lhnz

Records and Tuples were scrapped, but as this is JavaScript, there is a user-land implementation available here: https://github.com/seanmorris/libtuple

Out of interest, why is it a nightmare to use?

I've always been worried about how overly clever the approach is, does it have problems?

If it weren't for JavaScript we'd still be downloading binaries and running them unsandboxed on our computers.

I have lots of HTTP endpoints that we poll with a cursor but actually the underlying data is very large (we work with snapshots of it) and updates very frequently and eventually we'll move to something else (e.g. interact directly with the underlying services with capnproto) so really it would just be useful to be able to define these sources ourselves. I'm working doing full-stack engineering at an HFT currently and we were thinking of using DataFusion to allow users to join, query and aggregate the data in realtime but I haven't attempted this yet (and to do so means integrating with what currently exists as I don't have time to rewrite all of the services).

Do you have plans to make the data sources pluggable instead of being Kafka specific?

Is this something you'd need to download and install ROMs to use?

It's bittersweet. It seems likely to me that the US government didn't really want an open trial due to the possibility of scrutiny and that indefinite detention without trial followed by setting the legal precedent that aiding and abetting legal whistleblowers is a criminal conspiracy was their goal.

I'm surprised that an executive or lawyer didn't realise the reputational damage adding these clauses would eventually cause the leadership team.

Were they really stupid enough to think that the amount of money being offered would bend some of the most principled people in the world?

Whoever allowed those clauses to be added and let them remain has done more damage to the public face of OpenAI than any aggravated ex-employee ever could.

If I can sit down at any table in my house and get a multi-monitor setup without needing to buy multiple 4K screens then it'll win me over. However, in practice, I do not think the hardware will be high enough quality for me to want this yet.

These aren't "the rules of capitalism" they are just maximally self-interested hubristic behaviours by companies with monopolies. Capitalism doesn't have rules; states have rules. Capitalism has market incentives and stakeholders.

I don't want my family to know I spent 3 hours chatting about the Holy Roman Empire.

This is probably correct but I'd prefer that family don't read the conversations I've had, as even if I'm not saying anything too private, it feels too intrusive (it'd be a bit like reading my inner thoughts).

I did land a job making applications for an HFT firm and while I don't think that being able to implement data structures or write my own algorithms is necessarily what will allow me to keep this job, recently I somewhat regularly use the skills I pick up doing competitive programming exercises in my workplaces. Therefore, my answer to your question about whether it will help my performance in a measurable way is: yes.

I'm the OP (of this thread). The main issue caused by the industry-wide hiring freezes wasn't necessarily income but work/team quality. I've been in the top-10% of incomes in my country for more than 5 years and the top-1% of incomes for a lesser period of time.

I was able to get offers in this percentile but the companies making these offers didn't usually hire at this level. If anything, I want to be around people that are more competitive than me, that put a lot of effort into what they do and that can easily walk into high paying roles. I definitely don't want to be the highest paid engineer in the room at a company that frankly doesn't need this.

I know this can be seen as entitled but I'm the sole provider of a 4-person family and willing to work hard and prove myself. I'm happy to say that I now have a higher income than I did before being laid off and at a company with more successful people than me and a higher ceiling, however, that doesn't mean I didn't find it significantly more difficult to get a job this time around than I have in the last decade.

There are people that are going to have a much harder time than I have.

You are right in theory. But instead of trying to predict the future I'm trying to be descriptive about what has changed so far (very little) and why (mostly advertisers + debt driven by buy-out).

I think this is very unfair. In the few months that I was looking, I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job.

Nobody owes me anything but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it. It's very tough for those that have been laid off. Particuarly those have to support families as I did -- I am a sole earner and have two children.

You could benefit from practicing a bit of empathy and not lying to yourself that the market has merely moved back to "sanity" without gaining a bit of recent experience in it.

Features are both being added and removed. Actually, the main difference is that more feature are being added than were before, but this is being done in a more haphazard way. Sometimes things appear to break but are then fixed. It's not awful though, is what I'm saying.

These issues are caused by (1) the buy-out by Elon Musk involving a large amount of debt, and (2) Elon Musk annoying "woke" advertisers who have subsequently deserted the platform.

The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.

Honestly, I could feel it. In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been. It was very difficult to get interviews, and even though I managed to get multiple offers, many of these were at companies I'd not normally have accepted offers from. It took a long time to find a job offer I wanted to accept.

I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.

I don't think you disagree with me. For larger projects, like infrastructure projects, very detailed designs are used and contracts that disallow substitutions or alterations to the design without contractual agreement.

I'm talking with some level of experience here. I did a residential project that was obviously much smaller than this but still very expensive (£100+k). Even for this architects recommended a detailed design and a contract that enforced this.

I agree that it would be fatalistic to not try to improve the situation using technology, I'm just trying to explain what happens as you try to do so with more planning.

This is a negative outcome of the Town and Country Planning Act. We've mandated by law that all planning is done upfront and due to the possibility of construction fraud provide detailed designs to building contractors that disallow them from substituting any materials or design choices without it being explicitly requested by the employer. In theory, there can be conversation between individual subcontractors and the project managers or architects, but in practice these are not always on site at the same time and there are significant costs involved in changes as well as issues with trust. Therefore, we effectively have a very expensive waterfall process that everybody is legally obligated to follow.

The design and planning process for UK infrastructure is already notoriously expensive and we already do significantly more "planning" than we used to do 100 years ago (when we were actually capable of rapidly building high quality infrastructure).

I would expect there to already be consultants doing similar to what you've suggested however the work is complex and many will be quite cut-off from the build process or only around in the short-term.

It's very difficult to make thousands of up-front planning decisions perfectly. It'd be even more costly to try to perfect every aspect upfront within the planning stage and it'd be more reasonable to make best attempts but to provide for the ability (and budget) to retrofit bespoke alterations to fix problems that arise at a later date.

Interesting that some of the stickers contain significant white elements. Is the material used less likely to mark?

Actually, I'm not sure that these are stickers. Maybe it's paint. If it's a sticker it'd be very difficult to apply this perfectly...

I think they intend for their tactics to cause damage, but I do not think that they have set forwards reasonable evidence for their proceedings, or even been clear what they consider illegal or whether it's merely a case of them disallowing automated moderation tools.

When they said "dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" I can only assume that it refers to the October 7th attack by Hamas upon Israel and not to another attack.

Of course, it could refer to a specific video posted during this time period that they consider to be disinformation, however, taking action against a singular video would be quite over-the-top which is why I believe they're referring to the overall dissemination of videos around this time.

I don't think that you need VCs to be rational for what I'm saying to be true.

LPs will see this as reducing the likelihood of making their money back via investing in VCs -- or at least, this is a reasonable theses, and those that grow their customer's funds the most might make this assessment. In the long-term this would transform the landscape of VC which is downstream from institutional investors.

It can also have a cascading effect due to how reports and disclosures over investment strategies get shared and firms benchmark themselves against leading firms.

Counterintuitively this will lead to more monopolies since with less likelihood of "exiting" startups via mergers and acquisitions there'll be reduced interest in venture capital and therefore fewer startups capitalised to the extent that they can compete against large monopolies.

The EU's Digital Services Act permits the gathering of evidence and enforcement activities to be conducted confidentially behind closed doors. It does not require the EU to make their evidence available to the public, particularly when information is considered to be sensitive. This approach aims to preserve the integrity of the investigation and to protect the rights of involved parties.

Once such a law is passed there is no right to public scrutiny. While certain aspects of the process may not be open to public scrutiny, this does not entirely preclude the public's right to some level of transparency as it is stipulated that any decisions taken will be widely publicised (paragraph 101). That is, once they've made their judgement the matter will be settled and a superficial amount of information will be released to the public.

This is exactly why I think it's so important for us to speak openly about the speech rights we expect on the platforms we use and the level of policing of speech we're happy for there to be. If we don't do so, lawmakers can and do pass draconian laws that take these considerations away from us, and at this point we have little recourse to rollback our loss of freedom.

I'm not a free speech absolutist but believe that it's incredibly wrongheaded to try to argue away conversation about this as being without evidence particularly after lawmakers passed laws that denied us this same evidence. Blithely allowing lawmakers to pass laws that enable confidential evaluation of evidence limiting public scrutiny, but then afterwards criticising public discourse for lacking evidence without acknowledging that access to such evidence has been restricted by the same laws -- what a manipulative argument/framing!

The whole conversation on speech rights is also incorrectly centered in my opinion, as freedom of speech rights are centered on the speaker instead of the audience/public. I personally find myself advocating the following approach to speech rights:

  > "It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to
  >  be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience
  >  to listen and to hear."

1. His credentials are literally relevant to the evaluation that he is "some guy" and therefore not able to weigh in on free speech and related technology regulation. Specifically, this is his area of interest and he is capable of giving expert opinions on this.

2. The claim in question was within the EU's press release itself, however, the EU haven't made their specific evidence publicly available. It's quite likely that others also aren't allowed to divulge specifics but this doesn't mean that they haven't seen evidence or that the EU hasn't provided any evidence.