More seriously, the wallpaper stuff is OK, but I never found some of the more disruptive office pranks on the list to be particularly endearing (e.g., switching keycaps, taking the ball out of a mouse). It's work, and you sometimes need to do something urgently, and it's annoying to troubleshoot or clean up after someone wrapped your entire cubicle in shrink wrap, tied your shoelaces together, or something like that. If it's more fun to you than to the recipient, don't do it?

I did some office pranks, but tried to keep them nice. A tall stack of TPS reports on a manager's desk, sure.

The real Sean Byrne can produce a government-issued passport number, but that's clearly not enough for Apple.

I think it's more of a problem of all these "hyperscale" platforms where the cost of not being zealous enough is long litigation and devastating fines, while the cost of losing a single customer (or a thousand) is basically nil. This leads to all kinds of opaque, customer-hostile outcomes like this, also if you trip some filters not related to sanctions / mistaken identities. There's a recurring theme of HN posts along the lines of "an automated process at Google cut my business off, HN plz help".

And FWIW, it's the exactly same reason most people were buying DIY electronics kits in '70s, '80s, and '90s.

Most people don't think about it when buying a car, or they have no practical way to evaluate it. So it is one of these things you probably need to fix with legislation, except the legislators love the idea too because sensor-rich, always-online cars give them more tools to police the society.

I don't really know what to do with that, short of going neo-Luddite. People often see the excesses of ad tech as a failure of capitalism, but in a sense, we're seeing a tech-driven failure mode for free, democratic societies. In a world where your online presence is tied to your identity and always under the watchful eye of a large language model, and where you can't move from A to B without leaving a digital trail, it's not gonna be fun if you become a thorn in the government's side.

But I'm not sure the focus on corporations is all that interesting here. The Allies eventually let most of the senior Nazi leadership walk free, and few in Germany faced any lasting consequences for what they did during the war (even IG Farben execs were released before too long). I think the idea was that they needed to govern the nation they have, and mass-imprisonment wasn't a viable strategy. It worked out in a pragmatic sense, but it was hardly justice for the millions of civilians exterminated by the regime.

It's interesting that you chose to make that point in a thread about calculus specifically. It had pretty shaky foundations for most of its history, and even today, there's a pretty significant disconnect between the mechanics of epsilon-delta and the meaning we assign to the result.

> Math is not supposed to be easy/simple, but it supposed to be a great way to understand systems based thinking.

Math is a means to an end. Making the tool easy to use is a desirable property. I've heard "it's not supposed to be easy" applied to many disciplines, from film photography to software engineering, and I think it's mostly gatekeeping.

That's... not really true; it's surprising to see it in Quanta, of all places.

Godel's (separate) completeness theorem says that in first-order logic, anything that's semantically true in all possible scenarios can be syntactically proved. So, if G is "clearly true", that ought to make it provable.

The theorems don't contradict each other because in FOL, G is not guaranteed to be true. Its truth is independent of the machinery Godel put in place.

It's not something you really need to get into an introductory text, but it actually makes the whole outcome easier to grasp, and leads to many more counterintuitive results, such as Skolem's paradox.

Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.

Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.

It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.

It doesn't really even do anything to support its thesis that it's the "most intricate machine you've ever held". I don't know, I'm holding a Thinkpad laptop right now and I'm pretty sure it's a superset of what's inside a phone.

Why do feel so entitled to being able to pass LLM-generated text as our own? I get that a lot of techies aren't good at writing. I also see a lot of tech hustlers who like to use LLMs to fake human connection and compassion - I've gotten LLM-generated recruiting emails that talked at length about how the recruiter "valued" my work. Just because we found a "cheat" button doesn't mean it's wrong for others to want to know.

Yes, LLMs are great. So is transparency. If you think an LLM writing is your new superpower, wear that badge with pride. It might mean you will lose some business from LLM haters and win some other business from like-minded customers. C'est la vie.

I think the main thing Cloudflare is trying to do is block direct traffic from frontier labs and then start charging them for access. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot, as this simply empowers sketchy residential-proxy outfits to undercut Cloudflare and sell the data to labs for less.

In picturesque locations, there's upward price pressure because well-off urbanites sometimes buy vacation properties, but that's hardly a new thing.