skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mh. Though, if you have deterministic builds for GCC, imagine how much of a problem some nerd in Northern Washington or Scandinavia with their own strange C build chain would be to inject something strange into these compilers into the build process.

Like, you spend millions to get that one backdoor into the compiler. And then this guy is like "Uhm. Guys. I have this largely perl-based build process reproducing a modern GCC on a Pentium with 166 Mhz swapping RAM to disk because the motherboard can't hold that much memory. But the desk fan helps cooling. It takes about 2 months or 3 to build, but that's fine. I start it and then I work in the woods. It was identical to your releases about 5 times in the last 2 years (can't build more often), and now it isn't somewhere deep in the code sections. My arduino based floppy emulator is currently moving the binaries through the network"

Sure, it's a cyberpunk hero-fantasy, but deterministic builds would make these kind of shenanigans possible.

And at the end of the day, independent validation is one of the strongest ways to fight corruption.
Malware in a crypto-related JavaScript package. Surprised Pikachu face
I guess you're referring to this one? https://dedede.de/en/posts/CimzQqTYi4

FWIW that's a post I made myself - the German embassy in Tokyo put up a series of posters explaining some German words, and that's the image they chose for "schadenfreude".
I am, I was VERY skeptic initially but now it's clear Google will win.
Somewhat incredibly, the administration is citing a McCarthy-era 1952 law that many read as explicitly antisemitic and targeted at Jewish eastern-european survivors of the holocaust lest they be too sympathetic to communism as the legal basis for these actions. That law sought to keep people out, but the administration seems to believe it can also be used to deport people.

An ironic quote:

"In a 1952 edition of The New York Times, then-Anti-Defamation League president Benjamin Epstein was quoted as saying that immigration regulations like the McCarran law were 'examples of the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals.'"[0]

[0]: https://forward.com/news/702427/mccarran-walter-act-state-de...
First they came....(Explains the strategy)
You can easily represent it as an array:

[“foo”,”bar”,123]

That’s as tabular as CSV but you now have optional types. You can even have lists of lists. Lists of objects. Lists of lists of objects…
That's Terry Pratchett in action.

https://wiki.lspace.org/Multiple_exclamation_marks
> no idea what a 20% interest rate really means

Compound interest is hard to do with mental math, but what you're actually seeing is a behavioral economics phenomenon called hyperbolic discounting.
The job market for one is brutal. It’s all interconnected. Its been leading up to this for some time.
It's a method call on a String that returns a Regex type, courtesy of the Scala standard library.
SignalGate Isn't About Signal
This is largely a browser UI and browser control issue though

There’s a reason google pays both Apple and Mozilla billions to be the default on Safari and Firefox. And why MS makes its own browser, as a complement to its search engine

So yeah I wonder if this same dynamic plays out for AI, or if something else happens. I guess Google hopes it will, and that’s one reason they show AI answers about the search results now
Let’s say a compiler is doing something in a multi-threaded manner - isn’t it possible that ASLR would affect the ordering of certain events which could change the compiled output? Sure you could just set threads to 1 but there’s probably some more edge cases in there I haven’t thought of.
For someone in the games industry, you have an exceptionally thin skin and must have not been in many high stakes crises if the last two sentences bother you so much.
Or if using home manager:

programs.atuin = {
enable = true;
enableZshIntegration = true;
};
Just to be clear: Putin and bio-"weapons" labs is different than Assad and sarin. I believe you are referring to the Russian spin that Ukraine was doing bioweapons research. (I also don't believe Tulsi espouses that slant, despite being initially concerned.)
No - that’s what I’m trying to say. If I have newlines I use something else.
Paralysed man stands again after receiving 'reprogrammed' stem cells
Yea, it's more complicated than that, but in the US context unionization (like in the automotive and steel industries) was shown to slow innovation. [1]

The counter to this is that Europe actually has better outcomes because it takes a more collaborative approach vs. the adversarial approach in the US, and this better approach has shown to improve some outcomes.

[1] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Unioniza...
Planning a couple trips from WA to BC this year - so long as we are allowed in. US border patrol has generally been less than pleasant (coming back as a citizen) at the car crossing for decades.
I’ve told people at work, including my boss and his boss, that it will be time for me to go if and when my job ever becomes “translating business problems into something AI can work with.”

Right now I’m curious to see how long I can keep up with those using AI for more mundane assistance. So far, so good.
> It's just so damn adaptable

Like a rapidly mutating virus, yes.

> and easy to understand.

Gotta disagree there.

For example, one of the CSVs my company shovels around is our Azure billing data. There are several columns that I just have absolutely no idea what the data in them is. There are several columns we discovered are essentially nullable¹ The Hard Way when we got a bill for which, e.g., included a charge that I guess Azure doesn't know what day that charge occurred on? (Or almost anything else about it.)

(If this format is documented anywhere, well, I haven't found the docs.)

Values like "1/1/25" in a "date" column. I mean, I did say it was an Azure-generated CSV, so obviously the bar wasn't exactly high, but then it never is, because anyone wanting to build something with some modicum of reliability, or discoverability, is sending data in some higher-level format, like JSON or Protobuf or almost literally anything but CSV.

If I can never see the format "JSON-in-CSV-(but-we-fucked-up-the-CSV)" ever again, that would spark joy.

(¹after parsing, as CSV obviously lacks "null"; usually, "" is a serialized null.)
I'd guess warmer destinations in the US.

Flying from Canada to non-US destinations is often MUCH cheaper because there's no TSA fees (which the US puts on the departing airport) for the return leg.
Rocket Lab launches eight OroraTech satellites – SpaceNews
> turning yourself into an asset

How is that any different from any other skilled labor? Recall the old joke about the plumber who charged $1 for banging on the pipe and $1000 for knowing where to bang. Even purely physical labor like digging ditches requires that you have certain physical traits (strength and stamina) that you can look at as assets.

> Society will not be worse off with most people doing physical labor.

Like what? There is virtually nothing that used to be done with human labor that can't be done by machine nowadays. Even ditch-digging is mostly done with backhoes, not men with shovels. For the moment we still need (some) humans to run the machines, but that's knowledge work too.
I've moved away from Gitea and suggest others do the same given the controversy in the project's management.
> Ie. most managers can't help their team find a hard bug that is causing a massive outage.

Strategy vs tactics. Managers aren't there to teach their reports skills, they hire them because they already have them. They're there to set priorities and overall direction.
> the OP would not LEARN ANYTHING NEW

Do you perhaps mean "useful to them"? One of the most common complaints is that CS degrees include "useless" stuff. Based on that observation alone it's difficult to believe that OP will have encountered all the relevant material in the workplace.

But then OP said ME/EE. Surely you don't mean to suggest that working as a software developer will have covered that material to any significant degree?

Edit: Nevermind, I see we agree and I misunderstood you. I'll leave the comment though because the point stands.
Indeed. I started using Sonnet for coding only about a month ago. It's been great in that I've finally written scripts I had floating around my brain for years, and very rapidly.

But the feeling of skill atrophy is very real. The other day I needed to write a function that recursively traverses a Python dictionary, making modifications along the way. It's the perfect task to give an LLM. I can easily see that if I always give this task to an LLM, a few years down the road I'll be really slow in writing it on my own, and will fail most coding interviews.

Also, while there is a high in producing a lot in a short amount of time, there is no feeling of satisfaction that you get from programming. And debugging its bugs is as much fun as debugging your coworkers' bugs - except at least with the coworkers you can have a more intelligent conversation on what they were trying to do.
Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is an interesting thing to think about here. But IMO the real problem is that editing for most journalism websites is done very very poorly, if at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
(2023)

Very nice. It's not a "crystal radio", though. It's a direct sampling receiver. That is, the processing takes place at the RF frequency directly. Most receivers use heterodyne conversion to down-convert a desired chunk of spectrum to a convenient working frequency. This doesn't. It just runs the raw RF through an A/D.

As A/D devices and processing have improved, the frequency upper limit for direct conversion receivers has moved up. There are low-cost direct conversion receivers going up to 50MHz, but they have to use an FPGA rather than doing all the work in software.
AI Companies as Cars
Normally Solitary Rays Gather at Gorringe Seamount
FW25 Color Stats
Iceland's Covid Baby Surge: Why Third Births Jumped 38% Among Educated Women
Study:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-024-09727-1

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11729602/

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-024-09727-1
All knowledge work follows a distribution of skill…lots of people are in the middle of the curve when it comes to ability to do a varied set of tasks.

If I quizzed someone in the middle of that curve on (1) basic keyboard shortcuts, (2) how to VLOOKUP in excel, (3) how to buy a domain, (4) how to make a presentation that truly looked good, (5) detect if an email is a phishing campaign, (6) make a secure password, (7) do research in their industry…

You get my point…The skill of an average knowledge worker today is miles and miles away from elite levels.

Knowledge work is not declining, we’re just watching the average ability of a typical worker go way up, over the course of a generation.
I'm a retired computer programmer. All my time is free time. I'm using AI as a cognitive amplifier. I'm learning at a much faster rate than I would without AI. I don't have to waste time doing google searches and reading thru irrelevant material to find something germane to my research.

I don't depend on AI for anything. I am not doing corporate work. Could it be that what people are experiencing is that they are becoming less suitable for corporate work as AI and robots replace them? Isn't this a good thing? Shouldn't the focus be on using AI to bring out the innate talents of humans that aren't profit driven?
Well, I disagree with yours!

What cases are you thinking of when you say "Plenty of people are still using technology developed thousands of years ago even when there are modern alternatives that are thousands of times more efficient"? I considered hand sewing, cultivation with digging sticks instead of tractors, cooking over wood fires, walking, execution by stoning, handwriting, and several other possibilities, but none of them fit your description. In most cases the modern alternatives are less efficient but easier to use, but in every case I can think of where the efficiency ratio reaches a thousand or more in favor of the new technology, the thousands-of-years-old technology is abandoned, except by tiny minorities who are either impoverished or deliberately engaging in creative anachronisms.

I don't think "the relative simplicity of old technology" is a good argument for attempting to control your tractor with a Z80 instead of an ATSAMD20. You have to hook up the Z80 to external memory chips (both RAM and ROM) and an external clock crystal, supply it with 5 volts (regulated with, I think, ±2% precision), provide it with much more current (which means bypassing it with bigger capacitors, which pushes you towards scarcer, shorter-lived, less-reliable electrolytics), and program it in assembly language or Forth. The ATSAMD20 has RAM, ROM, and clock on chip and can run on anywhere from 1.62 to 3.63 volts, and you can program it in C or MicroPython. (C compilers for the Z80 do exist but for most tasks performance is prohibitively poor.) You can regulate the ATSAMD20's voltage adequately with a couple of LEDs and a resistor, or in many cases just a resistor divider consisting of a pencil lead or a potentiometer.

It would be pragmatically useful to use a Z80 if you have an existing Z80 codebase, or if you're familiar with the Z80 but not anything current, or if you have Z80 documentation but not documentation for anything current, or if you can get a Z80 but not anything current. (One particular case of this last is if the microcontrollers you have access to are all mask-programmed and don't have an "external access" pin like the 8048, 8051, and 80C196 family to force them to execute code from external memory. In that case the fact that the Z80 has no built-in code memory is an advantage instead of a disadvantage. But, if you can get Flash-programmed microcontrollers, you can generally reprogram their Flash.)

Incidentally, the Z80 itself "only" uses about 500 milliwatts, and there are Z80 clones that run on somewhat less power and require less extensive external supporting circuitry. (Boston Scientific's pacemakers run on a Z80 softcore in an FPGA, for example, so they don't have to take the risk of writing new firmware.) But the Z80's other drawbacks remain.
I'm also not that of a fan to know that many details, but I'd place my bets in that he actually doesn't care if people speak to him the same way, as long as they have solid arguments. I think Linus is overall one of the goods influences in this strange IT period.
The problem with CSV is that there's no clear standard, so even if you do reach for a library to parse it, that doesn't ensure compatibility.
I don’t know. Building your own gun from an 80% kit is absurdly easy. Hop on YouTube and watch some explainer videos if you haven’t done it. It’s easier than taking a trip to your FFL and filling out background check info. I see no problem with treating such an easily assembled kit the same way you treat a full firearm.
The Limits of Quantum (2008) [pdf]
Just get a radio? Not to be glib, they're well built, mature tech that can go many tens of km from elevated positions. Don't get triangulated in a conflict situation, but it's the thing most likely to work and remain durable/portable under extreme conditions.
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025
Steve Jobs may be a legend at business, but an engineer he is not. To say nothing of the fact that whole reason "it just works" is because of said engineering. If you would like to be the innovator that finally solves that, then great! Otherwise you're just bloviating, and by god do we already have enough of that in this field.

I'm approaching 20 years of professional SWE experience myself. The boring shit is my bread and butter and its what pays the bills and then some. The business community trying to eliminate that should be seen as a very serious threat to all our futures.

AI is an extraordinary tool, if you can't make it work for you, you either suck at prompting, or are using the wrong tools, or are working in the wrong space. I've stated what I use, why not give those things a try?
Maybe in '23 & '24 that argument made sense. But presumably the past two years they've spent laying everyone off has been enough to trim the fat.

Honestly, any company that's still laying off people that they "overhired" during the pandemic needs to take a hard look at their leadership teams, because they've had ample opportunity to be rid of such people.
I'm, uh, not a fan of AI, however in this case I would strongly recommend everybody ctrl-f the juicy quotes in the 404media article and see where they came from in the full text of Microsoft's study. Both of the leading quotes come from the _introduction_, where they're talking at a high level about a paper from 1983. It's enormous clickbait.
Not in K&R!
> Are there any forces in place to prevent the (de facto) mandatory API from becoming so complex that Google (or Fastly) is the only org capable of maintaining an implementation?

The big change going from WASI 0.1 to WASI 0.2 is that we decoupled the calling convention (Wasm Components) from the actual syscall APIs (WASI). That enabled us to make the various syscall APIs modular and composable.

Because CDN functions probably shouldn't know about TCP; and CLI applications probably don't care about blob storage. And now they don't need to. Take a look at the WASI Proposals page [1] for an overview of all WASI APIs.

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/Proposals.md
He's not disputing that. The difference, though, is that if you're using LLMs as code assistants, your skills will atrophy the way the manager's skills will, but you are still a SW engineer.

While the manager doesn't need those skills, you still do.
Well, you don't make up straw men that makes you inferior. Paul never met Jesus, James did and also was the leader of the (clearly) very important Jerusalem church. Paul knew and admitted that he lacked authority, hence he had to sell his ideas very hard to the readers of his letters. Nothing suggest that he intended for those letters to outlive him (the vast majority probably didn't) or become the backbone of a new religion. It just so happened.

The Pharisees in the gospels are good examples of straw men, though.
Big question in my mind was if OpenAI was going to formally endorse this (since it was created by Anthropic) but we have our answer.

MCP is now the industry standard for connecting LLMs to external tools.
I know it's not doing anything very different. But that's my point, that you don't need fancy tuning features.

As for final bitrate, maybe we need to talk more about use case here. Because for very small encodes (often around 250kbps), I never cared about moment to moment bitrate, just the final file size. And if that's too far off I change the factor and run it again.

For things I intend to stream I usually have a bitrate limit on top of the CRF setting, but that's the only optional flag and it doesn't kick in very often. The result is quite high quality out of 2-3Mbps AV1, without any flags that affect the details of the video encoder, so I don't see a need for knowing and understanding optimum settings. And the same setup worked with h.264 at a moderately higher bitrate.

The best thing you can do for the encoder is give it time to work.
> some farmer is going to choose to pay $20/hr for farm workers

And hope that in six months, the trade war hasn't been settled? They won't be paid until the crop matures, and there's a lot of labor before that point. You're also competing with other countries, from whom we already import agricultural goods at reasonable prices.

Again, decisions that lead to famine don't do so instantly.
This by a mile.

Anecdotally, by buddy runs a few bnb’s in cottage country in Ontario. Bookings for the summer are mimicking that pandemic surge in 2020/21. It’s wild out there right now.
Me, I prefer to relate to people as individuals rather than, as you are advocating, interchangeable representatives of their area of residence. If what you want is World War III, this is how you get it.

In particular, universal access to knowledge is a fundamental principle of liberalism.
Completely understandable. Why would I, as a Canadian who sees stories coming from the US of fellow citizens getting hoovered up into the bowels of ICE from border crossings, want to go to the US when I have a choice not to?
I was making a point that they are only trying to steal and hoard money, which when they are the only ones with money, money will have no value and you can't eat them.
I mean nothing changes, it was already open source, and few people outside Google know how to dev things around android, it's now a very complex os
The point is that a person who isn't born cannot make a value judgment about whether something is bad.
I think voice interface is the real killer app of LLMs. And the advance voice mode was exactly what I was waiting for. The pause between words issue is still a problem though, I think being able to just hit enter when done would work best.

Pro tip; if you’re preparing for a big meeting eg an interview, tell ChatGPT to play the part of an evil interviewer. Give it your CV and the job description etc. ask it to find the hardest questions it can. Ask it to coach you and review your answers afterwards, give ideal answers etc

after a couple of hours grilling the real interview will seem like a doddle.
Obvious advice for students: Human brains are neural networks- they have to be trained. If you have the already trained artificial neural network do all the work, it means your own neural network remains untrained.

You are tremendously better off getting a bad grade doing your own work than getting a good one using ChatGPT.
Everybody is commenting about AI, but that's barely mentioned in the article. In particular there is this quote:

> The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980, but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high.

I suspect there's a lot of factors at play and the expansion of access to college is part of it. The value of secondary education is somewhere diluted. There is the end of the zero interest era. There is massive layoffs of federal workers which skew heavily towards knowledge work. And some of it is was Starbucks cites as "removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams" which is a pretty normal cyclical thing where an era of expansion and promotions makes your org to top-heavy and bureaucratic so you trim aggressively and probably end up rehiring some as needed. Like a controlled burn of an overgrown forest. And if some of those are permanently lost to AI then that's a bonus.

I think a lot of business leaders are just expecting a recession and want to be on good footing before it hits.
Musk is a huge step back, just compare him with Werner von Siemens: inventor, engineer, pioneer in the application of electricity and a leading industrialist soon. Siemens realized that a successful business needed happy workers: He reduced work hours from the then standard 72 hrs/week to just 54 (on six days a week), gave boni not just to management but also to workers. In 1872, decades before a nation-wide social-security, his company introduced a pension, widower and orphan fund. No one force Siemens to do those things, Musk on the other hand actively fights against his companies' workers.
I will in a decade ;) Scuba fun
Literally what futures contracts were invented for.
I also believe this kernel adds Intel GPU support for the N100 and N150 chips used in lots of mini PCs. I have a Beelink N150 rig running various Docker containers that I am curious to test some light AI workloads on.
Use Rust
The magnitude is surprising for this to be attributed to the trade dispute - I wonder if this is primarily due to immigration concerns? I know a lot of folks on H-1B visas from Canada, and I imagine for those folks any non-essential international travel would seem overly risky.