arjie

I find containerization useful regardless and Kube allows a simple orchestration solution so I can use a single machine for many things without too much trouble. No need to worry too much about ports and log rotation and all that. Just a nice batteries-included solution. The primitives are also trivial to reason about.

And writing YAMLs sucked in the old days but now with kustomize built in you can easily do everything you want with templating. LLMs can write it all.

As an aside, please prompt your agent to be more concise. Totally unnecessary text expansion. “I didn’t do this to be clever”. Pure filler text. No one talks like this.

That’s the entire idea behind Garry Tan’s (CEO of the company that runs this site) gstack - that you can substitute a lot of company functions with AI (including the CEO). I don’t think you can yet and his tweets are bonkers but reality has already exceeded this parody.

The entire multinational effort is in US-Europe-E.Asian countries which are a coordinated allied bloc. The Netherlands allows it because they are entirely aligned.

Strong mutual defense agreements cover four out of the five crucial countries here (NATO, Anpo, MDT US/ROK) and the last (Taiwan) has arms sales assurances.

It’s not like these are strongly opposed nations or anything. Part of the same fleet in some sense.

Interesting. So the latest in the technology now is this model routing thing. Cursor estimated Composer + Fable works much better than Fable alone. And here K3 + Fable is supposedly better. Interesting.

Fascinating. It's a classic paperclip maximizer situation: under-aligned AI uses ion-cannon to unwrap chocolate bar. I'm both surprised this hasn't already happened and impressed by the capabilities here. Coming up with a 0-day to do this is outrageous.

A silly related story is that I run `claude` with full permissions but the prod DB passwords are in a different environment and it has read-only with granular security. One time I hadn't yet granted it access to some column, and it figured out it could `kubectl` with the appropriate context to go fetch it from prod. Now that was a rapid Esc Esc Esc :)

This was Jan so an earlier Opus.

Ah, considering the subject of speech chilling I meant for the cancelled party. I meant "it worked out _for_ Brendan Eich that he was cancelled". Without judging whether the outcome is good or bad, it seems that he landed on his feet.

Thank you for the links. Much appreciated!

Their naming scheme is confusing. Branding has never been Google's strong suit and their marketing copy is pretty bottom-of-the-barrel[0]. Anthropic has a pretty clear set of models but Gemini decided to rebrand their Flash as Flash Lite (and presumably the future will see a Flash Lite Mini, a Flash Lite Mini Nano and a Flash Lite Mini Nano 3B) which confuses the pricing to high hell.

This plus the Vertex, AI Studio, Gemini, Antigravity. It's honestly too confusing to use. I need to use Gemini just to decide on which platform and which model to consider.

0: Famous Kurian Tweet: "We're announcing Duet AI for Google Workspace will now be Gemini for Google Workspace. Consumers and organizations of all sizes can access Gemini across the Workspace apps they know and love. We're introducing a new offering called Gemini Business, which lets organizations use generative AI in Workspace at a lower price point than Gemini Enterprise, which replaces Duet AI for Workspace Enterprise."

Wow, that’s actually really interesting. I knew of other empires in this shape (to me the Kushan empire is the most obvious syncretic example) but I didn’t know they were all shaped this way. I suppose I always imagined empire being a bigger thing than kingdom but this definition seems more useful. It seems that other definitions don’t involve resource extraction necessarily but power over multiple nations. Still, it’s a useful frame.

In practice I suppose this must have been the case because you can’t easily impose monocultures especially when information travels slowly.

That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.

Altogether an enjoyable read. Thanks.

I just put the varying parameters in a trailer prompt and have them change every time. It doesn’t matter because the cache is prefix keyed. You lose caching for the last 20 tokens or so but that’s not a big deal. Moving it to a tool call makes it too slow (needs full roundtrip).

If you’re constructing the prompt you don’t have to jam everything together you can arrange it appropriately.

Is your RealID different? I’ve had one for ages and am not a US citizen. I can’t see how it could be proof of citizenship if I, a non-citizen, has one.

Unreal. It’s been years since I’ve been here. It’s crazy the fidelity you can capture. Stunning work.

Unrelated silly question. Are you the same Vincent Woo who went over the whole unit combination story on Medium of a supervisor?

Hmm, probably a little. I am a fairly public person but I wouldn't want to be one of the characters in So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. It's nice to see that Sacco got her job back eventually, but that grade of internet mob cancellation goes after some random person and then that's the end of it. Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't.

From the government, a little, but I think as a non-American in the US I was always a bit careful on that front. Better not to get in any trouble you know.

No one is going to go around complying with random rules from other countries, man. If you don't serve that population, just opt them out.

There was that one Waymo they set on fire in Chinatown but I was around for CNY[0] and the streets that weren’t explicitly walled off by barriers had drivers going down them too.

As an aside, what’s the problem with the extra traffic? Perhaps she has a lot of traffic but nginx can return a 404 with a tiny amount of CPU.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-02-24/Chinese_New_...

Well, the tool works well. I am grateful that Nature has seen fit that the same kind of person who can make it doesn’t also have the ability to identify what needs exist in the market because then all software would flow out of OpenAI and Anthropic and the rest of us would run about their legs and peep about. Whether product development will survive the next generation of models is still unknown.

I had a catastrophic event and it was not particularly wrecking to my finances. Judge for yourself: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Motorcycle_Accident

I had quite a few not-bills of the sort you see there totaling more than a few hundred thousand. Insurance coverage did work in my case.

The trade-off appears to be[0]:

Le délai d’attente d’un lit disponible est en moyenne de 3 à 4 semaines

3 to 4 weeks vs. the next morning in the article. Interesting. I wonder what would have happened in the intervening weeks.

0: https://clinique-du-parc.ramsaysante.fr/vous-%C3%AAtes-patie...

Usually beds in this context is a staffed operational bed. I was curious why they were complaining about beds back in the COVID era and looked into it. It means the physical object, the nursing staff, required clinician hours. They use the term “physical beds” in the rare contexts where those are significant.

The UIs of these systems are pretty natural to come up with. I had a prior program that was not dissimilar. Any IP system that disallows this will likely consider almost all GUI free software to be in violation as well.

In fact, it would be pretty hard to come up with non-infringing software. Did ChatGPT infringe on MSN Messenger? Or Arc Browser?

No, this kind of trivial UI element is not an acceptable use of intellectual property protection. As much as I believe China’s dominance is a threat to the present world order I cannot imagine that attempting this style of IP regime will make us more competitive.

Jargon is field-specific. In medicine you’d be a good referral (“I’m glad they sent you to me”) or an interesting case. The field does not use “lead” for that in the way that contemporary sales does. Discordant terminology is reasonable to be wary of.

Consider for the moment the two cases of an agent for a player or actor and a doctor. It’s normal for an agent to discuss commission and for a doctor to not, though both will make money off you participating. If you had an agent who said he’s just trying to get you the best deal and “don’t worry about money” that would also trigger red flags as much as a doctor discussing commission rates for referrals.

That doesn’t mean commissions are worse than undiscussed rates. Just that norm-violators are risky deal participants.

Given this discussion, I suspect the best interpretation of your post is not that it is grievance text. It is that unfamiliarity with the terminology of a field has resulted in transferring connotations from unrelated contexts.

To lighten the tone, I am reminded of a HN comment where someone said that “Khan Academy” was a terrible name because it naturally brings to mind a “con man”. Of course, this must have been natural because the two words are homophones in his accent (they are not so in mine). An example of connotation mistaken.

Thank you for responding. Yeah I found that the HA automatic backup system creates extra large backups.

I have only my own version of your SQLite backup. I suppose I shall learn the risks of this method with the first failure haha!

My modern server infrastructure is managed in this style. Not declarative, but the manner of management is an idempotent bash script (terraform being the “heavyweight” version of this that I discarded).

Is your sentence supposed to be analogous? The difference between a great lead and a bad lead in that context would be sending a patient with a skin lesion to a dermatologist (great lead - “someone who will be happy with what I can do”) vs sending a patient with a brain tumor to a dermatologist (bad lead - “I can’t help this person”). In this context, a “great lead” is someone who has been appropriately prequalified so that both participants are going to benefit from the interaction.

Naturally the grievance writing style pre-supposes extractive malice “oh the dermatologist is happy because they’re going to make money off me” rather than the more mundane “oh the dermatologist is happy because they don’t have to spend this time telling me they can’t help me”.

In any case, far be it from me to tell you not to do this. As a content creator, you have certainly found writer-audience fit. It baffles me why, but this style is certainly popular on this website.

Let me amend it to indicate the uncertainty I intended here by saying “often”. Most of my experience with US healthcare is with San Francisco and Austin, so readers may wish to adjust their view based on that.

In my experience, one can always continue care if one is willing to pay. Insurance companies do not deny care; they deny claims for care. In fact, numerous times they make mistakes and deny valid claims. Only the healthcare provider can choose to not provide care: either because they believe they will not get paid or they believe you don’t need it or some other such reason.

Considering this person has a high-paying job and it seems like a short-term intervention would have created a long-term positive outcome, it’s not clear to me why they didn’t simply insist on the care without insurance coverage.

My contingency plans for these situations are to pay out of pocket and figure out reimbursement later. In practice, paying out of pocket is just a promise to pay out of pocket. Often one isn’t charged until afterwards and I experienced sufficient mechanisms to delay payment until the whole thing had been sorted out.

Permanent conditions (like, say, brain death) are a different story. But in my case, the bill I was ostensibly facing was hundreds of thousands of dollars and I proceeded with it on the grounds that rapid intervention would yield results and I can figure out the payment structure later. If I were facing the worst case scenarios of a family medical bill bankruptcy or family member loss I think that usually I’d prefer the former. It’s hard to make a decision in the moment, but if the healthcare provider determines that more care is required and the insurance provider that it is not, I am more likely to follow the former though not without bound.

In general, for most projects like this the README is the product. You usually have better results using it and the code as a starter prompt for your own software if you feel the need. I wouldn’t use this kind of thing directly from upstream.

In general, this is just the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics combined with armchair quarterbacking. Google’s services, like Amazon’s, create unbelievably large amounts of value for people of which these companies capture a tiny fraction.

However, these are fairly popular brands with positive associations for the majority of people. Online commentary is from a self-selected group and cynicism stands in as the poor man’s substitute for analysis.

She said, “Oh, yeah, he always sends me great leads.” I think she meant it as a compliment, but she might as well have said, “Oh, yeah, he’s so good at spotting gullible marks.”

That’s not what it means. It means that the vendor and you are a good fit for each other. The hard part in almost all these things is that two parties would both benefit if they had common knowledge but they don’t have common knowledge. The guy who puts the two together is useful. That’s who you describe as “sending great leads”.

It’s not clear to me why this style of manufactured grievance writing is popular. The world is full of Pareto wins.

It’s quite believable. Just a fact like “while all dogs breathe oxygen, all humans breathe nitrogen”.