If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled.

The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they are just cracking down on things that they see as subjectively bad, so it's fine. And there's an element of truth in that: so much of American policy for a long time has been subject to agency interpretation and judicial review, and there was always room for political maneuvering and corruption in the system. Where the truth becomes a lie is the omission that this is the systematic ramping up from something that happens occasionally in a mostly-functioning system, to something that happens constantly and is systematically designed to facilitate corruption and politicization.

The thing that all these "MCP is dead" posts are missing is that whether or not MCP is used as a transport protocol is actually completely irrelevant.

The reason MCP isn't dead is because practically ~every company on the planet is building an MCP server. I know this because we interact with all of them. Most of these companies don't have a CLI. Many of these companies don't even have an external API! And yet, they're all building MCP servers.

And that's why MCP is not only not dead, but more important than ever.

Maybe we will turn every MCP server into a CLI under the hood. Maybe we'll use code mode. Maybe we'll implement tool search.

All of those are just implementation details to the much more important point: our AI agents are getting access to services they otherwise would never have had access to.[0] That's what matters.

So, is MCP dead as a direct communication layer for models to speak to? Maybe, maybe not. Is MCP dead as a protocol? Hell no, couldn't be further from the truth.

[0]: Although I will say the Codex app's computer & browser use features have made this statement a lot weaker than it used to be. If you haven't tried them yet—they're mindblowing.

This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.

The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.

Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...

First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.

From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.

Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.

Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."

There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.

Claims to have not used the internet or a phone since February, does all communication via USPS, declares that AI and social media make him hate himself... But somehow is continuing to post on Bluesky, continuing to update his blog, continuing to post YouTube videos, continuing to solicit donations on GoFundMe for personal matters. The account that posted this link to HN is brand new and this is the only submission -- hmm...

If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.

Need to tie off some loose ends first? Write a paper letter to your IRL inner circle and/or business partners. Get it copied at Kinkos. Call people (use a land line if you need) and talk to them about it.

Just this last time (you swear!) you absolutely must announce this at internet scale? Then walk the walk and minimize the tech involved by typing out your farewell in plain text and posting it directly. Y'know, like we did pre-AI, pre-social media. Don't pull out a typewriter, write a sappy "Dear Internet" letter, add a bunch of likely-pre-planned "edits" in red pen, pull out your digital camera, take a photo, transfer it to your laptop, carefully adjust and crop, then finally combine it into a multimedia update that you go out of your way to promote across multiple social media channels. This announcement has obviously been tailored for maximum social media engagement -- supposedly the thing they are making a principled stand in opposition to.

But I'm still excited about the Framework 12 because I don't love macOS. I don't need an alternative to beat Apple on every line of the spec sheet. I just need them to align with my values, support Linux well, and cross a certain "good enough" threshold. The latest laptops from Framework meet all of those requirements, and I'm excited to buy one after I've saved up enough money. I've missed Plasma for a long time. At the same time, I wouldn't even consider a MacBook Neo.

As a lot of comments here highlights, the issue is not so much the tech but the politics, constant perf reviews, re-orgs, nonsense BS that is pushed top-down. This industry is taking a toll on you.

My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot. When I started my career I thought I would love doing this forever. I would never imagine I would get burned out in the long run. I would never imagine I would think about retiring early because tech was so fun to me.

The reality is that money and savings give you optionality. It allows you to work without worrying day to day. You never know when the next wave of AI or BS is going to hit. That's when having that optionality is really important.

I have seen so many of my peers making very high tech income but also living the American opulent life, spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area to impress their friends. Today they have no choice than continue working for another 30 years. Today I can have a simple life and retire almost anywhere in the world.

Decide what is important to you. I guarante that buying the multi-million dollar home is not worth the extra 30 years of grinding.

He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it.

Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still make a huge impact. Either way I respect his decision and hope he finds peace offline. TBH I’m a little jealous.

The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted.

For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired.

I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.

Is that AI? Or is it me?

Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I don’t miss tech.

Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)

You can argue that abstractions hide consequences that fall on users who didn't choose them, but I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

The second time I did it they contacted my employer directly without even getting back to me saying they were unhappy of me reporting it and wanted to write about it after they fixed the issue.

Since then I decided it’s not worth all the hassle and I will let them be and I can also have a peaceful day.

I thought “it has to be some kind of corruption here”. And yup it’s the mormon mafia apparently

The unfortunate loophole here is that, potentially, by shutting down that franchise in a bankruptcy the corporation may end up being preferred for being made whole on debts relative to the consigner. Bankruptcy is complicated so while I am pretty sure any remaining goods from the consignment would be returned to the original owner the proceeds from sales that were successfully made might end up in the pocket of the corporation.

Personally, I absolutely loathe consignment. It is an incredibly complex agreement with a lot of weird edge cases about deprecation of goods and the duty to seek a good price that get complex quick. If you have goods like this and can find a store that will buy your goods in bulk you should be very careful in considering how much you care about the price difference between that bulk price and the percentage they list for consignment. A single transaction is usually much cleaner and easier for both sides and in this case (trying to pay for medical costs) having the money immediately can be quite attractive.

A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

A man gave a store merchandise on consignment, signed a contract with the store manager.

The manager lost control of the store to corporate. The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.

Corporate says, "this is mine now" and refuses to honor the contract. "It wasn't our name on it, says right here that the previous store manager signed this, and she's no longer with us." They sell the goods and keep all of the revenue, rather than just their 10% share.

It seems like theft, but it's a very common civil contract dispute. The side with possession and deeper pockets is the side with the leverage, sadly!

I couldn't figure out what is being claimed here. I'm not saying it's not true, I just can't follow the story at all.

EDIT: After reading other sources, it seems that the franchise owed $200k to BAM (unrelated) and also made a deal with the Mansell's directly. And it seems like the parent company is saying the unsold sets have been returned but the money is theirs because the store owed them money, while the Mansells are (correctly) saying consignment means they own the sets, not the franchise. BAM crossed into definitively illegal territory when they continued to sell sets after the Mandells asserted they wanted their property back (as confirmed by a "sting" operation).

The Reckless Ben stuff is actually pretty interesting: https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?si=yhSzpEDo5ut6s8eS&t=880

- Ira Glass

https://bsky.app/profile/senko.net/post/3mmwnrkwboc2v

The prompt was: Create a simple but functional real time strategy (RTS) game similar to old WarCraft, StarCraft or Command & Conquer games. The player should be able to build buildings, create units, gather resources and should uncover the whole map. No AI or multiplayer needed. Use simple but nice-looking graphics. No sound. Implement everything in HTML/CSS/JS, everything in a single file (you can use 3rd-party js or css libraries/frameworks via CDN).

(G)enerative (R)ecursive re(A)soning (M)odels. They really wanted the acronym.

https://arxiv.org/html/2605.19376v1

There's orders of magnitude of low hanging juice to squeeze out of smaller models.

It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks within 2-3 years (design not certain, probably unlikely).

It is far less clear that a 1.2T model will be meaningfully better enough to justify training it.

As far as reasoning is concerned, with the recent GRAM release, there may be 4 orders of magnitude of reasoning to tack on to smaller models.

Think about that... Google, OpenAI, Anthropic could train a 30B GRAM-based model in days - and it could potentially have better local reasoning than the best model available today at >1T params... They could upgrade that to a ~600B MoE model in days to have general trivia knowledge rivaling the best models...

You just can't train a 1T+ parameter model that fast. It is a giant if how much GRAM turns out to improve things, but it's unlikely to be trivial or nothing.

Larger models can already sort of tell you anything. They're never going to get everything right unless they stop being LLMs.

There's just not a lot of juice left to squeeze for Gemini to tell you exactly how tall Ke$ha is or when the last time Brittney Spears went to jail was...

I think this is the first time we've had a third minor version bump on a frontier Anthropic model. (I count the 0.5s as major here, because they've been issued non-sequentially and also corresponded to massive capability leaps, eg, Sonnet 3.5, Opus 4.5).

So now the Opus 4.5 family has successors 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8, each posting fairly modest claimed gains. My own experience w/ 4.6 and 4.7 are that I don't firmly grasp any capabilities improvements over my memory of 4.5, but it's all so fuzzy that it's truly difficult to tell.

Maybe my own tastes are saturated now (it's smarter than me?) and I'll never again perceive model progress. Maybe the incrementalism is such that I'd notice immediately if my 4.7 workflows were redirected now to 4.5.

Difficult spot for the labs to be in because, if they have a stronger product, I'd prefer they release it and that I can use it.

But as this dynamic continues, the improvements are going to be less and less legible for end-users, who will complain about the churn-without-payoff, even when the payoff may actually be real.

This is a refreshing attitude!

I've also verified that you can now turn off adaptive thinking in the web UI, which is great. I've had a lot of problems with thinking not triggering and the model producing sub-par output. Glad we can finally turn it off. (I hope being able to turn off adaptive thinking is new, if I could have turned it off at any time that would be embarrassing)

Probably more interesting than the 4.8 release.

To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.

That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.

Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.

Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.

Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).