For the entire September, Russia conducted 10+ strikes on all key telecom, and internet provider data centers in Ukraine.

Now it is just a return

Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.

Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.

If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.

For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.

The "abundance" is not all positive valence. It is a flood of superficial good with an unmanaged ratio of negative byproduct mixed in.

Some of the "change" is not merely doing things a bit differently. The LLM flood is effectively attacking existing feedback and control mechanisms without any attempt to establish appropriate replacements.

I think there are several more dangerous sentiments coursing through civilization these days:

1. That people bear no moral responsibility to act in good faith, and the corollary that one can enjoy the fruits of production while externalizing all the liabilities.

2. That strategies like "move fast and break things" and "fake it until you make it" are universally applicable and appropriate, rather than only in the low-stakes entertainment/media/marketing fields where they flourished in recent decades.

3. That mere acquisition of capital gives one the right to perform N=1 experiments on global civilization, the economy, and the enviromment.

This isn't about having trouble adapting to change, because many engineers going through this are adapting just fine as far as others can observe, adopting LLMs, changing the way they work and whatnot.

The grief comes from either that new normal being something they don't identify with anymore, or that new normal being just... different. The former will inevitably prolong the grief, while the latter will eventually result in the grief subsiding (even though some sadness for what was lost will never really disappear).

We're being asked to adapt, but perhaps we should just accept that things are not going back to what they were, look around, and decide not to do the things we used to love in a new way that we cannot love. Others might not even notice we chose that path, and think we just "adapted".

Does this make sense?

LLMs are not very good at performance issues unless you walk into it with a clear idea of the likely root cause and the bigger picture regarding actual hardware and desired customer experiences.

"Please make the code go faster"

vs

"I am noticing what appears to be contention between threads under workload A, B & C, but not with workload D".

These are completely different universes of capability and outcomes.

Even if an LLM can fight its way to the answer on its own, you can achieve a specific desired result much faster and with significantly lower risk if you are genuinely an expert.

I've seen a concrete example of this recently. I profiled the client's product "the hard way" and arrived at a change to a single line of code that would eliminate a mutex issue. One of the client's developers used the LLM and wound up with a change set that touched hundreds of files, but otherwise achieved approximately the same performance fix. The other developer even had my hint that it was a single file change and couldn't figure out how to do this despite prompting a leading edge model regarding this exact possibility over and over.

Taste and aesthetics apply to absolutely everything. Not just UI/UX design. Perhaps it is even more important that we care about the things that are invisible to the customer. It is certainly easier to forget about them or treat them like they don't matter as much.

Much of the text is generated as well.

That being said, AFAICT, the diagrams are also basically irrelevant to the article in its capacity as a high-level overview of the project. You can just ignore them for the purpose of reading the article.

It’s when digging into the project source code that you should look at those diagrams, and then feel frustrated by how much they suck. :)

===

[1] This seems to happen a lot with LLM-generated code docs / diagrams / etc, when the docs are written in the same session as the code itself, but later; the LLM seems to see the docs as “following” the prior work in its linear context, and so mistakenly writes as if the reader of the docs will have also read whatever’s in the context before getting to the docs. That assumption, of an incrementally-growing shared context that can be implicitly made reference to by “later” text to compress that “later” text, makes a lot of sense when generating one long linear stream of prose, or even when generating a series of chain-linked entries (like conversation responses, or chapters of a book); but doesn’t work out when generating a web/graph of separate bits of text. This is kind of a fundamental flaw in producing coding agents as fine-tunes over conversational base models, and it’s one that coding-agent harnesses have yet to really focus on addressing.

Great story, programming and mechanics.

The main question I tend to get from hacker-types is "what are the tech specs?". The demos run on a Mac with custom software I built for projection mapping/rendering/etc. (the hand tracking uses Apple's built-in framework, which is very good), a small consumer 4k laser projector, and a basic webcam for vision.

But really, this is primarily a research/design prototype - I think it's much more important to figure out what the user experience should ideally feel like, if the interactions are even plausible & desirable in the first place; and then work backwards to the technology.

One small quality-of-life improvement that could be added: have the software timestamp when you say "here" and then (using a short low-FPS video buffer?) analyze the corresponding frame of video. This would eliminate the pause when you're pointing at something, waiting for the computer to respond.

Alternately a low-latency speech analyzer could look for the word "here" and quickly snap a screenshot. Perhaps project a temporary dot on the surface, so the user knows they can put their hand down now?

Quite the impressive demo! There's huge potential here.

Like... that's the whole MO of the administration. None of the "reasonable" positions are genuine; they only exist to entice leniency from the gullible. It's been that way since day 1.

Happening in Austin, Texas recently. City cites:

- Rising cost of core services

- Weak sales tax revenue. This is the city’s second-largest revenue source, and it has slowed or dipped.

- A shrinking property tax base. Officials point to falling property values, appraisal protests, more business tax exemptions, and little new construction adding value to the tax rolls.

- Disappearing one-time money. Pandemic relief funds have run out, and federal funding cuts were anticipated.

- Rising service costs. The new budget’s highlights include $6 million more for permanent supportive housing services, $6 million more for fire overtime to keep four-person staffing, and extra EMS overtime. Employee raises and social services were also major line items.

It is frustrating... if core services are costing more, cut extracurricular services? Why would you lean so much on sales tax, seems obvious this would revert to a mean? If your budget is reliant on infinite new construction it seems a bad budget? Why is pandemic relief cuts a shock to anyone? More housing services? I'm empathetic but there's more homeless than ever before. I know it's simplifying the problem but it just feels like people are punished with permanent tax increases for governments spending more than they should... we start with a new "floor" tax rate and repeat forever? Is it going to get to the point where we work 50% of our time just to pay taxes?

In the UK, 'stamp duty' is something that buyers pay (as opposed to sellers), but sellers also have to buy, so everyone pays to move and everyone stays put to avoid paying.

(And of course no one builds, which is the biggest issue).

I'd say it's OK to defer your property taxes until you sell (or die), but it shouldn't be the default, only something you apply for if you're in a vulnerable position.

I think it's a great idea to let land taxes create the incentives to build efficiently.

My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home, which would offset some of the costs we currently pay in ad valorem property taxes.

The local real estate community had a meltdown and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into defeating it, which my neighbors obliged and did.

I've seen people completely change their attitudes about things once they own a home. I know a self-proclaimed liberal who claims to care about people suddenly go all NIMBY because they are buying a $2M house and now they don't want duplexes in their neighborhood and don't like the idea of more housing being built ("we're full"). They feel entitled to a high (and increasing) property value in a desirable area.

I hate it so much

One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.

1) bundle the "source available" modules as part of redis source distribution 2) enable people who only want bsd code to be able to build a "redis_core" 3) commit to the community that the core will remain BSD licensed and that they are committed to making it the best key/value store. 4) increase the amount of source available code that until then had been kept closed (including what we called big redis/RedisOnFlash/MultiTier) 5) Require anyone using the redis trademarks in a commercial setting to ship the entire Redis (which includes the source available portions, so Amazon et al would no longer be able to use the Redis trademarks without a license deal.

Another alternative was to simply go to AGPL (which they went to anyways awhile later).

I failed to convince the leadership about this. I honestly think they squandered huge value in community engagement, but perhaps that's what they wanted. I left a bit after these changes were made as it became clear that the new US led leadership of the company wasn't particularity interested in what was the soul of redis. (previously was heavily Israeli led and a critical mass there was invested in redis as an open source product).

Funny story, the then new/current CEO used to be the head of WebEx at Cisco. We had a Q&A when he was hired and I asked, what did he learn from his time at WebEx about how to maintain market position (as they lost everything to zoom et al). His response at the time wasn't that convincing, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel its fair to ask if the same thing occurred again.

Yes, I'd much prefer full open source, but "all source available; some restrictions on commercial use" is still miles better; the OSS funding and incentives problem is still unsolved.

Just look at Elasticsearch -> AWS ElasticSearch; or Redis -> ElastiCache; etc.

It's like leeching: a big corporation, with far more distribution and brand takes your codebase; and their structural advantages (in terms of distribution) makes it an extremely difficult uphill battle for you to compete.

I struggle to think of solutions: yes, they are doing everything by the license; so the main viable solution seems to be... changing the license.

I’ve seen only clips of his videos here and there, but assumed he was somewhat naturally gifted in creating content that interested people. Reading this, and his obsession with algorithms, his job seems like a hellish nightmare.

I recently stumbled upon ‘book influencers’ on YouTube and same desperation is holding them hostage. There’s no way this is fun for anyone. Being so obsessed with clicks and likes and retention and whatever. Then trying to earn money from it all. I’d literally rather be a vagabond.

It takes several months for the certification to appear on the site. What would be newsworthy is if we see a release next year without this release getting certification.

I want to push back against that. Lobbying is not corruption. All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints. That is essential for good lawmaking. It should be open (and is in the EU) with lobby registers (author uses lobbying as a synonym for corporate lobbying, confusing the issues).

Lobbying easily involves corruption, and that has to be constantly worked against (Qatargate, Cash for Amendments in 2011) for example. Hiring EU lawmakers after they leave the office should have long cooldown limits.

Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending. Civil society interest groups, consumer groups, and labor unions have less money. Revolving doors, astroturfing from foreigin states and corporations, and too much reliance on self-declaration in transparency register.

These can be all solved: mandatory meeting disclosures, declaration of private interests and assets, MEPs should be banned on paid lobbying activities, and long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists, independent refinforcement, public annex for all directives and regulation listing interest groups involved.

People should care and make these political issues.