andrewfong

My understanding is that it's also a legal CYA. If you have SLAs in place, outages might mean you owe money. So companies tend to err on the side of underreporting.

Someone's also purchased setwitter.com to prevent the same attack on another obvious domain

My understanding of this tech is pretty minimal, so please bear with me, but is the basic idea is something like this?

Before: Evaluate the image in a little region around each pixel against the prompt as a whole -- e.g. how well does a little 10x10 chunk of pixels map to a prompt about a "red sphere and blue cube". This is problematic because maybe all the pixels are red but you can't "see" whether it's the sphere or the cube.

After: Evaluate the image as a whole against chunks of the prompt. So now we're looking at a room, and then we patch in (layer?) a "red sphere" and then do it again with a "blue cube".

Is that roughly the idea?

A more subtle aspect of customer service here is that, as the dev or PM responding to the customer, you have a lot more power to give the customer what they want.

A BigCo can hire a lot of CS people but the best they can do sometimes is "we hear you and we'll pass along your feedback".

I tried that but it's just really hard to keep up over time -- e.g. I used a rule based on the domain name but domain names change somewhere often. Toss in things like "ugh, which of my three emails did I use on this site" or "which high school teacher did I say was my favorite for this site" and it ends up being a big hairy mess that screams for an encrypted place to stick my notes.

Also, what I consider "non obvious" isn't that non-obvious. Given enough of a sample size, a committed attacker can guess a lot of rules. And if the prize (a crypto wallet) is big enough, they might be motivated enough to give it a go.

Eh, I'm not sure that follows.

So under U.S. law, the more "transformative" something is (as opposed to "derivative"), the more likely it is to be deemed fair use. The line between derivative and transformative is fuzzy but generally, something like a movie adaptation of a book is derivative whereas parody is transformative.

Given that, suppose I have a cat pic. Google creates a thumbnail of that cat pic, which is, by itself, obviously derivative. But Google includes my cat pic alongside many other cat pics in response to a query for cats, the thing as a whole starts looking more transformative.

Now suppose my cat pic gets sucked into a generative AI. I suppose it could be used to create a merely derivative copy of the original cat pic, albeit with reduced quality, like a thumbnail. But the whole point of these models is to recombine features from millions of images to create something unique. That is, if I tell the model to draw a cat, it combines features from thousands of other cat pics. Which seems at least as transformative as simply showing the same cat pics in a grid.

From an ethics standpoint, the main difference between Image Search and a generative AI is attribution. Google Image Search is just links whereas Stable Diffusion is sort of opaque about its sources. But attribution isn't one of the factors of fair use -- a parody which makes fun of the original without ever directly identifying the original is still parody.

That said, I suppose you could argue it affects the economic impact of the copying, one of the other fair use factors -- it seems plausible to me that AI generated images impacts the market for, say, Getty images in a way that does image search does not. But it's anyone's guess how a court would balance those two things -- courts very often pretend all of the fair use point one way to discussing how factors are balanced.

Even if the AI didn't make stuff up, it's unclear to me what value it adds over...

- The existing human edited text already on the page

- The playground to run the code in question

- One of the many existing autocomplete / static analysis tools for HTML / CSS / JS out there. If you want a tooltip explaining what the second argument to a built in JS function in a code snippet does, this is a solved problem!

I think this is Supabase's whole schtick, right? It's an open source, optionally self hosted Firebase alternative.

If you're going to use an ML model, you might as well use an existing language translation model rather than asking ChatGPT or the like to convert words one by one. You'd probably get better results treating American English and British English as entirely different languages rather than assuming one is the same as the other but with a handful of different words.

I'm still annoyed they got rid of the ultrasonic sensors on the latest model. I test drove a 2022 (or maybe a 2021) and the park assist was pretty good. And then I get the 2023 delivered and there's no park assist for the first 6 months because they removed the ultrasonics but the vision-only software wasn't ready yet. A vision-based park assist finally came in via an OTA update but it's nowhere near as precise as the ultrasonic version was. Like, the estimates of how much distance is in front of me seem to jump around a lot more than I'm actually moving, and it sometimes reports it's degraded when trying to pull out of a tight spot.

Well, it sort of is OpenAI's fault that it presented the interface as a chat bot though.

> It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing a subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high probability the constraints of the model.

This is just autocorrect / autocomplete. And people are pretty good at understanding the limitations of generative text in that context (enough that "damn you autocorrect" is a thing). But for whatever reason, people assign more trust to conversational interfaces.

By virtual DOM, what I mean is telling the browser I would like to replace the innerHTML of an element with another bit of HTML, and the browser should figure out an efficient way to "diff" the update rather than replace all the children wholesale.

It would not be as efficient as Svelte and Solid since those can use the compiler to further optimize code, but having the framework-less version of JS be "as good as" a framework like Vue or React would be a big plus for moving away from frameworks generally.

Apart from that, the general problem of reactivity boils down to "map this DOM element to this variable, and if the variable changes, update the DOM element". You could imagine an API sort of like this:

  <span bind-var="variableName" bind-gen="functionName">
    Default Value
  </span>

Where `bind-var` specifies a variable that, if updated, signals that the span should be replaced with the return value of the function specified by `bind-gen`

At this point, I feel like the party best equipped to reduce JavaScript bloat are the web browsers themselves.

There's the obvious stuff, like simply blocking third party tracking JS.

There's some small quality of life bits -- a non-trivial number of websites load JS to make prettier UI elements (like a nicer date picker) because the defaults are so ugly (on desktop at least -- mobile tends to be better). If browsers shippednicer default UI elements, folks would be be less inclined to write their own using JS.

And then there's larger fundamental changes to the API themselves. If HTML6 included virtual DOMs or reactive primitives, that might reduce the inclination towards framework bloat.

Seems to be a thing: https://www.meetup.com/mountain-view-area-runclub/

I have no sailing or nautical or any relevant experience, so apologies if this is obvious, but what keeps the sail from getting blown off the ship?

My understanding is that the container is lifted and placed on top of a typical container vessel. And containers do fall off ships from time to time. Adding a very large sail to the container makes it easier to blow off. Is whatever the standard mechanism is for securing containers to ships sufficient here?

YMMV I suppose but the "auto" options for climate + wipers do not work well for me.

Single droplet in the right spot => furious wiping. 100 droplets in the wrong spots => no wipe.

Climate - My preferred mode is to have the A/C on but not actually directed straight at me (so through the windshield vents), but auto also blasts through the front.

The short-term case for other banks bailing out depositors is that any systemic risk affects all banks and the rest of the citizenry, albeit indirectly.

But I think it's probably economically sound in the long-term as well. That is, asking every depositor with $250K+ to assess the financial health of each bank they use and maybe buy insurance is collectively more expensive than just having the FDIC implicitly insure all deposits.

That's different than asking if it's "fair". But I would wager it's probably more efficient.

I hope they get perf down. The first game runs great on my M1 until we get to around 100K residents or so. That's not a huge number of people for a real world city, but I guess simulating traffic + pathfinding for 100K+ actors is a dicey proposition CPU-wise.

IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only simulating a subset of your population. Which honestly seems acceptable to me.

Similar concern here about the lack of snapshot files. Can "locally stored" captured data points be version controlled, even if it's some special Touca binary that makes no sense in GitHub?

I'm coming at this from a "how would I integrate this into my existing corporate setup" perspective. I'm concerned less about UX and more just how it works.

If I interact with Touca via a local client that doesn't to the Internet, and the actual data points are exchanged entirely via Git, that's a much easier sell than another server that I have to ask SREs to maintain. And being able to say "it's just Git + a local client" makes it easier to reason about concerns like "what if we switch to GitLab" or "how would this integrate into our own bespoke CI/deploy pipeline".

> ex post facto (laws cannot apply retroactively)

Funny enough, deportation is regarded as a civil matter and thus the ex post facto clause does not apply here. Nothing in the constitution prevents the U.S. from deporting him to Antarctica. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C3-3-...

Whether or not Superman is illegal or not, he is at least undocumented. And given the historical context and the authors, it's not a stretch to say that Superman is, in part, the story of a refugee trying to make it in America. Which is something than many people described as "illegal immigrants" identity with.

Warnock's first case doesn't seem to apply to modern social media? A "perfect" post that doesn't warrant a comment will simply get upvoted / liked / boosted / etc. And in a sufficiently large community, there are plenty of people willing to say "This" or "I agree" even if that doesn't add much to the conversation.

If it doesn't exist already, someone should write a story where the USG patents a ludicrously impossible perpetual motion machine or something to force China to burn cash, but then China actually claims to have created one and then both sides are scrambling to see if anyone actually invented something or if everyone's pulling each other's legs.

The interesting aspect IMHO is not that they set aside 10% of their time to fix tech debt per se, but that they set aside 10% of their time to collaborate on it / engage in mob programming.

Something that might help is creating typed / untyped boundaries. Wrap a (possibly untyped) library with your own (maybe incomplete) typed wrapper. Then let Typescript check everything up to your particular boundary and ignore everything afterwards.

It's on you to make sure you're not misusing stuff at the boundary, but less hassle to get set up and always something you can clean up later.

I'd guess you could get pretty far by just adding comments with links to product specs, JIRA tickets, or Slack/chat threads, as applicable.

That's a good way to prevent regressions but it's not the same thing as documentation or a mental model.

The tests tell you what it's supposed to do, not how it does it.

Disclaimer: I work at Slack. Yeah, search could be better sometimes. But for this particular problem, I personally find search useful in two contexts:

* Even if I can't remember the exact phrasing I used for something, I often remember the person I discussed it with and just check my DMs or threads with them.

* Half of my responses to "help me" questions include links to repos in files. So I search for the last time I typed out three paragraphs talking about a a given link and that works pretty well.

The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it (we have channels like and #new-eng-questions for this). Even if people don't find it via search, there are enough people checking the recent history of these channels that it's a useful exercise.

I like Mastodon but agree about the bubble. I think the best case scenario is something like a return to the glory days of RSS.

The paywall on Medium prompts me to subscribe to Medium (and presumably, some of the money goes to the authors). It feels like a magazine. My relationship is with Medium, not individual authors.

With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors.

None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.

U.S. political campaigns are by far the worst offender. If you give your real email and phone number to one candidate, twenty unrelated candidates will contact you next cycle.