tshaddox

I used to be a big metal fan.

This is most YouTubers who get very popular due to having original and opinionated content on niche topics. They tend to identify (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) their idiosyncratic personalities and opinions as the primary cause of their initial popularity and repeatedly double down on it as they grow in popularity. This is also the explicit advice that the vast majority of big YouTubers give to aspiring or up-and-coming YouTubers.

And I’m not advising that they should do anything different! Who am I?! I’m just pointing out that the culture of YouTubers is fundamentally about deliberately subjecting yourself to the most extreme audience capture.

I don’t know, this seems like a pretty basic feature that I would expect all the mainstream smart home ecosystems to support. Do they not? Is it possible with Alexa/Google Home/ etc. for anyone to say “turn off all the lights in the house” into any smart speaker? I’d honestly expect the defaults to only allow commands to apply to the devices in the same room/group as the smart speaker.

That makes sense. But is the price difference between doing it on home hardware versus cloud hardware less significant than it is for LLM inference? And if so, is it mostly because LLMs need much more VRAM (or more exotic memory architectures)?

I don’t know much about gaming GPU workloads and how they differ from LLM inference workloads, but I’m definitely rich enough to pay for an LLM subscription and definitely too poor to afford the GPUs it would take to get anywhere near that level of inference.

> It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.

And likewise, not everything you don't enjoy that society pressures you to do is somehow good and worth suffering through. Particularly when the whole point of the thing is ostensibly about enjoying yourself in the moment.

I suppose I am confused about why you’re confused. There’s a long history in computing of describing pieces of programming languages syntax syntax as “incantations” and similar. I suspect it has been very common, especially in the early part of developers’ careers, to know what you’re trying to do and to know that this code accomplishes it, but to not understand how the code works, to not be able to use the technique more generally, and to not understand all the effects your change has on the rest of the system.

I’m referring to competent engineers maintaining understanding over time of all the code they’ve produced. Long before agentic coding, codebases routinely grew beyond the comprehensive understanding of their own authors.

Of course less competent engineers (or anyone on a particularly disorganized or desperate day) can literally hand-write code they don’t understand even as they write it, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.

Humans could already produce more code than a human can understand. Even a single human in the pre-agentic era could produce more code than they could understand, certainly over a career and often even in the short term given the resources many companies give to maintenance.

A lot of old-school software engineering is about how to deal with this reality.

More tests that aren’t written by you don’t help you understand the system, and I would argue the there’s no confidence without understanding. That was true in the pre-agentic era and is perhaps even more true now.

> if there is a meeting in Perth at 10AM, and the Perth timezone gets shifted, the meeting is still occurring at 10AM perth time.

The thing about this is that if Perth's time zone ever changes so erratically or with such little notice that participants need to be notified that the point-in-time of an upcoming meeting has changed, it's no longer clear whether the participants would actually want the zoned "Perth at 10am" time to be canonical.

If athletes were flying in from around the world for an international competition tomorrow at 10am, and Australia decided to increase Perth's UTC offset by 1 hour as of today, would we expect all athletes, organizers, fans, etc. to show up and do everything 1 hour earlier (by solar time)?

The trouble is that you can't really make safe assumptions about whether to use the "sticky" paradigm or the "point-in-time" paradigm.

Sticky really only makes sense in two scenarios:

1. when all participants are assumed to be in the same geographic/political time zone for the foreseeable future (in which case the only advantage over point-in-time timestamps is future political changes to that region's time zone, like DST changes), or

2. when there's some privileged participant such that everyone else can assume events follow that participant's time zone (e.g. a company headquarters that moves very rarely, or an individual's personal wakeup alarms which can probably be assumed to follow their current location's time zone as they travel).

If you have a group of friends who like to stay in touch with regular group calls, and all/most of them are digital nomads who change their time zone of residence multiple times per year, you probably don't want the sticky paradigm.

It's always worth noting that future UTC timestamps are also ambiguous for certain operations, most notably computing durations, due to the unpredictability of leap seconds.

> I never understood the code. You think it works a certain way, until you find out that it doesn't.

Those are two separate claims, unless by the former you mean “I never perfectly understood the code.” You can understand code imperfectly. And even with LLMs, you can’t get truly infallible guarantees about a system.

> working to death to try to become interplanetary ASAP

That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m not even proposing a global prioritization of goals. What I’m advocating is simply to not attempt to slow or halt the progress of technology.

It is of course possible that we nuke ourselves. If we choose to. Or we could choose to use the same technology to massively increase our energy production. The more certain thing is that, if we do nothing, eventually something kills us.

Because eventually there will be an asteroid or nearby supernova that will destroy civilization unless humanity’s total wealth and technology have improved vastly between now and then. Stasis is death.

> Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_.

Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.

Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.

What are you referring to with the origin needing to support HEAD requests? For HTTP conditional requests your origin just needs to support GET with if-none-match or if-modified-since. Then it responds with a 304 with no body if the cached version is still valid. The origin should, of course, be able to determine cache validity much more cheaply than rendering the whole page, which is usually as simple as checking a single timestamp in the database.

And, of course, you can still use cache-control to permit some duration of staleness, so that you don’t literally revalidate on every request.

If financing a home is such an obviously great deal then why are mortgage lenders okay issuing debt with very long fixed interest rates when they receive nothing from the appreciation of the underlying assets?

That might be the default configuration if your CMS doesn't return any cache-control headers. But Cloudflare definitely [0] supports must-revalidate and etag or last-modified, which is also probably supported by whatever CMS you're using. HTTP conditional requests are very old and very widely supported.

[0] Okay, my claim is only definite up to my memory of using Cloudflare for a fairly high-traffic circa 2019-2022. I haven't used Cloudflare after that point, but a quick search of their docs shows support

Surely most of the people putting their money under the mattress would still need to use a little of that money to buy food.

Right. And there's nothing wrong with having regular scheduled downtime. That's obviously not appropriate for most massive scale global cloud services, but it's great for services that know their usage patterns well.

Most smartphones and smart phone speakers are always listening for a wake word, right? I think that’s very different from “always recording.”

I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.

Fair enough. But people here are expressing disdain at this new feature, which is not that.

Surely it would be very rare to want to listen to music at its highest quality while simultaneously recording your voice. It’s perhaps conceivable for some sort of niche mode of music or audio production, I suppose.

This is certainly the opposite of my experience. The sound quality from someone speaking via their MacBook microphone is noticeably worse than someone speaking via their AirPods microphone.

15 seconds at a time, when the owner activates the feature. The scale of its recall is not meaningfully different than someone scribbling down 15 seconds worth of what they hear someone say (or even just remembering it), and does not pose a greater privacy risk than a scratchpad or human memory.

It’s also much less effective at recording people speaking for long durations than the audio recording feature that every smartphone for the last 20 years has supported.

Apps already work on Apple devices with many different aspect ratios.