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I call them ransom futures. But given how many of the ransom situations that are started with "give us N amount of crypto X!" I suspect being resolved entirely in conventional money, through some subcontractor chain of decreasingly white-hattish "security consultancies" that somehow make the problem go away (by knowing someone who will make the problem go away for money), your take is probably the more accurate one.

Yeah, there are clavicle fractures that clearly don't need any surgery, but when in doubt, always slap on some titanium. Just try to get rid of the plate before the next fracture opportunity, because then you'll get an AC joint separation instead of a fracture and that stuff won't grow back. Ask me how I know, I had surgery to swap a fracture plate for an AC plate (those AC plates really, really suck)

The key service performed by a cycling helmet is not turning a death situation into a permanently maimed situation (they do that, but that's a very rare occurrence), it's turning a life changing injury situation into a situation of some fractured bones that will be almost forgotten two months later. The life and death part is overrated.

I guess one reason people are so focused on that is because it's easy to quantify.

Not only easier finding call sites than finding copies, also more intuitive to start looking. "Which callers will be affected by the change?" is the most natural question to ask. "Which places should have this same change applied?", not so much.

Why pretend? "private" on value types just means nothing to see here except when you happen to be one of the functions conveniently namespaced with the struct.

But I'd say that GP's complaint about inequality leaking makes no sense anyways, because what could be more unequal than different implementation, or different internal state implying different behavior down the line? The public subset isn't some arbitrary interface that could have different implementations. And even then, "equals under interface I1" would have to be considered a very special type of "equality", not the general case.

Value types are a concept very far away from the "magic black box organism" school of OOP thinking. It's not a novel way of doing classic OOP (does anyone still do that?), it's a way for a language born in OOP ideology get one step further into the post-OOP world.

Or subsidies from hopeful investors sweet-talked into not understanding the commodity nature of the business they are investing in. But that does not change much about the general assessment.

Chances are the typical story goes founders start fully believing that they would succeed with their own innovation but slip down a gradient towards commodity provider without really noticing themselves.

I had similar thoughts, but regarding fiction: I imagine that there must be quite a corpus of Tom Clancy style stuff indulging in "military gear porn" up to and including the use of tactical nukes, but fiction involving strategic nuclear exchange tends to be about what comes after.

I believe that it's more nuanced than that (this is from the context of German regulations):

In the old days, reflectors and diffractors were rather crude and light distribution wasn't even at all. Regulation was setting a light intensity limit for the arc above the cutoff, assuming that the brightest spots would be just that, unintended brightness outliers. And when those would comply with the limit, the typical brightness hitting the eyes of oncoming traffic would be much lower.

Now reflector design is SO much better manufacturers striving to make their buyers happy can make lights pushing out photons exactly at that old regulatory limit over the entire cutoff area, and with a precise jump where the cuttoff stops. That's awesome for the person behind the wheel ("best lights I ever had!"), technically within the old limits and a terribly blinding for everybody else.

Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.

depends on how many different problems the agent has to solve?

Instead of requiring each session to understand the n tools used to solve a particular problem, you bundle up the solution in a conventional script (that's what I meant by "can", as in canning) that the agent can use with very little documentation in the context. When the model is smart enough to figure out the composition of underlying tools during regular execution, it will also be able to do the canning up as a script and write the lightweight documentation that turns the script into a skill. Subsequent use will only require that lightweight documentation in context.

I think that what they mean is that instead of ten perfectly orthogonal "unix philosophy" tools (skills) for the agent to compose when solving a problem, each with an API surface (description text) the size of Texas, you'd want to can each composition in a shell script (or a bespoke rust binary, if you enjoy watching your bot perform some heavy lifting) that only solves one problem but solves it so focused that the accompanying skill description barely consumes more context than the tool's self descriptive name.

Is that so surprising? I thought that was a given. And as soon as remote resources are involved, the old "it's in a docker" peace of mind does not apply.

It keeps people employed, yes?

And with people I guess I might actually mean not people but tokens everybody has to spend on keeping their environment self-adapting...

Makes me wonder what the penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands would say about this

We don't see them because they are so good at it, obviously ;)

Yeah, those stealth games never really clicked for me, with their absurdly imperceptive professional guards standing around everywhere.

Read about it back then in what might best be described as a kid's annual hardcover magazine and loved it so much (a few years later they had a long article about the Porsche 959, it's almost a tie for me). "Das Neue Universum": in those years they had an awesome mix of technology, culture, adventure and science - some parts much further from "ELIF" than one might expect.

A part of that young me still seems to live on being mighty disappointed that I'm not living in that future!

Can you name the individuals you are betting with on Polymarket? Can they name you?

Do you find it hard to max out, or do you find it hard to productively max out?

It's like paying drivers per gallon of fuel consumed and then acting all surprised that you see them revving their engine while waiting at a red light.

Same thoughts exactly.

I wonder if Google is aware of its identity crisis? Even long after "don't be evil", Google was still "we earn so much from a healthy web that making the web a healthy one is almost a straight forward company interest". Now web content is actively relegated to training input and LLM chat replacing delegating to the source, that web that Google made so much money of, as healthy or not one considered it to be, will soon be gone. Could be either at Google, complete lack of awareness or desperate "we can't stop it but we might still try to profit a little from what we can't stop"

So give harder guiderails? Sonarcube and the like. But I guess then the failure mode would be appeasing the linter while slowly forgetting the requirements... (or not so slowly, because the try/fail loop won't be nice to context at all..)

That's just how perception works. It's rarely fair. People who keep their car running perfectly fine for 20 years will appear like they don't care, people who return a young but worn out near-wreck every time the lease runs out will give the opposite impression. And don't get me started about fast fashion!

But it's more than that with residential solar: at least in places where with a heavy oversupply in real estate, "massive capital investment" is hardly a matching term. More like a drop in the ocean, given the amount of capital bound in the whole package.

My perception has long reached the flipping point where sun-facing roof without any solar installed makes the house look like a house in bad maintenance.

Fukushima hit hard in (West) Germany: Chernobyl was mostly explained away with "because Soviet", it wasn't that hard to convince people that much safer nuclear was possible. But Japan, of all countries, not being able to safely run a reactor? The country of trains running on time and of Toyotas making domestic cars look laughably unreliable in ADAC statistics?

We don't know what to what fraction that peace movement ran on being propped up by KGB. Those things are not mutually exclusive, genuine protest and getting propped up by a foreign power just for destabilization and giggles.

Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.

Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.

When the iron curtain fell, there were big plans and a formal contract about modernizing the rail link between Prague and Nuremberg (a hugely important connection on the days of Charles IV). The Czech side eventually stopped electrifying their parts when they realized nothing happened on the other side of the border. These days, Deutsche Bahn is operating a _bus connection_ between the cities. It seems like they are solely focused on beating imaginary Autobahn times between a selected set of major German cities, and consider everything else a nuisance...

Can anyone from the region comment on the status of plans for the landside linkup on the German side? Last time it made the press it was because the project was at risk of seeing the Danish tunnel finished before Germany could tell not even when but if a linkup would ever make it across bureaucratic hurdles. Almost like a Darien Gap made exclusively of red tape.

Sealing is really not that difficult if you have access to the high pressure side. The hard part is identifying the location of the leak. In sum, this means that they have to absolutely nail it, on the first attempt, for the bottom part that is resting on the sea floor. If they can to that, the rest of the circumference will also be so good they don't have to even think about fixability.

They are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...