Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.

I wouldn't say it's shady or even untoward. Simon writes prolifically and he seems quite genuinely interested in this. That he has attached his public persona, and what seems like basically all of his time from the last few years, to LLMs and their derivatives is still a vested interest. I wouldn't even say that's bad. Passion about technology is what drives many of us. But it still needs saying.

> This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches?

It's just a fact that these things are statistical text prediction models. Sure, they're marvels, but they're not deterministic, nor are they reliable. They are like a slot machine with surprisingly good odds: pull the lever and you're almost guaranteed to get something, maybe a jackpot, maybe you'll lose those tokens. For many people it's cheap enough to just keep pulling the lever until they get what they want, or go bankrupt.

That said, I'm not sure if Bitwarden is the answer either. There is certainly some value in obscurity, but I think they have a better infosec budget than I do.

There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make their whole careers about being experts on this topic.

But it's still a statistical text prediction model, wrapped in fancy gimmicks, sold at a loss by mostly bad faith actors, and very far from its final form. People waiting to get on the bandwagon could well be waiting to pick up the pieces once it collapses.

But Tailscale is the real unlock in my opinion. Having a slot machine cosplaying as sysadmin is cool, but being able to access services securely from anywhere makes them legitimately usable for daily life. It means your services can be used by friends/family if they can get past an app install and login.

I also take minor issue with running Vaultwarden in this setup. Password managers are maximally sensitive and hosting that data is not as banal as hosting Plex. Personally, I would want Vaultwarden on something properly isolated and locked down.

But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.

My goal is some agent programmer that takes a Gitlab issue (e.g. "implement a timer in the UI") and makes a pull request implementing it. The only other constraint is I want to control spend: I would rather wait for it to implement stuff than spend more than X$ per week etc.

I could imagine building something like this which makes me think it's already built. Have any of you setup something similar? What did you use? What were the pros and cons?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087608

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Also rereading the article, I cannot put down the irony that it seems to use a very similar style sheet to Google Cloud Platform's documentation.

It's nitpicking for flaws, but why not -- what lens on an old DSLR, older than a car, will let you take a macro shot, a wide shot, and a zoom shot of a bird?

In any case I'm not surprised. It's a short story, and it is indeed _serviceable_, but literature is more than just service to an assignment.

From my experience we just get both. The constant risk of some catastrophic hallucination buried in the output, in addition to more subtle, and pervasive, concerns. I haven't tried with Gemini 3 but when I prompted Claude to write a 20 page short story it couldn't even keep basic chronology and characters straight. I wonder if the 14 page research paper would stand up to scrutiny.

  According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false positives already stood at 90,950.

Presumably the actual number of criminals caught by this would remain constant, so the FP rate would increase. Unless of course, the definition of criminal expands to keep the FP rate low...

  (6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the rules laid down in this Regulation and a level playing field within the internal market, those rules should apply to all providers, irrespective of their place of establishment or residence, that offer services in the Union, as evidenced by a substantial connection to the Union.

  But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.

Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?

  The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly.

Though my point was more about considering the historical context. Famines used to happen all the time but largely because of crop failures. That famine is _caused_ has become common knowledge is, I think, at least an improvement. ~All~ Most of the famines that could've happened for the old reasons haven't.

Admittedly, I'm grasping at straws to avoid dwelling on the horrid situation at hand.

Taking a broader perspective, large parts of the human race have come to realize famine is a relic of the past. Modern agriculture, synthetic fertilizer, and the technology of the last 100+ years has made famine optional. There is without a doubt the technological capacity to supply every person on earth with food and clean water. Nobody needs to go hungry to feed every person in Gaza. The same could be said of Sudan, or Bangladesh, or Haiti.

200 years ago, famine was usually a natural disaster; now it is almost exclusively a political choice.

If they flooded Gaza with food then Hamas would benefit less from the supposed stealing/reselling.