neilv

Related: Not US postage labels, but suspicious US postage stamps, seemed to also be used as a crude currency.

A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.

(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)

The biggest early selling point of Tcl was Tk, as a relatively easy way to make good-enough GUI programs with open source on Unixen and the X Window System. Even much easier than the easier-to-use X toolkits like XView with C, and the alternatives only got more difficult from there. There were no Web frontends.

Tcl itself was quite clever as what I'd actually call a string-based scripting language (contrast with Bourne/C-shell/etc. that preceded it on Unix).

Originally, Tcl was among the handful of off-the-shelf extension languages. You write your big application in C or C++, and then you embed an interpreter for a higher-level extension language, for users or the original developer to add on functionality. The options at the time were usually a small Lisp/Scheme, Tcl, Python, or something entirely bespoke and probably quirky and half-butted.

During early dotcoms, there was considerable interest in Tcl for backend work, and it also wouldn't have been the worst choice to put into the browser. Like Python, Tcl would've been more accessible and democratizing-the-Web than JavaScript, and there were already solid off-the-shelf designs and implementations. (Scheme would've appeared slightly more intimidating than Python or Tcl, and was more powerful, which I think was why Tim Berners-Lee preferred Python over Scheme as the people's programming language for various Web purpose. The semantics of the JavaScript we got was more a hurried toy Scheme, plus the simplest object model, and a more intimidating syntax that came from systems programming.)

If Google cares about some of the long-standing problems, I wonder whether they know how to fix them. (Assign OKRs, which may be conflicting, or get quietly triaged/prioritized?)

Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.

To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.

I have a suspicion that 99.999% of people who say that Lisp syntax is difficult to read haven't really tried to use it (outside of a random homework assignment in CS101).

The syntax is incredibly trivial, and needs very little initial instruction (except to tell newbs to stop trying to put the close-paren on a line by itself, like they are fresh out of a JavaScript boot camp and have no frame to conceive anything else, and that, really, the automatic indentation and the shapes should be at least as readable once you try to use it in real-world examples, and see how that works in practice).

> Since Lisp puts the function name after the opening parenthesis, there is more distance between the parentheses. This makes it less likely that the parentheses are close enough to be scanned as a single shape.

Or we can navel-gaze differently, and claim it's more a shape, because then it's a nicely rounded shape that contains the whole function application/call:

    (foo x y z)

    foo(x, y, z);

There is a small chance that you're doing the following in a Lisp or C, but you'd be doing something fancy that most people do not (like writing the internals for a pluggable framework or object system):

    (((f a) b ) c)    Pseudo-Lisp

    f(a)(b)(c)        Pseudo-C

If you were doing this, and you thought the particular code was hard to read, you could throw in a variable or two, for the intermediate function (or function pointer) values. Or use a combinator...

When you don't have this fancy function-that-produces-function-that-produces-function pattern, your list head will typically have the name of a function there, and then the syntax simple shape and indentation visually disambiguates.

In skimming the article, I did see something the article could've followed through on, for a good syntax criticism of many Lisps:

    f[a][b][c]    Pseudo-C, array access notation

Array-intensive Lisp code could use syntax/dialect extension for square brackets for this, if the Lisp doesn't already have comparable syntax:

    [m a b c]

In both references and setters; see my most recent mention of it: https://mastodon.online/@neilvandyke/117067069023420085

> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.

Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?

As someone who used PostmarketOS previously, and would be interested in returning...

1. Congrats to them on a name change.

2. Bummer about not getting the .org domain name, but if the current registrant hasn't been using the name, there is some ICANN trademark pressure that can help the registrant be reasonable with the price.

3. Is the effort into branding a sign that there's also imminent big news on viability for daily drivers?

That seems to be a big part of it.

There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.

AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.

Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.

I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.

Editing would be a good idea, but it was already over an hour old before someone pointed out the confusing phrasing, and HN won't let me edit it. Do you agree that the clarifying comments right below it will suffice?

Yes, I was thinking of the whole tragedy together, not wanting to dwell on it, and misspoke. Thank you for catching that.

I assume that the whole tragedy is also on the minds of those responsible for trying to prevent it from happening again, on any campus. So I'd think the point still stands, about, once you're talking about motivations for campus surveillance, that's one of them.

As context for this article presumably written for an audience of faculty, a few bits of historical MIT culture:

1. MIT prided itself on having minimal rules. Historically, they think rules are barriers to MIT people doing smart things.

2. MIT valued an open campus. Typical example was that at any time of night students could walk into an empty classroom to work on a problem or something.

3. There is a joke that it stands for "Military-Industrial Technology". There have been very close ties to US govt., more than most than most universities. Whatever goes on at a small set of partifcular universities will be seen by some to affect national security. This is in addition to, like other US research universities, suddenly feeling at the mercy of whatever US administration is controlling the purse strings.

4. Overall strong libertarian bent, of the student body and much of the faculty. This affects how you make non-engineering/science/financial/prestige arguments to this audience. (Excepted are administrative staff, more typically having the background of solid liberal arts educations.)

5. (This one is my own observation) MIT student body overall were less aware of societal and world issues, compared to students overall at the university I was at before. If you see demonstrations on certain issues, that might be originating with international students arriving on campus with concerns felt widely in their home countries, rather than the stereotypical general idealism of young college students.

(Aside: I'm surprised by the style of the article, if the audience is broad MIT faculty. The authors seem to be mostly from humanities pockets, so I wonder whether they bounced a draft off some engineering or science professors. Also, although the article might be implying that inhibiting protests is a motivation (not just an incidental effect) of the surveillance, I didn't see the article acknowledge the horrific recent mass-shooting on campus, which would be an obvious motivation. I'm personally highly skeptical of mass surveillance, and I think there are some profound questions for society, so I'd like to see engagement of the broader faculty.)

AI;DR fits. Though some deserve a stronger response -- "AI;FU" -- like the disingenuous AI-powered hiring spam targeting HN users recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849134

A rival team has an ambitious but craven assistant coach who, with a regime change, could be better controlled towards our interests.

Another team's key player couldn't be replaced on short notice, were they to be removed from the board, in a deniable 'gang-related' incident in front of the nightclub they frequent.

The roster of a favored team could be boosted with secret financial incentives to candidates, funded off-the-books by new gambling and prostitution operations.

In a startup with move-fast lightweight processes:

1. Docs that are naturally versioned with the code, like API doc or a design doc, might well go in the code repos. (I'm personally a big fan of API docs embedded in comment chunks right above the respective implementation chunk, but a separate Markdown or SVG file, or other format, also works.)

2. Everything else, one of the top priorities is to minimize friction to someone who has the information capturing it such that it can be found by someone else later, so put it in the very low-friction wiki (or an issue/task comment).

3. Have a lightweight way of cross-linking things between these locations, that everyone knows, so info is more likely to be found later.

This still applies even if you feed everything into AI now.

Flashback. When I was an adolescent, the dBase and Fox products were my first paid software development, and they were surprisingly accessible to even kids.

I was only supposed to help assemble computer furniture, and maybe install networked Unix and PC software, but the retired Marine my mom worked for thought I had potential. "Hey, Kid", he would say, we need to modify this dBase vehicle fleet insurance database to support more vehicles; figure it out. Here's the manuals for C database library, and Microsoft C, I'm evaluating; figure it out. We need to migrate between accounting systems; here's a sample .DBF of the target schema, here's how you generate a full dump from the legacy minicomputer, use this editor called Emacs to clean up the dump for import, once you figure out the schema mapping; figure it out. I also bought an older dBase product, and then a Fox product, for home, and figured out how to build a few fancier systems.

(Then I kept working, and there was a period when all employers either wanted me to figure out something, or were favorably surprised when I soon did, thanks to formative influences of figure-it-out mentors. Then a break to get belated formal degrees, then being surprised after that pause, when job interviews were suddenly Leetcode-like, and they didn't seem to want me to figure it out, but wanted a rehearsed ritual performance conforming to a big-corporate sanctioned set of rules, and apparently the Marine hadn't written a book to counterbalance that awful green book. :) )

DRM-free EPUB and PDF (for those who'll pay double to legally avoid Kindle DRM):

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/211460386/hands-on-large-l...

And there was already precedent:

https://deskauthority.saberkeebs.com/wiki.themk.org/index.ph...

https://deskthority.net/download/file.php?id=59173

Early Mac design was excellent overall, but decided not to include these keys (maybe they were leaning towards Smalltalk-like context menus?), and then seemed to go into more cryptic and power-user in-the-know keyboard direction (like with the 3-icon key including special support for flipping burgers):

https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/key-symbols-we-lost-to-ti...

Facebook had a good idea for hiring and retention: pay the highest, and that will boost college students' perceptions of how cool you are.

Facebook got a lot of mileage out of that, running long after public scandals confirmed the early hints of possible sketchiness, back when Google was an attractive alternative.

Though I don't know that's still necessary. The job markets are different now, since there's not many tech employment options that aren't either sketchy or reviled. Anti-AI-worker sentiment seems high lately, outside of HN circles -- much more widespread and negative than I recall any kind of perception of pre-AI tech workers -- yet there aren't a lot of non-AI employment options.

So, some Flock employees might want to leave, over ethics, social status, or company internal culture, but... if they end up at a AI company, they might soon still be seeing a lot of social negative feedback anyway.

("Hi, nice to meet you. ... Me? Oh, I work on, uh, software. ... Yeah, AI is really disrupting things in my field, too. It's been a bit rough, but we're hanging in there.")

Interesting. And all the history of Kafkaesque review interactions that various developers have had could be subpoenaed, as evidence of a pattern: that delays aren't necessarily due to excellence and good faith.

That link is an activist YouTube channel. Closest I could find to a news organization reporting on this:

https://www.wtae.com/article/springdale-playground-swing-cou...

Given the short-term pragmatic, conflicted way that AI tech adoption is happening... won't encouraging distillation effectively taint the entire space of open weights models, with the undisclosed biases of a few models that are under the influence of parties (certain billionaires and politicians) known for aggression and duplicity, and not for admirable ethics?

Following news of companies and projects increasingly moving to open weights models.

As AI gets more central to society, we really need to know how the weights were determined.

Open weights isn't just "free as in beer"; it can be "free as in the mystery drug that creepy guy chatting you up at the bar offered you". And maybe even he doesn't even know everything that went into the tablets, since he too was being worked, by an organ-theft ring who will be harvesting both of you tonight.

That's an analogy to get your attention. Your LLM probably isn't going to steal your organs. But in the current environment, it does and will have ideological biases determined by those with direct and indirect influence over it. And there will be a massive market for commercial influence biases (look at how previous generations of adtech invaded almost all technology companies). And there's incentive for military and spying capabilities to be buried in the models, perhaps as long-term sleepers. Maybe some organized crime trojans, too, depending which model you pick up.

In this low-trust environment of the current real world, we need genuine open source models, not closed "open weights", and not mindlessly distilling black boxes gifted by sketchy powerful interests.

It's a good analogy that's probably occurred independently to a lot of us. Here's my version from a private email a few weeks ago:

> [...] I don't like the "great equalizer" effect. [...] Like a kung-fu expert who wandered into a wild-west saloon of drunks all packing six-shooters. (I'm still working on this metaphor.)

Might as well share the entire off-the-cuff email, replying to a great software engineer friend who recently went academic, when they asked what I thought about AI development.

> "You're absolutely right," as the chatbots say.

> I think Claude Code (which I think is currently regarded as the best brand for software development) is for banging out *something* when you don't care so much about the quality. Like most applications of generative AI (homework cheating, customer service, usual corporate ticket-closing).

> And I'm definitely not thinking through the problem very well. The first time I noticed this was on UI design, where Claude would emit a generic *something*, and then the mode is to make incremental tweaks, rather than going through the mental exercises and holistic thinking.

> So sometimes I'm thinking like a non-technical manager, giving initial spec, and then iterating on things I notice -- not thinking like a designer, architect, or engineer.

> Or, like a senior engineer who has to mentor a hyperactive intern who bullshits and plagiarizes like crazy, and makes empty apologies like a sociopath when caught, but is the CEO's nephew, so you can't just fire and blacklist them. You just have to get *something* out of them.

> I can do much better design and better implementation myself, but it's good enough. And it's better than at least half the industry software engineers, so a lot of people who never cared much nor got very good, are in trouble. And management is often a poor judge of skill, if they even care.

> Besides the questions of its performance and utility, and all the ethics questions, I don't like the "great equalizer" effect. Now a lot more people can do (or seem to do) many of things I can do. And I'm having a lot of trouble job-hunting, and companies mostly want people to be using or building AI. Hence learning the robo-plagiarism tools. Like a kung-fu expert who wandered into a wild-west saloon of drunks all packing six-shooters. (I'm still working on this metaphor.)

That conversation might've started when I showed friend my new gen-AI portfolio site, so the context would be realist assessment and handling it, spoken to someone who already knows I'm an enthusiastic hardcore engineer.

On iPhone, so far "Go Map!!" works well for my simple edits, which are things I notice while walking on the sidewalk.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!

(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)

For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.

Looks like the IP address is from Linode. So it could be a $5 VPS running an inefficient server-side framework.

I currently host my personal Web site as static files via AWS CloudFront. But even static hosting on a $5 VPS with Nginx might handle an HN surge fine.

I host my AI-generated code portfolio site separately (to unambiguously distinguish it from my 100% human-written open source work), using github.io (seemed appropriate) with a custom domain.

Regardless of whether or not Google is liable, what would be interesting to me is how this happened, the role(s) at Google that were involved, when each knew of the problem, and what each did.

(I'm interested in what this says about current culture.)

> It's made even worse by the fact that [...] their external designs are unchanged from past ones, so there's no way to tell who's always listening to everything

Yeah, I just decided the entire Apple Watch brand is suddenly a creeper device, so I'm not going to wear mine out, nor otherwise around other people.

I don't want to endorse creeper devices by appearing to wear one, and I don't want to be insensitive to people who might wonder whether I'm "note taking" everything we say.

Also, I got an iPhone specifically to use the Apple Watch awhile, so I'm probably switching back to GrapheneOS sooner than expected.

A complementary view of one point in time is the LA Noire video game's attempt to recreate a (condensed and simplified) 1940s LA environment, with 3D architecture, cars, and ongoing expansion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPh2AcmG2A

The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.

Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.

Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.

(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)

> During bench tests, they found the TV could capture clean microphone audio while the screen was (or at least looked to be) powered down in standby mode. When the team disconnected the TV from Ethernet, the set continued saving voice input locally and uploaded the stored files once network access was restored.

Lawyers: If it is true that the company is secretly recording voices when the device appears to be off, and then uploading the recordings, does that sound like a felony in many US states?

(And a felony that is bumping into different laws than the "unauthorized computer access" ones that tech industry has been getting leeway with?)

A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".

Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.

Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.

Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."

Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.

Possibly, but straight anecdote...

Our startup noticed our first major-brand customer had a high-stakes B2B process depend on a spreadsheet that looked handmade and perhaps error-prone.

There was a moment of thinking This could be one of those startup pivot points, when what you thought was the incidental to your exciting technology solution, is actually the simple CRUD app/integration SaaS that customers need even more.

Then there was a moment of thinking We don't want to be the communication middleperson on that high-stakes communication, if there was ever a dispute.

Also, either it wasn't a perceived pain point of the customer, or they intended their ongoing CRM-ish conversion to address it eventually.

So we listened to the customer on what problems they (or at least the stakeholder executives' KPIs) actually wanted us to solve, and we continued to consume that spreadsheet in a manual and "zero-impedence" way, for the little bit we could use that info.

(A management consulting firm or YOLO/fly-by-night startup might do that one, though.)