Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. The contracts with the music labels came later. GPL violations by commercial products fits the theme also.
Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others. Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do.
As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketplace, find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)
> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are
> (…)
> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.
What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not necessarily the ground truth.
What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.
Are such drastic action appropriate given the current state of the US? The US probably hasn't been this economically dominant since after WWII.
Feels like Chesterton fences are getting torn up left and right by people too young and incurious to possibly understand why those fences might be there.
Never appropriate. The actions are entirely unconstitutional. If the US decided to disband USAID it would have to be an act of congress, unelected friends of the president don’t come close to being able to make that call.
This is nuts, 18F was one of the few groups in the federal government that is/was good at making software! (login.gov is a good example of craft you don't generally see in commercial enterprise software, let alone government software)
According to that tweet they were apparently “far left” because they also worked on Direct File, which sought to cut out the middleman (TurboTax et al.) and let Americans file taxes directly. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you're in bed with Intuit, this seems pretty hard to argue against!
Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper.
This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life."
This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
I work in fintech and we replaced an OCR vendor with Gemini at work for ingesting some PDFs. After trial and error with different models Gemini won because it was so darn easy to use and it worked with minimal effort. I think one shouldn't underestimate that multi-modal, large context window model in terms of ease-of-use. Ironically this vendor is the best known and most successful vendor for OCR'ing this specific type of PDF but many of our requests failed over to their human-in-the-loop process. Despite it not being their specialization switching to Gemini was a no-brainer after our testing. Processing time went from something like 12 minutes on average to 6s on average, accuracy was like 96% of that of the vendor and price was significantly cheaper. For the 4% inaccuracies a lot of them are things like the text "LLC" handwritten would get OCR'd as "IIC" which I would say is somewhat "fair". We probably could improve our prompt to clean up this data even further. Our prompt is currently very simple: "OCR this PDF into this format as specified by this json schema" and didn't require some fancy "prompt engineering" to contort out a result.
Gemini developer experience was stupidly easy. Easy to add a file "part" to a prompt. Easy to focus on the main problem with weirdly high context window. Multi-modal so it handles a lot of issues for you (PDF image vs. PDF with data), etc. I can recommend it for the use case presented in this blog (ignoring the bounding boxes part)!
IMF gave them 1.4 billion to abandon the “experiment”:
> The IMF made this a condition for a loan of 1.4 billion US dollars (1.35 billion euros).
In December of last year, the IMF reached an agreement with President Nayib Bukele’s government on the loan of the stated amount to strengthen the country’s “fiscal sustainability” and mitigate the “risks associated with Bitcoin,” as it was described.
—-
I dislike cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy but this was clearly something else than a failure of the currency itself
One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind.
Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.
Old movies have been available on various "free ad-supported streaming television" for a while now, so I'm actually more surprised it took copyright holders that long to realize that Youtube also shows ads and doesn't require people to install some wonky app that might or might not be available for their platform.
Of course, region-specific copyright deals are incredibly complex etc. etc., so I could imagine it was just a matter of waiting out until the last person putting up a veto retired or moved on to other things.
> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.
Respectfully, thats not accurate.
The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.
The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.
The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.
> Taking old, resolved scandals
In what way do you consider this resolved?
The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).
The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)
The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.
Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
Apple will use it's dominant position to create lock in like how they did with iMessage instead of cooperating with other platforms on a common standard.
Oder friends and family are surprised when they want to video call over Facetime and find it hard to believe other people's phones don't have Apple apps.
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]
The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.
As relevant here:
1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to...
2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.
3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.
4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:
5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)
TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.
First, there's hardly any evidence that these are anywhere near "brilliant engineers" let alone 1%. Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects. Some might be interesting, sure. But it's hardly relevant to operating in a complex organization.
But more importantly, the real issue is regardless of how old they are an unelected individual is doling out hyper-privileged access to sensitive data to folks without any kind of oversight. It's a total mess.
It's hyperbolic to the n-th degree to call these "the best of nerds" as well.
it's been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, as a trans person. one executive order after another, explicitly attacking us. scrambling to update all my documents, navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with constantly shifting rules.
now this.
there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything about "trans activism."
any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel.
I was once dragged to a hospital by police because they were looking for a drug smuggler that was not me. They told hospital staff I was a druggie criminal with drugs up my ass, as I sat there in cuffs.
It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.
I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...
I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:
- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.
- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.
- It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.
- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.
- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.
- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.
- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.
I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc.
So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So far my opinion is if you have a good interview process, you can clearly see who are the good candidates with or without ai.
I think the main issue for anyone wanting to take the offer is simply: this was never authorized by congress, so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best. Meanwhile, there's a government funding deadline on March 14, 2025. So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.
It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
There are people in this thread claiming that Wired "doxxed" these engineers working for Musk dismantling things they don't understand; however didn't Musk publicly mock individual federal employees on his twitter account, drawing the eyes of millions onto random government functionaries for no other reason than to capriciously taunt them about being fired?
I hope people condemning the former also condemn the latter.
This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those responsible accountable.
This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes.
I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China. It's going to halt all our R&D for at least 6 months while we onboard domestic contractor alternatives --- which will also just generally be shit. Not to mention the American contractors WONT BE ABLE TO SHIP IN THE FUCKING ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS FROM CHINA THEY NEED FOR THE PROTOTYPES.
Every single R&D department in the USA just got fuuuuuuuuucked by this.
"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."
The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly. And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion. (We all know his stance on C++, for instance.)
As a pilot program, R4L should have graduated or ended a long time ago. After several years of active development, its status remains unclear. Instead of cracking heads to get everyone on the same page, Linus has instead spent all this time sitting back and watching his subordinates fight amongst themselves, only to then place responsibility for the drama on Martin's shoulders. Poor form.
Arguably his reprimand of Martin is a clear signal that he will never show Rust any favor, but he hasn't said anything explicitly. Maybe he knows he should, but he fears the shitstorm it will cause. Maybe it's time for him to rip off the band-aid, though.
And again, all of this could have been avoided if he'd just put his foot down one way or the other. Imagine how much time and energy (even just Martin's alone) could have been saved if Linus had just said "no, keep it downstream".
Hi! I'm the dev here! I built this on a whim at after seeing someone ask for it on twitter. It was 12:30 at night but I couldn't pass down the opportunity to build it.
The code is very simple, there's no backend at all actually, I believe because wikipedia's api is very permissive and you can just make the requests in the frontend. So you just simply request random articles, get some snippets, and the image attached!
I used Claude and cursor do 90% of the heavy lifting, so I am positive there's plenty of room for optimizations. But right now as it stands, it's quite fun to play with, even without anything very sophisticated.
Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others. Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.