allreduce

I'm in my armchair thinking autoimmune diseases.

I don't think this community of professionals is going to come around to a solution which requires marginally more effort.

If no one checks their dependencies, the solution is to centralize this responsibility at the package repository. Something like left-pad should simply not be admitted to npm. Enforce a set of stricter rules which only allow non-trivial packages maintained by someone who is clearly accountable.

Another change one could make is develop bigger standard libraries with all the utilities which are useful. For example in Rust there are a few de facto standard packages one needs very often, which then also force you to pull in a bunch of transitive dependencies. Those could also be part of the standard library.

This all amounts to increasing the minimal scope of useful functionality a package has to have to be admitted and increasing accountability of the people maintaining them. This obviously comes with more effort on the maintainers part, but hey maybe we could even pay them for their labor.

A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone.

I don't disagree.

And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.

I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life. I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).

young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones

My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.

Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.

when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"

Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.

You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.

The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).

We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.

[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming

I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.

Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?

The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?

More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.

I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance.

People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.

The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.

That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.

No need to get fancy. A yubikey glued to a tungsten cube would have prevented this attack. Thats 50€ for the yubikey and 300€ for the tungsten cube.

This helping the vulnerable framing is naive at best. This is about an American ad company consolidating their power over what people can do with devices they bought and are reliant on daily.

Helping the vulnerable should not involve that. If your only idea on how to help the vulnerable involves that, think of better ideas.

You can emulate latency, packet errors, etc using netem tc [0] on Linux.

[0] https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en

And the devs are responsible for finding a good technical solution under these constraints. If they can't, for communicating their constraints to the rest of the team so a better tradeoff can be found.

Mostly agree, but X11 does not fit well into the unix model either.

What's the mistake here? Shouldn't an incident report start with this and then continue with an analysis of the process, without too much "internal perspective"?

In my mind, the internal perspective might be useful to jot down when doing the analysis, but is too noisy to be useful to disseminate.

Most things are a dag tho. :)

Not all software development will be automated immediatly. But I've noticed that many skills I've built are lessened in worth with every model release.

Having a lot of specifics about a programming environment memorized for example used to be the difference between building something in a few hours and a week, but now is pretty unimportant. Same with being able to do some quick data wrangling on the command line. LLMs are also good at parsing a lot of code or even binary format quickly and explaining how it works. That used to be a skill. Knowing a toolbox of technologies to use is needed less. Et cetera.

They haven't come for the meat of what makes a good engineer yet. For example, the systems-level interfacing with external needs and solving those pragmatically is still hard. But the tide is rising.

It commoditizes software construction.

The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill. This is democratization.

Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape poverty through skill closes.

Doing hard things has consistently made me more generally (not only in the narrow hard thing) competent and comfortable with myself.

Why go to the gym if you don't need physical strength? One needs to do something to not degenerate into a miserable state.

I'm starting to find the naive techno-optimism here annoying. If you don't have capital or can do something else you will be homeless.

I've got to ask. Is this kind of violent crime common or perceived as common in the US? If a stranger asked me for a ride home here my first thought wouldn't be that they want to attack me.

The point is that the tech companies don't.

Agreeing to say, forced arbitration with a company, because you signed up for say, their streaming service, is obviously unconscionable. What would be even worse if those TOS said that you have to go into arbitration in matters unrelated to the streaming service.

Yet, this is what's happening. Disney used such an agreement (obtained through Disney+ TOS) when a man sued them on behalf of his dead wife, who died in their parks. It's common practice now to have these clauses in TOS, e.g. Discord has it too.

If you need a bug to get fixed, hoping someone else is going to do it is not a good strategy anyway. Just fix the bug yourself.

I think people are mostly just cargo culting tbh.

Well it works better if your users have some intelligence^H^H^H wisdom. :)

There are many explanations why these incidents could be rare but not impossible.

These models are still stochastic and very good at picking up nuances in human speech. It may be simply unlikely to go off the rails like that or (more terrifyingly) it might pick up on some character trait or affectation.

Honestly I'm appalled by the lack of safety culture here. "My plane killed only 1% of pilots" and variations thereof is not an excuse in aerospace, but it seems perfectly acceptable in AI. Even though the potential consequences are more catastrophic (from mass psychosis to total human extinction if they achieve their AGI).

Better slop. The effect that these systems get better as you scale up [0] is real you know.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361

Not a lawyer, but that always seemed naively correct to me.

However, the copyright system has always be a sham to protect US capital interests. So I would be very surprised if this is actually ruled/enforced. And in any case american legislators can just change the law.

I assume it's a deliberate choice. Where I live these old prepaid contracts are still available next to the offerings you describe and are preferred by some older people and minimalists.

Honestly I feel like something important was yanked from under my feet. Computers were always an escape for me, then a starting career, something that helped me get started in life. Wow, those things I learned while spending nights making things move on the computer are actually worth something. And now a lot of it is just gone, worthless, right when I started having a bit of success. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Not that I can complain much, worse things have happened to better people bla bla. But it's disorienting. I still have non-automatable skills and enjoy learning, but who says they are not going to come up with Claude Opus 4.9 or something and turns out it can do that too, ha ha.

How is a young person supposed to establish themselves in this new world?

Are there more security disadvantages besides the obvious when giving one app like Termux root access? The obvious being that you trust Termux and all binaries running in it with total access to your system.

I am mainly looking to access my filesystem. Currently a lot of things I want to do (backing up app data, scripting, mounting network drives) are hobbled by the bad wrappers around the same.

I know this might be out of scope, but is there any plan to re-enable direct filesystem access in a more secure way? Even via ADB it would be useful. It just seems like madness to me that a lot of basics tasks are impossible or incredibly convoluted, because everything has to go through weird wrapper interfaces and Java/Kotlin code someone has to write (instead of just using the filesystem and OS which is right there).

Thanks for the great work by the way.

Sometimes Gibberish Producing Units