I passed on an invitation to tender a number of years ago because there was no way to meet the minority / women quota that was tied to it. The big players use pass through front companies which isn’t feasible for me as I’m a solo operator.
The Netgear thing is more egregious but the quotas are more pervasive. I would like to be rid of both.
The funding was tied to women and minorities only, so no veteran option. Also I would have had to get certified for that specific location which involves a third party that comes in and interviews the women / minorities to make sure they have actual positions of power and were not just figureheads. They had a scale down option so they could opt for a very small purchase that would actually be smaller than the audit cost let alone the cost of passing such an audit.
How do you think we got the grifting government? It is because people were upset with what the democrats were doing. Maybe if they stopped doing that they wouldn’t have lost. They’ve failed to lean and since Trump is so bad they still won’t need to learn and will continue their mistakes and keep losing.
The looting stage of collapse, people tend to think someone will come and save things but so long as there is more money in decline the leaders will do that instead.
> we started hating ourselves and pitted one another against one another, whether that’s by class, race, or gender
> stop some dumb ass gas station beaver and a bunch of MAGA folks and furries
I'm not all that supportive of Buc-ees or furries and definitely not of MAGA, but good job continuing the hate and pitting against each other. Do you think hate is okay if it's not based on class, race, or gender?
> dumb ass gas station beaver and a bunch of MAGA folks and furries
How on earth are those three things supposed to be equivalent? One is a gas station chain with an animal as part of its logo, which is uh, a normal thing? Are we against gas stations in general or animals used for branding or what?
Another is a group of people who like to dress up and/or pretend to be animals with their friends, the worst thing you can say about that is it's unusual.
The third thing is a bunch of death cultists who are scared of everything and willing to worship a dictator.
This is some hardcore false equivalence.
> because we started hating ourselves and pitted one another against one another, whether that’s by class, race, or gender
started? Were you raised in some kind of cave that prevented access to recorded human history? We've been hating each other for all sorts of reasons for quite longer than we have written records.
And it's funny, this kind of argument is usually made by people who are mad that injustices are being pointed out.
Well I didn’t say they were equally stupid, I just said all of those cultural trends were stupid.
People can do what they want, but if you’re going to have a conversation about the collapse of a country, well people who get excited about a gas station and drive an hour away to fill up on gas - yep it’s just a gas station - are part of the reason for that decline.
> tarted? Were you raised in some kind of cave that prevented access to recorded human history?
I don’t think Americans have hated each other or been this divided in quite some time. I don’t even think Americans hated each this much during the Civil War. You’re missing the context of the conversation here. Of course people have always had conflict, but the nature and intensity of that conflict can vary.
I know there is a personal responsibility / call to action in there but I think it elides both how politics work and how people work. Politics is run by cynical operatives skilled in mass manipulation and people generally believe what they’re told to believe. Encouraging people to tilt at windmills is one of the ways to undermine effective opposition. Pitting them against each other is another way. I think actual effective opposition is localism / a general devolution of power.
It’s all moot anyway because AI is already smart enough to upend the economy / social order. A productivity boom without a consumption boom will kill margins across the board.
I’m aligned with your critique, and especially aligned with a focus on local efforts. The more local the better has generally been a good guiding principle for democracies.
> Politics is run by cynical operatives skilled in mass manipulation and people generally believe what they’re told to believe.
I agree with you in the effect - people for whatever reason just believe what they’re told to believe, but I disagree with the hint of “can’t do anything about it” that underlies your writing here. If that’s not your intent - my mistake.
A big part of undermining opposition is to encourage your opposition to operate in ways that are ineffective. Regardless of who won the 2024 we would have gotten the war with Iran, the US has a long history of electing peace candidates and getting war. We live in a managed democracy, part of that management is ensuring the opposition are grifters, Trump was not viable for 2024 until democrats came after him legally, I am confident the decision makers there knew that going after him would make him more popular. They would rather have run against Trump a third time than against a likely more effective candidate like Ron DeSantos.
There are things people can do, I left the US for a small country where politics are so boring I don’t even know who the president is and don’t care to.
While quasi regulated they just raise the bar of expertise required. Poisons, bioweapons, and explosives are pretty easy to make at scale without using suspicious inputs.
At the moment the 3D printing crowd are pretty savvy I’m sure many could hook up a new controller or flash their existing one.
My teachers, prior to AI, encouraged the 'equivocating waffle' essay. These essays met word count and touched on the topics but failed to say anything interesting. Basically how ChatGPT writes, and I've as mentioned previously (https://qht.co/item?id=40646682), I am very happy that AI can do these essays so well that we're going to be forced to actually think in order to differentiate ourselves.
The teacher doesnt read, they skim, and they already know who deserves As or Ds.
I was a victim of this. I was a general A or B student, but I thought the funny kids (D students) were funny and hung out with them. I got stereotype graded. My last paper of the year I completely gave up, the least effort ever. Teacher gave me an A and said 'You improved so much!'
Back in the early dial-up era, when teachers were not tech-savvy, I went online and found a paper exactly matching what I was tasked to write about for a homework assignment. And I regrettably submitted it as-is with no changes. I guess I knew it was cheating, but I likely also thought I was being incredibly clever as I had not heard of anyone ever doing that before. However, another student in the class submitted the same exact paper. I received an A and he received a C.
The teacher likely didn't know that he used to be my best friend growing up, and at some point was more knowledgable with computers than me. He introduced me to things like IRC. But he became one of the most popular kids at school and started distancing himself from me.
After getting our papers back, he came over to brag about how he found his paper online and that's how we discovered we submitted the same exact essay. At that point in time, I thought the teacher must have assumed he copied from me. But I think your explanation is likely more plausible. I guess the teacher just skimmed the papers and graded based on our expected grade.
I have a friend who dealt with this in highschool. The English teacher just copied whatever their grade was from their first assignment onto all other assignments.
It got so bad that his Dad, who was an active English and Spanish teacher at another school, was convinced to write one of his papers for him. He got a D.
I could imagine, I guess that would be a side effect of large class sizes.
An optimization when I was a student was to find out what the teacher thinks and re-affirm those beliefs with a few twists to give an appearance of depth. On occasion, for fun, I would take a dissenting position and I was always punished for it.
I think the entire education system is steeped in orthodoxy such that it's not in its interest to properly teach critical thinking, failing to do so is an emergent behavior / happy accident. There would have to be an environment that would reward students for actual critical thinking and not apparent critical thinking (agreeing with the teacher) and I don't know how to create one, and I especially don't know how to reform the current system.
I still get a bit of a kick out of the idea that the often proposed solution to the mass academic plagiarism, following the replication crisis, is a mass amnesty - which strangely seems to have tacitly occurred as it's no longer even being discussed.
You failed to establish the link between giving up and getting bad grades from hanging out with the funny kids and how any of that is even remotely caused by stereotyping.
Even through college I've found that it's hard to optimize for grades vs learning. I've had teachers spite me for disagreeing with them.
Then I developed a formula that essentially went, "While {common sense assertion is true}, we need to consider the nuanced implications of {regurgitated pros/cons}." Combined with the smooth fluff and flow from using speech recognition with minimal edits, suddenly the A's started rolling in. I later found this of course works wonderfully with standardized testing essays in the GRE and GMAT.
Edit: I realize now why I get (even if I don't fully agree with) the 'stochastic parrot' dismissal of language transformer models, I basically lived it.
This is my experience as well. I remember one day completely zoning out and writing pages of drivel "defining what it means to be a X" or whatever. Got an A+. After that I realized professors didn't care about my original thoughts or ideas, but rather the appearance that I was thinking through the prompt deeply.
I would suggest that’s an availability bias, those who do it for free are more likely to blog about it.
There is a common distinction between professional and amateur with the former getting paid for their work. In general there is an understanding that someone getting paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better than someone who does it as a hobby.
Perhaps coding is an unusual space where the best coders are often misfits who have a hard time holding down a job.
> In general there is an understanding that someone getting paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better than someone who does it as a hobby.
For something like flying airplanes, I think this is obviously true: nobody can afford to spend the required hours doing it unless somebody else is paying for the airplane, and the only way that happens is if that person is your employer. A lot of things are like that.
But programming is very different, it requires almost no resources to practice except your time. You can sit at home in your pajamas with $1K worth of hardware and keep yourself busy for a lifetime through open source. Of course, you can also spend a lifetime building useless sandcastles while telling yourself you're a genius: you have to find ways to hold yourself accountable to grow.
I've been fortunate to get paid to work on some interesting things... but the work I do for fun is, on average, ~100x more challenging and interesting than the work I'm paid to do. I would be a much much less capable programmer if I'd only done work I was paid to do for the past decade.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "amateurs are better than professionals", but I think the skill level of the two groups is much more blurred in programming than in most other things.
Your example is obviously false; there are 500K GA pilots in the US alone varying from
my friend who had a Cessna 172
and flew it regularly (until joining CAP) to John Travolta flying his own 737.
And how would John Travolta at roughly 5K lifetime hours compare to the best of the comercial pilots at 1K hours per year? Also John Travolta has a commercial licence and has been paid to fly.
This argument seems absurd to me.
I get that in software quite often time is wasted by poor management that otherwise would not be wasted if working unpaid. Well managed research orgs can work at elite levels but they are few and far between.
Airline pilots rack up a lot of hours but get very little "stick time", and what they do get is extremely sedate flying to not scare the passengers / spill their drinks. Their primary skills are pushing buttons on the autopilot and talking in the radio and transcribing clearances.
A military pilot gets more effective stick time. But aerobatic pilots, ag pilots (but I repeat myself), and glider pilots gain a LOT more experience and skill per hour flown than an airline pilot.
I was working with the example given which was weak on two points, John Travolta gets paid and while his hours are impressive they nowhere near full time professional hours.
Military pilots are also professionals, and of the glider pilots how many of the best are trainers. Ag pilots are professionals, as are helicopter mustering pilots who are incredibly skilled. The majority of acrobatic pilots are also professional pilots. I’m not suggesting that great amateurs don’t exist just that a great amateur who has gone pro can often beat one that hasn’t.
I understand the sentiment, on one hand if I was rich I would be able to devote my time into constant improvement, but then maybe I wouldn’t have the same drive to succeed as having my livelihood dependent on the outcome. There is institutional knowledge gained by working in a research org that would be hard to replicate as an independent scientist.
I've been a gliding instructor, sometimes doing up to ten flights a day, all summer (e.g. when I was unemployed for a time). In the NZ/Aus/UK style clubs you don't get paid for it, but then it doesn't cost you anything either.
I have a pilot's license, that's why I choose that example. What I'm saying is that I cannot possibly fly enough for fun in my remaining life to have comparable skill to a professional pilot who flys full time for the military or for an airline.
Somebody wealthy enough can afford to just pay to fly that much, I guess, but that's so few people it's not even worth mentioning as a possibility.
should i repeat my comment and link the free document i doubt you read, again? modern software infrastructure runs on "folks that do it for the pleasure"
I've been playing with this for the last few days. The model is fast, pretty smart, and I am hitting the same tool use issues. This blog post is unusually pertinent. The model speed isn't an issue on my dual 4090s, the productivity is mainly limited by the intelligence (while high it's still not high enough for some tasks) and getting stuck in loops.
What I would like is for it to be able detect when these things happen and to "Phone a Friend" to a smarter model to ask for advice.
I'm definitely moving into agent orchestration territory where I'll have an number of agents constantly running and working on things as I am not the bottleneck. I'll have a mix of on-prem and AI providers.
My role now is less coder and more designer / manager / architect as agents readily go off in tangents and mess that they're not smart enough to get out of.
Google has replaced chat_template.jinja and tokenizer_config.json a few days ago in gemma-4-31B-it, which is supposed to have solved some problems related to tool invocation.
So if you have not updated your model, you should do it.
It seems like general improvements in ram efficiency, such as that used in Gemma 4, means it’s back to memory bandwidth as the bottleneck and less about total available memory size. I’m also curious to see how much more agent autonomy will reduce less need for low latency and shift the focus to more throughput. Meaning it’s easier to spread the model out over multiple smaller GPUs and use pipeline parallelism to keep them busy. This would also mean using ram for market discrimination becomes less effective.
I think it was more the violent people were hung, or ostracized to die in the wilderness. Animals likely have similar genetic pressures as some animals have evolved ways to determine who’s the strongest with contests instead of the more deadly violence that they care capable of.
Whose intent? POSWID Is about structural incentives not personal intent, and these can be, and likely are, an emergent behavior. It’s about reframing away from intents, treating the system as a structure and removing the whole structure for replacement. As opposed to localized reforms which are exposed to the same prior emergent behaviors leading to constant backsliding.
The Netgear thing is more egregious but the quotas are more pervasive. I would like to be rid of both.
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