I hate this timeline so much

Like AI companies care about business ethics

only a tool

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”

Every tool contains within it a philosophy — a particular way of seeing the world.

But especially digital technologies… they give the developer the ability to embed their values into the tools. Like, is DoorDash just a tool?

“This is sensitive data that could do a lot of damage if it fell into the wrong hands”, said the people paying a for-profit company to collect the data

Lemme share the tea for anyone who isn’t aware:

• Owl house is a show by Dana Terrace that ran on Disney
• It slowly developed into big pro-LGBTQ themes
• Disney panicked, cancelled the show, claimed it was unpopular despite excellent ratings
• Dana Terrace left with a bunch of others to form an independent studio
• Their first show (Knights of Guinevere) features a floating amusement park that rains garbage all over the workers below, and robots that have orbs on their heads that produce a silhouette strikingly similar to that of Mickey Mouse

To solve climate change, we need two fundamental beliefs:

• There is an urgent problem
• We are capable of taking meaningful action

This graph proves that we can take meaningful action. That proof is essential to our success.

I don’t understand the people who insist that while there is an urgent problem, we have never done anything to address it, we’re currently doing nothing to address, and we will never do anything to address it.

What is the point of that belief?

Perhaps the certainty of failure is more comforting than the vulnerability of working towards a success that isn’t guaranteed.

To add to the other replies: This is what AI is for. Not to replace labor, but to enhance the ruling class’ ability to exploit labor.

As a convenient side effect: If you use AI to spam people with bug reports, you’re basically DDoSing them… unless they then decide to use AI to help triage the avalanche. And wouldn’t you know it, Google just happens to sell AI to help you solve this problem they made for you!

“Nice FOSS project you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

And also also: If FOSS in general turns into a ghost town… where are you gonna turn to get that boilerplate code you need to do a common task? That’s right, AI baby! All roads lead to boiling the Great Lakes so Nvidia can pay itself back.

Those additional requests will reuse the existing connection, so they’ll have more bandwidth at that point.

Feels more like a home manager thing to me

I see what you’re saying, but the fact that it can be ambiguous is actually what makes it so useful to fascist organizers.

They thrive on phrases that allow them to wink at each other when they want to, but claim innocence if someone calls them out.

14kB club: “Amateurs!!!”

https://dev.to/shadowfaxrodeo/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-in-size-398n

a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.

This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care.

And now something much worse than SEO is gearing up to take its place: https://www.engadget.com/researchers-find-just-250-malicious-documents-can-leave-llms-vulnerable-to-backdoors-191112960.html

The original source was much more sensible.

The comparison makes sense for evaluating whether you’re over-invested in something. Like, if Nvidia suddenly poofed out of existence, would it seriously be worth 16% of everything the whole country makes in a year to get it back?

Owning a car that’s worth 16% of your yearly income sounds reasonable, no matter what your actual income is. A Pokemon card collection that’s 16% of your income is probably too risky, no matter what your actual income is.

Also, GDP is a decent scale to use for charting investment in a productivity tool, because if GDP ramped up at the same time as investment then it looks less like a bubble, even if they both ramp up quickly.

But that’s not what we see. We see a sudden and volatile shift, nothing like the normal pattern before the hype.

I think maybe the biggest conceptual mistake in computer science was calling them “tests”.

That word has all sorts of incorrect connotations to it:

• That they should be made after the implementation
• That they’re only useful if you’re unsure of the implementation
• That they should be looking for deviations from intention, instead of giving you a richer palette with which to paint your intention

You get this notion of running off to apply a ruler and a level to some structure that’s already built, adding notes to a clipboard about what’s wrong with it.

You should think of it as a pencil and paper — a place where you can be abstract, not worry about the nitty-gritty details (unless you want to), and focus on what would be right about an implementation that adheres to this design.

Like “I don’t care how it does it, but if you unmount and remount this component it should show the previous state without waiting for an HTTP request”.

Very different mindset from “Okay, I implemented this caching system, now I’m gonna write tests to see if there are any off-by-one errors when retrieving indexed data”.

I think that, very often, writing tests after the impl is worse than not writing tests at all. Cuz unless you’re some sort of wizard, you probably didn’t write the impl with enough flexibility for your tests to be flexible too. So you end up with brittle tests that break for bad reasons and reproduce all of the same assumptions that the impl has.

You spent extra time on the task, and the result is that when you have to come back and change the impl you’ll have to spend extra time changing the tests too. Instead of the tests helping you write the code faster in the first place, and helping you limit your tests to only what you actually care about keeping the same long-term.

No apps, no code, just intent and execution.

So the only problems you’re left with are:

• Making a precise description of what you want, at high and low levels of detail with consistent terminology
• Verifying that the system is behaving as you expect, by exercising specific parts of it in isolation
• The ability to make small incremental steps from one complete working state to the next complete working state, so you don’t get stuck by painting yourself into a corner

Problems which… code is much better than English at handling.

And always will be.

Almost like there’s a reason code exists other than just “Idk let’s make it hard so normies can’t do it mwahaha”.

Violation of the unauthorized access provision of the CFAA, or the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA

We do not disclose or publicize the specific capabilities of our technology. This practice is central to our security strategy, as revealing such details could provide potential criminals or malicious actors with an unintended advantage.

I was under the impression it was illegal to use exploits for purposes other than responsible disclosure?

Jimmy Wales: Libertarian that ended up creating perhaps the most successful collectivist project of all time.

It’s the problem, but also the strength. That fragmentation allows room to experiment.

It also puts pressure on the underlying protocols/specs to be air-tight. If you have just one implementation to support, you can do whatever. If you have to support 15, all with different goals and constraints, you gotta be pretty damn careful.

So in the end, we get foundational systems that are able to evolve over time instead of needing a breaking-change, ground-up rewrite every 2 years.

It looks like I’ve been using these terms in some bastardized hybrid of Campbell’s formulation of the hero’s journey and Vogler’s (which is the one I learned in school), so don’t take this as canonical, this is just what I look for:

For me, the “meeting with the goddess” moment isn’t the kinda trivial “this will be important later” exchange like Frodo meeting Galadriel, but an experience of pure joy in the midst of utter sorrow, so like when Moana’s grandma appears as a ghostly manta ray and reignites her determination. In romance stories, this is where the couple gets that perfect date where everything seems effortless and transcendent.

It can take many forms, but the important thing is just that this is a glimpse of what victory could look like, without having actually achieved it yet. It’s a chance for us to see the true, unbridled motivation of the protagonist in a way that doesn’t feel contrived like just stating it to the audience, and it usually has a stark contrast to the horrors that are currently going on in the overall arc of the story. It can be one of the most memorable moments outside of the climax of the fight against the “big bad”.

It’s usually either right before or right after the “all is lost” moment (well, the first one – the one before they really form their initial plan to take down the “big bad” and see that initial plan fail and have to pivot to something that incorporates their mastery of their original self into their new mastery of the supernatural world they dove into).

My take on “atonement with the father” is more conventional. It’s that moment where the hero says “I’m going forward with this journey even if you think it’s foolish, I’ve learned to love myself for exactly who I am in a way that you never could”. If you imagine a scene where someone says “Don’t you dare walk out that door”, and the hero does it anyway, that’s the atonement with the father.

It doesn’t have to be a literal parent or even parental figure. The important thing is just that it shows the hero recognizing that they had previously accepted some artificial constraint on who they were able to be, or what they were able to do, and they’re ready to move past that constraint.

Sometimes this is linked together with a “temptation” moment, where the nay-saying figure has an appealing offer like “Give this up, come home with me and take over the company like you always wanted” or whatever.

The most powerful ones, I think, are less about the authority figure and more about confronting something within the hero themself.

The reason that I like this moment in particular is that it has to be tied to something from their old life, before they started their adventure. So it sets up a contrast for later on, when they’ll have to incorporate something positive from their old life in order to defeat the big bad for real. Here, in this moment before the big battle, they’re discarding something about their old life – what will they choose to keep and emphasize later on?

In Guardians of the Galaxy, Quill rejects the abusive relationship with his father figure Yondu and later on embraces his friendship with his new buddies in order to defeat the big bad. It’s a nice little push-and-pull: he’s becoming more self-reliant, and careful in his social entanglements… but not to the point where he’s forsaking the need for friends and teamwork.

Anyway, those are the two moments I watch for. One that’s a starry-eyed vision of what their journey’s victory could look like, just at the moment where they need that boost. And one that’s a sober self-evaluation and rejection of past behavior. If they do it right, both of those moments should have some kind of echo in act 3, so most of the time I feel like if they nail those two moments the rest of the story is probably gonna at least be good if not great.