loosetypes

Or: filming location for the next Bond movie

Is this Human Resource Machine for GPUs rather than single core CPU assembly?

Ownership without corresponding property rights.

Mind linking any examples (or categories) of problems that are definitively not in pre training data but can still be solved by LLMs? Preferably something factual rather than creative, genuinely curious.

Dumb question but anything like this that’s written about on the internet will ultimately end up as training fodder, no?

He also released an internal memo on atoz today with a grammatical mistake in the first sentence.

Any recommendation for copilot integration with Emacs?

> to democratize coding

Does that mean we collectively vote as to whether the next addition is a for loop?

While a company may mean to make more widely accessible but used charged language, I think we should fight the urge to parrot.

Same boat - I get really frustrated by the “someone tried to access your account” emails from Facebook.

Oh, you mean the account that you confirmed as deleted 8+ years ago??

Related but not totally on topic:

How much would it cost to buy the rights to an essentially now semi-zombie game, that may have been been popular a decade+ ago?

Say a wealthy benefactor wanted to do so strictly to open source and preserve a series, not create new titles.

Maybe for a series that stills sells copies here and there, but is well past it’s prime?

Say, the Empire Earth franchise?

Or something with relatively more recent releases, like Heroes of Might and Magic?

Would it be the millions? Would one be able to do so for individual titles within a series?

I read the article but didn’t see any mention of inspecting network activity outside of, say, a company laptop but on the same WiFi network while WFH.

Do you, or anyone else, know if this happens or is commonplace? For software folks?

> Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers.

So replace computers with agriculture and this xkcd really is timeless.

https://xkcd.com/303/

Similar but unrelated, the audacity to post-facto denote something a Netflix Original.

Does sublime support editing remote projects over ssh?

Is there any reason not to assume they don’t for software engineers as well?

Honest question, I assume this isn’t covered by two-party consent of recording. Are there any legal frameworks covering employee monitoring in the US or on the state level?

Is it different if alerted on violation as opposed to a manager browsing their employees activity on a whim?

Because what niche they’ve carved out isn’t driven by utility for end users but by cost reduction for the company in reduced headcount.

They add value, just not to anyone who has to actually deal with them.

I’m increasingly convinced the endgame here is advertisers hiding content within the ads themselves via steganography.

Interesting.

I guess my off the cuff, unexamined criteria for democratizing is whether it’s a gating/enabling function for the occurrence of one party’s objectives as directly decided by the wider community.

So something like GoFundMe or crowdfunding, sure. Although doesn’t necessarily need to be monetary.

But I’d be interested in hearing counteropinions.

Does anyone else take fault with the increasingly commonplace usage of the word democratize as applied to technology?

For every valid case, I see others that make my head hurt. Is it just a buzzword for telling a story with emotional appeal to users and investors?

Making something available to someone who didn’t have it earlier isn’t democratizing. And ignoring future considerations is just lazy.

If guns were invented today they’d probably touted as democratizing violence.

Honest question - can a list really be curated if it’s basically just algorithmically generated?

Totally. And I didn’t mean to call you or your company out specifically. Actually sounds interesting.

Maps Street View of 1428 Bush St, San Francisco is more of what I have in mind. But maybe I’ve just passed that building one too many times.

> and the work literally saves and prolongs lives

I have literally yet to see a medical-adjacent company not default to assuming they’re on the moral high ground.

When I see companies say “we save lives” my initial reaction is no different from companies that say “we hire the best” or laws that “are for the children”.

Org mode next, please.

> the concept of a "salaried worker" doesn't really exist

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman

In Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, the author shows not only that there is money to be made renting housing to the American lower class, but also that it is in fact more profitable than renting to their more economically well off counterparts.

This is not because they have more money to part with but because they can be squeezed harder.

The wider concept seemed counterintuitive to me at first but I see various implementations abound in the wild the harder I look. This article shows one example.

I’ve read here that in prison, if inmates are learning to code without internet access that they’re given offline dumps of stack overflow. Or maybe offline Wikipedia in the library is a better example.

I’d really like to be able to buy preloaded offline versions of certain websites to be able to use indiscriminately.

For things like embarrassing questions which I might want to search for within a given subreddit without broadcasting it to who knows what systems.

I don’t even necessarily care if there’s a result, or even if the information/responses/comments are a decade stale - i can live without current events.

I just want the peace of mind that I’m not being observed. That’s something that I’d pay for.

Any current/ former Amazon employees have advice for future (Amazon) employees a little jarred by this and uncertain about their standing coming in?

I’d imagine for the less senior folks it also might be hard to initially get a read of the room when everything’s new and potentially remote.

On a side note, I recently spoke with several non-dev friends (sales, finance, etc.) about the idea of URAs and they made it sound the norm in their worlds. Honest question: Could it be just especially shocking for those of us potentially accustomed to “cushy” tech jobs.

Very cool!

Architecturally, is there a standard way to prevent exponential blowup when comparing all profiles to all profiles?

I’d imagine some heuristics like only comparing profiles within some geobounds.

Potentially gender as well.

Maybe a batch job that runs nightly and then accepting certain stale conditions but updating others on-demand?

I’ve become more interested in the abstraction of this kind of n-way profile comparison recently but am not sure I’m using the right words and have trouble searching.

In school a couple years back I spent fair amount of extracurricular time playing around with various lisps and frequenting related irc channels.

Robert often went out of his way to answer my dumb questions and really helped me better understand a number of things.

Thanks Robert!

Would it be hard to transition from that type of role back into a more product-engineering type position? Do you perceive there as being any stigma of engineering-adjacent roles?

I don’t know if DO sells “gift cards”, but are “credits”different in practice?

Iirc, at least in the US, gift cards cannot legally expire.