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What exactly is 'merging' here? Existing formal knowledgebases with LLMs? I don't think that's anywhere near human knowledge and thus ability to make novel connections. And autoformalization is... basically not happening soon, so we're still ultimately bottlenecked there.

Sounds a bit like trying to transfer my own money to myself at the bank. I.e. it seems designed to prevent old people getting scammed.

I think this is a good way to test a certain kind of capability, but as to whether LLMs would pass such a test, I'm guessing almost certainly not. If you've ever used one for research, it's very 'in' the current literature, whatever that may be. It's an incredible retrieval tool, and it will glibly evaluate any novel ideas that you feed in, but analyses are often incorrect when there's a paucity of directly relevant training data.

Right but was Booz Allen not dealing in mass surveillance too? There's something that's narratively appealing about Palantir in this context. The name, Thiel as a key figure, the mission statement, the branding. It may even be that they have an image of effectiveness that others don't.

If code > infra (wrt 'elegance' or whatever we're talking about), then just use code. I.e. build a monolith (or monoliths) as far as is practical.

Relative to other government contractors, Palantir is pretty good. More so because the bar is typically so low, though.

But that's priced in.

Them featuring in conspiracy theories is just because there's a cultural treadmill for all these things, isn't there? You can't harp on about Raytheon forever. Those are the villans of the past. Back when Bush was the great evil, or something. To get engagement, you need to frame things in the current meta.

Obviously people aren't finding the literal act of wasteful disposal the appealing thing about e.g. non-self-repairable iPhones, so no, not really.

> I don't think any single person I know would say they would exchange replaceable batteries for a 1mm thinner phone, waterproof up to 100m instead of 10m, or a $5 difference in price.

Well, yes it's quite easy to argue against strawmen. I don't know anyone who would favor a built-in shoehorn over a replaceable battery either.

Although on your waterproof point, that's just a single dimension metric used for comms. It's not really about specifically descending to 100m. A 100m rated device responds better to water. In a general sense, it's more robust. Even if I don't go diving.

Lack of incentive for technological development beyond the current required standard.

It would seem that "different opinions are out there" is not really a good basis for "one opinion enforced by EU directive", though.

> acquiring market share and customer relationships

The whole setup rests on this, and it seems mythical to me. These guys have basically equivalent products at this point.

Not sure if this is a joke or not, but competitive pressure still exists. This only really holds if you're the only orange seller.

There are no residence requirements for buying property in Japan. So... what?

There's always some wedge issue that means "don't punish the toolkmaker" is not politically viable. You can pick from guns to legal drugs to illegal drugs to all kinds of emotive things.

And once the wedge is in and the concept of maker responsibility is planted, it expands to people's pet issues, obviously.

The actual line of who gets punished just ends up at some equilibrium in the middle. Largely arbitrarily.

It must be representative democracy! And our representative is... Larry Ellison. Oh no.

No, it's entirely factual, not a matter of outlook.

Otherwise please explain why one new line at this standard per 20-40 years is acceptable for a city that sees itself as world-leading.

The Elizabeth Line is basically at the bare minimum for a global Asian city. It's not even that good by comparison. It's really a joke that London only has one line of that caliber and it took them literally decades to build.

So it's touted as some great success but to me it's a sign of failure. They'll say similar things if they ever finish HSR in California. Yeah I'm sure the end product will be fine but the whole process is disgraceful.

Never mind the fact that the Elizabeth Line is only so over-utilized because London completely fails at building density in and around its center. So it has to make its people live in zone 30 and sit on the train for two hours every day.

Ah yes, was too into the screed. Same problem though.

Almost everything works with Suica, no? Although to be fair I guess tourists are _more_ likely to use the heritage lines with slightly different rules.

TfL can barely build some flats in Zone 2 without the locals rioting like they're destroying a Cotswolds village. Actually, it can barely fix the literal busiest station in the country without a bunch of minor celebrity detractors riling up everyone about how much of a travesty it is that we're doing it.

Without the public or central government support, the efforts you're talking about amount to very little.

It's a good article, but I think the "it's not culture, just good governance" idea is a little hand wavy. The two bleed into each other greatly. The fact that houses are more disposable and wealth is less intergenerational in Japan does a lot to tamp down the NIMBY issues that plague e.g. the UK.

The UK is so far gone that the transport authority in it's largest city can't revamp stations or do add-on development without literal years of hand wringing. And even then it's often rejected or reduced in the end.

Stakeholder, in this case: the government

Thanks. I would say yeah, it's not too bad, but it is also a pretty simple site.

There are some interesting issues that probably relate to your workflow, like the nav links are different sizes, the icons too. And the resolution of some of the images/icons on a MacBook is poor. But I suspect that's because a simple ImageMagick raster diff will fuzz over those kind of differences.

I wonder if you can make some tweaks or find a better representation than pure raster screenshots to fix this. Can't really deal in vector images because AI sucks at outputting those, and you can't print a web page to SVG.

There was a super niche website framework that only used SVG a while ago. Would be funny if that kind of thing makes a takes off just so AI can do better.

I'm not misremembering. You can easily find monoculturey threads about all of these things. Just because there's a small slice of counter views, doesn't mean the average HN positions on these things isn't or wasn't decidedly negative.

Yes, this is what hysteria about bread looks like. People have been saying a disaster of the kids not knowing how to bake is coming since the 1800's. Yet, we still have bread.

How exactly will the knowledge of creating software be lost when the claim is that an ubiquitous software creation tool is going to take over the world? Is it going to refuse to emit anything less complex than a todo app?

I've never baked bread in my life and yet, with the right motivation, I'm sure I could learn from the literature and some trial and error alone. In the hypothetical world where bread demand massively exceeds supply, we'd form a guild and incrementally improve from there. Same way we learned it in the first place. Breadmaking wasn't gifted to us by aliens.

Well, that is the point :) we don't fret about where the bread comes from too much, or talk about how we need to act now lest we never have bread again. People want bread, and the price goes up until someone is willing to make bread.

> Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.

Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.

This place actually hates all technology after the invention of Lisp. And there's the common online incentive to dunk on things that also exists here. Hence the infamous Dropbox comment and others.

But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.

I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.

The EU 'seeks' to do a lot of things but is notoriously ineffective.

They're not breaking in; he knows the password. Also, it's not fully up-to-date; it's an iPhone 13.