> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
MSFT was pretty arms length for the first 5-6 years. I was honestly kind of impressed and it made my opinion of MSFT better. But then AI made it too attractive of a target and MSFT couldn't help but make it a place the former CEO wanted to leave (and it has been running headless for about a year now).
It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.
Sure, it could be incompetence. It could also be an intentional strategy to tie up CISA/DHS resources, poison or obstruct CISA/DHS investigations/operations, open up systems to sunlight and journalism, or cause general chaos.
The not-responding-when-notified part makes me think it's not just incompetence.
>The not-responding-when-notified part makes me think it's not just incompetence.
Strong disagree. The person in question probably thought it was a private repo on Github and had a massive deer in headlights reaction when they got contacted. Whoever this is, lost their job, possibly security clearance and more. This was 100% life altering "mistake"/gross incompetence decision they made.
the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories.
That doesn't support the theory that it was a mistake. That was intentional action. Maybe he was being blackmailed, and was coerced to do it. Or maybe he was a foreign agent or sympathizer who had infiltrated the organization.
There has been no indication if this was personally owned GitHub or Organizational owned GitHub. If it's personally owned, it still is one person doing massive dumb. Even if it's Organizational, it's very possible that person in question had rights to do this without oversight.
I've been a government contractor before, it does not employ best and brightest, it employs the average and below generally.
Maybe. I didn't see enough in the article about the repo owner/committer to make any inference about their intentions and wouldn't jump to conclude it was incompetence or malice or crafty leaking. The only real signal I saw was that the repo didn't immediately turn private when the person was notified.
For some people, yeah, this could be a career killer. For some other people, it might just precipitate a flight back to Moscow or Beijing or something.
Cars are also lethal weapons and around 1 out of every ~83 deaths in the US is a traffic death (~38k traffic deaths/yr, ~3M total deaths/yr). It's good to keep track of cars given how dangerous they are.
There was a way that the statute of limitations hadn't run out as the clock started when Elon became aware of OpenAI's shift to for-profit ambitions. That made it more subjective of a judgement than simply reading a calendar, so it went to a jury to determine when Elon knew OpenAI started planning to change structure to be for-profit, then they could look at a calendar.
It's clearly not the MO that capable engineers want, but it's the MO that is getting funded right now.
Reading code carefully is harder than writing code unless the code is written consistently and clearly in a way that is idiomatic to the reader. And there's way more code to review now, but companies aren't scaling up the number of skilled engineers on staff. So in practice, never reading all of the diffs is the MO that will be built into code we depend on.
> It's clearly not the MO that capable engineers want, but it's the MO that is getting funded right now.
Quite a few capable engineers really are that short-sighted!
The bigger question for the AI-techbro questioning "If AI writes your code, why use Python?" is "If AI writes your code, what use do we have for you?"
After all, there's dozens of people in the same business that have better domain knowledge but are unable to program - as a programmer the only value you added over random analysts and clerks was that you could automate shit.
Now you can't, so good luck competing with people who were already making half your salary when your largest value-prop is now gone.
> Enjoy this while it lasts, because very shortly LLMs are going to be fundamentally better at being the "idea guy" as well.
Maybe for the ideas that are so far from novel that there's a corpus of training data that could train an LLM to reproduce it. But for actually novel ideas, LLMs won't ever be much use. They can't interact with the world directly, they can only interact with text (or I guess bits).
And I guess that's not much of a distinction, as truly novel good ideas are very rare and you can go very far applying a good idea into a new domain. But at the edges where true novelty is required, LLMs will either hallucinate or guide you away from the edge.
Offloading cognition is what one does when they use abstractions that other people made through intense cognition. And it's fine to do that; people can build great things with great abstractions. A woodworker doesn't have to design and construct a tool to make great things with it.
But developing the people [who can build great new abstractions or the people who can build those abstractions into ergonomic tooling] involves a lot of cognitive struggle through which these people learn how to push knowledge forward.
Forming the mental models for how things work takes struggle. Debugging errors in your code forces you to figure out the disconnect between your mental model and reality.
Claude can figure out most errors I show to it much faster than I can, but when we're building something I could build from scratch, I regularly find even Opus 4.7 regularly provides vastly overcomplicated and inferior solutions and I have to redirect it. I assume this is also the case when we're building stuff that's new to me and I just can't recognize all of the overcomplicated suboptimal solutions until I get to testing the behaviors I need to be correct. If I got a tool like this at the start of my career or education, I just don't know how I wouldn't end up completely stunted.
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
reply