ismyrnow

I suspect that Anthropic wanted the govt to ensure they would not use Claude for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons even if it does become legal in the future. OpenAI was comfortable with the agreement because it's currently illegal and they can make a public statement that they still side with Anthropic on the ethics side.

I also believe that Anthropic's CEO just didn't get along with the DoW in negotiations. So much of these big contracts comes down to relationships.

Still pretty sleazy how the govt is being so aggressive about it. I wish they would have just denied the contract and picked another vendor.

China already has such legislation. They have placed restrictions on social media and internet use for children, and they censor content on these platforms.

Personally, I'm against government intervention for this sort of thing. I prefer government to be constrained to securing my liberties, rather than restricting my behavior "for my own good".

As a parent, I talk to my kids about social media like I talk to them about junk food. I want them to recognize that it's bad for them - it's addictive, and provides short term pleasure that results in long term misery. Avoiding it, or making good decisions about how you interact with it, is a personal responsibility issue.

A little less than half will go to taxes...

:sad:

The people in this community are more qualified than most people in my social circles for debating this topic, and tend to be less motivated toward bias. People here tend to be better at referencing source material, facts, and statistics that support their thoughts.

Although I don't usually seek out this topic in this community, I find these discussions here helpful from time to time.

App Store gatekeeping needs to burn. It may be helpful for the tech-illiterate who want simple and safe apps, but it's not a viable for a healthy ecosystem of broad ranging applications. It's crazy to think I can't install an app from a developer I trust from their website.

I like your wording on this - outrage cycle. I agree that social media algorithms promote that, which is why I have largely withdrawn from twitter, facebook, and instagram. They're nowhere near representative of my real life social networks. While platforms like instagram have the capability to keep friends connected and inspire people, they've turned into toxic waste sites.

That said, their effect on society hasn't been limited to raging twitter tirades. Companies, governments, and other institutions seem to be bending the knee to their outrage, which has led to not only our cancel culture, but to things like the CHOP situation which went on for far too long. Leaders are scared of making the mob angry.

I feel pretty strongly that the vocal "majority" on the internet isn't at all representative of our local, national, or global communities. Both government and business leadership need to stand up to the bullying that these online mobs are doing, and employ reason instead.

This isn’t how life as a software engineer has to be. I work for a small software company, which hasn’t taken any investment money, and is experiencing slow growth. The entire company is remote, and I love my coworkers, who I see daily, but only see in person a few times a year. I make enough money to live very comfortably with my family.

A lot has to do with your perspective on life. If work is life and it is what you get your value from, you’re bound to be disappointed if you work for someone else.

I can’t finish up this comment without mentioning that I’m a Christian, and I find value not solely in the work I do (what if I get injured and can’t work) or in my family (they’re human and far from perfect), but in being loved by God. Most people are gonna call that stupidity or the result of brainwashing or naïveté, but it’s a comfort few people have when the world turns upside down due to global pandemic and recession. I’m not here to argue religion with anyone, just to say that a Godless life can be a hopeless one.

I was actually looking to move from one urban center to another, and switch jobs accordingly. During my job search, my current employer found me on hired.com. They're an entirely remote company. Taking this job has turned out way better than I ever expected, especially considering I wasn't looking for remote work. I was able to move closer to family, get a house with a separate office, and live surrounded by woods, all while staying on track with retirement savings and living comforts.

I was weary of doing remote work initially. I always felt like the remote workers at my last job were a little more disconnected than the office workers. I also turned down the opportunity to work remotely at my last job. Working at a fully remote company has been an eye opener though. I feel more connected to my coworkers now than I did when working in an office. It all depends on the company's culture.

In the future, if I had to look for another remote job, I would look for remote-only companies. Their culture is likely to befit remote work much better, and the people making salary and benefit decisions are able to better sympathise with the employees because they are remote also.

Definitely not impossible. I got married at 21, and it's one of the best decisions I ever made. We just celebrated our 8th anniversary, and we've got two kids to enjoy it with. No, it wasn't to my high school sweetheart either. I was blessed to meet someone that fit me, and we made a commitment to each other. I know others who did the same and have thriving marriages.

I think it's really dependent on personal maturity. My wife-to-be and I both knew what we wanted families, so we looked at our financial situation, and decided we could responsibly get married while I was still in college. A couple generations ago, that was pretty normal. Not so much now, but that doesn't make it impossible.

AppGeo | Boston, MA | Full Stack Engineer | Full-time | www.appgeo.com

AppGeo is looking for a full-stack engineer to help us build rich, interactive applications for the modern web. Our small team of engineers are polyglots who regularly use a wide array of technologies, including React, Node.js, and Postgres.

We need your help to build mapping applications which will be used by people all over the country, from local governments to large corporations. Our applications have helped policymakers create affordable housing, transportation agencies report road conditions, and businesses find optimal locations for new stores.

Here are some of the responsibilities you might have:

- Write HTML5 and CSS3 for the front-end

- Develop client-side applications using JavaScript (along with React or Ember.js)

- Build maps using Leaflet, Google Maps, or ArcGIS

- Build RESTful back-ends using Node.js or ASP.NET

- Help design and work with SQL databases

- Deploy and maintain apps using AWS or Google Cloud Platform

Open-source technology is at the core of most of our solutions. Many of our engineers contribute to open-source projects, and even speak at conferences.

We have excellent benefits including medical/dental/vision insurance, 401k with match, commuter benefits, and flexible hours, including working from home when you need to.

Send a resume and cover letter to devjob@appgeo.com. Please include your salary expectations, US citizenship status, and links to your online profiles (GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn), if any.

I love his reflection at the bottom:

Life is easy. Humans are fucking badass -- we absolutely dominate our environment and are so smart and powerful. But for some strange reason, we take those millions years of evolution encoded in our DNA and throw it out the door. We live in ways that are so counter to the flow of nature.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention density of cattle farming. I know it's a complicated issue, but my understanding is that industrial animal production affects climate more than transportation does.

http://www.fao.org/Ag/againfo/resources/en/glw/Density_maps/...

https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html

Github is... adopting the old Visual Studio logo?

http://static.flickr.com/2768/4307936121_5b5e51a790.jpg

There's an app called Free Download Manager which has this feature. I suspect it may be using youtube-dl under the hood, since the functionality looks similar (with a GUI, of course). The app allows you to copy/paste youtube urls and it parses the page for available downloads (audio and video). I use it regularly for putting technical talks onto my phone to watch or listen to on my commute.

The app is very easy to use, and one of the few I would recommend to a non-technical person for the features it has.

I know the name makes it sound like spyware, but it's the most lightweight tool I've found for both this and the occasional torrent.

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/

^this

Sounds like he wants to avoid paying a lawyer to do something that the big record labels can do with a click, that is, get a network to honor a DMCA takedown request. It shouldn't be so difficult for an individual to prevent someone else from profiting from their work.

It sounds like yet another case where legislation favors the megacorps that put those laws there, claiming they were only for the good of the artists.

I've used Entity Framework in .NET extensively, and since moving to NodeJS back ends, have used Bookshelf.JS a bit, and researched numerous others.

In my opinion, an ORM is only worth using if it is very mature. I'm talking third major version mature. My biggest pain point in using an ORM isn't a lack of features, but the inability to easily drop-down a level, and skip the abstraction in order to get something unique done.

Entity Framework has been around a long time, and is the standard in the .NET world, probably in the same way ActiveRecord is for Rails. EF not only provides well thought out and proven abstractions, but also makes it easy to just write a complex SQL query when necessary. Bookshelf.JS lacks that maturity. It was helpful at the prototyping stage, but has gotten in the way as things became more complex.

Unless there is a clear best practice for your stack, I would stick with a simple library to build parameterized SQL queries (we use Knex for NodeJS), and build a data access layer. If you layer and abstract things well, you can always start with an ORM and move away from it if/when it gets in the way.

All that said, if you're just doing CRUD, an ORM will save you time. Just know that nearly every app idea is "just CRUD" in the beginning, but tends away from that as time goes on.

Although he talks a bit about formal specifications and tools for writing and verifying them, his talk has a few really great parts about informal specs.

I'd recommend watching 23:22-30:42, where he gives an example of where an exhaustive semi-formal spec was critical for writing good code.

I'd also recommend 44:00-54:00, which I think is the most broadly applicable part of the talk, where he discusses the need for thinking as writing, and writing specs before coding.

Web Application Developer - Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Applied Geographics, Inc. (AppGeo) is looking for an experienced and enthusiastic web application developer to help us build map-related web and mobile applications in our downtown Boston office.

You must be skilled in full-stack, modern web application development using:

  - HTTP/REST 
  - HTML, CSS 
  - JavaScript (including client-side toolkits and frameworks) 
  - an object-oriented server-side environment 
  - SQL, and 
  - Git

  - Node.js 
  - web mapping with Esri, Google Maps or Leaflet 
  - NoSQL databases 
  - open source development, especially active participation in open source projects

I'm pretty sure readability routes web pages through their service to strip them down to the main content, and restyle them. Since this processing isn't done on your machine, it would probably be slower than loading the original page. Also, a company would never invite the amount of traffic such a feature would incur.

The sample size ("over 30") is really too small to draw many conclusions. Then again, it's a larger sample size than the typical ranting blogger (sample size of 1) who likes/dislikes a given stack.

+1 for the link to the Java AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean class doc.

Yes, the title is link bait.

However, it was written by the author of a popular JS framework. It should really be titled "There is no Best client-side framework".

It's a good point he made, and one that anyone new to the client-side framework market should learn sooner, rather than later.

"... I don't see them as games anymore, I see them as ways to min/max, look for exploits, efficiency, risks vs rewards, mathematical equations."

I was talking with a fellow gamer, and we both made the same observation about playing video games at an above-casual level. I realized (when playing Skyrim) that I was focusing so hard on being as efficient and successful as possible, that I wasn't really enjoying myself anymore.

I've since been making an effort to play games more casually. I can still be competitive, but if playing games feels like a chore, I'm doing it wrong.