I'm not from the UK, but the soft power of BBC Radio 4 in the late 90s and early 2000s (the Real Player era) made the UK seem like an advanced nation to my young and intellectually curious self. If lived in the UK at the time, I'd have been immensely proud of the quality of the programming.
Am I missing something, but given that it flows through Anthropic’s servers I would have thought the US would just have used it to Hoover up the data of foreign users? Now overseas users have an incentive to use local models or those hosted elsewhere?
Don’t legally serious second Amendment supporters regard “arms” as things that can be carried, and are evolved from/analogous to their 18th century hand-carried guns?
It would be hard to classify AI (or tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft) as “arms” that can be “borne” in that sense.
Something I hate about ChatGPT is that it assumes I want my text to be rewritten instead of engaging with the content.
I like my writing style. Sure it may leave some sort of linguistic fingerprint and it may not meet some LLM’s idea of what “good” looks like, but I don’t care.
What’s worrying is that the rewrite-by-default behavior is probably there because most users want it.
I can't allow LLMs write my messages in any language I'm fluent in. They just don't sound like me at all. It would feel dirty and dishonest to send that slop out.
They can be good at grammar checks, but even then I wouldn't fix quite everything, it's better to let some of my natural flaws go through.
My wife translated some text she had written in her own language to my native language, as she didn't feel she could do it.
I found grammar errors, surprising ones. I found places where pronouns were used so far into the sentence that a reader would be lost finding what that pronoun actually referred to. And more.
In the end I rewrote the LLM-generated text myself, many pages of it.
I know this is going to. be contentious, but US mainstream discourse seems to have completely eliminated the distinction between illegal and legal immigration, in the last 10 years. Everyone seems to be a "migrant".
US policy has also nearly completely eliminated the distinction, by making legal immigration close to impossible and ~arresting~ kidnapping people at courthouses who are there for their immigration hearings, then shipping them off to foreign torture camps.
It is so nearly impossible, that somewhere between a half million and a million people have done it every year for the past few decades (including last year).
I don't think that is true at all. For example, it was considered a big deal when ICE was rounding up US citizens. It caused a big drop in public trust for ICE.
Nearly half of the workforce of crop farmworkers in the US is made up of "illegal" immigrants. The US food-supply relying on those people has meant that, in practice, immigration law enforcement is deliberately selective and self-serving.
So, the idea of illegal immigration as a vice worth cracking down on and punishing has not been consistently applied by the people publicly condemning it (like this current administration), meaning there is a very real sense in which the distinction between illegal and legal immigration is not real.
"The people"? Are you sure you're not committing the common sin of conflating vocal people with most people? For example, I publicly condemn illegal immigration, regardless of which industry said immigrants are propping up, while at the same time recognizing that such industries need to be carefully extricated from reliance on illegal immigrants and also that the management of immigration and the definition of illegal immigration needs to be fixed.
Tesla’s Solar Roof uses string inverters rather than micro-inverters or power optimizers, which means that partial shading on any section of the roof can shut down production for that entire string. This is a significant design limitation that competing solar installers address with panel-level optimization technology from companies like Enphase and SolarEdge.
This seems to be overblown. I've seen plenty of string inverters around without issues, I'm not sure why this being used against Tesla in particular.
The clean linear history thing is something I never really got, despite using git for 12 years now. I worked with some smart developers whose rule was "rebase if you want, but if too complicated, just merge", and it didn't hurt the delivery or maintainability of the code they wrote.
Yes - whenever I'm in a team and I hear someone who insists on a linear history, I always wonder why they have trouble with merge when lots of folks like me have no problem with it.
Finally, in one team, I more or less forced a senior engineer use merge (or rather, I was in control of the project and did not force other developers to use rebase). After a year, he admitted that he no longer really saw a benefit in rebase and switched to just using merges in his own projects. He also noticed fewer merge conflicts this way.
Rebase makes sense when you realize git doesn't have branches. Git has tags that move but no branches. That means when you merge you have no clue which branch was the mainline and which was the fork. This is a question I often ask 10 years after switching to git. Sadly git has better tooling so it is worth using despite the issues.
> That means when you merge you have no clue which branch was the mainline and which was the fork.
You mean - when looking at the history?
Incidentally, once you get used to jujutsu, you realize that the question is meaningless. A merge is simply the child of two nodes. It's a symmetric operation between the two branches. The thing that makes it "complicated" in git and traditional VCS's is the insistence in assigning a name to the resulting merge (so if you're merging into main, you want to call the new node "main"). Since jujutsu doesn't automatically carry the name forward, you see the "reality" of merge being a symmetric operation (i.e. you don't merge a branch "into" another branch - you are simply merging two branches).
That is exactly my point. I'm not merging two branches together. I'm merging two branches with very clear different meanings together. One of them is our main line, one of them is a feature branch. Everyone talks about all you should develop in main line, and I certainly encourage that. However, often that just isn't practical in a large project for various reasons. Some of them aren't even good reasons, but nonetheless that is the reality.
For a complicated long running feature branch I can see it. Instead of repeatedly merging the root in during development it can be cleaner. Tools aren’t always good at figuring out in a PR what was written and what was caused by those merges from root. And history looks better at the end.
For a short branch that can merge cleanly or perhaps very close to it, I’d kind of rather have the ‘true’ history. I don’t think it’s worth it.
I’ve never understood the “everything must be rebased before every merge” desire.
It really depends on how often you use git bisect and blame. This varies greatly across projects.
That said, if/when stacked PRs become a first-class citizen in GitHub, more projects will see the benefit of this approach (though they'll probably mostly get there through squash-merges).
Engineering has always been about more than writing code.
That's true, but it's interesting how FizzBuzz as said to be the bete noir of the average dimwitted software developer, and how much cutting-edge engineering organizations used to emphasize code in their recruitment processes.
If writing code is being replaced by "engineering judgement" it's going to need a much smaller cohort of developers. Too many opinions spoil the broth, after all.
I suspect that the goalposts for AI-assisted coding will be moved the same way they've been moved for the Turing Test.
The Turing Test used to matter until it didn't (does anyone even talk about it? was there a big news conference when it was solved?). Likewise every time it becomes easier to ship software, the bar will be pushed higher by sceptics. Ultimately the gatekeeping is going to become meaningless as software becomes "too cheap to meter".
reply