HN user
Common complaint is that government enforcement of laws is insufficient, i.e. fines are only x% of their worldwide revenue. Sounds like this way has teeth and might force companies to actually obey the law?
I was wondering about that. I've taken a number of different cold medications over the years, one active ingredient at a time, to check their effectiveness while sick. Phenylephrine, as widely reported, had zero effect. But Dextromethorphan seemed to work for my kids - give it to them, stopped coughing. Started coughing again 6 hours later, etc. n=1 and it's a 4 year old, but in one of those cases my results clearly matched the studies, and in the other it didn't, at least as reported by this article.
What I've been doing recently:
1. Vibe code a codebase that does what I want at a high level.
2. Iterate with LLM on this codebase to add features, fix bugs, improve performance, and address issues until it basically does what I want, but the code behind it is often a toxic waste dump.
3. Take lessons learned from vibe coded version and implement by hand. For challenging areas (writing a complicated algorithm) that would require a lot of thought or brainpower, I'll sometimes ask the LLM for a reference implementation and then modify it to suit.
This is a big speedup on manual code because you've figured out all the question-marks ahead of time and have a functioning blueprint you can refer to.
It's not as fast as having LLMs do all the code of course, but I find it to be a considerable improvement over doing everything by hand, while still letting me write code I'm comfortable with and understand deeply.
The other angle is to be very specific with the prompts and then dive deep into the code output and keep asking the LLM to change the code structure in various ways to ensure you get code you like. I found that to be frustrating and painful. Maybe in the future I'll write some really good prompts and future models will be better at following direction, but I haven't been happy with the results of that approach to date.
The people doing the voting are mostly talking about how much water datacenters supposedly use.
As I have snarkily observed at work: if I go $100 over the meal allowance on my business trip, I'll have to have an unpleasant conversation with my manager or finance. If I use $500 in AI tokens unproductively I'll be recognized for being a top AI adopter.
Certainly disagree with "AIs are not good at writing Rust". We can discuss the pros and cons of AI coding in general but in my experience they do just as well with Rust as any other language. If anything I'm impressed with how seamlessly the models can work with Rust's ownership model.
Yeah, same in the US. I would not leave my laptop in a cafe in SF. I would in the Austin suburbs. I might or might not in Chicago depending on the neighborhood and cafe.
In many of those examples, there is payment to the creator of the works that others are learning from. Authors are paid for their books, when we listen to music on the radio the musician is paid royalties, etc. When you lead a team and mentor junior engineers you're being paid for your time.
The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use.
IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.
If they can't tell their suppliers not to depend on Anthropic models and services, then... yes, potentially?
Right, usually law enforcement gets chat logs from a participant (search warrant for a phone, informants, undercover FBI agents, etc) and uses the metadata to connect messages to a real person's identity.
Yeah, and I wouldn't bet money on this happening for that reason. But it is possible.
People were also charged for coordinating and supporting J6 without being there, e.g. Enrique Tarrio of the "Proud Boys" was charged with seditious conspiracy based on activity in messaging apps. If people in these Signal chats were aware that people were using force to inhibit federal law enforcement, which some of the leaked training materials suggest is most likely true and easy to prove, and there are messages showing their support or coordination of those actions, I assume they could face the same charges.
Remember that most of the participants in J6 walked away and were later rounded up and arrested across the country once the FBI had collected voluminous digital and surveillance evidence to support prosecution.
Presumably Seditious Conspiracy, like many people involved in J6. Conspiracy to use force to prevent or delay enforcement of laws.
VXUS is up almost twice the S&P 500 year over year, although some of that is likely the weakening of the dollar.
Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular.
It seems extremely popular based on my LinkedIn feed! /s
The era of microservices and micro teams gives all "company X uses us" claims a different vibe. Maybe it used to actually mean "this is the thing Facebook uses to power its website on millions of servers" but now it's usually like "the team of 6 that runs the analytics platform for Apple Fitness+ uses this on 5 servers"
Only indirectly (see other comment).
In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of the farm bill).
Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products legalized by the 2018 loophole.
This is what always happened with Republican shutdowns too.
- You get nothing
- Eventually everyone understands they're going to get nothing, so they ask some sacrificial lambs to vote to end it while they posture and pretend they would have "kept fighting"
With Republicans this was called "RINOs" and "tea party" but it's the same thing now.
The reality is that most SNAP recipients are not going to go to food banks or anything like that; they're just going to use their own money and buy groceries or McDonald's.
Now, what that means is that they'll have to spend less money on other things to buy groceries. Sometimes that's concerts and fancy clothes. Sometimes it's car repairs or the electric bill; depends on the person and their situation. People in tight financial situations are typically accustomed to getting behind on bills and borrowing money sometimes, and realistically in the short term changing their grocery habits is going to be a lot more of a pain than just spending money.
3 months from now in the unlikely scenario that SNAP hasn't been renewed that's a different story.
Most "smart" devices simply don't function without connectivity back to the manufacturer's cloud, and this is basically just the same thing with extra steps.
As a concrete example, Nasdaq had a rule requiring boards of directors to have a certain amount of "diversity".
I agree with this to an extent, but I've noticed that this type of knowledge is much more prevalent in people who attended the top X% of schools, e.g. Stanford and MIT. I'm not convinced that getting a degree from Midwestern State University gives you much knowledge that being a tinkerer and self-taught technologist doesn't.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
I assume that means "you can resign, or we'll fire you, your choice".
An unfortunate aspect of the American system in today's political climate is that there are many veto points and it's even /typical/ for any new actions to be struck down by courts, so there is a sense in which it's rational to expect any new policies to never actually take effect.
A common scenario I've seen in the case of local governments is that a department (e.g. the Assessing Department) contracts with a vendor to run the website and has no idea how DNS works, and the vendor defaults to registering new domains for their clients since that's the easiest when dealing with non-technical clients. Texas alone for example has 254 countries, the vast majority of which are very small and have effectively no full time IT department, so when these vendors are engaging new clients, low IT expertise is the norm by volume.
The local government itself may have an IT department, but they may not know how to create a subdomain, or even be aware this contract is being made and the site is being set up until after it's announced to the public.
In those cases, the company controls all of the code running on those sites, so it's desirable for them to share data and cookies in particular. (e.g. any google.com site can read your login cookie)
In the case of user data domains, intentionally in the design of the service or via a security hole, users may be able to execute code and read cookies (e.g. in JavaScript on a page hosted on githubusercontent.com) and that's undesirable.
Historically UAW auto workers made very good money for the type of work they do, probably $100-150k/yr in today's dollars adjusted for inflation. It's changed since 2009ish after the bankruptcies, but the auto industry is still heavily unionized in the North, and the UAW exerts a lot of pressure even on the foreign (non-union) southern automakers by virtue of the threat of unionization, and so auto jobs are still heavily sought after as one of the best jobs you can get for a certain skill level.
I mean, this doesn't tell us whether they can pay them twice as much or $5 more per year. Some companies make no profit, or very little, or very little per employee.