This is likely the start to a useful approach. I suspect the crux of the challenge is that engineers who need to write code get very pedantic in their questions and picking the answers apart (because we need to be! code leaves no room for ambiguity or intuition). And you can imagine how that feels from the other side. I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate. A natural response will be to try to dictate what to build (often micromanaging) and avoid the discussion about why at all costs. Writing offers a bit of a neutralizing buffer, at least.
> I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate.
Wow, that's describing it really well. I work for a guy who basically started a company by trying to vibe code his ideas into existence (late 2023 LLMs) and realized he would need actual developers to get anywhere.
It was excruciating trying to make him answer questions to get proper domain modelling going since LLM use had made him think of software as being wished into existence in a "declarative" way.
Not to mention the heavy contrast my persistent questioning had to a background of sycophantic yes-man claudespeak.
I was really wondering what these replies were talking about until this one - when I remembered a guy I used to work for that was just like this.
I think I have been pretty lucky the last 5-6 years of my career at least, where someone asking those questions is treated as trying to drive the team to a better result, rather than a pedant.
Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
You can request a ride via Uber. They aren't building the tech. I find it a bit unclear who is operating the fleet (Uber or Wayve), but that seems irrelevant when the question is whether the vehicles' autonomous technology is safe.
I had an LLM reverse engineer the API protocol of LADBS and extract the content I wanted. Wether that scales from one property to many (rate limits for one) I don't know, but I didn't encounter anything in the thousands I extracted.
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
That's exactly the point though: if you are choosing to platform some and not others, and some (many? most?) of the groups you are choosing to platform are violent groups, you very quickly run out of plausible deniability.
It was both. 90% of people never needed nor purchased a bleeding-edge computer. The mid-tier was "good enough" and far closer to affordable for most people; though, that bar also moved upward every year.
If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.
if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less
This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?
My first PC 386 was in todays money easily $5000+ (basic 2d GPU + screen)... A lot of hardware in our family was handed down to my folks, because you lost so much on selling, that it was better to keep using them as they had less demands.
386 to 486 to the first Pentium (with the bug!)... You did not upgrade in place, it was often a new system. Sure, you maybe kept your screen, keyboard etc but ... The only upgrade we had on the same MB, was a coprocessor upgrade. Remember those? Each new generation of CPU was a new motherboard. Upgrading CPUs in the same MB really became a thing only later on.
GPUs had a shelf life of barely a year. Its been 35 year but i remember TNT to TNT2 having like 9 month in between. Moving from 2D to 3D involved a constant cost as GPUs evolved fast and the latest games required latest hardware.
We have not talked about the ISA, AGP, and PCI fun ... The “bus wars”.
DOS to Windows 3.1 (and OS/2 somewhere in between) to 95 ... with software being pushing hardware, just like games did.
This is why people are spoiled with cheap PC hardware where its cheap, and easily lasts 4+ years. Even with the bad memory price and more expensive GPUs, your can stil buy a $1500 system that will last you years (with maybe some lower game settings later on ... or the catalog of 10.000s games that will easily run on a mid tier GPU).
PC hardware has become boring but extreme stable. You can run GPUs for year, switch MBs without issues while keeping large amounts of old hardware. That was NOT the 80s and 90s that i remember.
Really depended when you bought them .. 386 is like the point where people really started to buy PCs. My 386 was more to the end period, so the jump to 486 was very short. Do not forget there was a ton of 386's and 486s released also. I remember the SX, DX, ... the coprocessor that you plugged into the socket and then the CPU into it.
The problem is that your too focused on the CPU only. There was GPU improvements (2d) then 3D, the constant improvements in sound cards. Printers ...
There was very strong depreciation in that time. I think that the poster before with his $10.000 > 1000 is somewhat exaggerating but like i said, my $5000 range system was not worth reselling. So did several other systems we acquired at the time, it simply became hand-me downs (for family who needed a PC for Lotus or WP but not a "advanced" PC).
Maybe my memory is off, but hardware in that time was way more expensive, then it is today. While todays hardware lasts WAY longer. The wife is still on a 8250u/8GB laptop, from like 8 years or so, and i can not pry it out of her hands. Needed a new battery lol ...
There really is rarely pressure to upgrade these days. That is not how i remember the 90's... Where upgrades tended to have much bigger impacts. Especially as gamers. But even on side equipment like CD players, CDRs and later DVDs.
Todays PCs is like ... raytracing, no interest. 4k? 1440p is perfectly fine. CPUs? Over powerful for most folks. The only new thing is AI and that is a totally different issue.
tbh this is how i remembered that time as well. If you look at recommended system requirements for something like Max Payne (in 2001) vs Unreal Tournament 2003, everything had basically doubled
Most likely a SaaS app that auto-saves, but didn’t save properly. Then closing the laptop caused a network disconnect, and the in-browser app did not recover gracefully while awaiting reconnect on wake-up and lost all unsaved data.
This would have been unbelievable to me before this year. Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.
I'm sorry your dad is facing this disease. Hopefully he can find something that helps slow it. I don't know what the side-effects are that he could be facing but, as someone who lost a parent to alzheimers, let me say that anything is probably preferable to advanced-stage dementia. I hope to see real, reliable treatments in my lifetime.
Thanks for the info on this. Hmmm, maybe Leqembi isn’t such a bad option.
And, would be very surprised if none of the drugs in clinical trials panned out in the next five or six year. It seems like they’re on the verge of making a major breakthrough. Here’s hoping:)
Stripe is positioning themselves as one of the leading adopters of AI internally. I don't know of public stats but I estimate they're spending on the order of $millions per week on tokens. I assume they've adopted Openrouter and the majority of that spend is going via Openrouter. So they understand the product value, they understand the current gaps, and there's also a threat mitigation. They've likely become very dependent on Openrouter and someone is going to buy it - so they may as well negate the risk to that. (Threat mitigation alone is not worth $7B but it justifies a certain premium.)
They also have very complementary problems and skills. The long-term roadmap for routers is auto-routing; that is, turning traffic into signals into automated decisions. Stripe has a lot of overlapping talent and experience from fraud-detection and likely other products.
Follow-up: Somehow in all that I forgot the most obvious pairing. Stripe wants to solve how agents pay for things. They’ve been quite open about this. Seems obvious that any solution to that is going to be through the model platform layer - so they just bought a major platform layer.
reply