coldbrewed

Wait a minute, weren't these the same people using layoffs and RTO to take down their employees down a couple of notches? And the people who were telling the world that AI would destroy white collar work? Could these possibly be the same people that indicated that AI might wipe out humanity?

At least they're not using their money to swing politics to their favor or being the US administration.

Or were the same people A/B testing their apps to "maximize user engagement" to the detriment of society.

Anywho, we should all unionize. No relation to the above, just seems like a neat idea.

Can I buy a 40mm grenade launcher without a FFL? No, I can't. Can I legally manufacture and install an auto sear on my AR? Also no. Would it be sick if I could? Hell yes. Do I own a delightful selection of firearms, including AR pattern rifles? Yes, and the cardinality of that set is only going up.

Does society benefit from mass ownership and unlimited access to fully automatic rifles and grenade launchers? If it does, what country allows it?

Are the above constraints explicitly decided as constitutional though years of legal decisions at all levels of the courts? Yes? Then we can observe that we can reasonably constrain constitutional rights through law and legal opinions. The line may be hard to draw and may shift, see the AR ban, but it is accepted that constitutional guaranteed rights have bounds that can be articulated and clarified through the legal and political system.

We put upper bounds on the rights and freedoms of individuals and corporations because we all must live within proximity to each other. These bounds may be authoritarian at times, and of course that's bad. But we collectively can limit freedoms because the alternative is actively and disproportionally harmful to society.

When it comes to the rights and the freedoms of the largest and wealthiest corporations, we already live in an era where these entities are shaping major aspects of our lives. Infinite scroll is one small mechanism by which they're hacking our biology; this is more than just pixels on a screen but a component in a system that was A/B tested to maximize behavior modification.

Help me understand - do you believe that it is possible to regulate these entities in any form? Or do we need to say that the folks that yeeted tea into a harbor were fine with infinite corporate power and regulatory capture?

Isn't it fascinating that the people making the most extensive use of infinite feeds and A/B testing for maximum user engagement are also the massive platforms with dominating network effects and captive audiences? It's like _specifically regulating large social media conglomerates with outsized impact, capacity for harm, and demonstrated propensity to maximize user addiction might provide an ideal balance of societal improvement without harming smaller actors_.

Re, source code: you can print out an implementation of your infinite feed and put it on GitHub. Go nuts. That's your freedom of speech. Likewise, I can write DDoS control software and clients. However I can't run said software as a service because that specific act is illegal. Same thing applies to the application feeds we're discussing; hosting content and offering software as a service has different semantics.

If you think that UX is a matter of free speech then I have an illuminated freeway sign running at 3000 nits to sell you.

We can have nice things. We can push corporations to act in pro-social manners. We can put individuals at a better footing with respect to large corporations while ensuring the liberty of individuals and small businesses. This libertarian idea that we cannot constrain obviously harmful behavior from massive corporations without immediately turning into an authoritarian both flies in the face of historical precedent and basic reason.

Exactly this. Residential proxies are _the_ tool that makes stealth browsers and massive scraping work, and it's overwhelmingly done without informed consent.

Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?

Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?

We already do limit harmful speech, at presence it's limited to speech and will immediately cause harm (the whole "shouting fire" thing) and the demonstrable addiction properties can be reasonably shown as harmful.

It's also telling that only corporations seem to be the ones demanding the right to infinite scroll; what's the scenario where an individual can only express themselves and their ideas through implementing infinite scroll on a social media?

We draw lines in the sand all the time for the sake of public safety, I'd like to hear a specific case of harm here.

I work at a CDN that provides bot detection services. I agree that there's baseline necessity in terms of fraud detection, and if not necessity then definitely financial motivation to fingerprint. But these days, abusive scraping is far and way the the main driver for fingerprinting.

We don't fingerprint for ad purposes, and we destroy PII for humans as fast as we can because PII should be treated as radioactive. But we see customers that are constantly burned by abusive scrapers and the scrapers aren't slowing down.

The current approach to scraping is strip mining the Internet and is having the corresponding pollution effects that you'd expect. I'm fine with individuals doing whatever weird automation they want, more power to you, but it's this industrial scale crawling and extraction that's degrading the Internet from all angles.

Addiction is an extremely complex public health crisis. Letting people starve on the street is bad, giving people benefits will result in some abuse, and real change would come from more comprehensive treatment plans but we're not ready for mandatory detox programs yet, and even if we had them we wouldn't set these people up for success after.

The abuse of benefits is bad but these people are the tail of a system. It's tragic and frustrating but we can't look at the tail and and assume that they bear the sole responsibility for their predicament.

The concern is that attestation turns into another mechanism to monitor and control people; see how age verification turns into surveillance.

Abusive crawlers use residential proxies to distribute crawl traffic between thousands of IPs, so that one agent that's making five requests blends in with the massive crawl. There is signal but there are ML inference engineers tuning their traffic to blend in, which requires that mitigations must get more sensitive.

At the end of the day, the defensive side has an obligation to protect customers and well behaved agents are the first thing that gets swept up along with the bad actors.

In 2011 Portlandia joked that Portland is where young people went to retire. Now Portland is where anyone that doesn't own a house will never retire.

Making people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.

CDN security SWE here. I have functionally zero interest in what individual people do in terms of automation. I automated my gym's class signup forum during COVID so I get the validity of the use case. You want to work around the mitigations to do the same? Go with my blessings.

The killer is that everything that works for individuals trying to get through the day and make the web a bit smoother is immediately used by industrial crawlers strip mining the Internet, and you can't block one without blocking the other. A future where the web is only accessible via device attestation is extremely dystopian but so is an Internet where every drop of content goes into an LLM training set.

Things like this is why all of the worthwhile content is going to drain into balkanized spaces, and we're all the poorer for it.

The highway to hell is paved with selfishness and avarice and we are clearly on it; if we keep doing this "tragedy of the commons" bit and don't prioritize the well being of the species we are going to destroy what remains of the climate that sustains us. The idea that our current predicament is that disaffected elites are just looking to elevate themselves doesn't square with the climate reality; plenty of people want a more equitable distribution of resources because we're out of runway for naked capitalism.

The aversion to authoritarianism of any flavor is well grounded and we cannot cross that line, so your point on forced collectivism is valid. But when the current system is trying to burn 300 million years of fossil fuels in a cool 300 years without having a ramp towards a sustainable future during a period of wealth inequality greater than the gilded age, _something's going to give_. It's either going to be our economic system, our mechanism for ordering society, or 3C+ of warming.

We need more judges and prosecutors that are hungry to catch corruption and are willing to go after white collar crime.

Why not build skills and an MCP for markdown or obsidian? I'm using both at present and it's fine, bit would like to understand the differentiating factor here.

RIP. I respect the author for the effort but source CAD kernels are a tough nut to crack; the existing solvers are pretty old at this point and there's a floor on the effort to get a kernel that's roughly on par with opencascade without the architectural limitations. We're going to be waiting on an entity like CERN or other organized body to put in the effort to meet that floor.

HN comment guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Remote device control allows for running and monitoring prints from another networks with zero effort, but more importantly local device control can't be monetized. It's just about the money.

Wait a minute, wasn't this effectively the business model of dotcloud before they became Docker Inc?

https://www.kuow.org/stories/privacy-advocates-flag-a-potent...

Yep, the fact that the safety merely blocks the trigger and doesn't block the striker in case of accidental sear disengagement is horrifying.

Browsers need to start displaying a count of em-dashes and en-dashes in articles so that we know what to expect from AI generated self-aggrandizing articles like this.

So, it's istio but with AI generated blog posts?

Coldbrew's law states that if an article is written in praise of AI and abstrusely written, then it's probably AI slop, written by someone who holds their own ideas in high enough regard to publish but holds their audience in low enough regard that they won't bother to edit it.

Edit: there it is. `vibe-coded and deployed with Claude Code`

In fact in a fully optimized system, once consumers have all of their wants and needs met, they will have zero dollars left over.

What are your parameters for optimization here? If the point is to maximize extracted revenue then this is a reasonable outcome but we could optimize for any number of targets. We could optimize to make the best use of resources, we could optimize for best consumer reviews, we could optimize for the ideal buyer/seller price that makes both entities in the transaction walk away with the best deal for each of them.

But there's this persistent notion in the current business zeitgeist that the only metric worth optimizing is profit maximization and it's one that we should reject. Companies need to make a profit and workers need to take home a salary and that's fine, but we get to build the world that we live in. Living in a world where we care about quality of life and equity in transactions is much more interesting to me than living in one where all we care about is the velocity of extraction from anything that isn't nailed down.

Open source is a gift within a gift economy. The software may be freely used but the labor needs to come from somewhere, and donations of either direct labor or compensation help ensure that the overall gift economy can continue to function.

My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...

Software engineer, or IFSAC Apparatus Operator engineer? On the west coast we absolutely refer to our pumping apparatuses as fire engines; when Engine 813 is dispatched from our station to a call we bring the whole vehicle and not just the engine block!

ICE vehicle fires take about 1000 gallons, and the average fire hydrant puts out about 500-1000 gallons per minute. Structural fire engines carry about 1000 gallons and the heavy duty nozzles and ground monitors/deck guns put out 500-1000gpm. This is a LOT of water for a vehicle.