I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev.
Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.
Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s).
- First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN providers partner with local orgs who can figure out the safest and most efficient ways to distribute a VPN package in countries at risk of censorship or undergoing censorship.
- Once you've got the software, you should try to use it with an obfuscation layer.
Obfs4proxy is a popular tool here, and relies on a pre-shared key to make traffic look like nothing special. IIRC it also hides the VPN handshake. This isn't a perfectly secure model, but it's good enough to defeat most DPI setups.
Another option is Shapeshifter, from Operator (https://github.com/OperatorFoundation). Or, in general, anything that uses pluggable transports. While it's a niche technology, it's quite useful in your case.
In both cases, the VPN provider must provide support for these protocols.
- The toughest step long term is not getting caught using a VPN. By its nature, long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a state actor). I don't know the situation on the ground in Indonesia, so I won't speculate about what the best way to avoid this would be, long-term.
I will endorse Mullvad as a trustworthy and technically competent VPN provider in this niche (n.b., I do not work for them, nor have I worked for them; they were a competitor to my employer and we always respected their approach to the space).
Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend to maintain.
This is blog post/comment section summary encountered many times per day.
The other side of it is people who seem to have 'gotten it' and can dispatch multiple agents to plan/execute/merge changes across a project and want to tell you how awesome their workflow is without actually showing any code.
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)
However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.
At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.
i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.
or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.
My niece weighed 3 kg one year ago. Now, she weighs 8.9 kg. By my modeling, she will weigh more than the moon in approximately 50 years. I've analyzed the errors in my model; regrettably, the conclusion is always the same: it will certainly happen within our lifetimes.
Everyone needs to be planning for this -- all of this urgent talk of "AI" (let alone "climate change" or "holocene extinction") is of positively no consequence compared to the prospect I've outlined here: a mass of HUMAN FLESH the size of THE MOON growing on the surface of our planet!
Full disclosure: I spent a lot of my life making excuses for the Chrysler products I owned over the years when they failed to proceed. I currently drive a 2007 300C SRT8 which is wonderful and frustrating in equal measure, a perfect example of the DaimlerChrysler collision: Mercedes "we can make this good" and Chrysler "we can make it cheap" from which Mercedes never really recovered.
Chrysler might be the most frustrating manufacturers that continues to exist. Their corporate approach seems to have been "how can we make this thing so marginal it barely functions so we save some money". The awful wiring looms, nastiest plastics, shoddily engineered engines, stupid choices in fasteners.
I think you can take every brand Stellantis now owns and point to the Chrysler-isation of them resulting in the poor reliability scores each and every one of them now has. Chrysler is like a slow, creeping disease that infects every sister company.
This quote is the best though:
"One is “this is invention.” This, usually said in a negative manner, literally meant “nobody else is doing this. Why the hell are we gonna be the first?” (Yes, that says a lot about Chrysler’s overall philosophy, but we won’t get into that)."
Out of all the Chrysler products I've owned, the best ones were not engineered by Chrysler. The XJ Jeep Cherokee we bought new in 1996 was the last thing AMC engineered and they are wonderful. The ZJ (which was the first Jeep to have Chrysler engineering input) was terrible. You could tell the amount of cheaping out Chrysler did on that car and it shows. The electrics alone would send you mad.
Given these initial results, I'm now experimenting with running DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B for some coding tasks on my laptop via Ollama - their version of that needs about 20GB of RAM on my M2. https://www.ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1:32b
It's impressive!
I'm finding myself running it against a few hundred lines of code mainly to read its chain of thought - it's good for things like refactoring where it will think through everything that needs to be updated.
Even if the code it writes has mistakes, the thinking helps spot bits of the code I may have otherwise forgotten to look at.
I disagree. Better to be direct, than frame it in soft 'feel good' terms. It's a matter of people's livelihoods. My tone invites confrontation as a sincere reflection of the stakes. I don't make value judgements. Citizens are entitled to hypocrisy, cognitive-dissonance and selfishness. It being bad is a social judgement made by the observer.
Let's be clear. We're talking about the US here. Arguments based in nativism, isolation and crowdedness have thin ground to stand on. By percentage population, legal-immigration to the US is below the historic average. Yet threads on H1b quickly devolve into vapid arguments. The accusers are happy to sling unsubstantiated stereotypes towards immigrants, but hide behind soft language like 'we aren't used to making space' when immigrant commenters retaliate in kind.
Racists aren't irrational actors or evil people. They simply have higher affinity for their tribe, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes for self-interests to be threatened, for bigoted & tribal behaviors to manifest in a loud manner. Again, that's okay. Americans are the ones who gave a negative connotation to to words like bigot and racists. In the rest of world, tribal & bigoted behaviors are an accepted norm. We're all racists sometimes. But, American tech workers are definitely at their racist-est on h1b threads.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you are the land of free, that practices extreme meritocracy and thrives as a result of it. You're a nation built by migrant groups over the last 4 centuries, and the door is always open to the ambitious and hard working. A benevolent super-power for all. Or, you're just as tyrannical as any selfish group. You're a white majority people that found a pre-inhabited land of the greatest resources and size. You claimed it all for yourself. Killed the natives. You give lip serve to globalism and meritocracy as long as it gives you access to all markets of the world. Your relationship with the rest of the world is transactional, and you will continue to be a world superpower through military strong-arming and thinly veiled globally-egalitarian propaganda.
The reality ofc, is that neither extremes are true. But, it is a slider between the tribal-nativist and internationalist-meritocratic impulse. There are no right or wrong answers for what a nation's choice will be. But, if your slider is near the former while you claim to be the latter, then the hypocrisy is grating for the rest of us. For the lack of a better insult, it's Trudeau-esque.
Personally, I am a big fan of out-right selfish people. There is genuine honesty there. I also love the US (warts and all). Say what people might, it is the least racist nation of any out there. Lastly, I have a vested interest as someone who is on an H1b myself. (although I'd like to think I'm senior enough to be insulated from negative outcomes for h1b)
As I write this, I recognize that most people don't like harsh phrasing. I don't think our politicians or public speakers should adopt this language. But, a mostly civil pseudo anonymous forum of tech nerds is IMO, just right for this kind of directness.
- Download as many LLM models and the latest version of Ollama.app and all its dependencies.
- Make a list of my favorite music artists and torrent every album I can.
- Open my podcast app and download every starred episode (I have a ton of those that I listen to repeatedly).
- Torrent and libgen every tech book I value. Then, grab large collections of fiction EPUBs.
- Download every US Army field manual I can get my hands on, especially the Special Operations Medic manual, which is gold for civilian use in tough times.
- Download every radio frequency list I can for my area of the country.
- Download digital copies of The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emory, Where There Is No Doctor, and Where There Us No Dentist.
I already have paper versions of almost all of these but it’s handy to have easily-reproducible and far more portable digital copies.
They're building a beautiful garden with rich soil and generous watering. In fact it is so wonderful that you'd love to grow your product there. A product with deep roots and symbiotic neighbors.
Just be careful when they start building the walls. And they will build those walls.
You can offer benefits but it’s harder to make people take the benefits. Japan has great paternity leave but no one takes it, because no one else takes it. You can double the length of the leave and it would make no difference.
It’s like the “unlimited” vacation days that some scummy companies offer. They do so confident that people will be shamed by the behaviour of their peers into taking very little vacation.
Although I disagree with the conclusion, this looks like a pretty decent article in terms of detailed thinking.
I just think that we not only need to work on all of the more immediate problems but also worry about less immediate problems that are existential risks.
Also people always say "AGI" and they mean different things but I am guessing most now mean something like a digital living human/simulation of human when they say that. Mixed in with some blurry connotation of it automatically becoming godlike in power.
That stuff is very speculative. But we don't need AI to get to that level for it to be very dangerous. Just imagine that we have an open source GPT that is something like 33% smarter than GPT-4 and less brittle. Make the output 50 times faster than human thought and suppose that we can run it very inexpensively, in a "swarm" of agents cooperating.
Then you have a type of superintelligence that does not require any really speculative AI advance -- hyperspeed reasoning -- based on the current technology.
If that is widely deployed for military and industrial decision-making then something like a computer virus could create existential risk.
Also, realize that all these systems really need to emulate some of the core functional aspects of animals, like a self-preservation instinct or desire to control resources, is the right instruction and relaxation of guardrails. So when they can reason a bit better and at hyperspeed with collaboration between them, they don't need to be alive or anything to be dangerous.
Look at the history of increases in computing efficiency. It is easy to imagine 50 or whatever times output speed increase in less than 5 years. And even though they are not human level now, GPT-4 has proven that these types of systems can have strong problem solving ability.
After much digging, here is a way to prevent account changes from the device.
Steps:
1. Settings > Screen time > Use screen time pass code > Enter a different passcode to your main one that you will remember
2. Settings > Screen time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Scroll down to Account changes > Don’t allow
This prevents account changes from the device, unless you have the second passcode.
This would not prevent a thief who was aware of this (they could attempt to disable screen time then request the second passcode), but it would prevent a pickpocket who happens to see your passcode being entered from changing your iCloud account details.
The most important fact is that riding a bicycle is 3 to 5 times more energy efficient than walking. Depending on the road, bicycle, terrain and weight of the rider. Riding a bicycle is the most efficient self-powered means of transportation.
There is a German saying: "Wo ein Trog ist kommen die Schweine." roughly translates to "Where there is a trough - the pigs will come." Rather fitting for all the crypto meltdowns in the last years.
For the past five years or so, I've taken singing lessons. I really recommend it to anyone who has even the faintest interest, even if you feel like you can't carry a tune in a bucket. What I learned the first four to six lessons was enough to make a substantial difference both in my vocal quality and in my comfort in singing for long periods (one of the first things you learn, essentially, is how not to shred your vocal cords). One thing I love about singing is that it's one of the most democratic arts. You don't have to buy or maintain instruments -- you were born with it. Almost everybody is capable at least of some degree of singing. There's no gadgets to buy to improve it. And no matter what kind of music you like, there is a place for vocals. You can sing by yourself in the shower or in front of a band or in a chorus or in a congregation, if that's your thing.
Aside from the benefits of being able to produce aesthetically pleasant sounds and the fundamental pleasures of mastery of a skill, I recommend it to anybody who wants to become more aware of and comfortable with their body and/or with expressing their emotions.
I'm sure that there are good free online lessons for singing, and I've used a lot of videos for practice, but I really encourage seeking out a teacher if you can. Covid has been bad for their business, and there's no replacement for face-to-face instruction. (The good news is that, unlike something like the piano, it's absolutely feasible to get useful instruction over a video call!)
Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both.
To some extent, it is true. Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age.
Race in America, however, is fraught. The history of racism is recent, overt, and systemic. It is impossible to deny the history of racism unless you are an idiot. The question is what, if anything, can be done about it that actually improves things. The answer is probably very little. Affirmative action is problematic and has some negative side effects, but it has probably been a net positive for society. It will also probably be struck down as it is now negatively and unfairly impacting another minority group.
I don't see this dynamic where I am in my station in life at the age of 45. To be forthright my station is just a part time employee at a cool grocery store but besides one other coworker everyone is younger than myself. I'm actually very impressed with some of the so called minors that work with me. They seem fairly well grown up in respect to my own maturity at least in what limited interaction I can have with them at work. There is no pettiness, everyone is very kind and helpful to each other and the customers.
Perhaps that was a meaningless paragraph in comparison to the environments found at universities of prestige. I've never studied at one and I can't say how they have evolved.
Basically though if a kid is raised by two parents of the following attributes: full commitment to the partnership, not letting work interfere too often with child development, and a father who takes honor seriously; there should not be any problem with feeling comfortable in further stages of life for either parents or children.
The woman is usually the spiritual leader of the family and becoming grandma is a sacred thing that grownups wish to become. Not having grandpa means not having so many years of experience and mistakes not to know about.
I never met my granddad and all I have of him are some photos. But I have audio interviews my dad made that I cherish for knowing the kinds of problems he had.
My parents passed away years ago and they raised me starting at a later than average age.
Because my parents could not repair their relationship they got divorced and although dad always stressed I could call him anytime, I rarely did because I feared him. Not because he was abusive or mean, but i didn't always take his wisdom well unless I was with him in person. I saw him on weekends. After I returned to my home town I was with him as often as I could until he passed of a difficult cancer, cancer of the pancreas.
I feel that I may have matured much faster if I followed dad's advice more often, but I feel like it would have been hammered on me daily, if he were around with mom every day till they passed.
At 45, I feel about as mature as the so called minors I work with. In most cultures, by the age of 16 or less, you are pretty much an adult and have all the capacity to be one in society.
The more time you spend with your kids, the more respect they will have for you, and also if you treat everyone with respect, your kids will emulate you for it.
I think it's worth repeating: at this point, MFA that is not based on Webauthn (https://webauthn.guide/#about-webauthn) should be considered dangerously insecure. Uber almost certainly enforces MFA for remote access; I strongly suspect we'll end up hearing that it was successfully provided during the authentication step (update: screenshots on Twitter appear to confirm this). As we saw in the case of the 0ktapus campaign, a sufficiently-skilled attacker will simply proxy the MFA calls to the real identity provider in real-time, the user none the wiser.
Webauthn, however, binds the authenticator to the domain and port, and requires https as the scheme. If a user gets phished, they cannot be compromised: the phisher's domain will not match and any Webauthn authentication challenge would fail.
So if your workplace is letting you authenticate with SMS codes, push notifications to an app, or 6-digit codes generated by an authenticator app/hardware device, you need to start banging on pots and pans up your reporting chain to get your security team the support they need to make Webauthn + FIDO2 hardware tokens or Webauthn + Mac Touch ID happen.
"Good Strategy / Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt - An awesome book on strategy, which explains very plainly how to construct a reasonable strategy, and see signs of bad strategy. It (among other things) dissects NVIDIA's rise in the late 2000's, and predicts (more or less) the next ten years of where the company went.
"The Effective Manager" by Mark Horstman - All the things that no one says or tells about management and communication.
"Team Topologies" by Skelton and Pais - A really good view of organizational design patterns and anti-patterns for software teams rooted in the premise of Conway's Law.
I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department):
"""
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.)
"""
