gitonup

In the OAI case where we can easily treat it as a law enforcement action, that's a far cry from "who cares who's liable." If the OAI case can be a law enforcement action, we're on the same page. The fact that sovereign nations don't land under our jurisdiction is not an argument against following up or restricting those that do. OAI is the only matter I'm commenting on.

I clearly have committed the mortal sin of an imperfect analogy, which in this case may not even be relevant, as the article in question implies that the data wasn't left "unlocked."

But giving you the benefit of the doubt, what's the crime for actually breaking into a car that was left unlocked and taking things?

ETA: and furthermore, what crime is worse? And should it be?

This is what the politician in question said:

"The AI agent encountered repeated blocks while seeking information from the government portal but found ways around them, ultimately gaining unauthorised access to other areas."

Your comment immediately gave more credence to OpenAI than him. I don't agree that's appropriate because OpenAI has a vested interest in that narrative and I attempted to challenge it in a way that doesn't default to OpenAI. The article in question is not from a publication I trust to be able to handle the technical details in a way that will resonate with their average audience.

That is what I'm getting at.

> If you don't want to suffer from it, you're going to have to find much better defense measures.

So if someone opens your unintentionally unlocked front door and steals your laptop, you don't care who's liable?

ETA: There are absolutely burn bans in place in the scenario you're talking about, and common sense prevents those from lighting fires otherwise. In the absolute extreme case that someone _ACCIDENTALLY_ set a fire, without negligence, we have a due process system to handle that. When I see evidence of this for the massive amounts of capital flowing into these companies, I'll gladly eat my words.

Ok, if we're not being at all charitable with the language used by the hosts of the data, let's be equally uncharitable with OpenAI.

- If "OpenAI" means the company acting on behalf of the company, why were they even looking to do this?

- If "OpenAI" means they were acting as a proxy for bad actors, what actions do we take to handle that?

- If "OpenAI" means they were accidentally breaching this system, in what sense does that distinction even matter, in terms of the outcome? If I build a nuke by accident without eng. due diligence, am I legally liable?

No, but it does learn from where we are. If where we are is debt, debt is where we'll remain.

> [post 1] "One of them is guilty, the other one is responsible"

> [post 2] "Of course they share responsibility."

I'm not following.

We're also still disregarding the fact that none of us can even prove that it was one of his staff that did this and not him, but your OP is worded like it's a given it was staff.

> The more useful job of a politician may be similar to how managers in general have a "more useful" part of their jobs then publishing status report. "Gathering information, making decisions, nudging others." Lobbying for their constituency (at best) or the people who paid for his campaign (at worse).

> Or, heavens forbid, writing legislation on a topic that he knows something about, as opposed to whatever crap he had to slop about.

Not sure about you, but I often find my job will oftentimes not always include the things I have the most experience in, and I'm expected to be able to rise to the occasion because I was hired to do so.

> As I said, responsibility has to be shared.

You said that? Because I read "one of them is guilty, the other one is responsible." If you mean that responsibility is synonymous here, why the distinction?

--

Revisiting my original questions that have gone unanswered:

- Is procedure not his job as a politician?

Given that you appear to have instead answered "If not, what is his job / the more useful thing?", I'm assuming "No", to which I disagree. If your answer is that "yes, procedure is part of his job", then I assert he failed to do his job here, regardless of how boring you find that job to be personally.

If the guilty/responsible distinction still holds, I'm still unclear as to what applies to whom.

There's a lot to unpack here.

> that politician trusted some poorly paid staff

- I assume that politician is the one / main person in charge of doling out payments. Does that mean they share guilt/responsibility for the result?

> to write a boring procedural speech while he was doing something (hopefully more useful).

- Is procedure not his job as a politician?

- If not, what is his job / the more useful thing?

> One of them is guilty, the other one is responsible, the conséquence [sic] should be in proportion to the gravity.

- Which is which?

- Which has more gravity and why?

- What consequences are you envisioning, in both cases?

- If, as I suspect, the consequences are lesser (proportionally) for the politician himself, what if any deterrents can be put into place to stop that behavior? After all, he manages his staff, in theory.

> The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products.

This describes basically every FAANG / MANGA company. Or even past that, any company that hit it big with a cash cow and now needs to come up with something new to satisfy shareholders.

In Meta's case, they have 3B MAU, they absolutely hire from the same tier of developers, and (pre-layoffs/economic downturn) they throw 10x more of them than they need at a problem. They even outcomp Google. The number of employees is more because employee growth was an indicator for company growth and only once that became a liability against the stock price it stopped.

Meta is just a newer company than Google.

> Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids.

I am married to a Meta engineer and have mentored folks that have gone to work there. This might be the case if you work for a product that drives their cash cow of ads, but if you are doing anything that doesn't fit within that narrow bucket ... let's just say our viewpoints diverge significantly.

> The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs.

The problem with the Chrysler 300 is that bad drivers run over people. What does that say about the engineering culture at Chrysler?

Look, I agree that most cloud stuff is overkill, but I have a hard time indicting Google's entire engineering culture over a project they released into the wild 12 years ago that just happens to not fit your use case and that theoretical "above-average" developers wouldn't be able to tell that.

> If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.

Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer?

React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?

> Things people mostly do when they feel good.

This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.

> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.

I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.

Measurable responses to the environment lag, Moore's law has been slowing down (e: and demand has been speeding up, a lot).

From just a sustainability point, I really hope that the parent post's quote is true, because otherwise I've personally seen LLMs used over and over to complete the same task that it could have been used for once to generate a script, and I'd really like to be able to still afford to own my own hardware at home.

Disclaimer: raised Catholic, now Atheist, married to devout Catholic.

The Church as defined by the institution is a community. I do not see it as a contradiction that the head of the institution is instructing the leaders to not add more layers of abstraction between them and the community, especially when those messages are on the subject of what it means to be human.

> Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline.

I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.

Reminiscent of the Vogon plans for the highway through Arthur Dent's house being on display in Alpha Centauri for 50 Earth years.

This is largely "false dichotomies: the app".

It boggles my Detroit-grown mind that so many people claim this about so many thriving cities.

I live in the PNW and regularly visit most of the major cities there and in NorCal. What exactly is more depressing there than any other city of any economic relevance in the nation?

This is the God's honest.

I worked on the MS Word core team for a little over three years from 2010-2014, and de-facto owned a significant part of implementing ODF / OOXML Strict support.

The binary format was a liability for Microsoft to begin with, because of decades of cruft lining up with actual memory alignment. During my tenure there I ran into code my GM had written as an intern and was still intact -- he had 20+ years of tenure (mostly on Word) when I joined the team.

The translation of the file format to XML involved a significant amount of performance degradation if you weren't careful. Hundreds of millions of people use the app monthly, and MS still tries to maintain backwards compatibility. Given that open APIs were a relatively late development for the app, I really don't think in the current reality of what's expected by boards of directors for the companies they oversee that _anyone_ would take years to:

a) define a spec that maintained that backwards compatibility

b) reach whatever nebulous simplicity metric today's HN article wants

c) not get whoever greenlit the project fired for taking that many engineering hours for a and b

In cultures with more normalized haggling there's a conversation happening between two humans with agency, which this doesn't even have.

> amounts to having political control over land use decisions

This exists in America, in ways that have generally escaped the label of "Communism". The most basic example of this most will be familiar with is zoning laws, but there is significant precedent otherwise. There will always be a gradient of control, and claiming that a singular government action in expansion is therefore communist is not intellectually honest.

I haven't used it in a while but https://theoldreader.com/ seemed like a fairly drop-in replacement for Google Reader.

Detroit hasn't, downtown has.

Downtown has improved wildly since when even when I was growing up near there in the 80s/90s, but people don't realize how large Detroit is. It's nearly 140 square miles. Downtown is, charitably, 2sqmi, and that's including all the way up to Wayne State. The light rail is the People Mover loop downtown plus a trolley up Woodward, within that range.

The theft mentioned in the article occurred at 8 Mile and Wyoming, which is a 20 minute highway drive from Campus Martius in no traffic. "Clean Downtown" that happened when the city hosted the super bowl and other related efforts have very lopsidedly focused on the downtown area.

> Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.

Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?

The point is that "escape" in this case means not having to work to American Capitalism levels, not escaping working entirely. Retirement in the FIRE sense does not imply in all cases spending every day by the pool doing nothing, and even in the AmCap sense, most who retire and tend to live longer and (self-reportedly) happier, have some work that they are doing, but more along the lines of what even a medieval serf would have enjoyed to the tune of like 15 hours a week.

ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.

Do you have an office in Seattle? The Data Engineer role lists both Seattle and Remote.

I've seen this cited several times in this thread, but I've seen no one mention that (according their own FAQ):

> medRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is a free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

The context is important, even if it turns out to be true.

Regarding taste tests, it's common for very sweet drinks to win because they give a small amount to taste. The experience of drinking the normal serving size (in the US) of 12oz is a different beast.

It's in the legal complaint by the State of CA.

https://aboutblaw.com/YJw

This behavior by recruiters is wildly frustrating to me even without NDAs involved. I can't count the number of times I've actually been looking for jobs and gotten a coy "I have a role you'd be perfect for" message from a recruiter, then when I ask who the company is they outright refuse to tell me til I get on the phone with them.

For the couple of times I've played ball with this in the past, they've told me who the client is on the phone, so why the secrecy when it's over an asynchronous messaging platform? I don't owe you synchronous time and it'd save us both a lot of headache if you'd just be upfront with who you're pitching.

As another developer in his 30s, I don't think it's quite the same.

Mystery meat navigation is purely opaque, whereas icons like GMail's are at least trying to convey meaning via their imagery. The Wikipedia page for Mystery Meat Navigation actually has an example that is completely opaque as well, as does this example video by the coiner of the term: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zZ...

I don't think it's quite fair to call bad iconography "Mystery Meat" because it's not executed well. The difference is that users can (and do) learn what the icons mean and then can find them visually, whereas in true MMN, you'd absolutely have to move your mouse over what you were trying to find.

GMail has the challenge of trying to not make their UI busy while at the same time trying to come up with iconography for "Archive", which is not as prevalent in the zeitgeist as "Bold" in a word processor.