But this isn’t new. Government overreach has been a long recurring pattern throughout US history literally since we were born as a country. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, et al, exercised powers and authoritarian tactics that shocked their contemporaries just as much as Trump is doing today. Not using history as an excuse, just to point out that this is a feature of US politics not a bug. We have managed to remain a free society for 250 years despite all the horrible, anti democratic sometimes barbaric things our leaders did, because 1) every generation got organized to defend civil liberties and 2) our “system” was cynically and explicitly engineered with competing centers of power, among other things, under the assumption that every single leader would eventually try to grab power.
We do have some bipartisan initiatives, it’s just that they are not news worthy. Take for example the initial push for banning TikTok. It had unprecedented bipartisan support.
I don’t think we can objectively say software is getting worse. I don’t expect an appliance website, a car infotainment system and a banking app to be the beacons of software quality and user experience. All those things would probably suck at any point in time.
There was an article by Vercel on how ineffective tool calling is compared to just a single md file with clearly defined instructions. They showed a clever way on how to use compressed indexes. My experience with tool calling was similar to what Vercel described, and I spent hours trying to perfect it. Since reading Vercel’s findings, Claude.md and Agents.md, maybe a Project.md it’s all I use.
That switch will actually take a few months, technically speaking. What may delay it is manufacturers strategizing to avoid oversupply and trying to minimize their loses from all the investment in tooling they cannot longer repurpose. It will be a logistical and financial nightmare for them too.
As an enthusiast photographer I use the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If you are not familiar with it, it simple means keep 3 copies of your data, 2 of them on different media and 1 off site. The off site copy is usually the problem because the options are either online or at a secondary home or family/friend’s place. If you only have one home like in my case, you have to either trust family and friends with copies of your data, or just pay an online provider. I find the latter more secure and convenient. But I agree with the author, no one should have a 1-0-0 strategy, let alone online-only.
The math looks good on paper, but in reality enterprise AI is hard, most companies are realizing they are actually not seeing ROI from AI. One of my customers took about 8 months to rollout an AI initiative that by the time it launched and people got trained on it, it was already legacy. Also if you are 10x more productive with AI that doesn’t necessarily increases your billable output. There could be some super models like Mythos aimed at very specific hard tasks like drug development, but we have not seen any of that yet, and the clock is ticking.
If hyperscalers flop, and there’s a good chance they will, memory and disk prices will crater. They are historically the most volatile asset in tech. If Samsung, Micron et al can’t sell to hyperscalers they will switch back to consumer, because they can’t just turn off a memory fab without losing billions.
The current commitment by hyperscalers is around 1.7T USD, reported liabilities 1.3T and this year global debt related to AI is 570B. So that’s around 3T total. For this to make sense AI must generate 2T in new revenue per year by the end of the decade. And that would be only a 10% ROIC. For context ROIC for big tech is around 35% so at 10% they will be barely breaking even. The SP500 gives 10-12%. With 10% ROIC from AI the only thing investors will be celebrating is that the whole thing didn’t trigger a financial crisis. Data centers are NOT real estate. Buildings and power lines usually last 30-50 years. GPUs become obsolete in 5 years. If hyperscalers need to refinance and their interest rate goes up there’s zero margin for error.
I currently work for a federal contractor including the DoD as their customer, using Wordpress as their main website. You would think there’s no sensitive information there, but some times all it takes is enough information about someone and their team to impersonate that person and gain access to an email thread, file sharing system or even an access card to a building. Never underestimate incompetence.
Yes, all corporations have their obscure interests and don’t profit from being ethical. But we can also agree there’s a distinction between companies like Enron, Purdue Pharma, Meta, Lehman Brothers, Flock and Apple, Walmart, Verizon and Ford. They are all unethical to some degree, but the first group actually conspired to commit terrible crimes or are borderline criminal. We don’t know yet where OpenAI belongs to but it’s looking more and more like they want to join the first group.
Not to mention with each iteration of every model you get lower cost per token. It’s really a race to the bottom for hyperscalers and neoclouds at this point, with technically only two paying customers.
I went through a two month long fight with AWS over a compromised account. I lost 20K even when my previous usage for the last 3 years was like $20/month, and I had more invoices coming worth tens of thousands of dollars. AWS refused to help until I stopped the breach myself, which required me to spend several all nighters after work learning how to script for AWS infra. They also refused to close my account after the breach was under control. They asked me to sign a shared responsibility agreement before they could look at my case, which I refused to do. I finally contacted the AG office in my state and they email AWS directly. In less than 24h I had a AWS manager calling me to fix my account and issue a refund for the 20K. Still, they refused to close my account after all this ordeal, apparently there’s no way for you to completely get out of AWS once you are in. It’s the shittiest business ever.
I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account. It took me a couple of months and involving the office of the AG of my state to get the issue resolved and get my money back. Since then I never touched any AWS product, moved my small stuff to Azure. It’s been years since AWS have these issues with billing, you can find the stories online, students billed 60K for a compromised account launching servers to mine crypto which AWS somehow was unable to flag and block, and let run for months.
I think LLMs, with only a few exceptions, have mostly created the illusion of value. It’s undeniable I can write code, troubleshoot and document much faster than in the pre LLM era, but putting a dollar value to that it’s not particularly easy. One group of people being 100x faster at one task doesn’t mean the organization as a whole runs at 100x the speed, in fact in most cases where the bottle neck is somewhere else, the productivity gains of the 100x group have little to no impact, or even a negative impact in some cases due to token overspending.
They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.
I’m in month 5 of not having access to any social network, and although the first weeks I felt tempted to reinstall X and Reddit, I’m at a point where I don’t think I’m ever coming back. There are still great spaces like HN where you can consume content and participate in debates. I do miss some of the fun stuff, but it wasn’t worth being exposed to all the other crap for a few laughs a day.
With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.
Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it
“ This time he didn’t have a choice. He was loaded into an ambulance for a six-mile transfer, evaluated without additional treatment, and sent home the same night.”
This is weird, why didn’t he have a choice? I have literally walked out of a hospital with IVs still attached to my arms when I disagreed on course of treatment that included hospitalization for a case of white coat syndrome. They also wanted me to wait one hour to sign a waiver, which I unkindly refused.
Land is not very expensive in most suburbs, but houses have become huge, the average size in the area where I live is 2700 sf. That’s because building a 3000 sf home doesn’t take twice the time and labor a 1500 sf takes, so there’s an economic incentive to build bigger homes. People also look for more space today than 40 years ago. A 1500 sf house would be considered a very small house and would likely be very hard to sell. Again, the average sf price remains in the low $200, so that’s not a huge difference to 40-50 years ago, factoring inflation. Not to mention you get much better quality materials, appliances and construction today. So, the fix appears to be more small homes, ideally condos, in urban areas just like many other countries do. The problem is, it is technically impossible to build multi family in most cities in America due to the ridiculous zoning laws and ordinances by city governments and neighborhood associations. If you own a lot in a city neighborhood and try to build an apartment building you will likely face years of court battles.
It seems that per sf house prices haven’t gone up that much. We romanticize the idea of older generations being able up afford a home, but those houses were a lot smaller than they are today, the average size I think was around 1500 sf, and a family of 5 lived there. Cities were also not as livable as they are today. Take for example NYC in the 1970s and 80s, where a young photographer could afford an apartment in Manhattan, with the caveat that the area was riddled with crime. Then there are the city ordinances that discourage multi family housing, so if you are a builder and you need to decide whether spend years fighting in court vs going to the suburbs and build large homes, that’s a very easy decision to make. The current housing deficit sits around 3-4 million homes.
This could work with someone you don’t know well and should be the default approach. But you also need to trust your instinct and know when debating it’s not worth pursuing. It could be a coworker you have known for years who has certain toxic attitude. Humans are complex beings, we don’t know what’s going on with other people’s lives and minds. It takes years of dedicated study and experience to attempt to understand other people’s issues. You are not going to suddenly become a psychologist or behavioral therapist by just listening and kindly discussing. Some of these attitudes have an underlying problem that has nothing to do with work, it could be upbringing or mental health, or a combination. It just happens that Software Engineers may be more likely to suffer from these problems than people in other professions, just by the nature of it.