> I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and personally in a variety of projects I simply could not have ever approached alone.
My brother works in wildlife trapping and management. I've been brainstorming and prototyping ESP32 sensors and mechanics for traps and educational devices with him. I probably won't end up doing the work with him, but I want him to see what's possible with my other brother, a machine learning expert.
Nothing has been deployed in the field.
Nothing will be until he and my other brother commit and get proper software risk management policies in place. And legal advice and other support work. And honestly, he's been careful and hasn't pushed for deployment.
He works with rabies. He works in people's neighborhoods. Maybe yours. Do you want me to finally get a Claude Code account created and go wild building shit, or keep reading up on ISA 62443 and other security frameworks and mapping out the risks?
I'm not going to drag LLM generated work into your neighborhood today. Would you honestly want someone else to?
And when people realize this is happening now everywhere and the entire AI industry is fucked, including other machine learning fields that get hit by association?
Then my other brother the fucking Princeton Machine Learning Super Star can't pay for his fucking kids' schooling because of a million people fucking *not understanding* and intelligence agencies taking advantage of it. He's smeared by the broad anti-AI brush.
Then my brother may have to depend on more assistance from law enforcement, legal resources and conservation agencies. Because I didn't have the power to stop the LLM hype machine earlier.
It always would have made sense to have them work with state and federal Wildlife Conservation officers and agencies. Now it feels a little less like watching my brothers build those relationships out of mutual respect for other professionals and more out of need. It feels unequal.
So, I have to put in work today assuring my brothers' clients of tomorrow, who care about their family and kids, that no, their machine learning algorithms won't take their elderly parents medicine and push them down the stairs. It will, with careful review from lawyers and experts, help their kids identify nature in their backyard on their Smart TV. If they want, it will identify the difference between gopher tortoise holes and mole holes, and maybe if they opt-in to a Community of Saving feature, it will let Fish and Wildlife Conservation know there are habitats nearby so we can see how healthy our ecosystem is as a community together, or call their preferred pest eliminator.
That sounds like PR. Because I have to do that extra work today. Because otherwise we aren't just protected by our fellow professionals who care about theie work out there in the field, instead we always need some bigger institution protecting and controlling us.
My brothers are delaying committing resources to projects. That's fine, they have other important priorities, but I keep warning them. And there probably will be an equivalent of the "Video Game Crash of 1983" in 2028 or whatever. And I think if I had had more personal power and been believed I could have done something about that before we had to be protected.
I'm sorry, I said I probably won't work with them. That shouldn't be a probably, it's a won't work with them.
I hope they are inspired. I hope others besides me can advocate for UBI which would have lowered the pressure for irresponsible AI use. I hope I have easy healthcare options with a doctor without making it my adovcacy or story.
In every Smart TV thread there are dozens or hundreds of comments that say people don't put connect their TV to their wireless.
I understand. I've been an EFF supporter for decades, at least when I can afford it. I get it.
The problem though is that you sometimes want to screencast a video or song from your phone. Your dirty dirty phone that has been out in the wild collecting malware. Or a guest does. And sure, what's one video?
And of course your TV doesn't have the latest updates.
It's a fucking perverse incentive that will lead to more regulation of the Internet and IoT when we get malware "leaks" and outbreaks.
The civil libertarians have been co-opted with game theory and smart knowledge of the tragedy of the commons in this case by the intelligence services.
Instead of just educating citizens and democratic debate.
I don't have the political power to sell that idea now, and I know it sounds crazy.
Cooking together provides an educational and bonding opportunity for kids and caretakers, and nutrition is important. Making it easier is a win to me.
We can be annoyed at the actions against Anna's and also celebrate OCLC members and physical libraries.
I appreciate I'm just replying to a off-hand comment, so I'm sorry for the next part.
I will be battling my family for decades about IP and how they are relying on it instead of first mover advantage and the IQ we had today and yesterday. And how it changes cultural values around sharing. It's not good. I know we probably agree on that, so that part isn't directed at you, just the future.
Thank you for sharing your direct experience, which is always valuable.
> We can be annoyed at the actions against Anna's and also celebrate OCLC members and physical libraries.
I didn't mean to say otherwise. And I think 'annoyed' is insufficient for anyone who can influence OCLC. Too much is at stake to be bystanders.
Free and unlimited distribution doesn't need to be the answer, but look what happened to the Internet Archive's lending library, for example. There are other solutions too, such as micropayments. Shutting down online access to books is immoral and damaging to society, the economy, and the people of the world.
>> 4) the vaccines likely have little effect on anything unless you were vaccinated as a child (and are a biological woman).
> This guidance is changing. Vaccinating men protects women.
Yeah, it was fucking like pulling teeth getting my HPV vaccine as an adult male. "It's for teenage girls" comments from multiple health care professionals.
I only took the first fucking dose in the regime, and none of my health care providers now offer low cost or covered options. I had to spend Covid money when I had it. I still need the rest of the regime.
It’s “like pulling teeth” because the guidance isn’t changing (at least not because of evidence).
There seems to be a very motivated contingency who want to spin a story that male vaccination for HPV has benefits for women. The problems with this story are:
1) Efficacy of the current vaccines for women are incredibly high. Vaccinating young women, alone, is basically enough. Whatever benefits you're imagining must therefore be marginal.
2) Efficacy of current vaccines for men are (surprisingly) low [1], so it’s hard to claim secondary benefits for other people without substantial additional evidence.
It’s perfectly OK to acknowledge that the HPV vaccine is an overall good, should be on the schedule for young women, and yet does not need to be administered to men. Giving it to men (particularly older men) is not supported by data at this time, which is why your doctors don’t make it easy for you to get it.
See table 4. In a naive population of men, the efficacy against DNA detection of HPV runs around 50%, and in men who may or may not have the virus, the number is lower. Efficacy against persistent infection is similar. Compare to tables 1-3 for women, where efficacy nears 100% in some populations.
It's a relatively new vaccine, this commonly happens for a few reasons:
1. They start with a cautious roll out to the highest lifetime risk population (teenage girls in this case)
2. They may be limited by vaccine stocks as it does take time to build up product. There's an entire world to vaccinate, billions of doses needed
3. They need time to prove that it will be useful to give to other populations - in this case, adults
There's no conspiracy here, you had to push to get it because you were going against the existing recommendations, which were reasonable. Not because of your gender.
Those recommendations have likely changed recently because when I went in for shots last month (male, 40s) they immediately recommended that me and my partner both get it.
I haven't explored the BEAM ecosystem much. And this post actually got me motivated enough to try it out.
The more programming languages we play with, the better we become as engineers. We learn the different design decisions that go into each language. And we learn the language of Computer Science itself.
Plus, Advent of Code!
So I finally got everything installed. But then I realized there are no easily accessible offline docs. I don't have Internet service at home. So I have to grab service when I can make it out.
So it looks like mix can download offline hexdocs, but I don't have elixir installed. And there's a hexdocs_offline dev package for Gleam. But it errors out on "gleam/dynamic does not have a 'from' value.
Maybe it's a "teaching moment" about the basics of the language. But I have to run out to another appointment now, so these teaching moments don't always help.
Anyways, I guess I'll dive in after the holidays and just wget the tour or get some well regarded projects for reference. I'm actually still really excited with all the functional features.
I really appreciate the level of discourse here on Hacker News. Thank you to threads like this and the authors of the comments.
I appreciate your argument, and you knowlwdge of economics adds weight to it. I'm wary of putting the burden on workers to remove information asymmetry and power imbalances in bargaining. Just because it's necessary now doesn't mean it needs to be. It could create a cycle of permanent extra work for those most in need of regulatory help.
I don't know if I had the full language of economic inefficiencies ready to flow like you do if that argument would be more effective. Or if there are other blocks, you know?
> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing.
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada?
Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
I didn't mean to imply Germany isn't independent and at the same time we can't trust our allies. It's mostly that the monster game puts risk downstream too. And some have it really bad if you're going for citizenship. I know, it seems like it's just a fucking Office Suite.
This has already been hashed over a hundred thousand times, but there are also developer habits that we all need to defend against. One is pulling in needless crates.
Rust encourages that behavior. Sometimes rightly, but it does build a habit.
I spoke previously about how the Rust book uses the external rand create as a key example and it sets the tone for developers. I'm changing that stance somewhat since it was a decent strategic choice to have crypto packages plug-and-play. But tit still builds a habit.
> I spoke previously about how the Rust book uses the external rand create as a key example and it sets the tone for developers. I'm changing that stance somewhat since it was a decent strategic choice to have crypto packages plug-and-play. But tit still builds a habit.
Yeah, that originally turned me off from the language entirely. I also changed my mind eventually.
> I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens
Hacker News has a unique user base. Professional Software Engineers, many of whom are Senior or Principal or Staff in level. Leaders and Managers and Architects.
I think, anytime we design a new system, we need to carefully think about how it can be used and what can go wrong. Not just with the current owners and users of that system, but future users and owners too.
Discrimination is one of those areas where identity management can go wrong. Discrimination and deliberate but undetectable Denial of Service "bugs" that always seem to hit the same types of users in the legs.
And getting evidence of wrongdoing like that takes years. It's nothing to an institution, but a lifetime to an individual. Sometimes there aren't even recordings or logs of individuals trying to ensure service and legal contracts are upheld. And again, the legal process is nothing for a large institution but soul crushing for an individual. And the solution always seems to be more institutional power, not individual power.
That kind of education in Engineering Ethics is common nowadays in University and College.
A lot of us who grew up self-educated in the early days or specialized in other schools may have missed out on those lessons early in our career.
And a person who goes through a Brazil-esque nightmare like that comes out at the end with a broken reputation. And always whispers and subtext floating around even after justice.
And there may be technically sophisticated intelligence services that can detect that kind of subtle tampering. But it's not the responsibility of other country's intelligence services to protect citizens of countries other than theie own.
Going through that I can say strength wouldn't be enough.
My brother works in wildlife trapping and management. I've been brainstorming and prototyping ESP32 sensors and mechanics for traps and educational devices with him. I probably won't end up doing the work with him, but I want him to see what's possible with my other brother, a machine learning expert.
Nothing has been deployed in the field.
Nothing will be until he and my other brother commit and get proper software risk management policies in place. And legal advice and other support work. And honestly, he's been careful and hasn't pushed for deployment.
He works with rabies. He works in people's neighborhoods. Maybe yours. Do you want me to finally get a Claude Code account created and go wild building shit, or keep reading up on ISA 62443 and other security frameworks and mapping out the risks?
I'm not going to drag LLM generated work into your neighborhood today. Would you honestly want someone else to?
And when people realize this is happening now everywhere and the entire AI industry is fucked, including other machine learning fields that get hit by association?
Then my other brother the fucking Princeton Machine Learning Super Star can't pay for his fucking kids' schooling because of a million people fucking *not understanding* and intelligence agencies taking advantage of it. He's smeared by the broad anti-AI brush.
Then my brother may have to depend on more assistance from law enforcement, legal resources and conservation agencies. Because I didn't have the power to stop the LLM hype machine earlier.
It always would have made sense to have them work with state and federal Wildlife Conservation officers and agencies. Now it feels a little less like watching my brothers build those relationships out of mutual respect for other professionals and more out of need. It feels unequal.
So, I have to put in work today assuring my brothers' clients of tomorrow, who care about their family and kids, that no, their machine learning algorithms won't take their elderly parents medicine and push them down the stairs. It will, with careful review from lawyers and experts, help their kids identify nature in their backyard on their Smart TV. If they want, it will identify the difference between gopher tortoise holes and mole holes, and maybe if they opt-in to a Community of Saving feature, it will let Fish and Wildlife Conservation know there are habitats nearby so we can see how healthy our ecosystem is as a community together, or call their preferred pest eliminator.
That sounds like PR. Because I have to do that extra work today. Because otherwise we aren't just protected by our fellow professionals who care about theie work out there in the field, instead we always need some bigger institution protecting and controlling us.
My brothers are delaying committing resources to projects. That's fine, they have other important priorities, but I keep warning them. And there probably will be an equivalent of the "Video Game Crash of 1983" in 2028 or whatever. And I think if I had had more personal power and been believed I could have done something about that before we had to be protected.
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