watchful_moose

Lots of parallels to the crypto wars / export controls on cryptography.

The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).

We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.

I'm guessing the kids who didn't do the standardized tests at/shortly after 2021 were already prepared for it.

The kids who saw the removal of standardized testing 3 years out from going to college never bothered.

The parallels to comic sans are so obvious that first thing I did in the article is Ctrl-F "comic", because my first thought was: how much further has this taken the concept.

The distribution of mentions of Comic Sans in the article is revealing: there are a bunch of mentions at around the 30% mark (in which they acknowledge the obvious heritage), and then barely after that. This font really does go further. Beautiful!

So one of the ways Robinhood makes money is payment for order flow (PFOF).

One lens to view PFOF is that it connects the most sophisticated traders (HFTs, etc.) with the least sophisticated traders (retail).

Inventing a new, even less sophisticated class of traders seems like exactly the kind of thing that makes sense for their business model.

Suspect there's a cultural aspect as well. As in, US is more of a monoculture (particulary, consumption-wise), than many other countries.

Oh and advertising being widespread and effective means there's more of a winner-take-all dynamic.

Eh, I think this depends on what you're shopping for?

I'm in Australia as well, and Amazon is good for certain products, regularly price matching (or slightly cheaper than) other stores.

That said, Amazon's product and shipping coverage is much better on the east coast of Australia than the west coast.

if the pilot doesn't have their hands on the stick flying the plane, i don't think those hours (... less than single digit minutes?) count.

Very nice!

I skimmed TFA, came back here to ask for the obligatory 11:59:59 rollover, but then went back and found it.

Windows had autorun starting Windows 95, but stopped shipping it as a default in Windows 7 (2009). So, yeah, no we haven't learned our lesson.

oopsie, has someone burned their proprietary intel for internet points?

this can only be effective if the school isn't counting on the bully to help the school win various sports competitions over the next few years.

often the school is in a tough spot because the only reason some jocks are there is for their sport ability, that the school needs.

This just moves the problem to support. The app doesn't work for users, they don't remember clicking no, and then some CSR has to hand-hold them through clicking "yes".

Hard to get promoted at Google doing that

> The fact this is part of a move off a "legacy" system to "modern" "microservices" suggests there's a huge amount of developers having fun ...

I don't think it suggests that at all. This is their press release, so of course they're going to spin it that way.

Reddit was founded in 2005, Go was released in 2007.

They picked the tech that was available and mature at the time, and enabled them to scale for 20 years (to 100M+ DAUs + IPO) - seems like a pretty good choice to me.

You know which other platform was built on Python? Youtube.

Python isn't a bad choice if you're building [certain kinds of] billion-dollar businesses.

Some of these would be retries that wouldn't have happened if not for earlier errors.

Yep, a decent canary mechanism should have caught this. There's a trade off between canarying and rollout speed, though. If this was a system for fighting bots, I'd expect it to be optimized for the latter.

It's probably not ok to silently run with a partial config, which could have undefined semantics. An old but complete config is probably ok (or, the system should be designed to be safe to run in this state).

This isn't what they do, though. This is a data/config push - original article says _a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system_