Lutger

We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling?

Who would profit from such a company?

Humans make mistakes too, does it mean humans are unusable? We accept as empirical fast that most production quality code has 2 - 10 bugs per 1k LoC. According to your premise, virtually all existing software is therefor unusable.

What if an LLM overall starts to make less mistakes than a medium developer, costs less than its salary and is 100 x faster? For sure, the companies that will leverage these with just a few senior devs doing prompting, testing and requirements analysis, will outcompete other organizations.

The 'vote' is real. But it is 'darwinian'. It's not that animals develop a certain adaptation on purpose in order to survive. Instead, out of many random changes an adaptation emerges by selection: those that are the most advantageous get the chance to pass on their genes.

If everybody stops using meta apps and starts using signal, bluesky, mastodon, etc., meta would instantly transform their business (if they still can make a profit).

The problem is, subtly harvesting data from and even shoveling ads into paid subscriptions actually doesn't make consumers immediately and massively cancel their subs. So you can make a profit from subscriptions alone, or make an even larger profit by also collecting and monetizing your customers data. Guess who will win?

And we still let tobacco companies spread their products, which are practically speaking as harmful as they ever were, maybe even more so considering their environmental impact as well.

Brilliant conversation.

"Would you let kids gamble?" - "It sounds very fun and obvious." "To be clear, we think it's a horrible idea!"

Surely you mean the laws of shareholder capitalism. There are many things you can do with money, and only some of them are legally backed by rules that ensure absolute shareholder power.

Really depends on the domain. I've been in jobs where the domain was much harder than my job as a software engineer, but I've also been in jobs where I quickly got to understand the domain better than the domain experts, or at least parts of it. I believe this is not because I'm smart (I'm not), but because software engineering requires precise requirements, which requires unrelenting questioning and attention to details.

The ability to acquire domain knowledge quickly however, isn't exactly the same as the ability to develop complex software.

The source of truth in fascism is not popular support or inquiry, thus they always need to channel some privileged connection to reality, or claim to voice the true will of the people and authentically represents the pure will of the nation.

Its a farce, of course, but one that can sometimes muster enough support to keep the signs in the shop with just a bit of intimidation and violence to back it up.

Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.

Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.

This, 100%.

Imagine working an a project for the first time, having a Dockerfile that works or compose file, that just downloads and spins up all dependencies and builds the project succesfully. Usually that just works and you get up and running within 30 minutes or so.

On the other hand, how it used to be: having to install the right versions of, for example redis, postgres, nginx, and whatever unholy mess of build tools is required for this particular hairball, hoping it works on you particular (version) of linux. Have fun with that.

Working on multiple projects, over a longer period of time, with different people, is so much easier when setup is just 'docker compose up -d' versus spending hours or days debugging the idiosyncrasies of a particular cocktail that you need to get going.

Maybe you are right about kubernetes, I don't have enough experience to have an opinion. I disagree about containers though, especially the wider docker toolchain.

It is not that difficult to understand a Dockerfile and use containers. Containers, from a developer pov, solve the problem of reliably reproducing development, test and production environments and workloads, and distributing those changes to a wider environment. It is not perfect, its not 100% foolproof, and its not without its quirks or learning curve.

However, there is a reason docker has become as popular as it is today (not only containers, but also dockerfiles and docker compose), and that is because it has a good tradeoff between various concerns that make it a highly productive solution.

The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.

I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.

You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.

I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.

which is just prep talk for "if we need it, we could do it"

Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that:

1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations

2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness

There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.

It is and it isn't. Relative wealth within society has consequences regardless of absolute wealth. But globally power is absolutely shaped by wealth distribution as well, as wealth distribution is influenced by power relations too.

Why not give them credit for that? There is no moral rule that to be virtuous, it has to be self-sacrificial. If you narrow a commendable course of action to some sort of ascetic vision of martyrdom and self-punishment, then yes everybody and everything is evil.

So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight and their culture will push them to stay the course on the long term, where other companies will do the reverse. Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive, including the worst imaginable?

Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts of decisions based on values and visions that are more than just economical, especially companies not beholden to shareholders that only care about short-term profits. Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and often done from some kind of cultural bias.

This really depends on your setup. If possible, I have local development containers as much as possible. nginx, postgres, redis, etc. I have several containers, each only has access to what it needs. We have an isolated cloud environment for development, in its own aws account.

Its not going to stop attacks, but it will limit blast radius a lot.

You're severely limiting the blast radius. This malware works by exfiltrating secrets during installation, if I understood it correctly. If you would properly containerize your app and limit permissions to what is absolutely required, you could be compromised and still suffer little to no consequences.

Of course, this is not a real defense on its own, its just good practice to limit blast radius, much like not giving everybody admin rights.

Everything runs in the container and cannot escape it. Its like a sandbox.

You have to make sure you're not putting any secrets in the container environment.

So it turns itself back into oil and seeps into the well where it originated from? You know this sounds like putting your hands on your ears shouting 'lalala I can't hear you'?

The thing I'm wondering is, if you don't care, why make the effort to comment at all? Clearly you care enough to do so. What are you afraid will happen by merely acknowledging what is the case? Whenever someone presents the finding of facts as hysterical, I'm left wondering who is actually the hysterical one.

The microplastic particles in our air aren't hysterical. They are just there. Research revealing they are present isn't hysterical either, nor is research about the consequences. At most, such research is more or less accurate, or distorted. I'm starting to think you are the one who is hysterical in this matter.

But for what reason? I can only think of only three:

you agree with the dangers but find it so overwhelming that you want to shut it down

you fear losing the benefits of plastic and want to undermine any action on the subject

you just can't take any kind of panic, regardless of the reasons and to maintain your sanity, you vehemently push away anything that might otherwise makes you feel alarmed

If it presents a threat to comfort, lifestyle or wealth, people can fiercely resist becoming aware even when presented with overwhelming evidence.

In the Netherlands, millions of people burn wood in stoves or fireplaces, just for coziness, or use it for heating where alternatives are readily available. The evidence for its massive detrimental health effects is overwhelmingly clear. When you dare to even present this evidence, you will get flamed and ridiculed as if you are an evil luddite out to take away their small pleasures in life.

We are slowly getting rational about the effects of smoking, but choking out your neighbors (and children) by burning wood is still something people feel is their human right.

You make a claim without a source and refuse to back it up when asked, yet you are doubling down on your confidence in the initial statement. There's an interesting discussion to be had, but this is not it.

There are several factors to be considered: the actual risk of older and newer systems, the impact, how to mitigate a fire and avoid the worst consequences, and weighing against the alternatives. Especially the latter is somehow always absent in denialist narratives. However, when the alternative is basically heating the planet into a dystopian hellscape, we may accept some negatives of any kind of technology that doesn't put our whole existence at risk.

We need to be real about the downsides yes, but let's also be real and accept we don't have any choice but push forward.

Here is my 1 minute AI powered 'research' btw:

"The fire risk for battery plant storage is not a single, universally agreed-upon percentage, but available data suggests a low and decreasing risk, especially for properly maintained and installed systems. For example, one study found the 2023 risk for home battery systems to be \(0.0049\%\), while another source reports a \(97\%\) drop in large-scale system failures between 2018 and 2023. The risk is influenced by factors like manufacturing quality, installation, and maintenance."

Doesn't seem all that alarming yet.

As an old man myself, I am quite sure the other old man has a good reason to yell at this particular cloud. Software is tremendously complex. It is one thing to write it, it is another to amend the thousands and thousands of bugs that inevitably follow, and implement the even bigger amount of adjustments and improvements successful software requires. The latter is the bane of any kind of code generation, whether is RAD, no-code, low-code or LLM ported codebases.

Any kind of code generation that proves incredibly productivity in the writing of software is kind of like saying you have a lot of money by maxing out your creditcard. Maybe you can pay it back, maybe you can't. The fact that there is no mention of future debt is exactly the kind of thing that old men get suspicious about.

I'm not saying the old men are correct. I'm just pointing out the reason for the yelling.

Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about open source like this. Either you know about open source and then you know exactly what it means, or you know nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are quite well defined and their definitions commonly known amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about software licenses.

Look at the other comments, one states "Oh, it's open (core) source."

Not exactly the fault of n8n, but the confusion is there to clear up. That is all I'm reading into it.

"Internal business purposes" can be professional right? Not saying its an open source license as defined by OSI, just that this license permits the most likely professional use (internal automation).

"mind-reading" is a really an unfortunate term though. Every algorithm is a strict and consistent set of rules that tries to serve the needs of its users. No magic is ever involved.

It is just that some users have conflicting needs and some sets of rules are more complex than others. So I think what this really is about is 'computer reading', the needs of some users to be able to predict with ease what the computer is going to do. Some people would rather be able to predict the computer doing something that they actually don't really need, and then make up for its shortcomings, than have something they feel they cannot predict and control, but is actually closer to what they want.

This is a bit like the term magic. Any sufficiently complex algorithm may indistinguishable from mind-reading, but it's still an algorithm. Mind-reading, like magic, depends on us being able to understand or not, which is highly subjective. But both are misleading terms.

Wait, are there smartlocks that depend on the availability of some api service to even open the door? I'd rather call that stupidlocks instead. I mean, just because you're an IoT device it doesn't mean you are smart, ffs.

> "In the Red Sea, lionfish have predators. There are sharks and barracudas. Here, we have none of that."

I don't know when the sharks will move in, but this final sentence of the article points to a broader problem with climate change induced migrations: species don't move at the same pace. Plants move much slower than insects, and insects faster then their predators. This will create imbalances, which will lead to big problems with new diseases and pests.

Eventually things will re-calibrate, but a lot of species may go extinct and we could see a very long period of reduced biodiversity. It takes a long time to adapt.

I've always find it interesting that once I take a wrong turn finding my way through the city and I'm not deliberate about remembering this was, in fact, a mistake, I am more prone to taking the same wrong turn again the next time.