Timely. In the age of AI, the command line is more relevant than ever..
8,687 karma · joined January 29, 2009
seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don't have a mac in the middle
yeah that's the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then, iCloud itself has been the sole source.
Looks like there's some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)
How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..
This just sounds like "no true scotsman" to me. You have a problem and a toolkit. If you successfully solve the problem, and the solution is good enough, then you are a problem solver by any definition worth a damn.
The magic and the satisfaction of good prompting is getting to that "good enough", especially architecturally. But when you get good at it - boy, you can code rings around other people or even entire teams. Tell me how that wouldn't be satisfying!
Ow: want
Mai ow: don't want
These words are used eg. when ordering food or accepting/declining an offer at a checkout. Translated directly to dictionary English, they sound quite shockingly direct and rude - "would you like a drink? Don't want! How about bread sticks? Want!" - but after a while realized they were actually just very useful, special purpose words for making it known what you were interested in, with no other subtext.
It's funny how many gaps we have in English where there's just no good way to say something, at least concisely, and you don't even realize it until you see how other languages handle it. You'd think we'd have evolved it by now.
The same goes in the other direction, of course!
You say this like it's some sort of established fact. My understanding is the exact opposite and that inference is plenty profitable - the reason the companies are perpetually in the red is that they're always heavily investing in the next, larger generation.
I'm not Anthropic's CFO so i can't really prove who's right one way or the other, but I will note that your version relies on everyone involved being really, really stupid.
> What they should do is bump TC by 60-70% and simultaneously lay off 50% of the engineers.
Tell me you're an engineer without telling me you're an engineer. The problem is they don't know which half and they can't know. It's an issue of legibility and transparency - put yourself into the shoes of the C-suite. You're staring down a complete black box of, what, 5,000 people. How can you possibly know who's good and who's not? Think of the information they have at hand - what the chain of command tells them. What if the chain of command itself is the problem? Think about how you yourself could protect a bad employee if you were a manager. You could! How can they possibly find the truth?
People rightly hate stack ranking, but you can see why ideas like that exist - attempts to come up with organizational pruning algorithms that are resistant to the managers themselves being the problem.
And this is also why CEOs incoming with a turnaround mission often do a clean sweep and stack the c-suite with all their friends. Not because they're giving jobs to their mates - although sure, that does happen - but because they're trying to establish at least a single layer of trust, which can then in time hopefully be extended downwards. But it all takes time, and for some organizations, they never do manage it. When unlimited orgs all compete for the same limited number of good managers - well, some of them are going to lose.
Ironically I'm bullish on AI being able to greatly help with all of this. Maybe running on AMD GPUs...
I don't have any inside knowledge of OpenAI's product release priorities, but your narrative about dead ends and desperate scrambles to push something out the door, tricking investors to keep the party going - this has nothing to do with reality as far as I can tell.
It's sort of like doing all your work on an 80386. Can it be made to work? Probably. Are you going to learn a whole lot making it work? Without a doubt! Are you going to be the fastest dev on the team? No.
Give it time, we'll get there, but not anytime soon.
I use Claude Code for programming work, but I choose OpenAI anywhere customer-facing and this cute little outage is making me feel better about that with every passing minute. NOT cool.
I think it's nonsense. Society is the way it is because of the prevailing conditions. We haven't really had to deal with getting rid of dead wood in science because death always did that anyway, if death goes away then we'll just adapt. That witticism from Planck is just an observation of the times, not some universal, uh, constant.
> There is plenty of reason to welcome death
Maybe we should welcome it even faster then! If death speeds up science so much, then maybe society shouldn't provide health care to scientists at all. In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
Security and convenience are always in tension, but there is usually a productive, "sweet spot" middle ground. Your "solution" is way off to one side of that sweet spot. The status quo is probably a little too far off in the other direction. But a happy medium can be found where most teams are fine, most of the time, while retaining the ability to take advantage from the open source ecosystem.
I don't think there are too many military analysts who would claim that the USA could "protect" Taiwan if China was really determined. The USA still retains the ability to significantly increase the cost, both militarily and economically, of an invasion, and relies on this - successfully, to date - as a deterrent.
I think most people recognize however, even in Taiwan, that in terms of pure practical facts on the ground, not even the world-beating US military can overcome geography. Taiwan is 100 miles off China's cost, Guam is 2800 miles away. It is difficult for me to imagine anything, barring some incredible technological advantage that the USA shows no sign of possessing, that could outweigh such a tremendous home-turf advantage.
It is very hard to come up with a realistic, or even semi realistic, scenario in which China does not end up with Taiwan if it really wanted it.
That sounds high to me. Maybe American banks? The smaller Swiss banks will start taking your calls at about $2m.
Reed, Thomas C. At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. Presidio Press/Ballantine Books, 2004
relevant quote (from 1992):
> The Soviets were well aware of nuclear weapon safety issues. Even though that subject touches on the internals of weapon design, they were willing to talk and seek advice. They discussed the merits of their transportation containers, which they felt to be superior to U.S. models, and they confirmed that their weapons were “disabled” when in storage, whatever that meant. On the other hand, security (preventing theft or misuse) was a new subject to them. Throughout the Soviet system nuclear weapons had been secured by operational means: people watching people who watched still other people. The Soviets confirmed that there were no electronic or mechanical locking devices on their weapons (as there are in the U.S.), a subject that grew to be of enormous concern as the KGB disappeared, the army disintegrated, and well-financed terrorists infiltrated the country.
RAND corp - From Testing to Deploying Nuclear Forces The Hard Choices Facing India and Pakistan (1998) - https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP192.html
> There are two ways to do this. One way is to use a mechanical device, which prevents the arming of the weapon unless the proper code is entered. In the United States, such devices, used extensively on U.S. weapons, are called Permissive Action Links (PALs). The other way is to use specially selected personnel in an organization separate from the military to maintain weapons control. This method was used in the old Soviet Union and is still used by Russia. India must decide on the combination of these two methods that it wants to use.
Interesting report from Sweden's defense research agency in 2005 - concluding that no-one knows if Russia's tactical nukes have PALs (majority of warheads in UA were tactical) - https://www.foi.se/rest-api/report/FOI-R--1588--SE
I hope this at least shows that it's not quite as settled a question as some make out! And I realize these aren't quite as "primary" as I had remembered; I thought they had more direct quotes, but I do find these sources quite credible.
What's a popular myth? That oil, still the strategic commodity worldwide, plays a large role in the USA's security relationships and use of the USD is, written or unwritten, a tacit part of those relationships?
That's completely wrong and you have a lot of reading to do to understand the entire post-WWII geopolitical order. Oil is receding yes, but it's still critical and you can't understand anything about the postwar security order - which is very closely tied to the rise of the USD - until you understand that.
I mean, the Nimitz is in the Persian Gulf right now keeping the sea lanes open for their client states in the region. That's the USA's part of the deal right there.
> Unfortunately the USA is playing a necessary systemic role here that nobody else wants to do
Well. I know what you're trying to say, but it's not like the USA just does nothing to maintain the system. The military, the middle east bases, the petrodollar - none of this is free. The economy is larger than oil, of course - but at the end of the day, most countries still need oil, most oil is still paid for in USD, and will continue to be as long as the USA is the final underwriter of security in that region (and asian, and europe.. until recently).
That's always been the deal. The USA provides the security at the end of the day, and everyone else agrees to use its currency. The unwritten promise part is that the US government won't allow too much inflation, keeps an independent central bank, and the debt it offers is to be considered risk-free.
The US military isn't going away but the security guarantees which were such an important part of the compact are fading, and inflation - serious inflation - seems to be coming into view. It won't happen overnight but it does smell a bit like the beginning of the end.
> EU/China) dosen't want that role either, lest they end up deindustrialising like USA
I don't actually think there's any law of nature that reserve currency status == de-industrialization. The UK didn't do so when it wore the crown and I don't think there's any reason the EU or PRC would inevitably do so either should they step up. I think it just happened to overlap - plenty of rich countries also de-industrialized without being the USA!
I think/hope that it will eventually be the EU that steps up but it obviously won't happen quickly and they aren't exactly covering themselves with glory over the current crises. There would need to be a lot of changes needed on their side, not least of which the mechanisms and mandate to issue a much, much larger amount of debt. But if the USA sees 5% inflation for a year or two - I think the opportunity would be there.
It's an open question among people who research these things whether the weapons stored in Ukraine even had the PALs you're referring to (Permissive Action Link). The literature is contradictory and while wikipedia insists they did, other (quite credible IMO) accounts indicate the PALs were only used on submarine devices at the time. In any rate, it is well known that the Ukranians could have reverse engineered and bypassed the devices; even the US State Dept contemporaneously estimated the PAL would last only "months".
I have no idea what was actually on those weapons but the popular notion that they had the PALs installed is not actually that well founded once you look at the primary sources. Whether it makes any difference is of course another story (I suspect not).
> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories
It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.
I am 100% on board with the vision, but the learning curve is absolutely brutal, and at least at the time the documentation was simply not anywhere close to where it needed to be. Something this different needs a truly giant "cookbook" to show, you know, how to use the damn thing. That was lacking and there was nothing to learn from online besides the most basic toy applications. Also, it was, at least at the time, slow as hell. All those damn macros.
Plus - elixir is already niche. Ash is a niche within a niche. I need to be able to hire people who can get up to speed in days, not weeks or months. There's a chicken and egg problem with something this ambitious - no-one uses it because no-one uses it. I hope it breaks out of this dilemma but professionally I can't bet the company that it does.
As I said I really like the idea. Anyone who has maintained an OpenAPI app will jump for joy with documentation and tests moving automatically and in lockstep with the core domain logic. But for me, at the time, it was too early, too risky and too obscure. I do wish it well though - I love these kind of moonshots and I look forward to trying it again as soon as I can.
We even have a word for this, noblesse oblige. It used to refer to the aristocracy, but I don't see much difference between the aristocracy of old and the moneyed classes of today.
No idea how widespread it is, but in Singapore airport the system is tightly integrated. You are "tagged" when you check in, and "tagged out" as you board, with your appearance associated with your intended flight details. If you miss your flight or otherwise spend too much time in the secure zone, you are highlighted in the system and will eventually be approached. Arriving passengers are also given a time limit to take their next action, be it clear immigration or enter transit, and lingering will also trigger a response.
All in the name of safety and security but I can't help but feel a measure of discomfort with it all.