I have 25 years of experience, including at prestigious places like Blizzard and JPL. However I've worked for a variety of startups, none of which succeeded.
I learned rust by doing this project. didn't have much prior systems programming experience too. usually, I learn best by just trying things until they work, but building a language server is pretty complex. after reading through a lot of similar projects, biome was the easiest to reason about. and it has exactly the architecture I had in mind: a generic workspace api where the language server is just one of many entry points.
They used to call this "peer pressure". Admittedly this is a narrower form of it where you harness the power of vanity and shame for purposes of good, not evil.
That's a very unhelpful link if you want to buy or comparison shop. Online walmart sells over 300 different styles of countdown timer, including ones shaped like a tomato. Note that the Pomadoro Technique recommends a timer that ticks or makes some other unobtrusive sound to remind you that you are in focus mode, and to associate the sound with focus.
I agree that anonymous speech is an important right in free societies. A novel attack on such a right in the Internet Age is to allow so much speech, anonymous or otherwise, ensure that most of it of is of very low quality, that thoughtful criticisms are ignored or, more accurately, overlooked. A related attack is to "flood the zone with shit", low-quality but emotionally resonant criticisms of speech, generated by hired humans and/or software. (Anecdotally most readers will see any coherent pushback as a signal about the OP's veracity.)
Yes. I'd be curious to know how resistance movements deal with this problem in other regimes. How do (did?) Navalny or İmamoğlu supporters organize, for example? Is it simply Telegram & Signal? How does one spread a message to the public under such a regime, via pamphlets? Does it work to share "anonymously" on a foreign-hosted platform? Asking for a friend.
Navalny died and İmamoğlu is in prison right? I feel like a lot of people’s hesitation with recognizing the new world is recognizing that it’s effective even if it’s distasteful.
If you(the royal you) disagree, then please point out the last pro democracy advocate who didn’t get demolished by their local authoritarian leader in the past 30 years
This is what Shannon disproved in the paper that founded information theory. It never becomes impossible, even at a fixed signal power; the noise reduces the channel capacity, but never to zero.
The layman, almost by definition, would refer to most things as impossible until he sees them done; then he takes them for granted because he has no idea how difficult they were. His opinion about the difficulty or resource requirements of any feat is worthless.
Yeah, I've been disappointed in a lot of code generation within my field of expertise. However, if I need to whip up some bash scripts, AI works very well. But if I want those bash scripts to be actually good, AI just can't get there. It certainly cannot "think outside the box" and deliver anything close to novel or even elegant (although it may give some tactical help writing boilerplate lightly adapted to your codebase). The analogy I use is that LLM AIs are like a new car mechanic tool that can generate any nut, bolt or gasket, for free and instantly (just add electricity!). It's great addition to the toolset for a seasoned mechanic, distracting for a junior, and is not even in the same universe required to fix an entire car, let alone design one.
What better way to "own the libs" than to openly transgress against sacrosanct values? There is a certain power when you demonstrate that shame, consistency, or principle has no hold on you. To avoid the internal backstabbing this would entail, you also need to convince the audience that it's all a kind of kayfabe, make-believe, and that you really ARE principled and trustworthy with your people, or for some short period of time to achieve a goal. It's foolish, but the world is full of foolish people believing simply because it feels good. Reality has no place in this calculus. This is NOT a partisan problem.
Sidenote: Voidzilla did a 6 minute video about this interview [1]. Tucker focused on injustice, but not the billions SBF stole from people, but the fact that the people who took SBF's political contributions didn't get him off. The implications seem to be that Tucker values transactional justice rather than unbiased justice. This is a sea-change in American (and indeed Western) jurisprudence that is (to me) some combination of shocking and expected at this point.
Yes, they knew. That is why multiple other people got charged. The idea that this was some huge secret was part of the media spin story because: financial company doing financial company things can't be spun the same way (the public are stupid but some people do still remember 2008). Saying "spooky autist stole money" is a much easier sell.
They had zero responsibility to disclose this to users of this exchange. Again, completely unregulated financial institution operating in the Bahamas...what could go wrong?
Ironically, you have left-wing people who appear to be puzzled about why financial regulation exist.
The reason there are laws around fraud is because a world where everyone is a shark is a world with much higher friction and transaction costs because of the lack of trust.
Better to work towards a world where "they shouldn't have trusted him" doesn't have to get said as much because it's easy to verify that if you can transact with it, it's likely to be legitimate. Why was, as you put it, "an unregulated financial institution outside the US," able to make itself so accessible? How much of it was because of dishonestly. That people "should have" seen through? Fuck that. Let's make more laws that would've stopped them even sooner. And be thankful for the ones that did finally catch him.
We should wan to make it easier for any random person and harder for a scammers. You're advocating for the reverse.
You veer off into appointed judges or elected prosecutors (is there a third option you want here instead?), like nobody's complaining about exactly that when pointing out how Trump-appointed judges give Trump an easy time, but at the end of the day: there's no defense for SBF, and nobody who wants a productive economy instead of Wall Street-and-lawyers-middleman-leech-fest should defend him.
You don't understand how laws work at an extremely basic level. If someone is operating in Canada as unlicensed hairdresser, they should not have to get a haircutting licence for NY (or whatever US state has the mad US regulations) if they cut the hair of someone from NY in Canada.
This attempt to apply national laws globally is an essential part of why the foreign policy of Western nations has been so bad. America First is an essential component of this as well, it is all the same thing.
No, I don't veer off. As I explain, the issue is that people complain very specifically about campaign finance as a problem in itself and ignore the issues with elected prosecutors and politically-appointed judges which is also very unique to the US, and causes the same outcomes as campaign finance. I helpfully explained for you in my original comment that when people are unable to see the connection between these things, it is because they have their own political motivation.
There is a defence for SBF, it is very easy: he did something that usually isn't prosecuted, the usual action would be a careful wind down that wouldn't destroy value (for the reasons here, billions of dollars was wasted because of the political context...again, people are very clear about SBF stealing money but only lawyers and consultants got FTX money), and a 30-year sentence makes absolutely no sense.
I have no idea why you are saying lawyers defend them...lawyers brought this case, there are tens of lawyers who deposited millions into their bank account last year from this case, the problem is lawyers (specifically: politically-motivated prosecutors, politically-motivated regulators, and a bankruptcy system that is designed to maximise fee income for lawyers). You are the one saying that the income of lawyers need protection.
> The actual sentence that SBF got was based on the media/political context, not his actual crimes...
He was rightfully charged with wire fraud. If you are talking about his campaign contributions, that was one of the only charges he had dropped.
It's like arguing that Bernie Madoff should have been treated better because he voted in the last Primary. Your special snowflake ideology does not acquit you from fraud and money laundering charges.
Again, comparing it with Madoff shows that you have no idea how these cases work.
Madoff lied to investors over forty years, stole their money, deposited in his bank account, and spent it.
SBF didn't commit fraud (US laws like wire fraud are deliberately vague so they can be used to bolster the political credentials of prosecutors so they can run for higher office...this is a banana republic style legal system), he ran a totally unlicensed securities exchange, that exchange lent money to a hedge fund he also controlled, and that fund temporarily turned out not to be good credit.
If you followed the case, you will know that prosecutors never explained where the money went...it just disappeared...the reason why is because what happened is the same thing that happens at every bank in the world. A recent example is H20, investor's money was lost lending to an (essentially) related party, this is in a jurisdiction where there was a duty for oversight, customers were missold this investment (again, in a jurisdiction where this was a requirement), and the fund has been frozen since 2020...the result has been a fine, deauthorization of the firm, etc. No-one was put in jail for three decades, fees were disgorged but only on related products, etc.
...and this is for a regulated, onshore product...not a unlicensed crypto exchange operating in the Bahamas.
There are two big error modes that we need to look out for when reacting in anger. First is to not jump from the frying pan into the fire by adopting a browser that makes nice sounding claims but really has no way to back them up. Installing a blob from a random website is never a good idea, especially when it's a browser. Personally, I think Librewolf is worth the risk but time may proved me wrong. The second error is a bit more subtle in that we need to think more deeply about how to fund browser development such that protects user interest. Clearly there are very powerful and pervasive market forces that Will attempt to warp any browser project into selling user data. That's true for all ubiquitous platform software, but the browser is particularly vulnerable because it exists at a high level of abstraction and therefore high level of utility. So I will make a prediction that the next successful privacy focused browser is going to be something like Cursor, a fork of a well-known browser engine with built-in local AI in service of the user only. This project will have to be a loss leader for another money making entity that requires a truly secure and private platform.
One of the browsers listed in GNU IceCat. They are one of the few organizations that can probably be trusted not to join the ad blob. So, that could be an interesting option.
GNU IceCat is still based on Firefox. Sure, it may remove tracking and some other sketchy stuff, but ultimately it's not a replacement for Firefox because if Firefox dies then GNU IceCat does as well.
That only captures your output, not your input. The best people to simulate in this world would be so-called terminally online people virtually all of whom's input is itself online. So for those who've read a lot of paper books or done a lot of traveling or had a lot of offline conversations or relationships, I think it would be difficult to truly simulate someone.
I think aggregate information across billions of humans can compensate. It would be like a human personality model, that can impersonate anyone. How do you train such a model? Simple -
Collect texts with known author and date. They can be books, articles, papers, forum and social network comments, emails, open source PRs, etc. Then assign each author a random ID, and train the model with "[Author-ID, Date] Text", and also "Text [Author-ID, Date]". This means you have a model that can predict authors and impersonate them. You can simulate someone by filling in the missing pieces of knowledge from the personality model.
Currently LLMs don't learn to assign attribution or condition on author. A whole layer of insight is lost, how people compare against each other, how they evolve over time. It would allow more precise conditioning by personality profile.
While I agree somewhat with my sibling comment's assertion that "aggregate information across billions of humans can compensate", somewhat, I'd like to offer that a lot of important output is non-digital, as well!
For example, lately I've spent a lot of time with resin printers, laser cutters, vacuum chambers, and the meaningful positioning of physical models on large sheets of paper. It'll be a while yet before my haphazard, freewheeling R&D methods are replicable by robots. (Although it's tough to measure the economic value of these labors.)
