deanCommie

Look, I get where you're coming from, I do.

In the last decade, we've seen rampant abuses and exploitation of open source projects and of maintainers. So much individual good will and generous efforts wasted because of corporate malfeasanse.

AND YET. If you "open source" a project, if you actually invest in BUILDING a community, you then become a PART Of that community - with the benefits and obligations that come with it.

You don't want the obligations? Fine. But then you don't really get to keep participating in the community. And if you act like "This is MY community, I get to do whatever I want", people are free to shrug, and say "maybe i'll go find a different community".

Which is exactly how I see people reacting to Zig right now. They're seeing that an active member of this community (which, as you said, keeps insisting "he owes them nothing because the community wouldn't exist without them") treats people he doesn't like, and they think "Oof i don't want that to one day be me."

Putting aside that I don't agree with Bram (I've been using all the Claude versions he refers to and haven't experienced this), I do think it's interesting that there is no universally perceived golden sweet spot between "sycophantic" and "rude".

Many neurotypical people call neurodiverse people (software engineers) rude, while they think they're just being direct.

Many neurodiverse people call neurotypical people sycophantic, while they think they're just being polite and friendly.

It also happens across cultures (Eastern European vs. Western European; European vs. North American).

So I can easily imagine that when you have a software tool whose interface is language, but its user base is extremely wide across both cultural lines and neurodiversity spectrum, it's going to be basically impossible to nail a sweet spot.

You make it too friendly, and the nerds get mad. You make it too adverserial, and the normies call it rude.

I wonder what kind of communicator Bram Cohen is. Is he succeptible to this? From what I heard about his career, he's always been more of a solo programmer. Has he had to interact with other humans much giving feedback? Could it be that he asked the model/tweaked his prompts to ensure directness, and now he's interpreting that directness as rudeness?

like with most things, these things are both overrated and underrated.

are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes.

are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope.

some examples:

* managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging

* sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone.

* 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy

There are other things like that.

They're not vulnerable to this.

But first, in the phrase that you quoted, you do understand that in human society "trying to harm" someone is still a malicious act.

If I push a coworker at an office window, and it shatters and they fall to their death, there will certainly be some culpability to the building since the window "Should" have been able to hold the pressure.

But I will still be culpable to this.

Second, the threat of more harm is looming. Does the author know that this kind of prompt injection doesn't work anymore?

Either:

A) If they know, and like the principle of it, then every thread here debating their moral virtue is irrelevant. This is an empty protest that will be ignored by the AI model harnesses, and I simply don't see the value in it.

B) If they don't, because they're so hellbent on fighting AI that they're out of touch with the real capabilities of modern tools, then:

i) They are anti-intellectual and incurious and forming their beliefs on incomplete data, and therefore not credible. But more significantly:

ii) *They are a risk for escalation*. If the author realizes this kind of prompt injection can't work, who's to say they won't try to develop and inject more sophisticated attacks?

You're not wrong, but it's also so sad.

FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.

Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.

It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.

So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.

When I was making 200k, 120k of that was cash.

When I was making 800k, 200k of that was cash.

Like I didn't discount that it gave me the ability to buy a house.

But day to day, week to week, it's the same doordash and the same restaurants, and the same vacations.

It's not like I started getting invited to St. Barths.

My sentence:

other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg

Your sentence:

800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income

So we agree.

The thing you missed in my post:

day to day

Day to day it doesnt feel different when you own a house vs rent one.

Day to day you're eating the same food, entertaining the same ways. Doing the same thing with your friends, family, and loved ones.

The 50% of your waking life that's not your job is not meaningfully different.

So when the other 50% starts to feel dramatically different, you notice.

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable.

Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other)

The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency.

For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries.

2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.

Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity.

And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing.

How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp?

I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.

The Three Mile Island accident is also dramatically exaggerated in the public conscience with its severity and risk factor - solely because of the default fear of Nuclear.

Oil, Gas, Coal, and random chemical plants have had much more significant accidents even in the US, but never made a blip in the public's minds.

Aren't France and Canada the ones to learn from at this point with regards to safe nuclear operation?

This is the first fundamental flaw of the article

Bob's weekly updates to his supervisor were indistinguishable from Alice's. The questions were similar. The progress was similar. The trajectory, from the outside, was identical.

No they won't be. They might be worse. They might be better. But they'll be very different.

And, like you said...

Alice and Bob had the same year. One paper each.

No they won't. Alice would've taken a year. Bob would've taken a few days.

You've already covered why that might actually be OK, so I'll talk about the author's other error:

This sounds idealistic until you think about what astrophysics actually is. Nobody's life depends on the precise value of the Hubble constant. No policy changes if the age of the Universe turns out to be 13.77 billion years instead of 13.79. Unlike medicine, where a cure for Alzheimer's would be invaluable regardless of whether a human or an AI discovered it, astrophysics has no clinical output. The results, in a strict practical sense, don't matter. What matters is the process of getting them: the development and application of methods, the training of minds, the creation of people who know how to think about hard problems. If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.

Keep asking why. why does the development of the application and methods, the training of minds matter?

the goal isn't abstract. The goal is still ultimately for the benefit of humanity, just like the cure for Alzheimer's.

Humanity learned physics, so we made rockets and now we have satellites, and the entire planet is connected with communication and information.

Humanity must continue to invest in astrophysics so that we do not get wiped out by a single rogue asteroid barreling through the cosmos, like the dinosaurs did.

Now i'm not saying that there isn't other benefit to making generically intelligent humans that know how to think. But at the end of the day, the purpose of astrophysics is no less existential than the purpose for developing medicine.

I want to know the age of the universe so that we can understand what created it, and if we can reverse entropy, and if there is anything beyond the universe. That is a quest for humanity that will take hundreds if not millions of years.

ok but i manually used arrow keys to set it to by clicking right 25 times, and that didn't work, so i gave up.

Are we watching the same clip? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?

In this scene, he is:

* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker

* privileged and self-important about his background with a client

* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because

* he doesn't make the sale

* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.

and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?

i'm curious, how do you think other large companies operate with regards to reporting progress/status/results up the management chain?

At least at companies where the upper management is aware enough of the details to make good judgements, and the business is critical enough for some reason that low level management can't just be entrusted to yeet/yolo-things into production?

We need to get past the point of binary perspective. The question isn't whether any one of us is innocent or guilty. The question is of what.

The word "rape" makes people visualize the most extreme scenarios of strangers in the night attacking those weaker than them, and assaulting them with violence.

But there are still significant parts of the world, even the western world, where "marital rape" is considered an oxymoron.

So people tried to come up with a generic neutral term like "sexual assault" which could mean everything from someone's worst rape nightmare, to unwanted touching in a sexualized manner in a crowd.Because that's the reality - physical contact requires consent. And consent is........complicated.

If I say "Do you consent to sex with me?" and you say "yes", did you consent? Yes.

If I say "Do you consent to sex with me, so I don't murder you", and you say "yes", did you consent? No.

Everyone can plainly understand the above. But finding the line for consent shifts can be surprisingly difficult.

* "Do you consent to sex with me, so I can give you the antidote to the poison you accidentally ingested"

* "Do you consent ..., so I can pay for life-saving cancer treatments that you need so that you otherwise can't afford?"

* "Do you consent ..., so I can pay for your rent, and otherwise you will be evicted?"

* "Do you consent ..., so that I don't fire you from the job you have?"

* "Do you consent ..., so that I no longer support you financially in a way that is currently entirely based on good will, and you've come to depend on it, and are scared of losing, because you've moved across the planet to be in my orbit, and now it looks like if you disappoint me, I'll turn on you"

Gaiman's accusations are at the end of this spectrum. Should he be in jail? I don't think so. Should he lose his livelihood? That's entirely up to his fans. Is he "innocent"? Well, if the facts aren't in dispute, I don't think so.

Which is why it' so frustrating and unhelpful to see writers and newspapers like https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y07w7nyxzo dwell on details like:

Gaiman's legal papers also included WhatsApp messages which he says back up his case, in which Ms Pavlovich thanked him for a "lovely lovely night" and told him their relationship was "consensual".

PLENTY of sexual assault victims "thank" their assaulter, and assure them things were consensual even when they're not. Because they still feel at risk. Or because *THEY DON'T WANT TO ADMIT TO THEMSELVES THAT THEY'RE A VICTIM*.

Nobody wants to feel like they were violated. Nobody wants to admit that they didn't consent. Nobody wants to have the burden of now being the one to decide what to do about this - on a social level, on a criminal level, etc.

Admitting you were assaulted is saying "OK, so do i want this to be something I have to admit about myself for the rest of my life? To waste countless time and money and stress and anxiety to pursue justice that probably won't happen? To risk my own safety and sanity?" No wonder so many people don't.

None of this may change anything that's in this Project. But the whole framing of it pisses me off. It leaves no room for nuance. This man is probably not a monster. That doesn't mean he's not an abuser.

Speaking of Zero Dark Thirty, it has WAY more problems than that - https://www.tiktok.com/@trademoviespodcast/video/75653617056...

Somewhere, John Carmack, in his new conservative era, is seething.

I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music instead of Spotify.

I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.

So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.

I think there's an even simpler point that people who make fun of athletes for blowing their paychecks instead of saving them miss:

* These are elite athletes at the top of their pyramid, which means they have an absolutely bonikers elite competitive drive that got them where they had so far.

They were probably the best player on every team they've been since kindergarten. They've made it to the top of the pyramid and most want to keep going. Championships, all-stars, MVPs, all of these are things they are USED to getting at every level so far, and they want to keep going.

So when they sign there $X00,000 rookie deal they're not thinking "OK how do i save the most of this for my retirement", they're thinking "how do i get $Y,000,000 deal next? And the $WZ,000,000 deal after that?" And of course then I'll be set for life, and it will be easy to save and retire cuz i'll be rich.

This is just human nature.

Changing defaults doesn't have to mean changing existing configurations. It can be the new default for newly created VPCs after a certain date, or for newly created accounts after a certain date.

And if there are any interoperability concerns, you offer an ability to opt-out with that (instead of opting in).

There is precedent for all of this at AWS.

What's missing from this history though is that when WhatsApp went from an Electron app to a native windows app it got decisively worse.

I agree with you, but "better" is subjective, and this change was ON PURPOSE because most consumers would disagree with us.

It's why they all have "motion smoothing" turned on all their TV's too. Yes, it's animation, but the Blu-rays look "higher resolution", and look "smoother" and less "noisy".

All the artistic benefits you and I see are lost on most watchers.

Doesn't the fact that they made it super-green in Matrix 4 proves that it should never have been blue? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR0YBqhMtcg

Wouldn't the lawyers be based in Israel - under some Israel-based shell/subsidiary of Google/Amazon, that owns the data centers, and complies with local law?

YES, but let's also not ignore that the market is cold right now and the tech industry isn't really growing like crazy like it did during ZIRP.

So yeah in a hot economy anything you launch grows crazy. Then you do the thought leader talk circuit.

And in a cold economy, you can stop growing, optimize for your 24/7 steady workload, and also do the thought leader talk circuit.

I don't think OP thinks his skills are useless per se now, but that the way to apply those skills now feels less fun and enjoyable.

Which makes perfect sense - even putting aside the dopamine benefits of getting into a coding flow state.

Coding is craftsmanship - in some cases artistry.

You're describing Vibe Engineering as management. And sure, a great manager can make more of an impact increasing the productivity of an entire team than a great coder can make by themselves. And sure, some of the best managers are begrudging engineers who stepped up when needed to and never stepped down.

But most coders still don't want to be managers - and it's not from a lack of skill or interest in people - it's just not what they chose.

LLM-based vibe coding and engineering is turning the creative craftsmanship work of coding into technical middle management. Even if the result is more "productivity", it's a bit sad.

Even if there was somehow a way to do a "national divorce" without a bloody civil war (no chance), who gets to keep the kids? (nukes)

I worry that as bad as things are, at least the blue state resistance (pathetic as it is) provides SOME restraint on the red states/MAGA's worst instincts.

Even if there was a way to divide the country evenly without dealing with the urban/rural divide, I have to imagine the first thing the new separate Red America do is start invading it's neighbours, if not outright nuking parts of the world.

There is no way that a breakup of the most powerful empire in the history of the world, with military bases around the entire planet, can happen without severe consequences for the rest of us.

You said it. Such mixed feelings.

The reality is there was a sweet spot - when the industry got less toxic and started attracting visible minorities, and you started getting some diversity of thought AND passion.

Then the money got too good and it started attracting the personalities that 10 years earlier would've become finance bros and caused the 2008 crash. And they fucked it all up.

And that was always known to have been a counter-productive protest. There's nothing ironic about this. They were told. They didn't care.

It was unambiguously clear that no matter how bad you felt Obama/Biden/Harris were on Israel, Trump was/would be worse.

If every single human life is worth saving (and it is), it's indisputable that Trump is worse for Gaza than Harris would have been.

It was the ultimate Trolley Problem, and a bunch of progressives acted like pulling the switch on move the trolley is NEVER acceptable regardless of how many lives it saves...

My "older" pixel (9 XL) is also now slower as a result.

It literally takes a half a second to tap "speaker" during the dialer after the update, which it didn't before.

Disappointing.

AWS isn't well-configured for AI workloads

What does that mean? Not enough GPUs?