By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.

I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.

This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.

It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.

In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.

> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?

That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.

> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

> Was all that money I made last year > For Whitey on the moon?

And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.

It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.

However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.

So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.

There is definitely manual access of data - it requires what was termed “break glass” similar to the JIT mechanism described by the author. However, it wasn’t quite so loose; there were eventually a lot of restrictions on who could approve what, what access you got after approval, and how that was audited.

It was difficult to get into the highest sensitivity data; humans reviewed your request and would reject it without a clear reason. And you could be 100% sure humans would review your session afterwards to look for bad behavior.

I once had to compile a large list of IP addresses that accessed a particular piece of data to fulfill a court order. It took me days of effort to get and maintain the elevated access necessary to do this.

I have a lot of respect for GCP as an engineering artifact, but a significantly less rosy opinion of GCP as an organization and bureaucratic entity. The amount of wasted effort expended on engaging with and navigating the bureaucracy is truly mind-boggling, and is the reason why a tiny feature that took a day to code could take months to release.

My feelings precisely. Min package age (supported in uv and all JS package managers) is nice but I still feel extremely hesitant to upgrade my deps or start a new project at the moment.

I don’t think this is going to stabilize any time soon, so figuring out how to handle potentially compromised deps is something we will all need to think about.

It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too.

I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy.

Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true.

However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.

The argument goes that because we are intentionally constraining the model - I believe OAI’s method is a soft max (I think, rusty on my ML math) to get tokens sorted by probability then taking the first that aligns with the current state machine - we get less creativity.

Maybe, but a one-off vibes example is hardly proof. I still use structured output regularly.

Oh, and tool calling is almost certainly implemented atop structured output. After all, it’s forcing the model to respond with a JSON schema representing the tool arguments. I struggle to believe that this is adequate for tool calling but inadequate for general purpose use.

- History, most likely

There’s some subtle bits to the humor depending on how charitable you’re feeling. It might just be absurdist, as in “Blackbeard’s guide to astrobiology”, or it may be more mean spirited and playing on a belief that she is not intelligent.

TL;DR - the joke formula is just:

subject=…

person_not_familiar_with_subject=…

joke=“${person_not_familiar_with_subject}’s guide to {subject}“

And the amount of implied cruelty in the comparison is variable.

Consider that when speeding, you might cause an accident. Such an accident would most likely impact a small number of people other than yourself.

When a PE firm engages in extractive hospital management, it provably increases mortality rate, and it does so at scale.

The first choice carries possible risks of lower magnitude, the second choice carries guaranteed risk of higher magnitude.

“Risky behavior” vs “ruthless greed”, the latter feels much closer to violence.

I wonder if any sense this is criticism (or actual criticism) is based on implementers of SaaS who have it so deeply ingrained that “haha what if the users of this software did this really extreme thing” is more like “oh shit what if the users of this software did this really extreme thing”.

When I worked on Google cloud storage, I once shipped a feature that briefly broke single-shot uploads of more than 2gb. I didn’t consider this use case because it was so absurd - anything larger than 2mb is recommended to go through a resumable/retryable flow, not a one-shot that either sends it all correctly the first time or fails. Client libraries enforced this, but not the APIs! It was an easy fix with that knowledge, but the lesson remained to me that whatever extreme behaviors you allow in your API will be found, so you have to be very paranoid about what you allow if you don’t want to support it indefinitely (which we tried to do, it was hard).

Anyway in this case that level of paranoia would make no sense. The programmers of this age made amazing, highly coreographed programs that ran exactly as intended on the right hardware and timing.

Depending on how well we assume an LLM would do at this task, it’s an interesting way to see what “real people” would think about a very hypothetical situation.