LeftHandPath

> Using quantum effects to break cryptography wouldn't have any real long term advantages unless you aspired to be some sort of a supervillain.

It's of interest to governments, for national security reasons. Quantum computing is an arms race.

The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since. Like someone took out a sheet of paper and said, "If someone actually built this thing, what problems would they have to deal with?"

The newer movies -- even Spielberg's own sequel -- don't capture that. They start with some park or island miraculously up and running, no explanation needed. They hand us predetermined good and bad guys whose motivations seem less complex, more contrived. Jurassic World didn't give me the sense that anyone struggled and triumphed in creating the park. It was just hand-waved into existence, in a way that cheapens the ensuing drama.

The most I've done with it so far has been asking what a nice database layout might look like for a given problem, copying the output to a markdown file, and then referencing it as I personally design the schema.

LLMs are pretty cool, but they make all sorts of unpredictable errors, and - especially when you're using them for things you're unfamiliar with - introduce all sorts of hidden costs you won't catch until later.

Off topic: This page is beautiful. Love it when people use magazine-style layouts on the web.

Hah, I had Michael Branicky as a professor (for his AI course) at the time (Jan - May 2023). Didn't expect to see his name here. He's a brilliant guy.

I wonder why they don't bother fixing it. Clearly it hasnt hurt their bottom line much, but you'd think they'd sell more phones if they were still the kings of "it just works" (and they aren't).

What a metaphor. Beautifully written.

Beyond the car culture issue, I thought it was interesting to see the direct line drawn between legally required insurance purchases and the preference for FIRE jobs over STEM jobs in the US. Several years later, a few of the author's points ring even more true - like outsourcing/offshoring affecting STEM jobs more so than other white collar jobs.

Seems like a good loose thread to pull to find some new ideas, regarding regulation and incentive structures in general.

Edit: My top quote from the article

> ...[A]t some point there is going to have to be a national conversation about the fact that our regulations are written to benefit the FIRE folks at the expense of the STEM people. It shouldn’t be less risky to insure a car than it is to design, engineer, build, market, distribute, and warranty it.

Immutability is a fantastic tool, especially when working with enterprise data. It's relatively easy to implement your own temporal tables on most existing databases, no special libraries or tools required. It seems really trivial/obvious, but I'll admit I first stumbled into the concept using the AS400 at work. If you make a mistake on payroll in IBM's old MAPICS program, you don't overwrite or delete it. You introduce a new "backout record" to nullify it, then (maybe) insert another record with the correct data. It seems obvious once you've seen the pattern.

I've made a few non-technical eyes go wide by explaining A) that this is done and B) how it is done. The non-tech crypto/blockchain enthusiasts I've met get really excited when they learn you can make a set of data immutable without blockchain / merkle trees. Actually, explaining that is a good way to introduce the concept of a merkle tree / distributed ledger, and why "blockchain" is specifically for systems without a central authority.

(Bi)Temporal and immutable tables are especially useful for things like HR, PTO, employee clock activity, etc. Helps keep things auditable and correct.

Absolutely. Look at how Sam Altman speaks.

If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in TV and movies.

Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1]. That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a legitimate product.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-chatgpt-artificial...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166713/openai-helen-ton...

I am glad you followed up on this, to see if you could do it again! That matches my experience.

I remember feeling like the big tech corps had turned "consumer" into a pejorative and started relentlessly abusing their customers circa 2016 or so... Especially microsoft, post Windows 8. Consumer devices don't need to work. That's for pro devices. Consumer devices just need to sell ads, soak up user time, and let businesses market their goods for consumption!

The majority of search results from late 2019 or so and onwards have only degraded. Even on other platforms, like YouTube -- you get 4-5 real results, and the rest are "suggested for you", even if you've logged out. Google and Youtube both feel like "consumer" search engines, where advertising and eyeball time trump usefulness and user authority (i.e. the user being able to ask for what they want, and get it).

For sure. I just really like the SL!

Currently have a 2012 C350 Coupe that I love to death. Have had it since 2018. Fantastic car, I don’t think it spies on me too much

My plan is to buy an old 1960-1970 280SL (or, really, any somewhat reliable vintage car) and stubbornly refuse to drive anything else.

It is! I found the sword quite fascinating as well. The older Chinese lettering on it looks really neat, too

What an interesting life to have lived.

> Evidence of his craft was seen in his tactics, which included feigned retreats, ambushes and the use of false information.

Reminds me of "Intelligence in War" by Keegan, which discussed the use of such strategies, mostly in naval battles, from antiquity to the modern era.

> In the 30 years that he served as a captain, Hawkwood's earnings ranged between 6,000 and 80,000 florins annually (in comparison, a skilled Florentine craftsman at the same time earned 30 florins a year).

Quite the pay for a soldier, even if a mercenary!

What a perfect invitation to get on one of my favorite soapboxes. Spoiler: I'm a big fan of Brock Yates.

Speed limits are an imperfect tool for an important problem. They were generally much higher, or nonexistent, on US highways before the 1973 oil crisis [0]. They were intended to save fuel, but weren't very effective. Nowadays, most people discuss them as a safety tool.

They aren't great for that, either. Speed disparity is the best way to cause an accident, with those going at least 5MPH under or 15MPH over the 85th percentile speed being the most dangerous drivers on the road. Limits force people to choose between going a comfortable speed and following the rules. When the difference between comfortable and legal speed is too high, you get situations where raising the limit can reduce the rate of accidents (citation discusses stats, my suggested reasoning is more speculative) [1]. There are still of course many cases where setting a slower speed limit has reduced accidents [2], but that effect is not universal. Also worth considering is that, even if higher limits reduce the rate of accidents, accidents at higher speeds are almost universally more severe.

Consider long, straight, flat roads with 2+ lanes on each side, a median, no sidewalks, infrequent turn and/or merge lanes, with ample room to speed up or slow down, and speed limits of 50 MPH or lower. There are several near me. They are painful to drive, because they breed traffic tickets, tailgating, and accidents. Hell, the people on either side of the "go a comfortable speed" and "go a legal speed" even fight each other, making rolling roadblocks to slow traffic, or giving way to road rage.

Either raise the limit, or add curves, trees, sidewalks, bike lanes, etc to convince people to slow down. I tend more towards the "I can't drive 55" side [3] because I think it's generally better for the economy when people and goods can move faster. Edit: For a specific example, from Kansas City, the 9+ hour drive to Colorado Springs or Denver (at 70MPH) makes it nearly impossible to go there. There's very little traffic on I70 past Topeka. Without a speed limit, I could easily do the trip in a little over 4 hours in my C350. That would be FANTASTIC for the economies on either side of that stretch (not to mention along it).

If you're not familiar with Brock Yates and his influence, check out [4, 5, 6].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law

[1]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212135021.h...

[2]: https://jalopnik.com/iihs-finds-that-lowering-speed-limits-a...

[3]: https://youtu.be/RvV3nn_de2k?si=mLYQIkwlHCDPr6ec

[4]: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a15143608/the-...

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9fZI3wBA1o

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTT1_JZp2Sg

Great article. I remember seeing that a year or two ago but had long since forgotten about it.

> Several car brands also note that it is a driver’s responsibility to tell passengers about the vehicle's privacy policies.

"Hey Bill, before we go to lunch, gloss over my Nissan's EULA."

I think I might start buying older cars and just swapping out the engine instead of putting up with the telemetry. If the car has a SIM card, I don't want it.

Perhaps there's a reason why. The market generally doesn't need people who can do it all. In the same way it doesn't need people writing C++ or Rust to know how to write machine code or assembly. Sure, the ones that can are probably more knowledgable, but their experience with the high level language is more important.

I've done full-stack with no frameworks or non-std libraries (aside from PDO and OpenSSL, the limitations set by CEO decree) for about 8 years now.

I write my own schemas in IBM Db2. Hell, I wrote small application databases in IBM DDS in the AS400's SEU while I was still under the legal drinking age. I've always written our stylesheets from scratch, using SCSS. I've written C++ APIs that run in PASE, talk to the database with ODBC, then send back to a front end through sockets. I do graphic design and photography -- something I started back in middle school and took some formal classes on -- and have led the creation of marketing materials for multiple subsidiaries. I've spent 40 hour weeks working on sysadmin tasks in vim, 40 hour weeks writing libraries in JetBrains and VSCode, and 40 hour weeks working running around with my DSLR or working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

But when I look for full-stack jobs, most of them actually want somebody who is well versed in a framework. There's not much point in doing all of this from scratch. It's more tedious, more error prone, and it takes longer to get to market. Some interviewers have given the impression that I'm a little "less than" because I haven't used any major frameworks.

I think that's actually a valid take, and it's something I've started doing side projects to address. Frameworks improve velocity. Frameworks improve reliability. They reduce the risk of a developer coming up with an out-in-the-weeds solution to a problem they didn't properly understand. They make it easier to maintain the code. They make it easier to onboard new developers who are familiar with that tech.

Wow. The fact that those "animations" (the fire and water effects) were all done with palette shifting is mind-bending.

Exactly! I expect that some are able to put it to good use. I am not one of those people.

My experiences with ChatGPT and Gemini have included lots of confident but wrong answers, eg “What castle was built at the highest altitude”. Thats what gives me pause.

Gemini spits out a great 2D A* implementation no problem. That is awesome. Actually, contrary to my original comment, I probably will use AI for that sort of thing going forward.

Despite that, I don’t want it in my IDE. Maybe I’m just a bit of a Luddite.

I’ve never used it, simply because I hate autocomplete in emails.

Gmail autocomplete saves me maybe 2-5s per email: the recipients name, a comma, and a sign off. Maybe a quarter or half sentence here or there, but never exactly what I would’ve typed.

In code bases, I’ve never seen the appeal. It’s only reliably good at stuff that I can easily find on Google. The savings are inconsequential at best, and negative at worst when it introduces hard-to-pinpoint bugs.

LLMS are incredible technology, but when applied to code, they act more like non-deterministic macros.

To be replaced with "Dell," "Dell Pro", and "Dell Pro Max"... Those tiers seem oddly familiar. They also throw away what I thought, as a proud long-time Dell Precision owner, was decent branding of their different lines for various market segments. But maybe it's a good thing - most major brands seem to offer too many laptop choices.

Shopping for a laptop recently has left me, ironically, running for Mac. The experience on most windows laptop vendor sites is awful:

- Dell's sales page focuses on proprietary names like "ExpressCharge TM", "Stealth Mode", "ComfortView TM", "Cryo-Tech TM", etc, that mean nothing to me [0]. It also gave me a pop-up when I went to a specific laptop's page.

- HP has way too many categories on the landing page [1]. I mistook "Elitebook Ultra" for their top-of-the-line, but then discovered they're $3000 lightweight notebooks with Snapdragon chips and Qualcomm GPUs. The first and second laptops shown appear to have identical specs, but differ in price by $2000 [2]. Trying my luck elsewhere, going to "ProBook" gives me no less than 53 options to read and sort through [3].

- Lenovo is actually decent [4]! The product lines are named well and properly explained. The UI isn't as pretty as HP's, but it's a lot more functional.

- Asus overall [5] isn't great (more proprietary names like "SmartHinge" and aesthetic-focused product descriptions). However, the Asus ProArt site is done fairly well [6].

Almost every windows laptop feels like it's trying to sell me on everything that isn't specs. "SmartHinge". "Stealth Mode". "Youthful" aesthetics. Weird proprietary bloatware and extended warranties.

And, even on the sites that don't give me confusing marketing, I'm left to figure out whether I need Windows "Pro" or "Home", what the hell Copilot+ is (a $20/mo upsell [7] that I'm guessing the laptop will forever beg me to add, like OneDrive used to), and if I a guide to get rid of spyware, bloatware, ads, auto-installed candycrush, and other anti-consumer jabs once I actually buy the thing (like I did with Windows 10 when it first released). And then fight every month or two when it inexplicably can't find the license for Office I pay monthly, for and locks me out of all of my documents.

With a Macbook, contrarily, I know I can actually research the silicon, figure out the specs, and actually get what I ordered / expected. I also know I won't have to fight the OS nearly as much, even if Apple has its own upsell attempts, anti-consumer warranty/repair problems, etc. I never would've expected to feel that way. Especially not 10-15 years ago.

But maybe Dell's rebrand helps them move back in that direction a little.

[0]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops

[1]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cat/laptops

[2]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/mdp/hp-elitebook-ultra-3074457...

[3]: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/vwa/laptops/brand=ProBook

[4]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/

[6]: https://www.asus.com/us/proart/laptops-home/

[7]: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/what-is-microsoft-copilot

It's fascinating because I came to a similar conclusion while working with very old IBM mainframe code editors (AS400 / IBM i "Source Entry Utility")

It's nearly impossible (if you read the docs) to write something with bad syntax on those machines. Columns are semantic in most of the languages (COBOL, RPG, DDL). When you write a program, if you don't know what you're doing, you can press "F4" and it will show you what each column means and when/how to use it [0]. It's not exactly a structured code editor, but it shares some similar concepts (see the link; you often write code in a "prompt" at the bottom of the screen, and the line won't insert until it's complete, though you can write it by hand if you wish).

All of that said, IBM's old SEU is still vastly inferior to modern text editors and IDEs, mostly because of the limited view window and the lack of syntax highlighting / basic modern features [1].

I think that, especially for enterprise code/development, there are some benefits to structured editing that are worth exploring. Not having a linter shout at a partially-complete line because you paused for a second or two would be nice, as well.

[0]: https://youtu.be/iw_wk5elf3Q?si=m9zVeboTyw0T8_Wu&t=635 [1]: https://youtu.be/Q3hxwcYB1Oo?si=WE9-rFdYo72A5yXz&t=404

On my laptop (2017 macbook air with an i3 and 8GB ram), about 45 seconds. On my desktop (Ryzen 5600G, 32GB ram), 2-15. I haven't tried any techniques to reduce the compilation time yet.

1: Actually, that's not true! I use Leptos in their "islands" mode for server side rendering. The entire page is sent as an HTML response, and there is little/no "hydration". The WASM file ONLY includes interactive "islands" that are explicitly marked with the #[island] attribute [0]. In other words, the server binary is handling most of the rendering, similar to if I used a templating tool like Askama or Tera.

2: Leptos is generally slower than vanilla JS, I believe for that reason, but comparable to major JS frameworks [1, 2].

[0]: https://book.leptos.dev/islands.html

[1]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

[2]: https://leptos.dev/

I liked the Leptos JSX syntax and I feel like Dioxus is addressing a different problem. Dioxus specifically markets itself as a tool for universal app development. I looked at it, Perseus, Askama + JS, etc, but ultimately thought Leptos seemed like the best to dive in with.

For charts and plots -- I was thinking about the same thing today, actually! I've usually done those manually with SVG and JS. I was wanting a framework, and spent 30 minutes or so today looking at tools to use R diagrams on the web [0]. Also thought a little bit about making my own library. There are existing libraries like Plotters that should plug and play with Leptos just fine [1], but I haven't tried any yet.

[0]: https://m-clark.github.io/webR/visualization.html

[1]: https://docs.rs/plotters/latest/plotters/

The only hitch was figuring out how to get server side includes not to break the WASM compilation (the solution was adding #[cfg] and #[cfg_attr] guards around the diesel use and derive rules). Other than that, it just worked - it’s so damn easy!

I always thought WASM would be difficult to use. With Leptos, it’s easier than JavaScript.

I’ve always loved Haskell as well, although the most I did with it was writing a small language interpreter for a CS class.

It’s amazing how much better major languages could be. They’re slowly getting better - I started out using PHP 5 at work, and the improvements since then (eg PHP 8.4) are HUGE. I’ve used modern C++ extensively as well.

I love Rust more than either.

If you like Ruby, Loco RS is really neat as a(n immature) Ruby on Rails replacement.

I've enjoyed what I've done with Axum thus far. I ultimately opted to use Leptos on top of it, so I don't really use it directly at this point. But it's neat.

For a long time, I used PHP and JS/TS for web projects. Now I'm using Rust with Axum/Tokio/Tower/Hyper (web server), Leptos (SSR using "Islands" flag, which also allows WASM generation for front end; JSX-like syntax), and Diesel (ORM and query builder that expects you define your schema using raw SQL). (I also leapt from DB2, MySQL and MariaDB to PostgreSQL)

It's heaven.

They built their phishing emails using data scraped from public profiles. Fascinating.

I have to wonder if, in the near future, we're going to have a much higher perceived cost for online social media usage. Problems we're already seeing:

- AI turning clothed photos into the opposite [0]

- AI mimicking a person's voice, given enough reference material [1]

- Scammers impersonating software engineers in job interviews, after viewing their LinkedIn or GitHub profiles [2]

- Fraudsters using hacked GitHub accounts to trick other developers into downloading/cloning malicious arbitrary code [3]

- AI training on publicly-available text, photo, and video, to the surprise of content creators (but arguably fair use) [4]

- AI spamming github issues to try to claim bug bounties [5]

All of this probably sounds like a "well, duh" to some of the more privacy and security savvy here, but I still think it has created a notable shift from the tech-optimism that ran from 2012-2018 or so. These problems all existed then, too, but with less frequency. Now, it's a full-pressure firehose.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/teen-deepfake-ai-nudes-b...

[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/deep-fake-audio-and-vid...

[2]: https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending...

[3]: https://it.ucsf.edu/aug-2023-impersonation-attacks-target-gi...

[4]: https://creativecommons.org/2023/02/17/fair-use-training-gen...

[5]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...