this was posted on 27. of november 2024. on the 3rd of december someone found a correct looking number in a yemen government document which was published in 2005 and updated wikipedia. so at least the country itself was not under any illusion of being bigger than they actually are.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.
The concurrency and threading in Go just feels like magic compared to every other language. I'm a goroutine addict and I refuse to be rehabilitated.
Just from observations over the years, I don't think there's any other language quite like this, in terms of how things can end up happening in any thread.
Not only an untrue statement, but also a sadly incurious way to approach someone else's design choice. Yes, it was an enormous amount of work and invention to achieve a desired effect, but the effect is striking in an environment that is otherwise plastered with everyday visual clutter.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.
LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.
I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?
The argument is that developers have a duty not to arbitrarily delete data on your system that you may have relied on that was produced by another program just because they’d like to replace it with something in their own format.
I don’t care if you’re volunteering your time; if you build something whose implied purpose and success depends on other people using it, you emphatically have a duty to those people not to silently destroy stuff that was there before your software was.
> Even for candidates for whom my feedback was scathing, they are still generally positive about the experience
If you have scathing feedback for someone you are interviewing, you should probably just shut up. Or at least deliver it in a different context where they aren't being held hostage and having their every reaction scrutinized. Sounds miserable, I seriously doubt they were actually "generally positive"
Supposedly WhatsApp scaled to serving over 1 billion users with Erlang and BEAM.
RabbitMQ, used by Reddit, uses Erlang and BEAM.
Discord uses Elixer and BEAM.
I just traveled down the BEAM rabbit hole. Fascinating story. The Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory cranked out some amazing products in the early 1990's.
Their goal was five nines of reliability for Ericsson telephone switches.
According to Joe Armstrong (an interesting fellow from Ericsson), the AXD301 ATM switch achieved nine nines over a nine-month period using Erlang and BEAM in 2002. That calculates out to 24 milliseconds of downtime.
What do Europeans think of the European economy? From my American perspective it looks like they are trying to lose, trying to fall backwards, trying to become a less prosperous society. No one seems to be building anything, and the governments seem to be preventing anyone who tries to advance from doing so. What am I missing?
There is a failure to understand that the process is the result. You don't study mathematics or computer science and information theory to produce commodities. You study them to transform your mind. The output of an LLM is useless without a human mind to comprehend it. We can have Super Intelligence, but if humans are incapable of comprehending it, it is just another useless dead artifact. Practice, applied over a lifetime, is what creates the capability for comprehension. Asking an LLM to give you an answer creates an artifact. Humans being humans, most of their requests boil down to "make me rich without having to work for it," so the request itself is paradoxical and impossible to satisfy. Philosophers have only been saying this for all of human history, so don't hold your breath for any breakthroughs.
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
Alberta is rat-free because its government has maintained an eradication program for three quarters of a century. That doesn't mean there are never rats in Alberta. It means that, when some show up, they're reported and destroyed. To date, the costs of maintaining the program have been smaller than the economic damage rats would otherwise inflict, so it has continued.
Bowden is nowhere near the border, so this is a little concerning. Hopefully it was just an isolated individual that made it in through a shipment.
I don't usually see Claude leaving comments that are obviously out of date compared to the code. The problem is that the comments are just a dumping grounds for Claude's stream of consciousness, verbosely recording random bits of history and context that are true and at least somewhat relevant, but without cohesively explaining why the code is the way it is. And some sentences in the comments will be beginner-style restating what's obvious from reading the code.
> The monitoring system detected this incident, but our retrospective review identified other cases of external DNS access that it did not flag at the expected severity. These included queries that returned a static notice that an external service had shut down. The monitor sometimes treated the failure to obtain useful information as evidence that the attempt to access the internet had failed.
This seems to say, "we are using entirely unreliable AI tools to monitor our AI tools."
Giants fan here. Watched the game. Even when it was happening and before knowing any of this, I could tell that Kruk and Kuip were going too far. It was starting to get super uncomfortable.
For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.
Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.
It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.
So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.
I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.
This is a lobby organisation using only the pieces and bits they like to push their own agenda.
"sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway.
But of course such an explanation would not click.
I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.
> requiring everyone to be richer than the average member of the population
In the UK, only 47% are net tax contributors. I can't find what the same statistic is for Japan. I don't believe it's wrong for there to be an expectation that they be a net contributor.
It is unfathomable to me that spending 5 hours of hard mental work is deemed ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unproductive time’
I might be of the old “hammock driven development” school, but I wonder if people have any idea of what productivity and creativity consists of, how it works and how to promote a state of flow and deep work. Hint: it’s not about context switching between 15 different agents per minute.
I keep wondering if I am defending my experience in this field against the deep hubris of 19 year olds that are still figuring it all out (programming but also system design and how to tackle hard problems efficiently)
"When attempting to get information from the Census Bureau, for instance, AI agents used tools reserved for software developers to access it, the company said. "
In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.
Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.
The issue is the breadth of scale. At the time of the industrial revolution those who we would consider knowledge workers were a much smaller percentage of the population. Today, they are a significant part of the workforce, and it is them who are being displaced first, and in increasing numbers.
The second issue is one of migration between skill sets. By the numbers, today is likely harder as non Ai-affected skilled professions take longer to train into in a general sense.
The third is the synthesis of AI and robotics. Humanoid help is good. As the Venn diagram overlap of capabilities between humans and humanoid robots increases, many professions defined by complex vision and environmental manipulation that are currently safe will not be.
There are, of course, upsides. But the world is right to wonder what the future looks like, and where people fit within that future in terms of earning an income if whatever path they choose seems to be able to be replaced by a machine within their lifetime. How do they achieve personal stability and safety if, even when thinking about their multitude of career options, the machines are so good that they can do almost anything.
