qurren

Reminds me of Yishan Wong's description of OpenID's failure:

https://www.quora.com/What%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-OpenID-Why-h...

I just do gcc -O3 and get SIMD without having to learn it

I don't consider 30 minutes away from town the "boonies", that's more like a normal commute. The boonies would be like a 3 hour drive in the Sonora desert.

Mining towns used to work in the days when one parent worked full-time and one parent raised kids full-time, and job security, unions, and pensions were a thing.

In modern times, both parents often have career ambitions, and the modern capitalist economy and housing pricing has greedily recalibrated to every family needing two incomes. So you're not going to have many families willing to move to the boonies unless you (at the bare minimum) hand out doubly-high salaries.

Very likely that's not enough though, as it's also a massive financial risk to them if you can just lay them off after the next earnings report with no pension to continue supporting them. Most modern families would rather stay where jobs are slightly more likely to exist.

They need to hire IT, maintainence, and security to run the datacenters, and there aren't many qualified people in the boonies. Small towns are better targets, and honestly also just objectively less damaging to the environment.

None of this NIMBYism is about the datacenter itself, it's all a protest against AI making the economy really shitty for them.

Part of the problem is the rest of us are broke as well and taxed to death so we don't have much left. If they paid you well, we wouldn't be able to afford your books.

From https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/agreement/modeluse

We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, support, and improve the Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and policies, and keep the Services safe and secure. Customer who requires restrictions on the use of Customer Content for training or improving Moonshot AI models may contact Moonshot AI to discuss available enterprise arrangements or separate written agreements. Unless otherwise expressly agreed in writing, Customer Content may be used for the foregoing purposes.

Notably, unlike Claude, there is not an opt-out option for the model training part. The TOS explicitly allows Kimi to train on your code.

I thought they were working on M5 already? Why are they still auditing M3?

They should also be forced to walk around town with a GDPR cookie banner pasted over their face covering half of their field of view. And then although automatic doors open for most people, for them specifically, the automatic doors shut. The doors are postered with "would you like to subscribe" newsletter ads. They have to manually open each one of them.

Nice idea but I feel like it would work better with a non-flat or mildly-3D theme.

Government cannot exactly "bar" terms of service. ToS isn't law. The most they can do is say they're unwilling to enforce them.

ToS is just conditions that you agree to in order to use a private service that is provided at-will. I can have a private coffee shop where the terms of service are that you must wear red to enter, and if you're not wearing red, you are not welcome on my property.

So it would be upto OpenAI and Anthropic to enforce them on their own terms (by banning accounts and IPs).

Right, the California HSR route doesn't travel through any really dark sky regions anyway.

My point was that if you want replace, say, San Francisco <-> Las Vegas with HSR you're going to inevitably have to wreck a chunk of Bortle 1 dark skies in the Sierra or Death Valley.

Doesn't mean I'm against HSR but it has to be done thoughtfully.

Some good points. However:

replacing the majority of air travel with high speed rail

I absolutely LOVE high speed rail, but I will note that it is correlated with far more light pollution than air traffic. I say correlated because typically high speed rail is routed through high-density population centers, but if there aren't population centers, you'll have to have plans to create them in order to support the rail system itself.

Basically there is nowhere in the world that has both high speed rail AND suitable for astronomy. If you want to find dark skies in China for example you have to get far away from all the high speed rail areas of the country.

Starlink gets a lot of flax for it but as an avid night sky photographer myself (IG: @dheeranet) who regularly goes to Bortle 1 parts of the world, I haven't found them to be an issue at all.

1. They are only visible when they are spinning up to orbit

2. They are too dim to desensitize your eyes, and are extremely easy to remove with the most basic of outlier rejection techniques; netizens often amplifiy outliers by max-stacking instead of outlier-rejected mean-stacking to make Starlink look much worse than it is

3. Lights from planes have ALWAYS been much, much, much, much worse than satellites. They still aren't particularly a problem for imaging if you know how to outlier reject, and their paths are known, predictable and trackable

I'm not an Elon-fan or anything but just giving a dose of objective reality here.

Not to detract from TFA's real issue which is light pollution from cities -- that's an actual issue as the regions of dark sky are shrinking.

As an applicant for a single opening

You're nitpicking at details. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to write it so that this isn't an issue, but it seems you're more interested in "taking the other side" rather than thinking together about how to increase job compensation transparency.

Here's the problem with minimums: Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K. Yes, I've seen them.

Here's a hint for everyone else: For small companies and single openings they can just aggregate mean/median/std by job level (E5 average, M1 average), or aggregate horizontally by team (HR average, ops average), whatever. Anything to increase transparency. If you're criticizing the math instead of building on the math, you're clearly against job transparency.

Good point. Absolutely include mean, mean, std of stock grants, bonuses, and sign-on bonuses by law as well.

I'm just tired of regulators realizing the right things to regulate but not implementing them correctly.

Job postings must include a salary range? Who the fuck thought of that? Did they even ask a mathematician whether providing the min() and max() would be useful rather than mean(), median(), and std(), which is what the law really should require?

The motivation is good, the implementation sucks.

requiring disclosure of AI-altered listings

So all the landlords will just disclose it and everyone will continue to be deceived. Just like every other picture on Meta platforms these days says it is AI-edited. That didn't make the feed any better; it's still a feed full of disclosed AI crap.

Why is this mayor so fucking chicken to just BAN AI-altered listings altogether? Have jail time and $1M fines for it. Fines big enough that you would risk losing your property altogether. We need more real leaders.

Less talk and more work.

As a google shareholder

How about you do some work? The world needs less armchair bosses and more do-ers.

During my grad school years, back when the world was less competitive, I organized a LOT of events. I liked giving to the community, I had space to do it, and my needs were taken care of.

Nowadays I feel like anything I do either needs to be either (a) getting me closer to opportunities to build a living or wealth OR (b) individual recharging time.

When my poke bowl costs $24 (yes, it actually did), and my job application acceptance rate has cratered from ~100% to 10% over the past 10 years, I don't really have space to give to the community for free anymore.

Meanwhile the big techs:

"Hmm how can we use this for fingerprinting"

Nowhere did I had even half an hour of disconnection.

Well my garage door opener sensor has been disconnected for two 30 minute gaps today and my plant humidity sensors go offline for 2 weeks at a time.

So yeah, it's not ready for prime time.

LORA

No, let's not even go there. Tech nerd protocol here that's an awkward middle ground that creates even more problems. Average Joes aren't going to set that crap up.

HomeKit will take care of the VPN/remote access part, sure, but your devices still need to communicate with the HomeKit device, and that's usually over Wi-Fi, which puts the devices on the public internet, and carries the same security risk.

There are various non-internet protocols for IoT devices, none of them good:

* Zigbee: Requires some technical understanding to set up, devices randomly disconnect for hours even when they are 2ft from the coordinator, all-around horrible experience for non-techies

* Non-standard Zigbee variants: even worse

* Matter-over-Thread: horrendously designed from a UX perspective. Easy-to-lose barcodes stuck on cards in the packaging, weird 12-letter codes, and your non-techie cannot understand what the hell Matter or Thread is. Pairing is an absolute nightmare.

Chinese-made hardware

Honestly, I'd rather it leak my GPS to the Chinese government than the US government. They don't have jurisdiction over me anyway.

should not be allowed to communicate over the public Internet

It would be a no-go for non-techies. One of the biggest draws to IoT devices for "average Joes" is being able to view and control them from remotely, and they aren't going to have the skills or know-how to set up a VPN correctly with dynamic DNS so that their phone can VPN into their home and then sideload/jailbreak their phone to load a custom app to control it. "It just works from anywhere" is a big sell for them.

From the manager's side, you're absolutely correct. The SEV looks bad on you, and is a headache to document.

From the perspective of people you manage, it's a very different picture.

We (I say "we", because I was an IC) sit under you, and every year at performance review time you're effectively required to put some percentage of us in the "LE" bucket. Never mind that we could theoretically all HV3+ if you measure by "normal" peoples' standards, your manager isn't going to let you mark all of us as HV3 at the performance meetings. I know this, because I've been there as well at those meetings where truly high performing people were downrated to fit a distribution.

So what happens? When I see a peer's critical lurking bug, I have no incentive to fix it for the sake of prevention. If I fix it quietly so that it never surfaces, it looks like I haven't done any work for the week, or have done un-impactful work, and I get the stick from you. Preventing fires doesn't look like work, to non-technical eyes.

The only "safe" way to play this game of "survivor" is to let that bug surface eventually, then when the SEV comes up, I jump in and fix it, earning your approval, skip approval, VP approval, as well as potentially the other person gets the stick from you, because you have to give the stick to someone anyway, you get a reason to stick it on them. At least it's not getting stuck on me.

I'm sorry if this comes off as shocking to you, but it really shouldn't; the incentive structure is NOT set up for teamwork, plain and simple. If "putting customers first" is a value, then it absolutely needs to start from systematic changes of how people are managed.

The trick to surviving under such management is to jump in and put out other peoples' fires but not spend time preventing them even if you know how to.

Yes, I am a former AWS employee.

I got put on Focus because my "contributions were not coming through" to leadership.

You overestimate how much people give shits at big techs like Amazon. When literally everything is driven with sticks instead of carrots, the work culture does not invite employees to proactively care about product quality.

You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against getting kicked out of the country (via the PIP->H1B grace period expiry mechanism).

I honestly can't tell a good music video from a bad one. I don't know what makes a music video "good". These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, of the same caliber as those Michael Jackson or "Beez in the trap" things. It's all just butt shaking and sunglasses in Philips Hue lights chanting some meaningless words.

I don't believe in paying "towards" anything. Either you buy it or you don't, in full. Anything else is financially irresponsible, unless you have the collateral but are only preferring not to liqudate.