I think about guardrails all the time, and how allowlisting is almost always better than blocklist. Interested to see how far we can go in stopping adversarial prompts.
Originally it would cost too much to have someone follow you around and keep track of where you're going. This was a kind of check against that system. Now you're an SQL query away from being on some list you don't know exists.
From turbo capitalist perspective, your work is uncaptured value. A version of photoshop you buy for 300 and don't buy again denies Adobe access to revenue you would be making over time. That purchase gets "cheaper" as you divide it over the life over jobs you do. With subscription, there's a limit to how much upside you get / month before paying again, and allows them to change the terms of the deal as time goes on to suit them.
Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects.
An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
> not a US citizen ***on US soil*** US law does not apply.
1) these strikes are happening in international waters
2) US law definitely applies to non citizens on US soil.
Like that's such a ridiculous statement. Even if the law was "we can do whatever if you're not a citizen", that's still law...
You think non citizens are all sovereign citizens bound to no law? To be able to do whatever they want? I didn't know my neighbor was a diplomat.
I think you mean rights. Which this is much more dubious. The constitution definitely interchanges the use of "citizens" and "people". Notably the 11th amendment uses citizens, specifying belonging to states foreign or domestic. It was ratified only a few years after the Bill of rights, so not like a drastic language change happened.
There are people who will argue "the people" means "citizens" but I find that a difficult interpretation if you read the constitution or federalist papers.
- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media
- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)
- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.
For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary.
A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
"not US citizen" on "not US soil" is what I meant.
Sorry for the firestorm this created!
What I mean to say is that the USA INTENTIONALLY violates rights of people outside the USA, expressed in things like the Patriot Act re:wiretapping, and also the spaces between passport control where they say "USA laws don't apply, our agents have purview to do essentially anything". If you check the discussions in the 00s about this the fed govt was very dicey and you can tell they were chomping at the bit to be able to have essentially NO OVERSIGHT on any of these massive violations of people's rights.
I'll take the karma hit, there is no way to edit it apparently. Sorry!
A country jurisdiction is both territorial and personal, the laws apply to anyone on the soil, and to the citizens, permanent residents, asylum seekers etc anywhere in the universe.
MBAs are the source of KPIism. We have spent many decades minting them at scale in the USA and now the chickens are roosting. Anything can be ruined by pursuit of KPIs at all costs. The model is to optimize a particular KPI, get your bonus, use this story to get your next job at +$X, leave, repeat. The longer story of the company does not matter, you shipped and got paid, even if the village burned down after you left.
No face, no case. They have to break it way down, just like at any org. In fact, I would ask for more tests than usual with a test plan/proof they passed. 9k is a little spicy, separate PRs, or an ad hoc huddle with them rubber ducking you through the code. Depends on if you care about this that much or not.
Unless you really trust them, it's up to the contributor to make their reasoning work for the target. Else, they are free to fork it if it's open source :).
I am a believer in using llm codegen as a ride along expert, but it definitely triggers my desire to over test software. I treat most codegen as the most junior coder had written it, and set up guardrails against as many things llm and I can come up with.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply space is easy. It's absolutely not. I just want to get a return on investment. And up-staging India and China for the sake of it probably doesn't give much return.
I think their game theoretic aim was to completely discredit video online. Just as we don't accept text in general as truth or image when we see it, we are being flooded with completely fake vids so people can shake the idea that videos are truth.
It smells of e/acc, effective altruist ethics which are not my favorite, but I don't work at OpenAI so I don't have a say I can only interpret.
I agree, but we will likely continue down this road...
Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
So, fraud? If you put a fixed price based on 3 hours, that's of course fine. If you lie about how long work takes you, that's fraud.
Unless your bids are what you bill not what it takes, and you would bill the same 3 hours if it took you 4. In which case it's a fixed price under a different name.
Yeah contracted flat rate and hourly billing are just different. If you’re billing someone for time and not deliverables, it’s not ethical to bill someone for more time than you spend on it because you were more efficient. The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share. If you’re not willing to do that, use a different metric to bill or charge 10x your hourly.
> The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share.
You are absolutely correct from a business perspective. However, I just cannot shake the feeling that I am so 'over' this society that we have created. I'm near my breaking point, I swear. Each passing day, I just think living off the grid sounds better and better.
Again, I am not trying to dog you or anything. It's just that reading statements like yours reminds my how unfit I am for this society. It's a 'me problem' not a 'you/them problem.'
I know life today provides an abundance of boons. However, I sometimes wish I could live in a time where I could be the town blacksmith, cooper, tailor, etc.. My job would be to provide a role for my small community and we would all know and rely on each other. I'm not cut out for this hyper-optimized world.
I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing.
However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/day plus materials for four days to make him nails, but you personally think you made four days worth of nails in one day, you might ask him if this was enough and then if so move on to the next job… but if he finds out you charged him for four days work while you were making horseshoes for someone else, you’re gonna have a real big problem.
The real problem is living in a society where extracting as much as possible out of everyone you deal with is not only acceptable, it’s expected.
Software isn’t real, and your employer would sell you for meat if they could. It is only that your current value is worth more than your meat value.
The value of your product is much more scalable than a pile of horseshoes to your employer. It all depends on who is capturing that efficiency. How else do you end up with billionaire CEOs?
Do everything right in your career, get RIF’d, live through an era like 2008, and watch people who have zero qualifications get promoted over you and you’ll change your tune.
The world is not fair and I will no longer be on the losing end. It’s not nice but neither is my old CEO buying their second boat and bragging about doing yoga on it at Cannes while people are living in basement apartments in NYC during COVID. I think we’ve all seen enough.
I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are on top because they either started on top or were extremely lucky. Hucksters that find themselves one step in front of the curve, trying to claw themselves a double portion of scraps will always do better than their immediate peers in the short term, and almost universally think they’ve figured out some grand secret to gaming the system. But gaining depth and credibility is what makes people actually successful in the white collar world. We’ll never be on the same battlefield for many reasons. Good luck on yours.
No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful.
All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular.
I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. https://layoffs.fyi
I deliver. It is as simple as that.
If you're here, we are peers whether you believe it or not. You're certainly right.
Used to be peers. Unless you start making very precise physical objects out of metal for the aerospace industry, our professional lives are very deliberately several degrees of separation apart.
You'd be surprised! I was a custom microscope parts maker during my time in academia, mostly one offs but a couple fun things that we shared with our collaborators. Surely not at your level of precision, but I did my tour of duty in academia for ~10y, and was none the richer for it. I can only imagine the toys you have, We had a great machinist who was an ex-tool and die guy in our department, was a dream to work with. This work was my first love, but the American student debt system caught up with me. So it goes.
I'm in no way suggesting you should bill less. I'm suggesting you bill for work product and not time.
I'm also stating if you choose to bill by the hour, not by the work product, you are legally and ethically required to bill by the actual time it takes.
Implying that I'm lying is a tall tale, I am capturing the efficiency of my own efforts. Sorry you see it that way. Consider your employer sells your time for more than they pay you and you'll see it my way.
If you worked for 15 minutes but wrote 3 hours on the invoice, how is that not a lie?
I'm not saying you're wrong to charge the full amount for the same job that used to take much longer. I fully support that, go get that bread! I'm just not down with writing 3h on an invoice when it took 15 mins.
"the IDE had to be discoverable right away (which it was) and self-contained to offer you a complete development experience"
This right here was the key to super flow state. Lightning fast help (F1), very terse and straightforward manuals. I have tried to replicate this with things like Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash), to some degree of success.
The closest thing I had to this in windows was probably Visual Studio 6 before the MSDN added everything that wasn't C/C++ to the help docs. After that, the docs got much harder to use due to their not being single purpose anymore. The IDE was a little more complex, but you at least felt like you got something for it. After that, too many languages, too many features, overall not great experience.
The keybindings were so simple and fast, Borland IDE on DOS was a very nice tool. Yes, easier than vim and emacs. The reason is because of mouse in TUI so things like complex selection/blocks/text manipulation are not keybindings in the same way so the key combos are more "programming meta"(build, debug, etc) rather than "text meta".
EDIT: also, I feel like this needs to be mentioned: compilers were not free (as in beer) at that time!
In order to develop on my own machine as a teen, I had to sneakily copy the floppy disks the teacher used to install this on the school computers so I could have more than 1h using it at home! COPY THAT FLOPPY
I think about guardrails all the time, and how allowlisting is almost always better than blocklist. Interested to see how far we can go in stopping adversarial prompts.