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On point 4, is the general flow that an "update" would read the current latest, check whatever conditions, then rather than updating, insert a new record (all in a transaction), or is your append only sot more an ordered "log" of update requests with the result of any conditional operations requiring a replay (from at least a check point). Or something else entirely.

I'm generally an immutable first, type developer but ive not had to do much schema design for a while and looking back to previous attempts we never hit scale to stress test my approaches.

Perhaps political candidate Count Binface here in the UK should add to his "I'll lower _your_ taxes and raise _everyone elses_" policy with "I'll protect _your_ job and automate _everyone elses_"

I wonder if some sort of member owned cooperative would be the way forward if we the people want to retain any control.

I'll take this as an uninvited opportunity to plug nushell. Ive never got on with bash, it feels like too much of the friction is incidental to the problem, whereas with nushell I find I get to the fun intrinsic difficulty of a problem. YMMV but give it a try if you haven't before

You might be surprised how "little" engineers make outside the US too

I've used postgres on a few projects (via AWS rds) but I've always used it as a pretty vanilla SQL database. Probably the most "fancy" feature I've used being bson columns.

Can anyone recommend good resources for going deeper? (Obviously I could Google, but I appreciate HN recommendations)

People already know a lot of things.

But which "know"?

There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before.

There's being able to recite it without seeing it.

There's being able to explain it.

There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you.

To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.

The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.

Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society

When you say "it", I suspect it will pan out to American Elites, as opposed to America the nation, or Americans the people.

Makes me think of [shepherd tones](Shepard tone - Wikipedia https://share.google/xooRbF7wIIhcsTt2J) which sounds like they're rising in pitch indefinitely

good timing, I just started learning Typst this weekend!

I think there are multiple aspects at play.

People have reasonable concerns about the ethical, political, economic dimensions before we even get to the technical capabilities.

Even within the narrower question of the technical utility, I think there are a lot of factors which differentiate people's different experiences which are largely unacknowledged and lead to people talking past each other and failing to understand how others have such different experiences and opinions.

The sentiment that "users only care if it works" for example implies that all considerations beyond "does the feature work today" are developers self serving their aesthetics, but overlooks many other concerns which _do_ impact users at a later point.

I wrote about just this division of experience and the polarisation which manifests on hacker news just last week as it happens https://www.julianhaeger.com/posts/Disparate-Results-with-AI...

Interesting. Could you elaborate. As a pro Europe Brit I'm interested to understand this viewpoint. Is it a widely held perspective do you know?

It feels like the virtual actors are the primitive the author is reaching for. As an erstwhile Elixir hobbyist I've often found myself wishing for the simplicity of actors when solving problems in my day job. I tend to work in an AWS environment, but I believe over in Azure they have something like it. I think it was called Orleans when I read about it but I think it's got a more corporate name now.

This is somewhat off topic, but a question to Americans: Why do none of you seem to pronounce the "l" in soldering? Every US video seems to say "soddering"

Seems like a decent place to point out that there are good savings to be had on heat pump running costs with a smart controller designed for heat pumps which can learn the dynamics of your building then preheat when tariffs are low or outdoor conditions are favourable.

I work for homely energy which has such an offering, but fwiw I genuinely think it's a good product. It's been studied by Salford uni in their energy house lab, so if anyone's interested maybe dig into that for a more neutral verdict.

apparently it is a British thing. https://editorsmanual.com/articles/collective-nouns-singular...

I suspect sycophancy has a lot to do with things . People with power attract those who want their favour and/or money who will align themselves to please the powerful rather than steer them to their best selves. Furthermore as the sycophants accumulate the genuine voices likely begin to sound out of place, like their _against_ the individual. Ironically paranoia gets deployed in the wrong direction to push out the true voices.

I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.

I built a very similar system into my own assistant type project. In all honesty though I've not used it enough to know how well it works out in practice.

I've never implemented it, but I think WebMentions was supposed to enable this

Since Kagi small web was on HN a few days ago I've been visiting multiple times a day and spelunking around. I've added a number of interesting feeds to my RSS reader off the back of it already.

I was looking into Fedify just yesterday! I'm trying to decide whether to A) try and make my blog an activity pub instance of some sort, B) host my own Mastodon instance, or C) Use someone else's Mastodon server and link to my blog POSSE style. If I go with option A (which somehow feels like how things are _supposed_ to work) Fedify looks like the way to make it happen.

Thanks for your work.

minor nit to pick: Welsh accents are British accents as Wales is in Britain. In fact by some definitions it's the most British part.

People from outside the UK often use British as synonymous with English, and in the context of accents, often a South East English accent or some sort of Received Pronunciation (RP) accent. Technically a "British" accent could be from anywhere in England, Scotland, or Wales, and therefore by extension might not even be the English language.

While I'm here, since it's generally confusing, the UK is Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales.

I feel like activity pub was supposed to / does enable this.

Perhaps someone better informed than I could comment.

Yeah I've been wondering if the increasing coding RL is going to draw models towards very short term goals relative to just learning from open source code in the wild

I've been thinking about this recently and it seems like the most enthusiastic boosters always suggest difference in results is a skill issue, but I feel like there are 4 factors which multiply out to influence how much value someone gets: - The quality of model output for _your particular domain / tech stack_. Models will always do better with languages and libraries they see a lot of than esoteric or proprietary - The degree to which "works" = "good" in your scenario. For a one off script, "works" is all that matters, for a long lived core library, there are other considerations. - The degree to which "works" can be easily (best yet, automatically) verified. - Techniques, existing code cleanliness, documentation etc.

Boosters tend to lay all different experiences at the feet of this last, yet I'd argue the others are equally significant.

On the other hand, if you want to get the best results you can given the first 3 (which are generally out of one's control) then don't presume there's nothing you can do to improve the 4th.

I salaried employees who are paid by time, and are paying their own Anthropic bills.

Initially there is perhaps a mitigating advantage of briefly impressing ourselves or others with output, but that will quickly fade into the new normal.

Net result: employee paying significant money to produce more, but capturing none of that value.

And this is the best country in the world, with the best system of government, because private citizens can voice their disagreement with such actions, including by refusal to participate.

On the off chance other Americans were unaware of this: Other countries are democracies too (and many are better functioning)

Sounds fun. Can't beat a good whimsical project!

I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.