jasmer

The people here commenting that this is outrageous have missed the boat a little bit.

This 'one line change' is an existential and fundamental effect on the company, it may very well affect operations otherwise.

'One line of code' can easily blow up a system, and the checks are not there to for the 99% of time time we are 'all good' it's for the 1% of the time when there is sketchiness.

Someone complaining about 'hard coded variables' is perfectly right to do so.

Every single element in this situation is in place for very good reason.

Imagine someone wanting to replace the lock in your Airline door, mid flight - oh, we'll just use a 'regular screwdriver' instead of the one designed for the door, who cares!? It's just an airplane!

The gripes are misplaced: the solution for this situation probably is to have a war room/crunch room situation to move the issue quickly and correctly through the hurdles so it can be done within the timeframe needed.

All of those 'delays in between' were the problem - they did not respect the urgency of the situation.

Finance is extremely regulated even if there are shenanigans, Crypto is just an excuse to do finance without oversight, which means it's mostly shady.

Every attempt to peel away the onion layer reveals mass problems.

It's like saying 'we have no hard proof that all this Mafia gangs revenue came from illegal activity!'.

What I'm saying is, the point of crypto is hustle, there is no real economy, and the players are all shady as can be.

Literally nobody knows where the Binance guy even is!

Why would the Binance guy want to hide from global authorities?

Regular bank CEO's don't.

It's mafia-adjacent the whole way down, with a lot of small dupes and kids playing with some amount of money.

There is no 'there there' in the value creating sense that we might want to see.

If you told me BTC was 95% regular people using it for business and 5% shady, I'd say we need to work on that problem. But it's only 5% 'useful' and the rest is just layers of scam and fraud.

We need to dump crypto, and if we want to try that experiment again - because I think there might be value there - we can give it a new name and keep it clean from the start.

The price of all crypto is managed. All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices, and insiders with giant ownership stakes manipulate markets. All exchanges are either a scam, or 'implicitly colluding' with shady things.

BTC is ironically not a very free market in that sense, moreover, because nobody needs it for anything, it has a buy-hold characteristic.

If people needed BTC for things (which would force some liquidity ops) then we'd see a price that reflected something.

Crypto markets are essentially 'schemes' of one kind or another, they serve no purpose other than to be a hustle.

If people want to play dumb games, that's fine, as long as they are doing it legally and it doesn't rope in a lot of external players.

Callibri is a nice business font actually, slightly opinionated and definitely not good for everything. Like a Prius when it came out.

Just because Calpers fails doesn't mean the industry is a failure.

VC is a wide gamut, the top 25% generates something like 30% IRR while the bottom 25% is negative return.

LP in VC is just like VC - have to get in on the good deals and I think maybe since it's harder to evaluate deals, than say for building some homes, a lot of money goes to crap.

The carpenter absolutely should have some education, certification, and especially apprenticeship.

A certified carpenter has more trade-specific information than your average dev out of a great Uni.

It'd be positive if there were some degree of institutionalization of software.

I would not put the needle that far over. The person responsible for the total user experience, and the PM are responsible for the overall design.

The developer is not.

Yeah, if you don't know why you weren't going to keep your job after that, then well, that's not good. Plenty of places you can work with opinions like that. Also be wary that others will then voice their opinions about you.

This reads 'immature borderline toxic' I can't imagine having to work with this kind of drama.

I'm afraid this call for freedom is actually narrow ideology.

Consider: what is more 'free'?

A) Here is some code, do whatever with it?

or

B) Here is some code, you can only use it in certain circumstances?

FSF is dead because it's not practical, and the ideologues behind it naively malign 'capitalism' as something terrible for the world.

OSS makers are free to publish as they chose. Apple and MS don't force or cajole anyone to use MIT. If you use copyleft, your software will not likely get used very much and that's that.

'Big companies leverage over small developers!'

True, maybe they should get together and license their software to Large Corporations?

Finally, the conversation started with a giant Photo of Stallman and that hints at the ideological demagoguery right from the start no matter how much they try to play it down, it'd have been better to not opened the discussion with that at all.

In the end, it will not matter, very few will use copyleft because it's just not practical and that's that.

Where your rack is is basically not relevant. For most startups, AWS is great, even if it's more cost of colo, it's the opportunity cost and dynamism it offers. Use AWS until the savings of not doing so will not affect your ability to grow, or costs are not dreadful. Moving away from AWS is a cost optimization, it depends on the kind of business you have.

But more broadly, the value is IP, essentially know-how and lock-in with customers, relationships etc..

Not really, once you are up and running even then the economics of cloud are usually better than self host. Instance time is 10x more costly on AWS than self host, but, it's still very cheap.

Things like 'egress data' can be a problem, but for the most part, even if AWS is more expensive than self hoste - the 'total cost of ownership' is much cheaper in the cloud - usually.

So private fleets aside, when will it be out-of-the-box on my Toyota?

Are we at diminishing marginal returns and not getting closer?

Do we need a 'leap' in AI? Or is this just a matter of grinding it out?

It's fast, does not have ads, doesn't have layout reflows, doesn't have popups, doesn't have marketing overheaad and BS.

Those things alone would make 90% of sites better.

My god man just give us the goods!

This example is not going to help your case.

The statement 'kill all men' is literally a call to violence.

Now of course (probably?) you didn't mean it as that, but it still falls well within purview of 'obviously moderated', probably immediately, by the automated mechanisms, and frankly, how could you expect anything otheriwse?

The fact that you're willing to admit your bigotry and blatant hate speech on another forum, as though somehow you're a victim, is probably an exmaple of how we tolerate trolling dirtbag bigotry, so long as it 'targets the correct side'.

My god man the lack of self awareness.

Lack of moderation is 10x a worse problem for revenue that offending the blue icons.

Moreover, it seems most of the activists don't want to contemplate that bigotry runs in all directions and saying things about 'men' or 'white people' probably should fall under the same auspices ... which is why even as irresponsible and inconsistent as Musk is, he leans a bit more 'loose' than not which is probably preferable than ideological forms of censorship.

I also feel that as a society, we're going to get used to 'foul language' and that it just doesn't have the resonance it might have had.

Someone spreading fake papers saying 'doctors are trying to kill you with vaccines', with a ton of followers, is actually more problematic than some random dirtbag's side-comment.

Fisted by Foucault is a dark substack, meaning at least partly ideological lies and disinformation.

It's a bit like Zero Hedge in that it's one of those places where they like to talk about how the 'World Really Works!' aka 'behind the curtain' and they do so with some actual insight and intelligence, but ultimately there's a lot of BS and lies, and plenty of over misinformation.

The author is also a pro-Putin fascist / apologist who thinks that Putin's invasion of Ukraine must somehow be the result of Russia's victimization by other countries.

Most devs are not earning anywhere near what a doctor is.

" Nobody would expect e.g. Rhode Island to feed itself, b"

Again - internal self sufficiency is not the basis of development.

S. America has relatively free trade for things they need, and there are no hugely relevant issues there.

The wheat innovation is going to be nice for Brazil, but more as a function of expansion of industry, not really on the basis of 'self sufficiency'.

Brazil's path to wealth lies through the reform of civic and social institutions, not through some kind of magic grain.

The same could be said of most places.

"would make Brazil a lot more stable economically (and even socially and politically) "

It's the other way around.

Brazil and Argentina especially should be rich, what's lacking is coherent social organization from top to bottom. Obviously it matters more at the top, but it has to be borne by regular people as well.

Same could be said of other Central/South American nations, but geographic factors and natural resources do give a material advantage that can be leveraged into a lot.

Consider that Canada, unlike most other so called 'advanced nations' - does not actually have lot of advanced industry. Research, yes, but 'applied' - no. And yet, because it has a 'free export card' with natural resources, it can import the equipment and materials necessary to support the rest of the regular domestic economy, which benefits from ultra boring politics, 'functional' bureaucracy, low levels of corruption.

Innovations can only be leveraged by organizations that have the coherent ability to make use if them.

The 'low hanging fruit' in Brazil is governance, though I hope this Wheat helps.

It says what it says in plain English.

If the claims of climate change people were true, that we are facing existential destruction in short order - then how is it possible they are denying a tried and true solution?

We could have reached 'Paris targets' long ago were we to have kept deploying Nuclear installations, in the terms that we understood decades ago. With fewer accidents. Etc.

The denial of a tried and true solution to this supposedly existential crisis destroys their credibility, and therefor their claims. That's not to say clams aren't valid, but that we can't trust the vanguard of the people behind the climate movement, obviously.

It's incredibly naive (but maybe understandable) for people to not understand that the issue of climate change is hugely politicized and ideological, and because of that, it's hard to make heads or tails of a lot of information.

People running around screaming that the sky is falling - and not talking about Nuclear as part (possibly the basis) of the solution - are spreading irrational fear and hysteria. There's no reason to talk about 'mass flooding' if we can solve the problem in a fairly straight forward manner.

Far from not being listened to - the green movement absolutely killed nuclear development and research in the 1980's and continue to fear monger about that issue, in places like Germany, the fear is generationally entrenched.

The buildout curve grows rapidly in 1980's and 1980's and then drops to 0 in the early 1990's [1].

Were the USA to have 'kept the pace' on that buildout, 60-85% of current electricity generation in USA would be supplied by Nuclear, much as it is in France.

The denialism of the green crowd is existentially damaging to their credibility.

With respect to climate change, far from 'not being listened to' - they're the most influential NGO movement maybe in history (aside from religious movements) - and influence government policy all over the world, at the highest levels, towards a fundamental reshaping of the economic basis.

Mixed in with the 'climate movement' are all sorts of other ideologies, particularly those against consumption etc. which gives you hints as to why they won't chose a relatively clear 'almost solution' to their supposedly existential problems.

If there's a funny bit of history it's that Greenpeace has caused climate change. They saved the Whales, which is nice, but they killed Nuclear (and continue to hold it back) which is bad.

Look at the data from the EIA. Look at those numbers, rate of buildout, and the % contribution made to US energy generation mix. Extend the growth phase (which stopped in 1990) out 20 more years. What is the result?

The result is relatively easy reach to Paris targets.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-indus...

Climate fear mongering is a driver of denial.

Unwillingness to build nuclear power, which could possibly solve the problem, is a driver of suspicion, which is a driver of denial.

Politicization of social sciences and campus activities, severely damages credibility, which drives denial.

Corruption of global institutions (such as the WHO, in light of COVID origins) and the understandable yet also uncomfortable 'Don't Look Here' approach to NIH, Lancet relationship with Wuhan Biolab Research (it's complicated) generates deep suspicion, and fosters denial.

Big Pharma + McKinsey designed scheme to addict millions with opioids without real consequences, and subsequent embracing of Big Pharma during COVID on totally unquestionable terms aka 'Trust The Science!', although rational from a policy perspective (it's a national emergency), is again, a huge driver of suspicion and therefore denial.

Political voices basically have no credibility in most situations and won't be able to convince anyone remotely skeptical.

I think things like 'Housing Insurance' frankly is one of the better means of social interdiction, it hits people right in the pocket book, and I would hope insurance companies just send out the letter with the graph saying 'well, this is where the weather is going, this is the expected damage, so this is your rate'. That's not political logic.

If eco warriors rationally believe this fear mania, then why are they not screaming for a Nuclear Energy revolution aka large scale builout over the next 20 years to literally save the planet?

Because we could absolutely do it, we wouldn't need to invent a single iota of new tech.

It wouldn't even be that hard - we need to pick up where we left off in 1985 when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout.

Why does the current Administration believe in 'science' only when it suits them?

Or maybe there's more than 'science' going on ...

My gosh 'the robots that replaced the factory workers ... will just help the workers - so now worries!'

Do you know what happened to manufacturing when automation low-cost outsourcing happened?

It was wiped out.

It was devastating for certain sectors of the economy, even as 'net productivity rose' - the surpluses were acquired by some, not others.

A lot of 'ghettos' in the US are a direct result of mass factory closures.

Now - imagine that happening over the developing world, or rather, factories that were supposed to open, never did.

The developing world are 'services export' economy, with things like call centres etc. - and AI will more likely than not just evaporate those roles.

That those people will have 'access to ChatGPT' is besides the point when most of them don't even have computers (just mobile phones), or any way to apply that knowledge.

It's a bit like saying: 'The developing world has access to Wikipedia and all of Harvard courses online! They should all have great jobs!'

Unfortunately that's not how it works.

AI is going to help white collar workers, not pink or blue collar work which is low-skilled.

It's scary because AI is going to put the developing world out of business.

This coming century is supposed to be about 'Rest of World' - first China, then India and the rest.

But it's going to risk the ability of the nearly-unskilled labour to help.

There's something to be admired about people who put a lot of effort into planning and doing something, even if it is a bit petty.

There is no reasoning, which is why it will be impossible to move the LLM's past certain kinds of tasks.

They are 'next word prediction models' which elicit some kinds of reasoning embedded in our language, but it's a crude approximation at best.

The AGI metaphors are Ayahuasca Koolaid, like a magician duped by his own magic trick.

There will be no AGI, especially because there will be not 'automaton' aka distinct entity that elicits those behaviours.

Imagine if someone proposed 'Siri' were 'conscious' - well nobody would say that, because we know it's just a voice-based interface onto other things.

Well, Siri is about to appear much smarter thanks to LLMs, and be able to 'pass the bar exam' - but ultimately nothing has fundamentally changed.

Whereas each automaton in the human world had it's own distinct 'context' - the AI world will not have that at all. Context will be as fleeting as memory in RAM, and it will be across various systems that we use daily.

It's just tech, that's it.

'It's not AGI yet' - the implication is insufferable. It's a language model that is incapable of any kind of reasoning, the talk of 'AGI' is a glib utopianism, a very heavy kind of koolaid. If we were to have referred to this tech as anything other than 'intelligence' - for example, if we chose 'adaptive algorithms' or 'weighted node storage' etc. we'd likely have a completely different popular mental model for it.

There will be no 'AI model' that is 'AGI', rather, a large swath of different technologies and models, operating together, will give the appearance of 'AGI' via some kind of interface.

It will not appear as an 'automaton' (aka single processing unit) and it certain will not be an 'aha moment'.

In 10 years, you'll be able to ask various agents, of different kinds, which will use varying kinds of AI to interpret speech, to infer context, which will interface with various AI APIs, in many ways it'll resemble what we have today but with more nuance.

The net appearance will evolve over time to appear a bit like 'AGI' but there won't be an 'entity' to identify as 'it'.

Sam is responsible for marketing the team which popularized a certain kind of AI product. No need for personal attack.

It's absurd that people are still thinking that a language model which a bunch of tokens are indexed is some kind of 'AGI'.