wcarss

It's difficult to recommend things without knowing a reader's taste, but I blanket recommend The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination

- at a minimum, your id will be stored on random servers where it can be stolen

- at a medium, you will have annoying and intrusive identity checks required to use many common websites

- at a high medium, you will not be able to use a non trusted computer and identity stack: get on a windows, apple, or google device and use their identity services in their browsers, or else you cannot use the internet

- at a maximum, all activity you and everyone takes online will be monitored and faithfully tied to your or their verified identity. This total loss of privacy will result in a total loss of freedom of speech and assembly online.

That last point is the direct aim of the people driving these laws.

Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.

Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.

yeah, I have to admit I was commenting on possibilities here without having gone into the article yet -- having now looked for real, I agree that the disruptions don't seem very useful for actual jamming and repeatedly like this for years across satellites and bands in this specific way doesn't make sense for some mistaken targeting either.

Or actual jamming mistargeted for some reason, or used because it was deemed necessary.

I don't disagree with you, but your example of nails and their cost reductions made me wonder whether we reached a meaningful limit in say, some fundamental material terms, or whether we just reached a limit in terms of return on investment.

Return on investment can be too low because the investment required is really high, but it can also be too low because the returns are just limited. If prices had dropped 90%, surely nails became even more ubiquitous, but at that stage there's only so much more money to dig out of the cost reduction hole. It feels plausible that there may have been ideas about more digging that could be done, but the reward just wasn't there in the market, especially versus just selling what worked.

I bring it up because the distinction in one specimen may speak to a larger trend: do new sigmoid developments tend to fail to materialize more often because of serious physical limits / lack of good ideas, or because of limitations to ROI? (Or, other things?)

In the arena of AI, the ROI on more intelligence/unit-cost seems pretty high right now. So, it seems like the difficulty of applying any potential innovations would have to be staggering for none to be pursued. Or, there'd have to just not be any good ideas to try.

Overall, I think there's ideas to try. So in my opinion, that shapes out to justify a bullish sentiment on sigmoids continuing to stack until the perceived potential gains from more intelligence/unit-cost somehow fall off.

Like I said, I don't disagree, we really don't know. But I feel it's a good bet that there's more coming.

Just answering with a possibility here, but they could be seeking freedom from liability for failure to moderate content or ensuring their service is "not harmful". If it's only for consenting adults, and every adult can be pinned down with an identity, whatever happens can have the blame assigned away from meta.

edit: I took too long to write this :)

I agree with what you're saying about writing something twice or even three times to really understand it but I think you might have misunderstood the WET idea: as I understand it, it's meant in opposition to DRY, in the sense of "allow a second copy of the same code", and then when you need a third copy, start to consider introducing an abstraction, rather than religiously avoiding repeated code.

I don't think this diminishes your point, but, for a thing like memory, your father may be maintaining it by insisting on relying on it. It may diminish regardless, but its diminishment may slow down.

At work, we are in a certain kind of race. In life, we are in a certain other kind. To paraphrase a recent Brandon Sanderson talk about creativity in an era where AI can outpace and possibly soon, out-quality a professional, "The work you do on _you_ can be _the art_."

Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus

Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?

This is the take, very well said. I've been trying to use analogies with cars and cabinet making, but building a house is just right for the scale and complexity of the efforts enabled, and the ownership idea threads into it well.

Going into the vault!

This is not true.

When you spend Canadian dollars at a business owned by a Canadian, you're sending that owner and the Canadian government your money, in exchange for their goods or services, normally at a surplus of value for them. You are 'helping' them; you are 'investing' in the Canadian economy. You are justifying the existence of their business and the jobs of the people who work there.

Especially insofar as you're making this choice versus American options, you are putting money into the hands of Canadians rather than Americans. This is the underlying concept behind boycotts and voting with your dollars or feet.

lol, uh, I'm pretty sure they actually can't.

You or a business with legal owners can have a bank account, and you can give access to that account to an agent, but real banks work in the real world, and "know your customer" regulations need a real person somewhere in the chain.

But, hey, maybe I'm wrong.

For anyone else who briefly got very lost at PFC, probably "prefrontal cortex".

https://www.courtlistener.com/ is run by freelaw.

All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.

My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.

That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work.

Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.

Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.

I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour.

It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise.

A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it.

It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".

Singing copyrighted Billy Joel to make your footage unusable for reality television; thanks 30 Rock for an early view into this dystopian strategy

Yeah, getting into the car with the guy holding the gun doesn't become okay because you have a great argument you're waiting to use down the road. He's already got the gun out.

We should have started arguing when he just said he had a gun, indoors, in the crowd. We shouldn't have quietly walked outside at his demand. But that all happened. Here we are now, at the car, and he's got the gun out, and he's saying "get in", and we're probably not going to win from here -- but pal, it's time to start arguing. Or better yet, fighting back hard.

Because that car isn't going anywhere we want to be. We absolutely can not get in the car right now, and just plan to argue the point later. It doesn't matter how right the argument is at all.

Neat! Yeah, that's a pretty complex context and I completely see what you mean about the new hardware being part of the rollout and necessarily meaning that you can't just run both systems. My comment is more of a strategy for just a backend or online processing system change than a physical brick and mortar swap out.

In my note about misreading the suggestion, I was thinking generally. I do believe that there is no reason from a PCI perspective why a given production system cannot process a transaction live and also in a dry mode on a new code path that's being verified, but if the difference isn't just code paths on a device, and instead involves hardware and process changes, your point about needing to deploy a dev box and that being a PCI issue totally makes sense, plus the bit about it being a bad test anyway because of the differences in actions taken or outputs.

The example you gave originally, of shipping to the lower stake exceptional stores first and then working out issues with them before you tried to scale out to everywhere, sounded to me like a very solid approach to mitigating risk while shipping early.

Absolutely, I agree that it's a useful pattern. I've personally typed 4111 1111 1111 1111 into a stripe form more times than I want to even think about.

My point above was that it's not necessarily easy to convince the operators of a business that it's a justifiable engineering expense to set up a new "prodlike but with anonymized data" environment from scratch, because it's not a trivial thing to make and maintain.

I do think it's pretty easy to convince operators of a business to adopt the other strategy suggested in a sibling thread: run a dry mode parallel code path, verify its results, and cut over when you have confidence. This shouldn't really be an alternative to a test environment, but they can both achieve similar stuff.

So, no. There is no development configuration in production, or mirroring of a point of sales terminal to another system that's running development code.

This is a misreading of the suggestion, I think. My reading of the suggestion is to run a production "dry run" parallel code path, which you can reconcile with the existing system's work for a period of time, before you cut over.

This is not an issue precluded by PCI; it is exactly the method a team I led used to verify a rewrite of and migration to a "new system" handling over a billion dollars of recurring billing transactions annually: write the new thing with all your normal testing etc, then deploy it alongside in a "just tell us what you would do" mode, then verify its operation for specific case classes and then roll progressively over to using it for real.

edit: I don't mean to suggest this is a trivial thing to do, especially in the context you mentioned with many elements of hardware and likely odd deployment of updates, etc.

Lead: "We have six weeks to ship. Questions?"

Dev: "Could we pull an export of relevant historical data and get some time to write code to safely anonymize that, and stand up a parallel production system using just the anonymized data and replicate our deploy there, so we can safely test on real-ish stuff at scale?"

Lead: "I'll think about it. In the meantime, please just build the features I asked you to. We gotta hustle on this one."

I'm not arguing with this hypothetical exchange that it's infeasible or even a bad idea to do exactly what you suggested, but attempting to justify an upfront engineering cost that isn't directly finishing the job is a difficult thing to win in most contexts.

There's some fair points here but this is much less than half the picture. What I gather from your message: "if it is built like a human and it says it is conscious we have to assume it is", and, ok. That's a pretty obvious one.

Was Helen Keller conscious? Did she only gain that when she was finally taught to communicate? Built like a human, but she couldn't say it, so...

Clearly she was. So there are entities built like us which may not be able to communicate their consciousness and we should, for ethical reasons, try to identify them.

But what about things not built like us?

Your superconductivity point seems to go in this direction, but you don't seem to acknowledge it: something might achieve a form of consciousness very similar to what we've got going on, but maybe it's built differently. If something tells us it's conscious but it's built differently, do we just trust that? Because some LLMs already may say they're conscious, so...

Pretty likely they aren't at present conscious. So we have an issue here.

Then we have to ask about things which operate differently and which also can't tell us. What about the cephalopods? What about cows and cats? How sure are we on any of these?

Then we have to grapple with the flight analogy: airplanes and birds both fly but they don't at all fly in the same way. Airplane flight is a way more powerful kind of flight in certain respects. But a bird might look at a plane and think "no flapping, no feathers, requires a long takeoff and landing: not real flying" -- so it's flying, but it's also entirely different, almost unrecognizable.

We might encounter or create something which is a kind of conscious we do not recognize today, because it might be very very different from how we think, but it may still be a fully legitimate, even a more powerful kind of sentience. Consider human civilization: is the mass organism in any sense "conscious"? Is it more, less, the same as, or unquantifiably different than an individual's consciousness?

So, when you say "there is nothing more to it, it's pretty much that basic and simple," respectfully, you have simply missed nearly the entire picture and all of the interesting parts.

The opinions of their principals may not align with published findings, for many reasons.

That cop was later my landlord -- he was also the art director of the film, and a wonderful storyteller.

Also, the purpose or end of a country is not to produce some widget at high efficiency for a client, or to rapidly respond to the whims of a despot. It is just a structure around the essential activity of humans simply living their lives.

not a recruiter: I have never felt that recruiters pay attention to linkedin references specifically.

You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.

well, another way to recount it is that google tried and it worked okay but they decided it wasn't moving the needle, so they stopped trying.