It's funny to see Reddit posts driving HN posts. There was a viral post about a rather video friendly lady getting politely arrested for shoplifting at Target going around today.
A surprising number of people commented about how Target had made sure they got long sentences by waiting and recording them until they would get serious charges.
Target does tend to build cases, up to a certain point, so as to not waste LE time. But it’s not as much as people tend to think. If you steal a candy bar or a loaf of bread it’s just not worth it, but more? A TV? Yes.
Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
It's worth noting that the Claude Code team themselves add corrections to their CLAUDE.md file. So as long as you curate the corrections you're probably fine.
I hate to say it, but Zuckerberg is right about where online content is going. The future is just an endless feed of personalized short form AI brain candy.
AI code generation has something important in common with 3D printed houses. Both optimize the easy part.
3D printed houses can only manage the underlying structure of the house. It doesn't cover finishing work which is much harder on the nerves and pocketbook.
Likewise, AI code generation is only useful for the actual implementation. That's maybe 20% of the work. Coordination with stakeholders, architecture, etc are much harder on the nerves and pocketbook.
"While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not." Couldn't be further from the truth. Software folks are obsessed with copying what has been shown to work to the point that any advance quickly becomes a cargo cult (see microservices for example).
Once you've worked in both hardware and software engineering you quickly realize that they only superficially similar. Software is fundamentally philosophy, not physics.
Hardware is constrained by real world limitations. Software isn't except in the most extreme cases. Result is that there is not a 'right' way to do any one thing that everyone can converge on. The first airplane wing looks a whole lot like a wing made today, not because the people that designed it are "real engineers" or any such BS, but because that's what nature allows you to do.
Software doesn't operate in some magical realm outside of the physical world. It very much is constrained by real world limitations. It runs on the hardware that itself is limited. I wonder if some failures are a result of thinking it doesn't have these limitations?
As the great Joe Armstrong used to say, “a lot of systems actually break the laws of physics”[1] — don’t program against the laws of physics.
> In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden) where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? - shared state breaks laws of physics. State changes are propagated at the speed of light - we always know how things were at a remote site not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that ignores this fact you’ll be in trouble.[2]
> It very much is constrained by real world limitations. It runs on the hardware that itself is limited
And yet we scale the shit out of it, shifting limitations further and further. On that scale different problems emerge and there is no single person or even single team that could comprehend this complexity in isolation. You start to encounter problems that have never been solved before.
You can scale it within the bounds of the physical hardware it is running on. And as you scale it you start running into all the problems brought about by distributed systems, problems which very much stem from physics.
Except that it kind of does. I can horizontally scale a distributed storage system until we run out of silicon. I cannot do the same with a cargo airplane.
I'm puzzled by your reply because it starts out by refuting that software is constrained by physics "Except it kind of does" and then immediately gives an example of it being constrained by physics "until we run out of silicon".
You can horizontally scale cargo transport by running more cargo planes until you're constrained in some way.
> Software folks are obsessed with copying what has been shown to work to the point that any advance quickly becomes a cargo cult
Seems more accurate to say they are obsessed with copying "what sounds good". Software industry doesn't seem to copy what works, rather what sounds like it'd work, or what sounds cool.
If they copied what works software would just be faster by default, because very often big established tools are replaced by something that offers similar featurage, but offers it at a higher FPS.
I disagree. At least at the RTL level they're very similar. You don't really deal with physics there, except for timing (which is fairly analogous with software performance things like hard real-time constraints).
> Result is that there is not a 'right' way to do any one thing that everyone can converge on.
Are you trying to say there is in hardware? That must be why we have exactly one branch predictor design, lol
> The first airplane wing looks a whole lot like a wing made today, not because the people that designed it are "real engineers" or any such BS, but because that's what nature allows you to do.
"The first function call looks a whole lot like a function call today..."
> That must be why we have exactly one branch predictor design, lol
I'll be that 'well akshually' guy. IIRC the AMD and intel implementations are different enough that spectre/meltdown exploits were slightly different on each manufacturers.
What you and the GP said are not mutually exclusive. Software engineers are quick to drink every new Kool-Aid out there, which is exactly why we’re so damned blind to history and lessons learned before.
If you don't understand how critically violent Chicago is, especially in the number of Black people shot and murdered every week, then you have no business being engaged in this topic. Chicago is one of the most violent cities in the US.
What does that have to do with federal officers conducting immigration raids against schoolteachers and random US-citizen paralegals? Do you suggest that those people are the ones shooting and murdering Black people every week?
Well then you should have no problem proving what you are now only insisting on. This is HN, not Reddit. Where's the citation? Prove what you said or I have no reason to take you seriously.
1646 shooting victims in chicago over 40 weeks = 36 shooting victims per week. Although these are cases so there are probably multiple victims in many cases.
If you go back 10 years, there are around 34,000 cases of gunshot victims.
So what you're saying is that the rate of violence has been dropping over the last decade? And that we should ignore fed violence (against brown, white, and black people)?
The obsession with Chicago's murder rate and not the murder rate of cities like St Louis, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Indianapolis, or Little Rock is a political constructon of a right wing apparatus still hell-bent on punishing Chicago for having produced Obama.
That murder rate is gang related and extremely localized, and to boot, people in Chicago DO care about it; here are the top results for searching for "Chicago groups against gang violence" in duckduckgo:
It is just broadly untrue that nobody cares about it. This point is extremely easy to debunk if you have any desire to debunk it, but you obviously have no interest in that.
And besides, there's an ocean of a difference between interpersonal gang on gang violence and the government sending secret police to put people into concentration camps and deport them to countries where they have no affiliation based on racial profiling.
The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
> The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind.
- 74% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the Trump administration is doing the right amount to deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. Another 12% say it’s doing too little and 13% say it’s doing too much.
- Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans approve of sending additional U.S. troops to the border (88%) and increasing deportations (86%). More than six-in-ten strongly approve of these actions.
- 80% of Republicans approve of cutting federal funds to cities and states if they do not cooperate with deportations
- 72% of Republicans approve of suspending asylum applications, with 38% saying they strongly approve.
Only that first stat aligns with what you are claiming. Wanting more border / deportations is fully inline with wanting to control immigration. Likewise cutting funds to states not supporting federal law isn't fringe. And asylum applications are clearly broken.
You can want all of those things and still be against eg ice agents raiding a school. It would be more accurate if it focused exclusively on the more egregious ICE activities.
It looks like the difference in the popular vote was 2,284,967 votes towards R. Do all of those 2,284,967 voters demonstrably overlap with that 86% of the polled Republicans? If not, then claiming that a majority of Americans support every incident in the linked article based on the last election, lacks basis.
I'm not saying anything about the majority of the American population. Just that Republicans broadly support these actions. I hope we never get to the point where a majority of the overall public support this.
95% of people don't care about anything (but not always the same 95% on every issue). Revolutions are typically caused by 3% of the population outweighing the other 2%, while the 95% do nothing.
Do you not think there might be a relationship between the lack of due process and the choice of terms?
Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.
For some years now there has been a segment of the American left, particularly visible on social media, who believes that strictly enforcing immigration laws at all is bad. This predates the current guy, as well as his administration as the former guy. So, when I read an article by someone like the writer here whose online activity has other shibboleths of a left more extreme than found in mainstream parties in many other democracies, my assumption is he is coming out of this trend and the current events, as appalled as he is by them, is not the ultimate cause of his use of that loaded language.
No, my point was that in a close election that depended on a party building coalitions between heterogenous groups of voters, the people in favor of any particular action taken by the elected government may be a minority of the population, not even a slight majority.
Sure, but in a healthy society, such extreme opinions should never even be close enough to a minority large enough to be elected into power. Hopefully, anyway.
Many of these people are documented permanent residents or US citizens being grabbed without warrants, without being read rights, without charges, and without an opportunity to present documentation.
ICE are wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, abducting citizens and non-citizens alike. They are accusing citizens of assault and then releasing them without charging - a pretty good indication that they lied.
They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.
They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.
The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
In the USA, we have come to expect a certain level of formality, transparency, and adherence to due process when it comes to how law enforcement operates. Or, at least that's what we tell ourselves the standard is. Granted, we've been backsliding in this department for decades, which really started accelerating during the War On Terror. It's not new with this administration. But, we have strayed a long, long way away from the idealized "uniformed cop visibly walking the beat on the street."
The whole "masked plainclothes men jumping out of an unmarked van, dragging someone off the street into the van, and swooping away" thing is what the villains in the movies did, not the good guys.
Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.
A plurality of the people who voted went for Trump not a majority. He won 49.8% of the vote. When you include everyone who is eligible to vote he only got 31.8% of the total electorate. A large percentage of the electorate doesn't vote.
If you don't vote, you agree with the majority. Plain and simple! If you want to show your protest, go vote and explicitly vote with an invalid ballot or a third party. Don't give yourself the convenient "out" of staying home and then feeling like you're such a counterculture warrior for doing it.
> the income from selling access to the model has overcome the costs of training it.
Citation needed. This is completely untrue AFAIK. They've claimed that inference is profitable, but not that they are making a profit when training costs are included.
A surprising number of people commented about how Target had made sure they got long sentences by waiting and recording them until they would get serious charges.
reply