josh2600

This is sick, in the 90's Tony Hawk sense of the word.

I love that people can just bang stuff into existence now.

There were times in my life where I would wait for an engineering team to change the color of a button for a day to a week.

We are not in the slow times anymore.

There's a video if you click around...

https://x.com/MaximeRivest/status/2073544461473169432?s=20

Only if you pretend the Sami's don't exist, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people

The thing is... under the laws as they're written today, if US Gov wants to take a peek at your stuff on FB and friends servers, FB can be barred from informing you that such a request has come in under the National Security Letter (NSL) guidelines.

It's a very complicated thing :/.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai?

If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not?

Genuinely curious.

Howdy,

I made a repo to automate building software with Garry Tan's gstack repo.

Basically you install conductor.build, authenticate to claude, install gstack, and then you can use the web interface to write a strong product requirements prompt and it will build 3 versions of the product fully autonomously, check them for bugs, rate them for functionality, and present them to you.

It does all of the steps of Garry's gstack including QA and uses the retro to score it.

I tried to design it to ship good software. I would not use this for production without reviewing the code it produces extensively.

This thing is absolutely wild.

You essentially get an agent in conductor.build who drafts multiple choice replies to your product and engineering questions from claude.

Dramatically improved code quality and speed of development for me.

I served on the eboard of CWA local 9410 when all of that was going down.

Words cannot describe how crazy things were at that time.

I feel like someone will make a movie about it someday.

There’s so much in this article where I look at it and I’m like, is this ai slop?

I’m beginning to really appreciate short articles with a few bullet point takeaways.

With respect to version control across systems, when you get into serious stuff where mistakes are measured in lives and/or three commas, there’s just a lot more simplicity in the design of those systems than most people think.

Really big systems often have very simple design principles at their core which are echoed through out the topology.

In secure code like the stuff signal uses, having a hash of the code that is attested by a network of servers and chained back to self-signed identities on the client is the only way to go.

Here’s the hash of the code that’s supposed to be running on my server, here’s the proof that I verified it with all of the hardware and software tools at my disposal from the server, and here’s that hash and attestation embedded into the app on your phone or laptop that’s connecting to my box.

If there’s an easier way to get some semblance of “my device is talking to the right code on the right box,” please enlighten me.

LLMs are amazing.

Nothing replaces making simple UX instead of complicated kitchen sink products.

It’s easy to make stuff. It’s harder to make stuff people want.

I am thankful for the increase in product velocity and I also recognize that a lot of stuff people make isn’t what people want.

Product sense and intuition still matter.

Signal requires a phone number for signup but you only have to share a username.

We know from subpoenas that signal only holds the user phone number, creation timestamp, and last login timestamp. That’s it.

This is why signal’s encrypted phone number lookup system is so cool. The server uses a bitwise xor when querying for numbers using hardware encrypted ram. The result is that even if you’re examining the machine at the most basic levels you can’t tell the difference between a negative or positive hit for the phone number unless you’re the phone requesting the api.

Obviously ratelimiting is a separate and important issue in api management.

The thing about building secure systems is that there are a lot of edges to cover.

I was 7 when Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness dropped.

You cannot imagine the lengths we had to go to play this game in our home. We were lucky enough to have two apple computers and so my brother and I would play each other using the battle net technology over appletalk. The thing was, the only appletalk cable in our house was barely long enough to make it between the two bedrooms, so when we wanted to play the cable would hang in the air stretched across the hallway where the slightest tug would rip it out of the port killing the match.

The number of times that cable got unplugged mid-game and the inter-household rancor that would ensue is the stuff of legends. I honestly remember the fits we had about whose fault it was that the cord got unplugged more than I remember any specific aspect of those Warcraft games.

It just goes to show, networking topography matters.

WCII ToD is absolutely one of the most insane games to ever be birthed unto the world. It was so brain breaking compared to everything else we were playing at the. time. Just a real quantum leap in terms of dopeness.

Blizzard really hit it out of the park with Warcraft and Diablo.

I think this was definitely true of CEOs in the past but Google and Meta have managed spectacular infrastructure buildouts over many decades with proper capacity planning.

There were a lot of lessons learned in the dotcom boom (mainly related to the great telecom heist if you ask me). If you look back on why there was dotcom bubble it's broadly, imho, related to the terrible network quality in the US compared to other first world countries.

Our cellular services for example lag behind basically every asian market by at least 1 maybe 2 generations now.

Just gotta say that this thread really delivered in so many ways.

Thank you for constantly removing some of the veils from the mystery of our computational universe.

The notion that you’re a very obvious leftist seems asinine to anyone who has seen your comment history in these digital catacombs for the last decades.

Every single time in my life that I’ve failed, there was a silver lining.

The only way to lose at the game of life is to give up.

There’s an old Soviet saying “even when you’re eaten by a bear , there’s still at least two ways out.”

You’re never out of options, there’s always new angles of imagination.

Once upon a time my wife went to close a bank account in Italy.

She went to the post office which is also a bank in Rome. She asked to closed her account. She was told that she needed to go to the branch where she opened her account in Florence.

We rented a car and drove to Florence.

When we arrived at the bank in Florence, the teller informed us that we would have to come back “domani” which is Italian for tomorrow because the only person who could help us was the banker who had originally opened the account for my wife when she was a student many moons ago.

We came back the next day and met the banker who immediately recognized my wife including recanting that she was an artist. He informed her that he could not close her account, she would have to speak to the Director of the bank.

We waited in line for the director of the bank but we were told it was too close to the end of the day and the bank was out of money so we’d have to come back… Domani.

Domani arrived and my wife again waited. The Director willfully ignored her for 2 hours and it wasn’t until my wife began to cry that the Director finally called her over and allowed her to close her account.

This for €2500. That was a balance that meant a lot to us at the time.

I will never forget banking in Italy.

This is actually one of the major fights of our generation.

If signal/whatsapp/e2ee are desecrated, only criminals will have encryption for a short period of time until we all come to our senses and realize that some semblance of personal privacy is a human right.

IMHO, we should fight for the maximum amount of privacy possible within the context of a civil society.

In every generation there is a battle, sometimes quiet, other times a dull roar, and occasionally a bombastic. This battle is who can oversee who.

Surveillance should be the last resort of a free society.

Thank you for contextualizing this. We are truly living in a wild part of the space time continuum.

Not OP but in general sourcing software and hardware radios in that time was very difficult. There weren’t good open-source implementations and everything had to be sorta reverse engineered which meant that anyone with the skill to do that was selling it for a lot of dollars.

Source: did 10 years in telecom land.

Encryption absent open source is dubious at best.

This is a combo of high interest rates and the insane IRS tax rules related to R&D expenses for software companies.

If companies can’t hire people to build the product they can’t afford to invest in entry level people to push it.

I always think about blackberry’s internal design teams telling the ceo that the iPhone was fake, then getting one and seeing that it was a small logic board with a giant battery.

RIM got so completely smoked with their ten year development cycles. It’s amazing if that they still have a business today to be honest.

Yeah what a week to lose two giants. Both were great in very different but resonant ways.

End to end encryption of these systems cannot come soon enough!

I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem.

Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult.

We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors.

This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even the eye scan has threat vectors.

Calling KYC a solved problem is ludicrous.

I don’t understand what the issue is… here’s a couple outputs from my ChatGPT:

Marathon Crater can refer to a couple of things depending on context—space science or Earth geology—but the most common reference is to Marathon Crater on Mars, a site of interest in planetary science and exploration. Here’s a breakdown:

⸻

1. Marathon Crater (Mars)

Location: • Found in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. • Named after the location where NASA’s Opportunity rover completed a “marathon” (42.2 kilometers or 26.2 miles) of travel on the Martian surface in March 2015.

Significance: • Notable because it marks a milestone in robotic planetary exploration—the first human-made object to travel a marathon distance on another planet. • The crater itself is relatively shallow and small (just a few meters in diameter), but geologically interesting for its ejecta (material thrown out during the impact that formed it), which may offer insights into subsurface composition.

Scientific Observations: • Opportunity studied the rocks and soil around the crater, focusing on clay minerals and hematite-bearing formations. • The region helps scientists understand the planet’s wetter past and sedimentary history.

⸻

2. Marathon Crater (Moon or Earth - less common)

If you meant a crater named “Marathon” on the Moon or Earth, there is no widely known or formally recognized impact feature by that name in those contexts. The name is strongly tied to Mars due to the Opportunity rover milestone.

⸻

Symbolic Meaning

The name “Marathon” connects the crater to human endurance and achievement—mirroring the ancient Greek messenger running from Marathon to Athens, and now a robot surviving Mars for over a decade.

⸻

Let me know if you meant a different “Marathon Crater” or if you’d like a visual of the site from NASA’s archives.

_______

Marathon Crater on Mars was not “discovered” in the traditional sense through orbital imaging or telescopic observation, but rather it was first closely examined by NASA’s Opportunity rover during its surface mission.

Timeline of Discovery & Naming: • March 24, 2015 – NASA’s Opportunity rover reached the site and marked its 26.2-mile milestone (the length of a marathon). • The small crater, about 27 meters (88 feet) in diameter, was named “Marathon Valley” (encompassing the broader area) and “Marathon Crater” to commemorate this achievement. • The naming is informal and symbolic, coined by the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), not through official IAU designation.

Context • The Marathon Crater itself was identified from orbital data (likely by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), but it gained its name and significance once Opportunity physically reached it. • Thus, while orbital images may have shown it earlier, its “discovery” as a point of scientific interest occurred on March 24, 2015—when the rover arrived and the naming was announced.

Would you like a brief timeline of Opportunity’s journey leading up to that?

I came here to write this exact response.

Folks work in mission driven organizations. In organizations that are optimizing for dollars you see quality fall by the wayside.

Mission driven organizations that understand the levers of capital are the most enjoyable workplaces of my career.

You want a CEO who is customer obsessed, not a CEO who is maximizing for dollars in the bank at all costs.

It has to be mission first for a startup to be great, really for any critical endeavor.

Hand coded will always win for bespoke projects (and any hard tech startup is a bespoke project).

The reality is that many startups are not tech hard. AI can help alleviate the pain of engineering a v0 to see if you have product market fit much faster. It’s great for prototypes.

I wouldn’t trust AI for production code without also having a strong AI counterpoint testing system.

That is to say, producing code is an annealing process. There is a refinement that comes from striking the hot iron and quenching the blade in water.

With code, spaghetti code will get you out the door, but it will never get you to scale. Scale requires precision, meditation on Kolmogorov complexity, and a clear understanding of the tradeoffs in distributed systems.

AI can help right now, but it is not a panacea, at least in the present moment.

There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised. Notice that all of those voices have less open-source-ness than Signal in virtually all cases.

Signal is doing its best to be a web scale company and also defend human rights. Individual dignity matters.

This is not a simple conversation.