Key point (mostly drowned): Feds can compel A to surveil B if A maintains equipment or services for B. The Feds can also compel A's silence on point.
Originally applied only to the largest communications companies, this now has effectively unlimited scope.
The only safeguard (which took years to add legislatively) was that the FBI had to clear it; but now the FBI is refusing even to record such requests, to avoid any record of abuse (and the person responsible is dubious).
Surveillance seems necessary, but in the wrong hands, it's systemically deadly: it grants overwhelming advantage, and destroys arms-length trust, driving transactions of any size into networks prone to self-dealing and corruption.
Yes, we hate the abuse of open source, in its everlasting legal purgatory, by large evil "other" shadows acting at a distance...
But I'm stupefied at m/y/our own oblivious excitement when extracting our expertise for others in the form of skills we share. It's a profound hacking of our reward system, on the fear of losing a job and the hope of climbing the ladder of abstraction.
Tech companies have for decades subsidized developer training and careers with free tools and tiers, support for developer communities and open-source -- in order to reduce the costs of expertise and to expand their markets. Now skills do both. For developers, the result will be like developing for or at Apple: the lucky few will work in secret, based on personal connections and product skills.
Chat --> Notebook: Jupyter is so much more functional than slack for communicating real work product!
Next up: exporting or sharing selections from the chat as a document or interactive page. If they allow share with non-subscribers, subscriptions could hockey stick -- particularly if the document/page included prompts necessary to replicate (or modify and adapt).
If/since AI agents work continuously, it seems like running macOS in a VM (via the virtualization framework directly) is the most secure solution and requires a lot less verification than any sandboxing script. (Critical feature: no access to my keychain.)
AI agents are not at all like container deploys which come and go with sub-second speed, and need to be small enough that you can run many at a time. (If you're running local inference, that's the primary resource hog.)
I'm not too worried about multiple agents in the same vm stepping on each other. I give them different work-trees or directory trees; if they step over 1% of the time, it's not a risk to the bare-metal system.
For me, it's file system latency on mac os when virtualizing that kills me. Cargo, npm, pip, etc create many small files and there's a high per-file latency on the FS layer
1. You don't find a golden age by looking for interesting problems. You find it by solving customer problems, even if they're boring.
2. Luxury watches, or anything luxury or fashion, are almost by definition using brand for status signaling. That's a business where you don't control your destiny but jump in front of the crowd.
The most important thing about brand is that it reduces the information costs of reliance, which only gets more important as customer reliance is deeper and more complicated. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Netflix, McDonalds, Halliburton, even Berkshire: they're somewhat distinguished by quality, but mainly get their premiums by their reliability at serving complicated needs.
(Indeed, the problem with the beautiful luxury mechanical watches is that they require good care and maintenance - high cost of reliability. Quartz watches just work, reducing the market for mechanicals to status symbols.)
This is (yCombinator's) golden age because software/ai and devices/(mainly Arm, somewhat robots) now can reach many more customer needs. But being reliable means marriage: lifelong devotion to this one problem. Already taken: the transferable-skill opportunities of general-purpose computers, frameworks and infrastructure, consumer internet and cloud compute. Now available: small and complex niches.
He's definitely conflating two things: watches changed from utilities to fashion items, and watchmakers changed from engineering to branding. In this example, the one change caused the other, but it's just one example. It's no excuse to paint all of branding with the same brush and ignore how, say, Milwaukee's branding provides a valuable signal of real utility.
I think it's tempting to be equally dismissive of branding and fashion because they are both forms of virtue signaling and therefore have all its perversions. However, they're operating on different actors. Branding is virtue signaling by companies to its customers. Fashion is virtue signaling by customers to other people.
It sounds like the lead was demoted to attract new talent, quit as a result, and the rest of the team also resigned to force management to change their minds.
If so, I'm happy that the team held together, and I hope that endogenous tech leads get to control their own career and tech destiny after hard work leads to great products. (It's almost as inspiring as tank man, and the tank commanders who tried to avoid harming him...)
(ducking the downvote for challenging the primacy of equity...)
This is pitched as entry-level, but it works as N+1, as in: people have beaucoup computers, but they avoid carrying them around (risk loss/destroy). The computer absolutely needs to be a mac for keychain-linked services, etc. For those users, not having TouchID on the base model is a bummer.
Originally applied only to the largest communications companies, this now has effectively unlimited scope.
The only safeguard (which took years to add legislatively) was that the FBI had to clear it; but now the FBI is refusing even to record such requests, to avoid any record of abuse (and the person responsible is dubious).
Surveillance seems necessary, but in the wrong hands, it's systemically deadly: it grants overwhelming advantage, and destroys arms-length trust, driving transactions of any size into networks prone to self-dealing and corruption.
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