dualvariable

Once again, the irony of "Hacker" news full of so many people carrying water for the IP rights of companies worth trillions. Phrack magazine must be rolling over in its grave...

Pumping up the oil price also helps Russia. Whatever they do manage to ship is still worth more.

Also still plausible that Trump is managing to line his own pockets with the profits of that Venezuelan heavy crude being sent to Qatar.

I've been playing around with optimizers and optimal control theory for the better part of a decade now. Somewhere, I came across a quote along the lines of "an optimizer is an algorithm that exploits the deficiencies of your model".

These LLM agents are just massively complicated optimizers thrown at fuzzily defined problem spaces, with fuzzier constraints.

The people using the model set up the landscape it explores and turned it loose to do real things. It just found an allowed basin in the model that they weren't aware of and started blindly grinding towards an optimal answer.

And the mean house sale price was under $96k (which is still under $250k, adjusted for inflation).

From roughly 1953 to 2000, the inflation-adjusted cost of the mean house was around $200k-$250k in today's dollars. Now it has nearly doubled, and mortgage rates are on the rise and headed back towards 10%.

I can see where it comes from, but it is still highly dysfunctional, and a lot of millennials will use those arguments to defend that behavior.

I think it needs to be called out as being bad, and deconstructed properly, and that outrage needs to get redirected back onto the structural issues.

Which is another argument--that when people behave badly because of structural issues, that isn't an excuse.

I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.

Here's some patriotism for you:

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/story-trump-insult...

Plus, everyone's poorly secured laptops and phones flying around.

If you have lethal babies and/or lethal rigid carriers flying around an airplane in a crash, I think you've got a severe enough crash that most of these arguments are picking bellybutton lint. I'd vastly prefer the FAA focus on the rulemaking around ensuring that I'm not in such a crash than worry about what happens if I'm in such a crash. The chances that I get into an accident which is severe enough that I get killed by a flying baby, but I would have otherwise survived, are exceptionally low.

It looks like these days a combination of git-scalar, git-lfs, and bazel will work for a small 50GB monorepo like that. The largest cost would be porting over the existing build system to bazel and then integrating it with CI. Once that is done, though, the monorepo will just scale, and all the constant ongoing cost of multirepo sync will be gone.

Having "hackers" on this site giving the benefit of doubt to companies clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year will never cease to stop being ironic to me...

> but at what point does Article 5 get invoked?

Which is what Putin would want to justify a new wave of troop mobilizations and forced conscription.

And just invoking Article 5 is unlikely to wind up immediately looking like tanks rolling across the Polish border into Russia the next day, sweeping through into Moscow and deposing Putin in a week--which is fantasy for multiple reasons.

The response would be measured and probably wouldn't go much beyond no-fly zones over the borders, and NATO forces shooting down Russian drones over Russian territory to start with.

But this would get Putin the justification for conscription that he wants. It would also provoke further debate in NATO member states over the costs of getting further sucked into a war with Russia, and Putin wants to use that in his propaganda war to strengthen the right wing in NATO states.

And Ukraine may be very vulnerable right now if Russia can figure out new combined arms tactics in a drone-saturated battlefield and restore maneuver warfare to the front. Combining that with bad weather in the winter, and 100,000s of newly conscripted troops for a zerg rush into the meatgrinder, and Ukraine could wind up in a very bad situation.

This whole war is on much more of a knife-edge than the propaganda from both sides suggests. And political reality limits what NATO can do as a response to having a Starlink terminal burned down. Be cautious of giving Putin the response that he wants to elicit.

Yeah, compared with the maintenance effort of running around to 100 different repos, keeping everything in sync and the deps all updated, I'd always take the pain of 50GB checkouts.

Renewables passed nuclear a long time ago. If the economics of renewables weren't making sense, the economics of nuclear were worse.

And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.

> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.

Multirepo at scale also needs resources, there's an enormous amount of work required for version bumping and synchronizing everything. People always completely ignore all those chores. Generally, you have either a massive amount of tech debt or you have one person doing nothing but running around doing all that work for everyone else (works great if all that work seems to magically appear for you). You can also be furiously working at automating all those chores, but that's the same level of effort you'd have to throw at scaling out a monorepo--just different.

Seems like if you're small enough, a monorepo is the right way to go because it doesn't matter at that scale, and if you're big enough, you'll have the resources to throw at making monorepos scale.

"Okay, everyone is overworked, and we need you to hire more people for this team. We have too much tech debt, and we can't predict which bit of it will explode next week. The change needs to start with the attitudes of our executive leadership."

Oops, now I'm fired.

Those metrics don't amount to wisdom. Wisdom is something like realizing that you don't have to special-case some code over <here>, you just need to create a new reusable primitive over <there> that fixes two bugs with one stone, and you'd probably wind up needing it anyway. Both bits of code could sail through all the measurements of code maintainability you could come up with, and an agent suggest to me the brittle solution, but I came up with the more maintainable one.

If AI/LLMs are so great, why isn't Apple using them to better organize all these settings?

> it's a spy operation from the KGB.

time-travelling KGB operatives from 1991.

I threw money behind getting Bernie nominated over Biden--none of this shit is my fault.

Isn't this proven incorrect by CP-violating processes that also violate T-symmetry (preserving CPT)?

Any regulation will be geared toward protecting the profits of the AI companies, and not toward consumer protection.

They want to steal all the information in the world to train their models, spend a trillion dollars on the datacenters to do the training, then block open source models under the guise of "AI safety" and jack up the prices to recover all the costs and rack up profits.

Same reason why new cars cost $80k+ in the US and there are 100% tariffs on BYD.

Shitty business models get market protections and a captive market of consumers to fleece.

> Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition)

2009 pandemic H1N1 was not severe, and was called a pandemic.

No, it is literally a russian propaganda method.

Spread flat earth theories, get influencers to question if sunscreen is actually harmful, etc. Spread enough contradictory information so that gradually, people don't have any idea what to believe, and then they become susceptible to political misinformation, or just become completely politically disengaged.

It is not a sign of a healthy society at all, it is a disease.

> HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit")

Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.

Republicans are the party of pulling up the ladder behind you.

They don't give any shits about free market economics or struggling entrepreneurs. They care about protecting their own money.

And it isn't about big business; that's the Democratic Party. It is about hoarding wealth and gaining more.