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DannyBee

31,531 karma · joined June 21, 2011

Xoogler just enjoying life for a while after a long time in tech. I'm also an open source lawyer.

If there is anything i can help you with, feel free to poke me.

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DannyBee··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
This is true in other cases but in this case they are actually hoping it leaks
DannyBee··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
"How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison."

I would bet a lot of money the number here is also >1.

DannyBee··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
MMA (this stuff) hardens when exposed to sunlight. The tank and valves are outdoors.

I would not be surprised to learn that is why the pipes/valves/etc are "gummed up" (to use the term from the article) - people who touch the valves/etc probably have mma on their hands/gloves, and then because those are outdoors, it eventually hardens.

Or something similar.

DannyBee··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
The standard choice for MMA processing is actually stainless steel, because carbon steel/iron/etc scavenge the inhibitor used to prevent thermal runaway. HDPE would work, and often how it is transported in drums, but for actual processing, everything would normally be spec'd as stainless steel.

Which, of course, is pretty spark resistant to begin with.

Even if this wasn't true, this is not a hard problem, you can use non-sparking tools, proper coolant, lots of things to avoid sparks.

Or you know, we could require that highly flammable materials subject to thermal runaway have "drill here in case of emergency" patch of non-sparking material or something.

The cost of ATEX/Class 1 Div 1 compliance would not really go up if you required this.

DannyBee··on Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better
It's fairly customary for folks who can afford it.

So, there are two issues:

1. The grid is now pretty unreliable. Georgia Power overall is a great company to work with (compared to say PG&E), but power quality has dropped out the past few years in some areas.

I've had plenty of equipment destroyed due to grid spikes and other weirdness that just didn't occur a few years ago. To give a concrete example: About 3 weeks ago, there were 4 days where literally every arc fault breaker in the house would trip randomly. Why? Because the incoming waveform became super noisy[1], and arc fault breakers are tricky beasts :).

They do notice and fix these things eventually, but the practical time to resolution is days, not hours.

2. We live in an area where the power lines are above ground and trees are aging out. They were planted over 150 years ago, and for a lot of these trees, the lifespan is 125-150 years. So we don't just get taken out by storms, but just nature :)

Georgia power puts new lines underground exclusively, and has moved a lot underground even around us, but our street is the last on the line of service that is both above ground and quite long. As a result, literally any issue/disconnect over about a 2 mile length with tons and tons of old trees, takes us out. This is also partially the reason our power quality sucks so much - any issue is more likely to affect us more than others.

Again - when it comes to outages they are quite fast at repair, having dismantled and removed insanely huge trees, and then repaired the line, almost always within 24 hours.

But it's still annoying. Combined with #1, it's just easier to be semi-off grid (IE monitor grid and swap over when grid is gone or sucking) with a generator or equivalent. Note that because we all own historic homes built in the early 1900's, our electricity usage is is significantly higher than normal just due to lack of insulation, etc. Retrofits only help so much for various practical reasons.

In a newly built home, the generator cost would probably be closer to 15-20k. Battery cost would be similarly half. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but still.

[1]. I have a very high end fluke power analyzer (a fluke 1775) that i've had for years to debug power quality issues. These are power quality analyzers meant to be used to test service issues like this. I actually bought it when i got tired of having PG&E lie to me in California.

DannyBee··on Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better
So random consumer who just bought a ton of batteries here: i don't follow the hype closely, nor am i a crazy battery dude, but i have tracked over the years the cost of doing battery backup vs generator, etc.

It's definitely the case for me (and friends of mine), that between reasonably priced batteries, inverters,etc, doing good battery backup for the house (and peak demand shaving/etc, i use a lot of power and take advantage of time of use tariffs) is now less than half the price of a generator.

Most of my friends spent 35-45k on a generator.

I will have spent <20k on batteries + inverters. It would actually be even less, but i have 600amps of split phase for the house, and 150 amps of 480v 3 phase for the shop, so i need two different kinds of inverters.

It is all literally being installed right now.

I would actually go completely off grid, but i live in a historic area and have slate roofs so can't really do solar easily ;)

As for what changed - 12 months ago this setup would have been almost double the price, just because of the availability (or lack thereof) of the right kinds of products necessary to achieve it. I know because i priced it :)

Availability here isn't in terms of stock, but literally in terms of "variety and choice of product".

For example - the availability of UL certified low cost 48v batteries in various sizes has skyrocketed in the past year. Lots of states require UL certification, assuming you are doing this in a permitted/etc way) Additionally, a lot more outdoor batteries are now available (my setup is outdoors but mostly protected).

The availability of choices in higher kVA but still residential grade inverters has also skyrocketed, etc.

As for why the price was doubled - before i would have needed 2x the number of inverters, and you really couldn't get a good 480v inverter except with high volt batteries that are wildly less available and wildly more expensive. On top of that, the batteries you could use that were UL certified and outdoor rated or could easily be done in outdoor enclosures was much lower than it is now.

DannyBee··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
An infinite number of comments about how good/bad/etc this is, and nobody seems to have noticed that it is literally a report of exactly one waymo getting stuck in flooded water that caused this.

I live in Atlanta. This was 3-4 inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is uncommon and was unexpected enough that the flash flood warnings were not issued until well after the flooding occurred.

The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood?

I know it's more than 1 because there were 4 cars people abandonded on my street alone! I'm not even on that flooded or busy of a street.

DannyBee··on Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud (Resolved)
According to the timeline the account was suspended for 18 minutes total. That is fast enough that it could have simply been a bug in a Google rollout or something that made something think it was suspended when it wasn’t really.

If it was actually suspended the yeah it’s weird not to get an email.

DannyBee··on Google I/O
You have to realize why something like antigravity exists.

There are two usual ways it occurs:

1. Political fights internal to the company resulting in incoherent strategy and products. HN assumes this is almost always the case, and but it's only sometimes the case :).

or

2. A bunch of execs sitting in a room saying stuff like "we have to have a platform with eyeballs that we control where we can surface our AI innovations and tools or else we'll be disintermediated/unable to release stuff that matters" or whatever.

(or both!)

The second part is often a real problem to solve. The first (you have to have a platform) does not follow.

At least two of the main issues with solving these kinds of problems this way (ie antigravity) is:

a. No user actually cares about your strategic problems and isn't interested in helping you. What you release still has to be valuable/etc enough that people are willing to use it over their existing tooling. At least right now, antigravity really isn't.

b. The strategy seems to assume a complete vacuum where it's Google vs existing tools. However, there are tons of large developer companies with the same exact problem of wanting a place they control to surface stuff (or whatever particular problem this is meant to solve). If they opt for the same approach, why would Google's strategy beat them? . If they opt for a different approach, same question.

If you poke there, i suspect you will find nobody has good answers to these questions.

So this approach turns into, at best, skating to where the puck is instead of where it will be.

DannyBee··on C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For
Compiler guy here - yes, the optimizer claim is,in fact, just totally wrong. The claim is it can't be constant folded, scheduled, etc because it doesn't turn into simd instructions. At the bottom, as you say, it will turn into code. That code is almost certainly builtins or uses the vector extensions or whatever , not raw asm statements. compilers can and do turn these into ir level simd instructions.
DannyBee··on Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server
It's actually now at least 400 per tb.

The 64's are 25k, up from 6k a year ago. I have to imagine the 128's or 256's are at least 500/tb

DannyBee··on Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server
The 64's and 128's could be bought, and were not even totally unreasonable, price wise, at intro (IE <100/tb).

Concretely: a 64TB was like 6000 bucks last year. You could get them easily. It's now 25,000 for the same SSD.

DannyBee··on A History of IDEs at Google
I mean, everything's my fault - it was overall my org, so it doesn't matter who did it in the org. That's the job :)

As for Eclipse, you are correct that at one time it had tons of users, but eclipse was dying very quickly, with no signs or possibility of recovery, well before any decision was made to intellij. People were already moving. So not sure what you are remembering there. Eclipse was dead no matter what we did. There were people that loved it (sounds like you are one of them), but at the point of deprecation, death was already clear.

Additionally, given the Android team's desire to use IntelliJ, mobile first, and all that jazz, we were going to be forced to support IntelliJ as a first class citizen no matter what.

Eclipse literally made no sense to keep going with given all that.

DannyBee··on Claude for Legal
While i agree for the most part, they can only cut the middle man so many times before they get themselves in antitrust trouble.

I suspect that will happen faster than they'd like, because regulators (at least outside the US) are not interested in a repeat of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc.

DannyBee··on Claude for Legal
Lawyer here:

Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)

Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.

This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.

It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.

Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.

None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.

Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.

Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.

Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.

Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.

Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).

Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.

DannyBee··on Claude for Legal
Good. Harvey was never actually good.
DannyBee··on A History of IDEs at Google
Yes, there were over time, multiple teams working on intellij plugins to support google3 before it all got relatively merged.

You are talking, i believe, about the support for blaze builds in intellij, which was fairly early on, as you point out.

I suspect Laurent is remembering some of the google3 mobile/android efforts, which were much later.

This is just on the "java" side, too. There were other plugins being built that were fairly specific to google3 support.

DannyBee··on A History of IDEs at Google
Not on the developer side. The cloud side, yes, a bit.
DannyBee··on A History of IDEs at Google
That is because the Cider team did an amazing job of managing it, and spent tons of time going bug report by bug report to find and fix the blockers stopping people from preferring Cider-V over Cider, instead of the typical Google deprecation approach of "monkey knife fight"
DannyBee··on A History of IDEs at Google
I was responsible for getting the investment and (and pushing on turndowns) in getting Google to one IDE, and also worked at IBM for a few years. I also spent lots of time talking with my counterparts in other places.

So I know what others spend and were spendingin similar environments in terms of actual dollars, and where it roughly goes.

So let me say - it was not a small investment, in part because the all-in costs of engineers are very different. I'm really unsure why you would think otherwise.

Unlike others, Google is also remarkably good at quantifying the actual value something provides in developer productivity/etc. Most engineers handwave this tremendously. Google has an amazing amount of telemetry. So i laugh when you talk about "the leverage over developer productivity" because the vast majority of companies i've worked at or talked with have almost no useful idea about their developer productivity (IE can't even account for the majority of their developers time at work), or how to invest effectively to do something about it. They can often account for <30% of time developers are spending at work, etc.

As for perspectives - there is plenty of sentinment and other data. Cider is overall one of the top 5 most loved tools at Google, and had well over 90% developer satisfaction IIRC.

DannyBee··on Copy Fail
I love how it says "Standalone PoC. Python 3.10+ stdlib only (os, socket, zlib). Targets /usr/bin/su by default; pass another setuid binary as argv[1]."

Except you can't pass another setuid binary as argv[1] because the AI writing this slop never added that feature to this python script.

I can't get it to work on any distro i've tried.

DannyBee··on OpenAI Reportedly Working on an AI Smartphone to Rival iPhone
This fails the very basic test of "who actually wants your product to succeed other than you".

It's like when Microsoft was like "we want the Xbox to be the center of a connected home entertainment experience" (it was something like this but I don't exactly remember the dumb phrasing). That's cool I guess, but nobody cares about you succeeding in your strategy and they are the one who have to buy it.

DannyBee··on US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf]
Lawyer here: So first, while this entire comments section seems to treat privilege as if their is a single universal corpus of law around it, their isn't. Federal and and state courts do different things here. Each state does different things than other states.

It's therefore practically hard to give a useful answer to your questions. There are states and courts that don't recognize drafts as privileged. There are states that do as long as they are created for the purpose of seeking legal advice. There are states in between.

Also keep in mind the main goal of this kind of privilege is to ensure people seek legal advice, and feel comfortable doing so, before they do something that’s going to get them into trouble. it does protect your ability to prepare a defense, and that sort of thing,but if you do a thing after you email your lawyer and the lawyer says "that is a horribly illegal idea", privilege isnt really there to help you, even if that particular email often happens to be privileged. It's there to help society, not keep you from having to pay damages. For example, Companies overuse lawyers in things like clean up after security incidents - very little of that will be actually privileged from discovery no matter how many lawyers got involved.

All that said general advice is to ensure drafts are deleted after being sent.

The only real common thing in this area of law is that the party trying to withhold the document bears the burden of showing it is privileged.

DannyBee··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
Probably don't do this if you have a magnesium-aluminum alloy laptop.

Depending on exactly how much magnesium is in the alloy, metal shavings can be highly flammable and otherwise hazardous.

I think it's fine to mess with stuff like this, just make sure you know what you can do safely to the materials.

DannyBee··on A16Z Capital Management, Llc Vs. Dulat Akan
I'm not trying to misrepresent anything, just going by what the documents say.

I don't know what happened but the last paragraph of the complaint says he approached another firm, became aggressive, and pulled out a firearm.

There isn't a transcript of the hearing itself or other affidavits that give a different pov like you are giving.

He also did not show up to the hearing or send a lawyer to present an alternative view or set of evidence.

At that point it becomes an accepted set of uncontested facts (legally, i mean)

DannyBee··on A16Z Capital Management, Llc Vs. [name redacted]
To access the actual docs, go here:

https://web.sanmateocourt.org/midx/

Search for 26-CIV-00518

Deep link to the petition/complaint PDF: https://tinyurl.com/32xj5djy

(The details are the last page)

The respondent did not show up to the hearing. They also did not show up to the gun relinquishment hearing, where it was noted they have approached another VC firm with a firearm before being apprehended by the police. The san mateo prosecutor's office was notified of non-compliance.

This seems unlikely to have any sort of happy ending.

DannyBee··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
"That alone is a good sign that these judges don't really think this is a great argument."

No, this is a totally normal thing, at least for the 9th circuit (and a few others). They do not publish all rulings, and they don't designate all opinions as precedential.

The rest is just disagreement with governing law, framed as if the court should have disregarded it and done what you wanted.

"California law requires that the end user makes an affirmative action to accept a TOS agreement in the form of checking a box or clicking a button. Something the court admits the defendant does not do."

This is only true as of July 1st, 2025. So was not in force at the time of this dispute.

"Just showing someone text does not count as accepting the TOS."

During the time, it did, as the court explains pretty well.

It is hilarious that you think this was about clearing a docket.

As a lawyer, I would guess this was literally the last thing they cared about here.

I also happen to think consumers get shafted and am quite happy with california's recent contract law changes, but ... this ruling is quite clearly reasonable, if not totally correct based on the law as it existed at the time.

DannyBee··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
Did you read the case at all?

It is a totally reasonable discussion of what assent entails, is clear that assent only exists when people actually read the notice, and placed the burden on the companies, etc.

One can disagree with the law at issue here, but the court was very carefully following it, and had a meaningful and thoughtful discussion of the issues involved.

Which you dismiss as just "trying to clear their dockets" because apparently you don't like the law as it is (which is cool, but not the courts job)

DannyBee··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
In this case, both users admit they actually read the notice, one after it was sent to spam, and the other it was delivered properly.
DannyBee··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
Almost always, as long as the term change is not material. At least in the US.

Material changes require mutual assent. This case was about whether mutual assent existed. The court said "yes".

So no contracts were changed by one side without the other one signing off - the court found the other side signed off.

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