I'm not optimizing for $$$ spent today and agree that this isn't the cheapest solution to a specific capability problem, but I don't super mind paying for a cool piece of compute that I can do some fun (and educational) stuff with.

I had heard people talk about the operation pain involved in keeping Kafka alive (which is a thing for sure), but what I was surprised by was how many things behaved in a slightly unobvious manner that wasn't loudly-documented (e.g. if you're using transactions for RWP loops the default rebalance protocol is unsound and transaction markers take up an index in the log so you no longer have contiguous indices in your message stream etc).

There are plenty of usecases for lower scale or higher latency (my examples are somewhat unique), and owning the opinionated middle instead of claiming to cover everything is a really useful thing, but acknowledging that the system is opinionated such that it covers a specific set of things well is generally a better argument than 'this basically does everything that people need'.

The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.

Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.

That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.

Writing is a difficult skill that many (most?) educational systems do not effectively teach. Most people are terrible writers.

LLM providers must dynamically scale inference-time compute based on current load because they have limited compute. Thus it's impossible for traffic spikes _not_ to cause some degradations in model performance (at least until/unless they acquire enough compute to saturate that asymptotic curve for every request under all demand conditions -- it does not seem plausible that they are anywhere close to this)

Another (higher profile) example are the baseless threats of criminal indictments against Jerome Powell -- it is impossible to argue that these threats have been made for any reason other than that he, as a nonpartisan official, defied the president's demands to execute his duties as fed chair in such a way (that is, poorly) so as to put a temporary thumb on the scale for the current admin.

The more important question, I think, is how many folk in explicitly nonpartisan functions are choosing not to break step with the current admin for fear of some sort of (likely professional) reprisal. I'm not alleging that they're disappearing dissenters or anything that inflammatory, but it would be intellectually dishonest to contend that there isn't a long, well-documented trail of malfeasance here.

There is a serious problem in the US. There is also a serious (though different) problem in the UK. The problem in the US is the chilling effect of the vindictiveness and lawlessness of the current regime. I will not elaborate on this because it's too complicated to communicate effectively in a forum post.

The problem in the UK is a set of vaguely and arbitrarily specified-and-enforced laws that enable the criminalization of 'grossly offensive" speech. There is no statutory definition of what constitutes a 'grossly offensive' communication -- all enforcement is arbitrary and thus can be abused. Whether is it actually abused in any widespread fashion is irrelevant.

- Communications Act 2003 (Section 127): Makes it an offense to send messages via public electronic networks (internet, phone, social media) that are "grossly offensive," indecent, obscene, or menacing, or to cause annoyance/anxiety.

- Malicious Communications Act 1988 (Section 1): Applies to sending letters or electronic communications with the purpose of causing distress or anxiety, containing indecent or grossly offensive content.

The money here (in the AI realm) is coming a handful of oligarchs who are transparently trying to buy control of the future.

The difference between the two scenarios is... kinda obvious don't you think?

I get that the elegant thing to do would be to bootstrap this, but in practice does this actually cost you anything, or is this a purely aesthetic concern?

I (like a very large plurality, maybe even a majority, of devs) do not work for a consulting firm. There is no client.

I've done consulting work in the past, though. Any leader who does not take into account (at least to some degree) relative educational value of assignments when staffing projects is invariably a bad leader.

All work is training for a junior. In this context, the idea that you can't ethically train a junior "on a client's dime" is exactly equivalent to saying that you can't ever ethically staff juniors on a consulting project -- that's a ridiculous notion. The work is going to get done, but a junior obviously isn't going to be as fast as I am at any task.

The purpose of giving that task to a junior dev isn't to get the task done, it's to teach them -- I will almost always be at least an order order of magnitude faster than a junior for any given task. I don't expect juniors to be similarly productive to me, I expect them to learn.

The parent comment also referred to a 'competent pair programmer', not a junior dev.

My point was that for the tasks that I wanted to use the LLM, frequently there was no amount of specificity that could help the model solve it -- I tried for a long time, and generally if the task wasn't obvious to me, the model generally could not solve it. I'd end up in a game of trying to do nondeterministic/fuzzy programming in English instead of just writing some code to solve the problem.

Again I agree that there is significant value here, because there is a ton of SWE work that is technically trivial, boring, and just eats up time. It's also super helpful as a natural-language info-lookup interface.

Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.

For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.

It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.

If this operation was planned in Signal, then so were countless others (and presumably so would countless others be in the future).

If not for this journalist, this would likely have continued indefinitely. We have high confidence that at least some of the officials were doing this on their personal phones. (Gabbard refused to deny this in the congressional hearing -- it does not stand to reason that she'd do that unless she was, in fact using her personal phone).

At some point in the administration, it's likely that at least one of their personal phones will be compromised (Pegasus, etc). E2E encryption isn't much use if the phone itself is compromised. This is why we have SCIFs.

There was no operational fallout of this particular screwup, but if this practice were to continue, it's likely certain that an adversary would, at some point, compromise these communications. Not through being accidentally invited to the chat rooms, but through compromise of the participants' hardware. An APT could have advance notice of all manner of confidential and natsec-critical plans.

In all likelihood this would lead to failed operations and casualties. The criticism/pushback on this is absolutely justified.