I find it odd in this reorg they are creating an organization for "China" instead of one to deal with all the common attackers: China, Russia, Israel, India + the plethora fraud organizations (whose nation state support is ambiguous, but certainly is tolerated by those same countries)
And stop allowing people who view their house(s) as an investment from being able to veto any and all building. While that incentive is present, there will be massive hurdles to being able to build the amount of housing that is necessary.
No sure I see that any different than the typical American behemoth truck/SUV blocking all lines of sight to everything other than a 12 wheeler. And to top it off, they can't take a corner and so they all seem to slam their brakes and cause a traffic jam at any interesting corner.
All to transport one person by themselves from home to office and back.
Here in Europe, fat American-style SUVs are still somewhat rare, especially outside cities (!). People still can't corner worth shit in their "regular" sedans. And I say this as a pretty chill motorbike rider.
I've lost count of the number of Golf GTIs and similar behind which I have to wait around when riding on roads that aren't perfectly straight. And these cars should have better cornering ability than my fat bike. I know my dad's Corolla does.
Counterpoint: I know my car can brake and turn much harder than I do (it's not a sports car by any mean, but that's beyond the point).
I'd rather not change my tires and brake pads all the time though, and keep some margin for whatever unexpected stuff is hiding behind the corner. Also I don't like having to stop because everyone in the car got motion sickness.
I'm not saying they should drive like a rally. I most certainly don't. Just don't slow down to a snail's pace for no reason. Or if you insist on doing that for whatever reason, let other people pass you if you can see that visibility is low.
Every car can brake, turn and accelerate much harder than any of us will even think to do especially turning and braking. But you pinpointed why we must not attempt to reach for the limit, not for us but for the others. And anyway a normal car won't lay long if driven like a racing car. Every single component is not designed for that.
Race cars component are designed for higher loads, but they aren't designed to last either. Running cost per mileage of race cars is super high actually because of all the consumables to be replaced and stuff that needs to be serviced on a regular basis.
I used to drive a GTI, (it was stolen from me…) - you can absolutely fling it into a corner and come out unscathed. I never put it on a track and I don’t think it would do great without adjustment but on road legal speeds there no reason it should need the driver to be “tender”
I have a sports car and a Model Y. Whenever I go on a twisty mountain road, without fail, if I will encounter what you said. It does not matter which of the two cars I drive! What's worse is that this happens even in roads where the speed limit is 35 mph and those people may drive 25 mph or even 15 mph! (See the road passing through Cambria in California. It's an epic drivers' road, and yet...)
Sometimes I wonder whether going excessively slow around corners is a symptom of people pushing their steering wheel from the side opposite the direction of the curve instead of pulling it from the same side into the curve. Just a hunch, but doing the latter usually feels like I have more control.
I don't know about that. But what I usually observe is that many people tend to veer off in the next lane in the direction of the turn (even if it's a lane for traffic going the opposite way!) if there is one. But if there isn't (right turn, they're in the rightmost lane), they'll tend to leave quite a lot of space between the car and the shoulder.
So I'd say these people have a hard time figuring out the space on the road their car takes. I can only imagine this worsens with larger cars and less visibility.
Oddly enough I recently accepted an old beat up, but gigantic utility truck from the 90s that I'd never have purchased, and while it's fun to drive, it's also absurd to try and park it anywhere. Even box trucks are comparatively easy to figure out. When it dies, I'm sure as hell not going buy another one, but until then I'll enjoy not knowing how close I am to anything.
Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Red Delicious? All apples, wildly different, all common. Even within the more commercially available variants there are significant differences: https://www.jessicagavin.com/types-of-apples/
> "Apple" is a generic name, that does not actually really express anything particularly specific.
...
> "apple" as an idea doesn't really express anything concrete without lots more context.
I understand where you're coming from and appreciate the nuance, but can't help to feel that you've moved the goalposts from the earlier:
> There are no "ideas" independent of expression.
I never meant to claim that ideas have to be concrete or specific, if anything, the best thing about an idea is that it is not any of those.
And it's clear to me that you did perfectly understand what I meant by:
> "apple", "manzana", "pomme", "mela", "maçã"
as you then said "isn't even a fruit", so I was able to effectively communicate to you the abstract idea of a particular type of fruit. Communication of ideas does work to promote coordination of actions (in this case a comment thread on "the same topic"), and while flawed and fuzzy, I don't see how it could function if there were no ideas independent of expression.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. All of us have half a dozen of what appear to be good ideas every. Execution matters, testing and sanity checking matters, actual engagement with users and iteration matters.
Sure, we're reducing the cost of idea -> prototype to near zero (well, as long as tokens are free or nearly free), but that just means we now have mountains of throw away code, within which there may a gem or two.
Nothing yet has replaced the curating of ideas that good teams do as a matter of course.
> Sure, we're reducing the cost of idea -> prototype to near zero (well, as long as tokens are free or nearly free), but that just means we now have mountains of throw away code, within which there may a gem or two.
This doesn't strike me as wrong, but where the rubber meets the road. Let me give you an example.
My superior with close to zero programming skills, sat down with Claude and "wrote" a Django backend with SPA React frontend that enables user directory sync from one source to another and then exposes an API for other services to consume. It supports RBAC, 2FA, extensions for directory sources, dashboard with stats and what not. Everything packed into docker containers ready to deploy on the cloud. Again, the person is very skilled as a consultant, but lacks programming skills whatsoever. I did a code review, prepped a list of things to fix and he did fix them with Claude again. Later on, he used Claude to rewrite the Python backend to Go. I did no code review on that part. Fable was used in several iterations to test for security issues before each release.
Long story short, this service is now running in the cloud and the customer uses it to solve their problem. We got a couple of other customers on the line as well.
> Fable was used in several iterations to test for security issues before each release.
How? The point of Fable (vs. Mythos) is that it has extreme guardrails against doing e. g. security work, even mentioning "security" or "vulnerability" in the prompt will shut it down.
That if you polish it a bit, you can probably write a short story. /s
The thing is, making claims like that doesn’t prove anything. You have to either show the result or prove that is reproducible. Otherwise, it may as well be something you dream up this morning.
Execution is not the code, but how do you decide to do every part. "Idea does not matter, execution does" always meant: "big generic ideas don't matter, it is how you organize it in the myriad of details it is composed of (in a given incarnation of the general idea) that matters."
But why aren't lower level "ideas about execution" more clearly expressed in code? Or at least pseudocode?
Many of us would struggle with our reading comprehension of an English description of an algorithm. But the pseudo / actual code? Much easier to reason about.
I'm not saying you should review even 90% of code. But it feels like an arbitrary line to say "never look at code". It's like never taking a wrench to a car to look at what's built to see whether you trust the car factory.
I think "idea" is getting overloaded here. The article isn't talking about new feature/product/tool ideas, but about what concepts to use to build those features. e.g. what data structures and algorithms to use.
So your last line agrees with the article, I think. They are saying that it's still important to curate ideas, and no longer important to read the code; the time you would have spent reading the code should be spent curating ideas.
Curating ideas requires experience and taste. Can you really develop that without looking at code? Compare Steve Jobs vs Joni Ive curating as a prime example of how taste without practical experience and context can lead things astray. And the worst of it is that it can take a while for the problem to be easily noticeable.
Maybe the problem is structural: there is an absurd amount of power to be gained by seniority in both houses. To a voter there is a significant advantage to choosing an incumbent as their power increase with seniority.
I'm not sure why so many seem to think anthropomorphism is so mad in this specic instance, if it is because people think that anthropomorphism creates a belief that the imagined features are real, they are simply wrong. The abundance of examples in all areas of life where this does not happen is proof that anthropomorphism does not lead to an erroneous belief in a mind that does not exist.
If people are believing in minds of AI, true or not, they are doing so for reasons that are different from mere anthropomorphism.
To me it feels like we are like sailors approaching a new land, we can see shapes moving on the shoreline but can't make out what they are yet. Then someone says "They can't be people, I demand that we decide now that they are not people before we sail any closer."
People don't fall in love with rocks unless they're objectophiliacs, but even people who aren't objectophiliacs fall in love with AIs. All of that to say, there are different levels of anthropomorphization.
Yeah, we do it, but so what? A good chunk of all civilization involves recognizing human foolishness and building something to mitigate it anyway.
Software is no exception. Yeah, people are lazy and will instinctively click "continue" to dismiss annoying popups, but humans building the software can and do add things like "retype the volume name of the data that you want ultra-destroyed."
What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
Except in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)
Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
>Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.
A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.
>Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)
Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.
If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.
Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).
If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?
In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.
Prediction markets and all the market manipulation are the symptom, not the cause. Our society used to have real consequences for breaching public trust, but with our mere decades old "money is speech" legal system, there have not been any consequences for moneyed interest in quite a while. And as long as there are no consequences, they keep trying more and more egregious violations of public trust to establish where the new red line (if any) actually are.
Money is speech - but speech isn't speech. What's the latest thing a US citizen said in the US that got them arrested? They said in a private WhatsApp group that Benjamin Netanyahu should come and bomb their school to get them out of an exam. Benjamin Netanyahu was not in the group chat, but they got arrested anyway.
reply