Boldened15

Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.

Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.

Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.

> As an aside, GDPR enforcement is so lacking (even today) it doesn't register on anyone's radar

That’s not really true, every app offers some version of “Download your data” these days as a result of GDPR.

IMO the backlash against LLMs is more philosophical, a lot of people don’t like them or the idea of one learning from their content. Unless your website has some unique niche information unavailable anywhere else there’s no direct personal risk. RAG would be a more direct threat if anything.

Don’t 2FA apps have the major downside that if you lose the specific mobile device you installed it on you’re SOL, unless you have backup codes that are too technical for most. SMS gets you more human support since you pay your carrier, I can walk into my nearest teleco branch with my ID if I lose my phone and change the SIM to another phone. So most of the time unless your SIM is hijacked it’s a good proxy for being actually you.

Plus having to download another app adds friction to the signup process and most users aren’t going to bother, so for most it’s SMS 2FA or nothing. Since apps often want your phone number anyway for bot prevention, and users are used to verification codes, it’s not a big deal.

Also a tail end of other issues with 2FA apps (and SMS 2FA predates the nice ones anyway); in other countries there are devices other than iOS/Android to suggest an authenticator app for, limited network speeds and device storage, etc. Heck, I know people in the U.S. with full device storage who can’t download new apps without deleting some stuff. If you’re a random app and not a tech company SMS 2FA is just going to be much easier to implement.

I would count is as decentralized enough if there are a few major players, you have Google, Microsoft, I assume Proton Mail works fine though don’t know as I only use it for burner accounts, iCloud Mail including Apple’s cool private email relay thing. (Maybe other countries have big providers I dunno.) You can use your own domain and switch between providers if needed, and use custom email clients… it’s all the benefits of decentralization to the end user.

Yeah I'm no expert in financial systems but since the money ultimately needs to be spent in the U.S. it doesn't seem that important whether the funds are frozen in the U.S. or locked away overseas and can't be transferred in for the next ~4 years.

The Wikipedia article has "deprival of the rights of individuals and parties from running for election" listed as a method. So I assume the prison/fine part of the sentencing wouldn't really be defensive democracy but barring her from office is. (Don't think I would feel positively about that in the U.S. but nonetheless the concept is there.)

At some point we have to trust the electorate whether we like it or not, or democracy is impossible. If the populace is easily brainwashed by the media to believe in the innocence of a corrupt and extremist candidate they could just as easily be brainwashed on any issue or candidate so what's the point of letting them vote at all?

> Usually these people are friendly to capital as well, and the opposition are the "little people"

Don't know if this is actually true, I assume capitalists generally prefer stable market-oriented politicians and not far-right kleptocrats in favor of protectionist trade wars. And plenty of wealthy people value democracy for its own sake, Kamala outraised Trump in the 2024 election for example.

Also I doubt traditional media spend plays as large a role in a nationwide contest with a lot of eyes, if I recall during Trump's 2016 primary candidacy Fox News tried to go against him but was rebuked by their own viewers (who fell in love with him on social media) and forced to bend the knee.

Cults of personalities are more dangerous than other types of brainwashing though, and the right level of protection from the state here should be other checks and balances on the office's powers.

That is all true but in this case she was sentenced to 2 years prison and 2 years house arrest, it's not exactly locking her up and throwing away the key for a minor infraction.

Letting judges bar someone from running for office is silly though, if French law allows that they should reconsider; if someone is popular enough to win a national election despite a reasonable criminal conviction they are popular enough to threaten the civil order if they are barred from office.

Some are kind to eng ICs, you’re not laid off from the company just given time to join another team. As you can still be a high-performer with context on company culture/tech stack while on a non-revenue-generating team.

Sorry I don't get the example, are both code blocks meant to be client-side code?

> It acknowledges the reality that a non-exhaustive enum isn’t really an enum. It’s just a list of things that people might type into that field.

I would say the opposite, the kinds of enums that map a case to a few hardcoded branches (SUCCESS, NETWORK_ERROR, API_ERROR) are often an approximation of algebraic data types which Rust implements as enums [0] but not most languages or data formats. Since often using those will require something like a `nullthrows($response->getNetworkError())` once you've matched the enum case.

The kind of enum that's just a string whitelist, like flavors or colors, which you can freely pass around and store, likely converting it into a human-readable string or RGB values in one or two utils, is the classic kind of enum to me.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/keyword.enum.html

Since speedrunners who find glitches are obviously very technical, do they usually already have some sort of day job in tech? I imagine it might be easier and just as lucrative to work on some CRUD app 9-5 and devote the rest of their time to research/streaming, and may be preferable to overloading their brain with even more of the same kind of research.

Since Netflix never (edit: rarely) releases Blu-Rays for their original content, there's no source to produce high-quality versions of their 4K content right? Could be wrong but I thought webrips that screen capture are relatively low quality because they're reencoding a video that's already being compressed for streaming.

Don't know if I notice these things much personally but if someone already cares about 1080p vs 4K they probably would.

Headline buries the lede imo, should be "Xcode slows down builds by constantly phoning home". Given the walled garden nature of Apple and the app review process it's not really surprising that Xcode would be full of forced telemetry

Also not the worst thing for Apple to measure average build times or whether developers are discovering some new feature they added, that can be actually helpful for improving the product.

That's cute. Also just reading the first part "Drone captures narwhals using their tusks..." my mind jumped to a more sinister interpretation, poachers using drones to spot and hunt narwhals by recognizing tusks with AI... I've clearly been reading too many AI headlines recently.

I'm curious, why? The startup connection is disclosed in the third sentence so it's not particularly hidden. And at least if it's a real product they're putting their money where their mouth, you can check out their product or reviews from customers to see if their approach is right.

Someone working on AI tooling for code reviews is exactly the right person I'd want to get an opinion from on the space, otherwise it's just opining with no validation.

Curious what people would see as the longterm future of Firefox in the ideal world. Just being privacy focused isn't enough especially for the layperson, it needs some actual benefits like being faster or at least as fast, plus mindshare from developers... but it seems impossible to compete with Google's resources on any of that. Even if Firefox committed the resources to come ahead for a moment Google could just match it easily, in addition to building better dev tooling, etc.

That being said I'm surprised they dropped the Servo project, it seemed like a step in the right direction?

I actually think working adblockers is a great pitch, not sure what sites specifically the Manifest v2 version of uBlock Origin doesn't work on, but "download Firefox to watch ad-free YouTube" is a great pitch to convince people to use it. Sucks that Apple limited custom browser engines on iOS to just the EU, otherwise Mozilla could focus on full-fledged extension parity on iOS and the pitch would be to get sync + ad-free.

I hope they change the name of the browser at some point, it sounds vaguely promiscuous (maybe because "ladyboy" is the closest word to it). One reason Chrome started taking off in popularity is because tech enthusiasts appreciated its speed and made their friends/relatives download it. Harder to imagine telling my parents to download something called "Ladybird"...

Doesn’t seem like the author is recursively building solutions, so this doesn’t work.

It’s just about having fun at the end of the day, the gamma function and square root are considered fundamental enough. But if one wants they could try to limit to different subsets of functions and prove which numbers are possible or impossible to achieve just with those.

They also say “mathematical tools” not arbitrary functions.

I believe the audit stuff is overblown [1], there are strict requirements for passing and it doesn’t mean the money is literally disappearing into a black hole. I don’t have every Chipotle receipt saved in the past year but that doesn’t mean my spending is mysterious. I assume that’s why being audited by the IRS is considered a nightmare, it’s nontrivial.

It seems the Pentagon audit process only started in 2018, and Congress gave a deadline of 2028 to pass a fully clean audit, which they have made progress on:

> Of the 28 military agencies, DoD leaders think 11 are expected to receive clean audit opinions, one more than the previous fiscal year.

[1] https://thenationaldesk.com/news/fact-check-team/pentagon-fa...

Did those teams have lots of senior engineers? I’d assume when you have a single tech lead over each area the team won’t fight each other since junior engineers will just follow their lead.

IMO legacy code is code that has lots of if statements and special cases sprinkled in over the years to enable new features quickly and get out immediate hotfixes for bugs without doing full refactors and/or data migrations to address the root causes. Even with 100% test coverage it’s a pain to build new features in because there are so many paths to think through, and instead of single sources of truth each part of the app assumes every other part is working in very specific ways.

An alternative definition, legacy code is any code where there’s no one left on the team who has been working on it for years and intuitively knows the pitfalls. Then everyone’s scared to touch it or make big refactors, which actually leads to those small special cases being added instead.

Wow this is a great formulation. I’ve started becoming senior more recently, for most code I’ve become pretty good now at making the tradeoff of how much refactoring to do versus a quick hack based on risk. Sometimes adding in an if statement makes more sense than a full upfront refactor.

The exception… is for any feature I added myself. If I spent a lot of energy releasing v1 with the “perfect” (to me) abstractions, etc. I get paranoid about more junior developers messing it up for new features. Re-reviewing code changes, insisting on all the upfront refactors and rare edge cases handled, etc. Something I need to overcome.

All Bluetooth technology is licensed, no? Then it's still the fault of Bluetooth if not only is their protocol so difficult for many or most manufacturers to get right, and their qualification process doesn't enforce correctness.

But yeah I mean Bluetooth sucks, everyone has had the experience of trying to connect to a device repeatedly that keeps trying to autoconnect to some other random device that was used before. My usual interaction with Bluetooth is to always enter pairing mode and just be done with it, but hardly feels futuristic to manually hold down a button press every time you want to use a device.

> except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol

Isn't the usual way this problem is solved that the big players (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) come together and create a consortium for a new technology? So you get widespread support in all new devices and within 5-10 years most people are using it over the old one. If a better protocol is possible I don't think this would be the bottleneck.

> once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example)

Curious, what do you mean by this?

> pretty much no intellectual, either in India or the US, actually cares about the mass-wiping out of Indian languages by English

Well I've never heard of this so lack of awareness would be an obvious cause if it's an issue, are there any orgs raising awareness of it? Also seems surprising to me, Bollywood movies are immensely popular and are all in Hindi. Is there a danger of English overtaking Indian society to the extent where Bollywood movies would mostly be made in English?

It really depends on the product (or feature) how much of that expertise is necessary. You need some domain experts for sure who really know the ins and outs of the specific backend and frontend technologies to architect the overall app and build system, and do the hardcore stuff like optimization that you mention.

But fullstack engineering is just much more individually productive, if you're updating a settings page why involve multiple engineers and coordinate a handoff, when one engineer can just add the API calls on the backend and add the new toggles to the frontend in a single day? Most software doesn't need to be beautifully polished and completely excellent.

Anyway I personally just find it fun, I get to breathe life to a vision end-to-end and tackle a wide variety of problems, and I can deliver quickly. Even if I'll never be (and don't desire to be) a super expert in one technology.

Detection algorithms can be less useful in general if they're public and open source, eg. website operators sometimes mass ban on a delay so they can trap a lot of misbehaving users and don't immediately tip off the suspicious behavior.

Although in this case it's already a publicly available extension so even without the algorithm details you could easily check your text against the detector and tune it until it passes... but maybe having the method be public would make it easier for users to prompt engineer the AI to write in ways that wouldn't be caught by it.

Deepfake is a pejorative not because of the artistic value of the AI but because of the ethnical concerns that spring to mind around one's ownership of their own likeness, and how the tech can be used for deepfake porn and political misinformation. Muddying that conversation with a personal dislike for any AI seems harmful especially to the people most affected by it.

The closest analogue for text I can think of is when you use an LLM to write in the style of someone else, like Shakespeare. But "deepfake" is a stretch because AI-generated text in someone's style is not particularly convincing that it actually came from them, and wasn't too hard to do manually before. Plus doesn't raise the same ethical questions.

Subreddits sometimes split the difference by dedicating a single day of the week where something is allowed, eg. only allowing you to post questions on Fridays, or creating threads to consolidate off-topic discussion.