extheat

The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so meaningful.

The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world intelligence, and the DOE is also apart of the intelligence community given they run most of the US national research laboratories.

> The other thing that gets me is the Energy Department said this back in 2021. There's since been a bunch of additional research done -- swabs in the market, cases traced back to points of origin -- that at least make the "market origin" more convincing than it was in 2021.

Do you have a source on that? AFAIK it seems to be the quite the opposite.

A lot of media attention was incorrectly put on the sea food market ruling out the lab leak based on some studies done on Chinese data [1] but the caveat was no animal lineage was found, only that people near the market had experienced similar coronaviruses, something we've known since the start of the pandemic.

> Nevertheless, some virologists say that the new evidence pointing to the Huanan market doesn’t rule out an alternative hypothesis. They say that the market could just have been the location of a massive amplifying event, in which an infected person spread the virus to many other people, rather than the site of the original spillover.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00584-8

The Energy Department is far more credible than spy agencies as they actually do biological and genomic research.

With the nice addition of banner ads.

When you have legislators chasing buzzwords and clout, you get a lot of grandstanding from them. They don’t understand the tech, which doesn’t really matter to them. What matters is they get to say they did something to protect the people.

$30k seems grotesquely high, although I do agree with the point. I'm not sure how much of it is to do with supply vs demand (there being a lesser quantity of software engineers experienced in capable of making apps vs plumbers) and how much of that is just artificially inflated, but I imagine it's some combination of both.

And what is knowledge? It could very well be that our minds are themselves fancy autocompletes.

While that may hypothetically be the future, that time is not now. The case before the court is much more consequential in nature and may remove the need for partnerships between companies like OpenAI and ShutterShock for consenstual sharing. It must be adjudicated based on the current capabilities, facts and circumstances of the case. Does IP and copyright go out the window because computers happen to be good at taking in and transforming like a human? The complaint isn't hiding the implementation, they explained it in a high level reasonably well. US courts are some of the strictest when it comes to IP, largely in part because strict laws were passed by the legislature. The court's job is not to legislate from the bench, but adjudicate violations of the laws as they are written today.

Just because it's easy to speed on a road and other people are speeding and they aren't charged doesn't mean you can't be held liable for speeding if you're caught. Likewise, copying proprietary source code from another project into your own commercial software can seem innocuous until you get hit with a lawsuit. You "prove" it the same way you prove any other thing before a court. The jury/judge doesn't need to be absolutely certain that something did or did not happen, just that the plaintiffs prove it beyond the standard of proof.

So yes: we may as well enter a point that computers are virtually indistinguishable from humans in generating "novel" things, in that case the existing laws would need to change. In the meantime, I don't view AI models as a trump card around copyright/IP. If everyone else is following the rules of the road but you decide to stick it and do your own thing, don't expect to ram your way through without consequences.

Copyrighted content on the internet isn't a free for all for people to train models with. No matter the good intentions, if Stability AI didn't take reasonable steps to remove copyrighted data from the training set then IMO they have an uphill battle to prove the case to a jury (if it gets there).

I agree, the shell changes are a big step backwards for the sake of some eye candy. Personally I use ExplorerPatcher [1] to restore most of the shell UI back to stock Win10, and it's been working pretty well for me without any problems.

[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Growing interest rates propagate throughout the economy. The goal of higher interest rates (aside from debt & borrowing becoming substantially more expensive) is to bring down demand and slow the economy.

It's not wrong. The Fed is explicitly asking for these kinds of layoffs. The fact that they are seeing more layoffs in tech opposed to other industries is part of why the interest rate hikes aren't stopping.

While I normally would argue about virtue signaling, this seems like creepy and unsettling behavior that definitely warrants an investigation. That doesn’t mean there was any rule breaking, but this is one of those creepy things that I strongly oppose looking the other way at. If you’re afraid of an investigation, then it is probably something worthwhile looking into.

Is it actually “removed” globally or is it just blocked from viewing in India? This would be a big deal if it’s the former.

Except we’re talking about photons…

How is working at Apple like?

For one, commiting project dependencies into your SCM can go along way. Treat 3P code as your code. Not only does this help prevent supply chain attacks, but it makes you more conscious as to the stuff you’re importing. Maybe you don’t need a 10,000 line dependency for something you could have written in 15 lines of code. There’s also other benefits of not depending on external servers for your build step which can dramatically improve install time if you have a big project with many deps. Not to mention never worrying about dependency version mismatching. All the clones have the same copy of everything.

For languages with good package managers it might seem like an anti pattern (why commit node_modules?). But stuff like this is standard for C++ dev, for example.

Hence why I said silently. If I’m posting something and it appears to me as usual on my feed but not others, by all means that’s a shadow ban.

Well if you are silently placed on a hide list (by manual human intervention without you being able to know without a third party), then by all means that is a shadow ban.

Edit for clarity.

Most importantly platforms like RN substantially lower the barrier to entry for making mobile apps, and cross platform ones at that. Whenever you lower the barrier to entry to something you inevitably attract low quality, low effort content that can obviously damage the perception of the broader platform. Setting that aside however, the development agility that RN provides I think is priceless. Most apps don’t need maximum performance, or the usage of niche platform specific APIs and so the time you’d spend working with two standalone codebases can be reinvested in your actual product and not mental overhead.

Do you deploy confidential information into the repo ? That would be the root problem.

Yep, it seems like most of the posters here in this thread don’t do much software engineering from the looks of it. Or are being purposely obtuse here. There is no security vulnerability here in any of the links we’ve seen so far minus some unnecessarily deployed boilerplate. The gitignore file is not the same file your deployment tool uses when publishing a website. If there’s an API endpoint that is public opposed to some static asset, that would be a problem. Nothing we’ve seen here indicates that.

What makes you think that there is some "substantial risk"? You seem to be mixing together git repos and site deployment rules. I don't see the big deal here with some CMS leftovers being deployed, but yes from a perspective of correctness this is not something that needs to be deployed.

Your mainstream user doesn’t care about the underlying technology behind a product. They care about good UX/UI, good content, who’s on it and a supply of dopamine to keep the “must check social media” cycle going. There’s a separate group of people who use social platforms to stay up to date with the news. Think Twitter/HN. It’s not so much about dopamine but necessity to stay up to date on things/discovery. There’s really no shortage of platforms out there. I don’t know if we want to bundle general chat applications like Discord/WhatsApp into this as they’re more closer to SMS than Instagram or TikTok. All the talk about “federated” or “decentralized” infrastructure matters little to people outside tech people and the tech enthusiast crowd. Programmers wanting widespread adoption on a platform should be focusing on the product itself and value to content creators versus the nuts and bolts around the product.

The i-line of products was already well known by the general public at the time to be synonymous with Apple. iTunes, iPod, iPhone ... those were normal english words prefixed with an "i". People wonder why Apple didn't call their watch the iWatch. This is a much different thing with "mastrodon". It's not a word people are familiar with, has enough syllables to sound funny, and gets combined with other nonsense words people aren't familiar with. Compare that with something like youtube subscribers, posters, tweets, etc. which are all basic words. Mastrodon's situation is that it reeks of being engineer designed. That's not a good thing if your goal is to reach a mainstream audience.

> Has global recession started

Long ago. It's going to get worse before it gets any better, IMO.

Companies have to be forward looking, not backward or just present looking. If there's tough times ahead, you want to be ahead of, not behind market headwinds.

“Better software engineers” to anyone who does software engineering is a joke. It’s an totally unquantifiable measure, and some people use dumb metrics like leetcode capabilities as some IQ test.

Seems like this is commentary rather than news.

All sorts of software can be used to “generate potentially harmful results”. Think about an algorithm for displaying content on social media sites, a search engine, a piece of malware on a computer. Do we ban books on how to make bombs? It’s such a broad point to make that it’s practically meaningless. The computers job is to read a set of instructions and execute them. It’s abstractly no different to a human writing instructions for another human, with the adage that the computer is a much faster processor than a human. You can quite literally run these ML models (a collection of statistically weighted averages) with pen and paper and a calculator (or even none!). Things will be maliciously used, that means we don’t ban sharp forks (at the determent of legitimate users), we ban those that intentionally misuse those tools.

There is no singular best answer. Nuclear fission for the foreseeable future will remain one of the solutions. There is the caveat that it’s not technically “sustainable” or “renewable”, but practically no source of energy is fully.