (Hint: because Elon has been using the US government to press companies into buying his ad product, despite the fact that it is materially worse than Google or Facebook's).

> The only insight we have

This is untrue. There's fairly credible reporting (e.g. in the FT) that Twitter's reveue numbers have bottomed and they are not making money. Of course, a lot of these problems are being disguised by the fact that Elon Musk has merged in xAI (and investors are very happy to pile money into AI without even the slightest due diligence).

> Elon dumped 80% of Twitter staff and it didn't collapse.

Have you looked at a graph of Twitter revenue and profit recently (hint: it is very low). Nobody has ever claimed that you cannot fire all the employees and keep Twitter online with a skeleton crew; the claim has always been that you can't do that _and remain a viable business_.

You can also just... not use any of these features. It won't be pleasant, but it's doable. And some projects _do_ do this!

It doesn't have a great ecosystem of libraries, but it _does_ have a good way to manage them: https://dune.build/, which as I understand it was developed at Jane Street (lots of code and dependencies) and is now open source.

> Even rust with all its hype lacks in this area imo.

This is surprising to me! I find that Rust has pretty excellent tooling, and Cargo is substantially better than the package manager in most other languages...

> What we need isn't Rust without the borrow checker. It's C with a borrow checker, and without all the usual footguns.

Which would look a lot like... Rust!

Even then, this isn't actually what you want. When people say deterministic, at one level they mean "this thing should be a function" (so input x always returns the same output y). Some people also use determinism to mean they want a certain level of "smoothness" so that the function behaves predictably (and they can understand it). That is "make me a sandwich" should not return radically different results to "make me a cucumber sandwich".

As you note, your scheme significantly solves the first problem (which is a pretty weak condition) but fails to solve the second problem.

I agree that they can get the data through other means. Not so sure about

> There are so many different players who have access to most or all of the data it would hard to prove it came any one source at all.

Because a prosecutor can obtain copies of all emails talking about this, they can examine your bank accounts for payments from data brokers, they can require legal to give them copies of any contracts, they can look at audit logs from the production database and airlines aren't Evil Inc -- stuff will inevitably leak and get out. You can't cover yourself that well as a CEO looking to make a quick buck...

At some level this is true, but I'm also 98% sure that if you do that, you get far fewer donations. Fewer donations = less money to do good work. This means you can't provide money to support foundation projects (these are quite valuable and promote exchange of knowledge amongst Wikipedia contributors, and also onboard new people to make a better encyclopedia). Eventually not doing this leads to the pool of contributors shrinking, which leads to burnout, and eventually to a slow death spiral.

The US government doesn't really take kindly to other states trying to reign in its companies. This is something that has bipartisan support. Even American politicians who support regulating Apple, only support _them_ doing this. Is this good? No. But it's also how Europe treats other countries. Basically: think about what France would do if Mozambique ejected or otherwise restrained Total -- that's roughly what Americans would do.

https://www.politico.eu/article/victory-eu-donald-trump-meta...

> why would countermeasures destroy trust

The countermeasures won't destroy trust - it's the fact that you can't just pick up the phone and work out if you're speaking to a real human. Or trust that posts on an internet forum are from real people, and not just planted by bad actors using generative AI.

The thing that was most disillusioning for me here was SVB -- failure to apply basic principles of banking (i.e. they never really had a plan for central bank interest rates to change more than +-1%). Not just that the VC types running a bank weren't able to do so, but that such a large number of tech companies held all their cash on hand in a bank account (and didn't deposit anything in another bank, or a money-market fund/t-bills).

We will have a mountain of GPUs!

Yes and no; there is a tipping point, past which hardware/software vendors will be forced to adopt countermeasures and new ways to verify identity.

We will lose a lot though; the most prosperous societies really rely on high levels of interpersonal trust (which allows people to easily do things together, whether that's leaving their buggy outside when they go to buy a coffee or commercial relations). It would be a shame to see that get destroyed.

> it is clear that Apple only moves exactly as far as the EU forces it to

I don't think this is a secret - Apple publicly opposes these kinds of laws.

> And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.

Sure, it's unclear what the EU can do to oppose this though. If they push too far they risk invoking the wrath of the much more powerful US government.

> The simple fact that they restrict this to the EU, where they are forced to provide the option, shows that Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.

Apple may or (more likely) may not be complying in terms of allowing third party browser engines, but I don't see how you can argue that not implementing this _outside_ the EU fails to comply with EU law (which applies _inside_ the EU).

That's not to say they shouldn't allow this elsewhere (although it will just cement the Chrome monopoly - actually _decreasing_ competition and solidifying the incumbent's position) but I don't think you can argue that this law requires them to do that.

Did you read my comment?

> The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend.

I think there is a small set of people who would do a good job running Mozilla. Of these people, a very large chunk would do this for $500k annually (this is still enough money for almost anyone to lead a very comfortable life). Being money-driven might make you _worse_ as Mozilla CEO.

You may be happy running an economy on vibes, but it makes no sense for old people who have a house intended for them and kids close to their work to remain there when their kids have moved out and they've retired. The fact that you can't afford to live somewhere isn't some crime. They can go move somewhere nicer and more suitable for them, freeing up that land for densification (or just proper occupancy).

A very informative comment.

> It's just behaving like a child.

No it's not.

> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.

Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!