Kina

this thread didn’t have specific policies people took issue with

Can you give me a consistent principal that that the government of the day is doing outside of flopping around screaming America First while shooting itself in the foot while harassing citizens and critics it deems undesirable? Meanwhile Trump preens about like a pig prancing in front of a mirror and everyone is too weak to publicly acknowledge the farce we have all helped facilitate.

- The immigration policy is nonsensical, incoherent and basically driven by, “I don’t like others”. If it were consistent we would have proper review processes. A respected Somali FIFA referee would not be banned from the US for reasons that apparently cannot be disclosed.

- The AI policy is just based on whatever exec has the right person’s ear as demonstrated by the export controls being enforced on Anthropic’s recent models entirely due to Andy Jassy talking to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

- Onshoring jobs has not moved in any meaningful manner, there is no evidence of this outside of Trump screaming about unproductive and illegal tariffs which he continues to try and argue are not the consumer tax that they are.

- Deconstructing science and practical field work has caused a humanitarian and supply chain disaster. Pest prevention programs are in chaotic states, diseases that the US helped limit worldwide are on the rise, and we have destabilized multiple regions where we used to provide food security which also helped prop up American agriculture.

- There is no crypto policy in the United States. Crypto businesses have spent money trying to stop this. What does crypto actually facilitate? The central bank wasn't created just to annoy people or impede their ability to profit. Should we go back to JP Morgan locking bankers in his personal library and berating them until they agreed to start lending money again?

It just means that the entire system has not been captured by insane people that there is still some pushback.

Anyone who believes in the Unitary Executive Theory likely believes that the President wears imperial robes. The idea that the President should have unchecked power over the executive branch is insane and mocks the whole idea of coequal branches of government or checks and balances.

You can argue for reform, but nothing currently going on is reform. It is entirely running on fumes. The recent AI executive order is representative of this as is the constantly shifting policy driven by whoever has Trump’s favor at any point in time. There's nothing grounding any recent policy change of the United States.

Whether or not you agree with how US laws are drafted, this administration has no logical foundation for anything it does which is a massively different and worse problem by orders of magnitude.

This administration runs on whims. This is horrifying and there is real harm in this we have yet to see the full repercussions of.

Yes, if it was that a search result returned a defamatory article that Google had nothing to do with outside of indexing, it is likely they would not be found liable. The court is clearly trying to make a distinction that the AI search results are produced by Google and thus they can make an editorial decision on whether to publish it despite knowing that it is potentially defamatory.

Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does.

No, the article implies the court’s logic is that the AI search results are presented as search results and that’s a big part of why they are liable. It seems like the court (again, according to the article) does not find the disclaimers that Google has slapped on the AI results compelling because again, it chose to represent these as a summary of search results and it is aware of the failure rate.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."

Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."

Google does not, as a general rule, control the actual content of search results, but usually there’s a distinction between the ranking and presentation of the results vs. the actual content. In this case, the court is basically saying, “You sold this to people as a search summary, you know it might be full of crap and you chose to do it anyway. No, you don’t get to claim the equivalent of a US safe harbor defense.”

There is a lot of tension that the report seeks to either minimize or avoid. It’s also just really hard to express it in a report like this because there’s no real place for it if the goal is to look professional.

I think the RubyGems fiasco was a result of unresolved tensions. People chose not to be adults about and resolve the issues respectfully. IMHO, I think one of the main problems is that nobody was willing to spin up a core foundation to own critical infrastructure to the Ruby community which remains a problem.

I cannot find the blogposts I remember reading, but recall that there were some bad feelings about Ruby Together and Arko’s leadership of it before it was merged with Ruby Central. It appears these feelings never went away which is made very clear by the way that key Shopify engineers started posting after Ruby Central took over the RubyGems GitHub org [1].

Now combine this with dhh’s right-wing political posts and behavior, his extremely close relationship with the founder of Shopify (dhh is on the board of Shopify), a key Ruby Central donor pulling critical funding because he did not want his money going towards giving dhh more attention and you’re left with Ruby Central effectively being controlled by Shopify (which, as far as I can tell is still the situation) because that’s where all of its funding comes from now.

Frankly, the biggest thing this entire fiasco has shown me is that a lot of us are still a bunch of idiotic teenagers. Integrity and maturity is in short supply where it is needed the most.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/rmfranca.bsky.social/post/3lz7alpob...

IMHO, Ruby Central keeps trying to find a way to frame all of this in a good light, but it seems like they keep falling flat. They tried doing filtered Q&A avoiding all the obvious questions that people hostile to what happened would ask, temporarily providing transparency reports that didn’t really say much. It all felt like very incompetent damage control.

I think they were hoping that handing it off to the Ruby core team would allow them to move on, but that requires ownership of their failings or at least actions that demonstrate that they will be better moving forward and none of that has happened.

From what I can tell, this story is primarily about personalities. The community essentially ended up with several factions, but I’ll try to explain this without it degenerating into the schoolyard fighting that it appears to be.

1. Ruby Central is the surviving Ruby non-profit that another Ruby non-profit, Ruby Together merged with. This is where part of the legal ambiguity/dispute comes from that will make sense in (2).

2. RubyGems (the code, GitHub repo, etc) and RubyGems.org are two separate things. RubyGems code appears to not have been legally transferred in the merger. RubyGems.org is run by Ruby Central, but this transfer is also extremely muddy.

3. For reasons in dispute, Ruby Central seized the GitHub repos of RubyGems. It is not clear they have the legal or ethical right to do this (based on the evidence, I believe they do not and they have committed theft).

4. Ruby Central has made various noises about the need to do this for security and other things despite the extremely sloppy nature of the takeover.

5. Ruby Central then “gave” RubyGems to the Ruby core team without resolving anything in what appears to be an attempt to try and end the controversy.

In the background of all of this appears to be a lack of trust, dhh posting crap like this: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64, resulting in a fight about the future of the Ruby ecosystem.

Don’t worry Peter Thiel will help change that after he destroys the functionality of most of the global economy since he’s basically asserted that New Zealand is his break glass refuge.

Why? If you care about the rules based order that we have mostly try to adhere to for decades, all of this is an enormous attack on it.

Is the United States at war or not? What basis is there to sink a frigate leaving a naval wargame exercise? Was it planning to bomb Diego Garcia?

It did not raise $110 billion. According to their own SEC filings $35 billion of Amazon’s funding is contingent on “(i) OpenAI meeting specified milestones, and (ii) OpenAI directly or indirectly consummating an initial public offering or direct listing of equity securities in the United States”

The future is not evidence? I don’t understand what you’re saying.

The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.

That’s not evidence. That’s a belief. I’m not disagreeing they overhired, but this statement contains no evidence that reducing the size of the company like this is going to yield the same or greater profits.

The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this.

I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes.

Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon.

The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet.

While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend.

IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...

I believe that OpenAI wants to IPO at that valuation. I don’t think it can IPO.

This really depends on how a state structures this, but “county courthouse” is not necessarily a meaningful statement. The judiciary is a state function and it has been delegated to county for purposes of logistics. In larger states, each county gets to set its own court rules, fee schedules, etc. because it would be maddening otherwise. They still ultimately answer to the state judiciary.

Iowa is small enough that it looks like the Iowa Judicial Branch just runs everything directly. Every county seat in Iowa has a courthouse, but the county probably doesn’t really have any control of it.

My guess is that the sheriff had an ego and may not have wanted a finding against him.

I remember distinctly that the developers said they were working on a next generation version of it and it just never happened.

I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.

I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.

Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.

Apple is on the record as being neutral at worst on the matter and at best weakly supportive. I think there was an article when the M1 came out where it was reported that the Asahi Linux folks met with some Apple developers where they were encouraged to explore the system and report bugs, but that Apple was not going to offer any support.

Apple has also done things such as adding a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. Which is only useful for 3rd party operating system development.

The Family That Owns New Brunswick: The House of Irving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9I-HY3wfVM

This reminds me of modern windows having fake panes. They’re just strips that are applied to give the impressions that there are multiple smaller panes because people are used to that and it feels “correct”.

I have to imagine past glassmakers would have been absolutely enthralled by the ability we now have to make uniform, large sheets of glass, but here we are emulating the compromises they had to make because we are used to how it looks.

The most worrying thing is that Mullenweg just seems unwell and has created his own reality distortion field where he can no longer see the absurdness and damaging nature of his actions. His behavior reminds me of a cult leader or a celebrity where they surround themselves with only people who do their bidding and gradually slip into this state.

FWIW, I found LocalSend (https://localsend.org/) to be quite handy especially since it is a cross-platform solution.

I agree with most of this story, but I really find the assertion that weird nerds are just autistic rather offensive and dismissive. It reminds me way too much of lazy teachers in the 90s insisting students they didn't want to manage were just suffering from ADD and hoping they could just get their parents to dope them up on Ritalin.

It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it.

Is where we are any good? I think one of the more germane issues with generative AI art is that it is distinctly not creative. It can only regurgitate variations of what it has seen.

This is both extremely powerful and limiting.

An LLM is never going to give you some of the most famous films like "Star Wars" which bounced around before 20th Century Fox finally took a chance on it because they thought Lucas had talent. Is what we want? A society that just uses machines to produce variations of the same thing that already exist all the time? It's hard enough for novel creative projects to succeed.

It doesn’t matter who the Gerber Baby really is. Society has chosen to associate the Gerber Baby with certain attributes regardless of who the person behind the photo really is, and so it is with Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick, the real person, excelled at social engineering more than any other trait and was arguably subjected to malicious prosecution. But in his later years, there’s a lot of documentation online indicating that he didn’t live up to the myth that grew around him and he was not a pleasant person [1].

People here are mostly reminiscing about Mitnick--the myth, not the man.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uk6wgd/why_d...

I also theorize that founders are very social people and they especially typically can't figure out remote management.

I think this is a large part of the problem that isn’t being explicitly pointed out. Extroverts likely hate this style of work and it feels like some folks, instead of really compromising or trying to find an effective model that works with this new reality, just go the safe route. I was happier with the way things were...

Has Musk ever handled the operational aspects of the companies he claims to run? Does he really understand what it takes to make a company _work_?

For instance, my understanding of SpaceX is that he really should be seen as the initial financier of it to chase a crazy idea. Gwynne Shotwell is really the one in charge of day-to-day operations. It's just that Musk shows up for the fun bits and gets all the sound bites in.

This constant hagiographic view of Musk and others like him is grotesque.

Foster City will amplify any shaking since the entire city was built on compacted fill and reclaimed earth.