tokioyoyo

Isn’t the edge that they have most of communication channels, people’s wants, desires and etc.? Sure, you and I might not be using them as much. But a good chunk of the users are just on IG, WhatsApp, and Marketplace.

Sorry, I took it as the main part of your argument is that whatever Apple creates will not be for the general mass “unless your target market is the adult children of emigres with unexplained wealth”. My argument is, people who pay $400+ for a ticket are fairly ordinary people. I guess, I was arguing against that.

Oasis was going for more here in Tokyo for standing tickets. I know multiple people who went, despite it being way above their budgets. I’m not sure why you think $400s is something top 20% of income levels can’t afford. Keep in mind, the average age is higher than it was ever before. There are a lot of single / DINK people, who can easily shell out some money without a blink, and not have a lot of money in their savings.

Think of some very fringe group of 0.1%, which you question from time to time how they function/exist/for what purpose. That’s basically how general populace looks at people who go through efforts of de-Googlifying. Stuff that matters to you (privacy, owning your data and etc.) does not matter to super majority of the people, especially outside of the tech circles.

I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.

I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.

To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.

I mean, you can say that Fred again and co. are "sanitised", "corpo music" and etc. But quite a lot of people will happily buy the tickets, and go to the concerts. The only reason I'm bringing him up, is cause Apple featured his live concert.

Obviously Apple is in the game of making money in the end. Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue. But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience. A lot of people will spend a couple of hundred $ for a fun night out, and they don't have to be extremely rich.

> deploy and rollback, which do not scale the same way

Why not? A good chunk of software engineering problems can be solved if we re-structured our definitions. Even just a year ago, people did not believe that a good chunk of prod-running code would be completely AI generated. Now we're at the point where some companies try to split "what code has to be PR-reviewed, and what doesn't have to be" to remove that bottleneck and so on.

Sure, but I kinda have other priorities in life which is more important to keep up, than FOSS influencers.

I have no idea why I clicked on that link, but honestly, it must be exhausting to try to care about that stuff consistently. Maybe I’ve gotten old, or have other priorities in life, but I can’t think of being so much into anyone’s yet alone FOSS people’s lives/choices/politics/etc.

That’s all true, but if you walk around “old people neighbourhoods” even within Tokyo, you’ll realize there are A LOT OF old people. Maybe it’s much more urbanized, and older people are more likely to still go out for groceries and stuff here. But even on the ground it feels like “yeah story tracks”.

Current court systems around the world are just not built to handle the flooding of cases from the citizens.

The stupidest analogy is open source projects having a hard time accepting LLM generated PRs from the masses, because review process is the bottleneck.

No idea how to fix this, to be honest. In coding world, with some mental gymnastics, I can see code not being reviewed by people anymore. In courts, things generally have more consequences, and you can’t really roll back decisions that easily.

Not to play into the bait, but there are a lot of people here who live in Japan. Funnily, during JST work hours, I notice more jp related posts in the front page, because well, NA is sleeping.

We’re technically token prediction engines as well, when we communicate and act.

For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads.

Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.

But in large, it works. We only hear from people for whom it doesn’t work.

Counter point to “complex businesses” is they’re currently buying Copilot licenses for their employees, with the hopes it can intermingle with Office365. Very ineffective, I think, buy from my exposure the “non-tech” side of things is not on the same timeline as us.

That’s also one of the reasons why I think harnesses might be obsolete in a year, or re-defined completely.

Obviously, once again, I might be completely wrong. But my thesis is investing hard on any model/harness/custom builds might be counter productive given the speed of development. It’s not easy, but having a nimble org where you can swap things around might be a good call.

We might have different views on where the SE as a profession is headed, I think. Again, I might be wrong, nobody knows the future, but we didn’t even use the word “harness” that much a year ago. There’s a decent chance in two years the harness itself as a concept might be obsolete. Depended on how fast your teams move, investing in a custom harness might be a bad resource allocation. Unless, obviously you’re in top tier companies which can benefit from it and pivot fast.

Again, this is all subjective risk assessment. I very much support any engineer to learn how to make harnesses, and I, myself, have a long way to go. We’ll see where we are in a year or two, I guess.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that what you’re doing is wrong, although re-reading my own comment sounds like so.

The capabilities of a model unlocks certain harness behaviour, and in its terms might be beneficial to automate more of your x, y, z.

I guess computer use would be an example I was thinking about. Certain models are not as good as some current models (Astra/Fable) in understanding through screenshots, or going through some hoops in some environments. As models evolve, they unlock new capabilities, that you either have to keep implementing in your harness, or using an existing one. I’m pro-using existing just because it doesn’t make sense for my org to support another dev tool internally, when there is heavy better development happening by people who focus on that.

The reason why i said cc-derivative, as far as I can see, cc was the one that convinced people “it might be a good idea to dev this way”. Sure you had some lesser known harnesses around, but a year+ ago, nobody really cared.

I don’t think, at least as of now, anything is really much of a lock in. We switch out between cc/codex/cursor and it takes trivial amount of time to set stuff up, depended on how your dev loop goes.

Again, it really depends on one’s conviction of “how fast things will develop from now on”. I personally think stuff will keep changing very fast. In a year what we think of harnesses will be different. Investing in custom tooling might be bad, as that is basically a lock-in. But again, I don’t know the future, but that’s my bet. Hovering around the edges and using what others battle test is an easy way out right now.

Also in some larger orgs, there is more friction in model choices. So you slowly start losing the benefits of model-swapping. Obviously different for personal projects.

The end goal is not you watching what the agent is doing, verifying, then accepting its changes. In the ideal scenario of automation, the agent does it on your request, doesn't matter wherever you are.

Kind of slack-button-click-to-fix-something workflow.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the harness will always be dependent on the underlying model, and useless without it. All custom harnesses are being built, could be obsolete in the next big-generation-jump of the models.

I might be absolutely wrong, but "harnesses" / cc-derivatives became "good enough" only maybe a year ago max. Before that, people were pushing for gigantic folder structures with custom documents and "pretend you're X" stuff.

My point is, depended on what you're trying to achieve, testing out current-gen harnesses, and nudging your workflows towards them might be better RoI, rather than chasing something that might be throwaway code a quarter later.

Obviously, this really depends on whether you believe model development will speed up or slow down in the upcoming future.

It’s sad, but non-issue for super-majority of the population.

It might be a sub-comment on a tweet that was fairly viral last week. Or it might be serious. We’ll never know.

But why should the government should step in? Nothing of a big problem is happening. Like it all sounds bad and awful, in the end dilutes into a nothingburger and gets forgotten.

I agree with that statement, but disagree with "The visual seems very apt for the how brittle our current software industry feels". It feels brittle, but for every single supply-chain-attack that has happened in the past year, nothing of significant was felt. So in the end, it seems like we're doing okayishly well.

> Tens of millions of people have been directly compromised by ransomware (likely higher because that’s just the cases we know of) and you hear about state-sponsored hacks in the news all the time.

With no consequences. Everyone just churns along. It might be detrimental to the business a little bit, but from my personal experience, there's more effort in creating DR processes, rather than preventing an attack, exploit, leak and etc.

I'm also not going to put much effort on stuff which has small returns in the worst case scenario. Like Equifax got hacked in 2017, and company is still doing fine. And that's like top tier data one could acquire.

The reason is simple - nothing really bad has happened that we can point at and say "ah, shit, let's all learn collectively". I know it sounds naive when I say it, but there hasn't been a significantly consequential hack, leak, destruction, or anything related to cybersecurity where it led for concerns of people.

The main thing I can think of is cyber insurance, which requires a bunch of audits, and some checks maybe, and it changes some conditions whenever there's a big explosion. Whenever big leaks happened, data security and etc., nobody really went to jail, so nobody really cares. Everything can be brushed off, because it costs time to implement proper measures and adds friction / barriers in some cases. So in the end, there's a huge pushback against it. And I totally get it, to be honest.

Everything has a gigantic depends* on it when it comes to RE. People want to find one reason why things are bad, but it is always a big bag of mixed things.

When I was in Vancouver, people kept saying if we got rid of rent control, houses will be built, rent will come down. But houses are expensive to build, and they need to make money asap in the “exit economy”. They won’t come up easily, unless they make it cheap to build, which isn’t happening. Rents just started coming down, but so far insignificant amount (I just checked, a place I paid $2500 for in 2019, is going for $3300 after the decrease!), and demand curbing had more influence on it. Personally, I think we shouldn’t force people to move to a different area because rents skyrocketed. I’m all in support of getting paid out though.

People look at Tokyo, and talk about “less-zoned build whatever, and no rent control, thus more or less affordable”. Which also depends*. YoY rents are going up by 10-15% right now, even more in some areas. It’s unreasonable for a good chunk of residents. Speculation is big influx of money from China. But you can actually challenge the rent increase in a good chunk of cases. So it’s a pseudo-rent control.

I’m not saying something is right or wrong, just saying everything has multiple layers of problems.

Any big information fan out is pretty useful for JP twitter. Like yes, we’ll get notifications for flooding / earthquake and etc., but if you want up to date, on the ground videos and etc. it’s pretty useful. Not even talking about the train line scenarios as other commentators mentioned.

There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.

> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.

Yeah, you’ll need a lot of supporting evidence for this claim. From my personal and professional experience, this doesn’t track. And given how online the younger generations are, it tracks even less. I think there might be a bias towards tech bubbles in that statement.

> If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.

As much as I’d love UBI to happen, in current geopolitiks it’s a no-go. People are not happy with having what the others have.

> instead of allowing us to achieve perfection

Huh?