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I doubt distillation had anything to do with it. They barely had enough time. Can you distill Fable (which involves training!) in literally one week? No!

Why would this be the case. Why would software output from a model magically have greater protection than the software the model trained on.

The main problem is ORMs are more work, because you need to understand the ORM. That’s its own beast, each ORM is different, and they change between releases. But SQL is something you already should understand, so you get to reuse the knowledge.

Also you can make SQL much more tolerable if you use migrations. That’s really where ORMs shine, but you don’t need the rest. Also query builders, although those also have a risk of abuse similar to ORMs. 99% of SQL should be static. That sounds like an absurdly high percent but it’s true if you use all the SQL features.

There is one major difference: those install under your users. I haven’t seen a windows installer that didn’t require admin. Some older Linux apps require sudo. They don’t need to do that anymore, not for a while. We have xdg standards of where to install stuff in a users home directory.

Almost never occurs as the repos contain a ton of software.

I would say 95%+ do just this. The Debian, Ubuntu, and even Fedora repos are very large and include all the software you could ever want. And then flathub takes the rest.

It’s really only arch with the AUR and some others where completely untrusted packages are used. This is legitimately a better model than what windows does, although Microsoft has been trying to change this with winget.

If anyone knows that life has a 100% fatality rate, it would be me, with cancer. Trust me I know that.

It’s not an argument, it’s just not.

There is an amount of acceptable risk, you’re right. How do we calculate it? By making sure we follow due process, the law, and we hold parties accountable.

ICE is allowed to execute Americans. Yes, allowed. Because they’ve done it many times, and face 0 accountability. So they are allowed to do that.

Now use your knowledge about humans. When humans are allowed to do something, what happens? If we let people get away with murder, what is the end result? This isn’t rocket science buddy. Put on your thinking cap.

Ditto for the police. When the police make mistakes and violate your rights, they face zero consequences. Your average McDonald’s cashier faces more consequences if they forget your god damn ketchup. So the police are allowed to violate your rights, yes they are. So they do, obviously.

I’ll admit: this conversation is a little bit frustrating to me. Because this is not a deep analysis or conspiracy. It’s just very simple facts and then some very basic incentive analysis. It’s disheartening that there are Americans going around not putting any thought into the power structures of entities they interact with. It’s dangerous, too. People like you are the best target ICE and the police could ask for. They want people who lollygag and don’t care about their phone getting tracked, aren’t concerned about tear gas and rubber bullets, and who believe their rights won’t be violated.

They are already militarized, they have the best technology in the world. Better than most nation’s militaries. It doesn’t help much, because the incentives are such that they don’t get rewarded in any way for solving crimes.

It’s not anecdata, it’s analyzing the incentive structures of our institutions. You have to do that analysis because nobody is going to be a hero. Yes, there are some heros, but there’s no systemic way to make people heros. You need structure.

You just don't require ID to know this. Voter ID is a very new construct and we don't need it, period. We already know who is and is not registered to vote and the voter registration process is pretty secure.

ICE has been basically transformed into the FBI but mostly targeting American citizens. The goal has been, for a while now, to develop a domestic military and intelligence apparatus that can be used against the American people where they are - in their cities, in their states.

The police largely failed this job. Too local, too much accountability if you can believe it. The government really wants a federal force, beholden only to the desires of the dictator. The constitution gets in the way a bit, as you can't just deploy the military domestically against the US people. So ICE it is.

We have similar FDIC insurance in the US. The solution is companies have many, many deposit accounts to still get the insurance, mostly for payroll purposes.

This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.

No surprise then when they fail.

Police in America is so beyond cooked that the entire system needs to be rethought. It's just not working from any angle. It's expensive as all living fuck, with the majority of city budgets going to the police. It doesn't prevent crime. Traffic violations are still rampant, including speeding and reckless driving. And, worst of all, nobody likes it. People complain constantly and police basically just whine about how hard their job is.

Who is this for, really? Is this just a complex money-siphoning scheme to extract funds out of local governments?

Right, and the elephant in the room here: if you aggressively suppress dissent, then of course people will say they're happy and everything is good.

I'm sure North Koreans will tell you to your face that it's fantastic, they love it, it's the best government on Earth. So once the surveillance is powerful enough, truth ceases to exist.

The main problem with these arguments, which are common and we also see in a lot of free-market discussions, is that they assume that every person has perfect knowledge all the time. Including knowledge of changes that might have just occurred.

That's... an extremely difficult claim to make, and one that people largely make for free, unchallenged. I'll challenge it: most people have absolutely no idea what's going on.

When you sign a terms of service, do you read it in full? When you get what feels like a weekly email saying the TOS has changed, do you read it in full? And, to be clear, you auto-consent when the terms of service changes, they don't pretend you have to read it.

This is by design. It's not a coincidence the TOS is extremely long, extremely vague, and constantly changing. And, it doesn't matter anyway. There are no competitors. Because guess what - they have the same TOS. And the TOS doesn't mean anything, anyway. Because the majority of the rights they explain they can exercise in the TOS, they never do. So you can't even use that as a baseline for "what is this company doing".

So not only are people not knowledgeable in practice, but they also face many barriers, by design, to being knowledgeable. And, one further, they actually CAN'T be knowledge even if they dedicate their entire lives to it, because the knowledge does not exist and is not available.

People do not "want" the surveillance state. Rather, they submit to it, under lies, omissions, and asymmetric power. This includes me and you.

None of this is an exaggeration.

It was just recently ruled that your phone can be searched extensively at an airport, without a warrant. The only reasonable thing to do is simply not bring your phone.

Notice what I am claiming and what I have claimed. I am not claiming these things will happen. I am saying there is a risk. People have gotten executed by the state for not complying with obviously unlawful orders. It has happened many, many times. And before you argue: yes being shot by the police is "public execution by the state without a trial or conviction". That sounds harsh, but that doesn't make it inaccurate.

Every time you are pulled over, there is a risk. Any time you enter a public space, there is a risk that ICE, which is a domestic peace-keeping military force, will arrest you or kill you. There is a risk. There is a risk you will not receive due process. Every time you go to a protest, there is a risk your phone will surveilled, sometimes remotely. We know ICE uses 5G devices to surveil the the air waves. Every time you go to a protest, there is a risk you will be subjected to tear gas or rubber bullets.

All of these things are real, are proven, and have occurred on many occasions that we know of. There is really no dispute here, so you can try to dispute it, but if you do, then you are outing yourself as a dishonest person, and of course then naturally nobody will waste their time talking to you.

Now, you probably aren't happy about this. Neither am I. But emotions such as unhappiness do not magically override reality. Whether these things are happening or not and whether they are a risk is a separate question. A question with only one reasonable answer: yes.

The US is most definitely hostile towards its own people, and we also have the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in the world. On par with, if not more extensive than, China.

People largely can't protest here right now, and US citizens are being killed. People are being sent to work camps in countries where laws do not apply. And our leadership is, right now, priming the American people for when they reject the results of future elections. Not to mention everybody involved in the last attempted coup was pardoned - after we were told that our current leadership had nothing to do with the coup.

The state of the US is much more dire than most people are letting on. And it's understandable why. Nobody likes bad news, and we all like to believe things will be okay. All I know is I can't take my phone into the airport. I can't go out and protest without risking my life and freedom. I can't drive anywhere without my location being tracked and logged. And, if I get pulled over, I must comply with any order, no matter how unlawful, otherwise I risk being executed in the street.

Some of these things have been going on for a while, and some are new. But all are real.

Typically you force a split. Configuration is one thing, plugins are another. Maybe you can reference plugins from your config, but not express logic there. Boom, now you have both.

It also means your plugin system doesn't have to choose an "easy" or "simple" language. You could use wasm if you wanted to and allow just about everything under the sun. Although, Lua is used for Roblox games so, maybe it's complex enough.

This is why I run CC under podman.

They want to be challenged in such a way that they perceive to be enriching to their life. The reason people use AI at work and don't blink, but then won't listen to AI artists on Spotify, is that they see one as enriching, and the other as menial.

Optimizing the menial is the end-goal, optimizing fun and humanity and expression is not desirable. It's just not, and we're seeing that over and over again.

If I install one great big Dr Evil dish that records all web traffic in texas, that would be mass. I have no idea how far these vehicles surveil, but I'm guess it's very far.

Eating healthy is a sub-optimal solution. Typically we see the most significant results with lifestyle changes + medical interventions and pharmaceuticals - more than either alone.

There's a strange belief, I believe most born out of morality, that medicine undermines discipline or healthy lifestyle. But it does not, they work in tandem, each making the other stronger.

It is true that taking medication is "easy" - not that easy, though. But easy != evil or immortal. If it's so easy, that's a good thing. It means we can stack it on top of lifestyle changes for very little marginal cost. If you're already working out and eating good, that's great. Go to your cardiologist and see if you're a candidate for statins or hypertension medication.

To be completely fair, most software projects fail, AI or not, and we've known that since before the 2000s. I'm not saying everything post-2000s is bad, but just that the core is unchanged: most software projects fail, you should expect failure, and there is no magic silver-bullet process to either anticipate or prevent failure. Agile (big A) is certainly not that process.

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might make some coin for Spotify. But are people going out to those non-existent tours, or are they instead listening to Confessions II and praying nightly that Madonna tours again?

And, Madonna, if you're reading this: please go on tour. Please.

The job and economy effects drop off a cliff once the DC is actually built. They take remarkably little staff to run, and they certainly don't do much for the local economy. We can tell BECAUSE people are erecting them in the middle of nowhere. There is no local economy, and that works for DC specifically.

I can't erect, say, an Amazon SWE office in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. How will I get:

- Talent for my office? - Food, shelter, and creature conveniences for my workers? - Culture for my workers? - Entertainment and nightlife for my workers? - and on and on

Turns out DCs need like... none of that. Which is why we just put them anywhere, it seems, and we don't build them in downtown Seattle or Manhattan. But we do certainly put offices in Seattle and Manhattan.

Also, while the DC itself takes some local capital to build, both labor and materials, everything inside the DC is imported. We don't use skilled workers to build GPUs for the DC right, we just buy nvidia.

I don't love the phrase "politically permissive" because it kind of implies a natural bias of "permissive for corporations" which is usually, then, less permissive for private citizens like you or I.

For example, allowing flock cameras is more "permissive" maybe, but for me, now I have more surveillance to worry about. I am, effectively, "permitted" to do less. So is it permissive really, or just permissive for the "right" party? The party which, lo-and-behold, happens to have more both literal capital than me and political capital?

Politically impoverished is kind of nice, because:

- Red states are "impoverished" politically in that there's very little competition of competing ideas. It's mostly just converged on who's the most christian and most white, and it's become a hivemind. Obviously not all. But I live in Texas. Have you seen political ads in Texas? It's almost 100% just virtue signaling "I'M the most christian!!1"

- Red state fiscal policy often leads to, like, actual poverty. Most red states are very poor, or at least their inhabitants are. There are exceptions, like Texas. But even in Texas: if you drive through Central, South, or West Texas, you will just encounter town after town after town that are borderline abandoned and obviously riddled with abject poverty.

Right but the 10/month price is actually unreachable, I can't pay 10 dollars every single month. Which is generally what that language means to consumer. When we say "10 dollars per month" that parses as "10 dollars paid each month" NOT "10 dollars per month of service". I understand that's strange, but that's how I would say almost all consumers read it.

The switch and switch 2 are unique because:

- Nintendo is the only console player putting out high-quality first party games at an acceptable level. Yes this is arguable but I won't.

- The switch and switch 2 are reasonably priced, even cheap. Again arguable - the switch 2 had a lot of backlash for it's price. But 450/500 vs 800, come on now.

- The switch and switch 2 are hybrid consoles, both home consoles and portable. Again, I've had people argue with me that the switch is not a home console. I used it for 7 years exclusively hooked up to my monitor and TV. It's a home console.

The overall perception of Nintendo is that they're largely evil and greedy, and they are. But once you look at the value prop itself and the $$$, it's not crazy because Microsoft and Sony are also evil and greedy. Consumers see price tags, not pop culture discourse. They see the Switch 2 is the best priced new gen console, and that the games are actually typically equivalent in price or cheaper especially when stupid DLC is factored in. People were paying 100+ dollars for single games 5 years ago on Sony and Microsoft platforms. Yes Mario Kart world is 80 dollars. But big picture.

I believe generally contract law is not as hard-and-fast as people think. You can truly put anything in a contract. But... that doesn't necessarily mean it's God's word. Even if everyone read it and signed it. I can't take your first born even if you willingly agree. Well, I can in some instances - a company can't buy your first born I should say.

Also many contracts are just uncontested. Everyone is just hoping they work, but nobody is testing it out.

The flip side is if you already have the hardware and can utilize it. Also, if this is for security or IP concerns, you largely don't have a choice. The US players are out.

The marginal cost goes down significantly if you have datacenters. Baring in mind that US API pricing is kind of absurd. Even if you, say, only utilize your DC 1/10 of the time... you might still be ahead of API pricing by a wide margin.