lacker

Reminds me of:

“In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

I wonder, if you ask a local LLM to access a forbidden site, from within Russia or China, can it figure out a way to do so, out of the box?

The conclusion that "insurance companies using algorithmic tools have failed Californians who lost their homes to fire by systematically undervaluing their properties" seems pretty dubious to me. Everyone is shooting the messenger by getting angry at the insurance companies when fire insurance isn't cheaper. Meanwhile many insurance companies are leaving California entirely.

It isn't the "evil algorithms" at fault here - it's the high risk of fire.

> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better.

It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term.

So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.

ChatGPT is a great resource for learning things, if you really want to learn.

I hope that this leads us to shift education towards helping people learn things, when they do want to learn. Instead of forcing people to learn things that they do not want to learn.

Isn't that how it should work?

If you write the police and ask them to delete all their data about you, that isn't a thing that they do. It shouldn't matter if the police store their data on AWS or their own servers.

Flock is a tool used by the police so it should work the same way.

I've been making games with JS in the browser with my kids, ages 7-13. Very simple games, the sort where we can just use emojis instead of real game assets. Even just building a game inside a Claude Artifact is pretty fun.

The nice thing about JS is that there is not very much overhead in setting things up, debugging weird things, restarting.

This part of the essay makes me feel moved by the author's situation.

> I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.

That sounds really tough, and I'm sorry the author finds themselves in this situation. Six months sounds grueling.

I think the interview process is likely to be completely overhauled in the age of AI. I don't really know what will happen. I used to be in favor of the standard code-at-a-whiteboard approach, but nowadays the actual work is even further from that. But I haven't seen an AI-aware interview process yet that seems like an improvement.

At any rate, these systematic changes are likely to come too late for the author. Hang in there. Maybe it's time to consider a bigger change, like moving cities and looking for in-person work. I like working remotely but it's harder to get a remote job, and the in-person stuff does have upsides. Good luck out there.

It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.

That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.

It seems tough culturally.

If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.

So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.

It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.

In general electronics aren't recycled because people don't care about recycling them.

The easiest piece of electronics equipment to recycle is probably an iPhone. You can give an old iPhone to Apple and they will recycle it for free. But still most end-of-life iPhones are not recycled.

It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible.

What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".

It would be great if home assistants actually started to understand me personally. Not even in the sense of "what am I like", more like in the sense of, "when I ask what the weather is today, do I want a long lecture, or do I just want you to say high of 60 degrees, wear long sleeves".

The problem with AI art is that it mostly sucks right now. Well, for "high art" - it can't write a novel, it doesn't create interesting artistic images. It's great for mocking up product UIs. And there are exceptions when an individual human puts a lot of work into it, for graphic art at least. Novels, it doesn't seem that close.

Yet.

I don't know if it will always stay this way, though. If one day I read a novel and I think, this is a great novel. I appreciated it, I felt myself growing from it. And then later I learn it was written by an AI. That's it, that will prove that great AI novels are possible. I will know it when I see it. I haven't seen it yet, but if it happens, I'll know.

So it's really just a technical question. Not a philosophical one.

It's pretty common in California for cities to abuse the permitting process to extract money from homeowners. But on the other hand, these homeowners are getting subsidized by Prop 13. For a typical house in the Palisades bought 34 years ago ChatGPT estimates the subsidy is about $15,000/year. So, I have a little bit of sympathy but they're really on the benefitting end of California's various forms of tax craziness.

If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.

In my experience, whenever you mandate open source software, you get software so unusable that it might as well be closed-source. Like, it doesn't compile, and they ignore all bug reports.

I'm not sure if I have the right mental model for a "skill". It's basically a context-management tool? Like a skill is a brief description of something, and if the model decides it wants the skill based on that description, then it pulls in the rest of whatever amorphous stuff the skill has, scripts, documents, what have you. Is this the right way to think about it?

At first this sounds cool but I feel like it falls apart with a basic example.

Let's say you're running a simple e-commerce site. You have some microservices, like, a payments microservice, a push notifications microservice, and a logging microservice.

So what are the dependencies. You might want to send a push notification to a seller when they get a new payment, or if there's a dispute or something. You might want to log that too. And you might want to log whenever any chargeback occurs.

Okay, but now it is no longer a "polytree". You have a "triangle" of dependencies. Payment -> Push, Push -> Logs, Payment -> Logs.

These all just seem really basic, natural examples though. I don't even like microservices, but they make sense when you're essentially just wrapping an external API like push notifications or payments, or a single-purpose datastore like you often have for logging. Is it really a problem if a whole bunch of things depend on your logging microservice? That seems fine to me.

I feel like Zig is closer to "better C" and Rust is closer to "better C++". So I'd pick based on whether you are more in a C mood or a C++ mood.

The real risk is not that Anthropic will run out of money, but that they will change their strategy to something that isn't Bun-based, and supporting Bun won't make sense for them any more.

A similar problem that I like.

A "lattice point" on the plane is a point where both coordinates are integers, like (3, 4) or (-2, -1). Prove that for any five lattice points, there will be two of them that if you connect them with a line segment, there's another lattice point between them on that line.

I think Ruby has declined because Rails was its selling point, but Rails was optimized for the world of HTML templates. Once you're writing JavaScript-heavy frontends and mobile apps, Rails isn't giving you much that you can't get from Python or server-side JS.

Something people want, apparently!

I was riding in a Waymo recently and it suddenly braked for no reason at an intersection where it didn't have a stop sign. I was like, what the heck, this Waymo is broken, it didn't see that the stop sign is only two way. Then a little kid on a bike riding along the sidewalk at an angle where I hadn't seen them just barely braked to a halt before riding into the street in front of the Waymo.

These things must be saving lives, it's obvious. When my kids are riding their bikes around I want the other cars to be Waymos, not human drivers.

Obviously it's property damage. How would you like it if someone covered the windshield of your car with glue?

It makes sense to me that criminals, like this guy you met in a bar, are opposed to Flock cameras.

There are a lot of Flock supporters out there. In my neighborhood, homeowners can volunteer to put Flock cameras on their property, and a number of people are doing this.

It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?

Oh... that explains what's happening here.

It's frustrating for the participants, but typically for these "internship programs for disadvantaged students", future employers will not treat it as equivalent to a regular internship.

That includes the company that runs the internship. In my large tech company experience, usually the entire "internship for disadvantaged students" program led to zero job offers.

Honestly, it might be a good idea to avoid those programs entirely. You often don't get to work on "real problems" while you're there. The program exists for PR much more than to give you useful experience.

That said, I don't have experience with this specific program, so this might not fit the archetype.

I don't intend to say the author is "bad", I'm just trying to follow up on this reasoning:

I learned the tools I was told to learn. I watched the right talks. I followed the right people. I can point at a neat little row of experiences and say: I played by the rules you told me about.

The rules are, do well at your internship, and you'll probably get a job offer.

The author also seems to be saying that they are getting interviews, but no job offers. ("The interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections.") Another rule is, if you do well at interviews, you will get a job offer.

So, without putting any value judgment on anyone, this is what's happening. The author isn't doing well enough on internships and interviews.

So my advice is not "just apply to more places", but to do that and also practice programming in order to interview better.