There are many branch prediction algorithms out there. They range from fun architecture papers that try to use machine learning to static predictors that don’t even adapt to the prior outcomes at all.
We've also seen it go wrong plenty of times. They can do them and we can do us I figure; I'm quite happy with my gun rights thanks.
There are highly developed countries that tightly regulate speech and network access relative to most of the west. Does that mean adopting an ID requirement to post on Twitter coupled with anti hate speech laws would be an obviously good thing?
It was an arbitrary example. Try to see past the politically charged topic to the actual analogy that I'm attempting to make.
The point of my original reply wasn't about the position being expressed but rather the stated reasoning. If your logic amounts to "Y could solve X therefore we should be doing Y" notice that when applied to other things that line of reasoning doesn't seem to hold up very well.
If you want to have a discussion about child mortality versus tail risks such as elections being suspended or the government murdering protesters a la Iran that's fine but please realize that wasn't the point of my earlier reply.
Most importantly, Australia removed "self-defence" as a reason to own firearms. You have to be a farmer, hunter, or belong to a shooting club.
While the number of guns increased, the number of gun owners dropped. And the new regulations enacted this year drop the number of guns one can own even more.
There was a near-total ban on "military style" guns. See how the terrorists at the massacre last year were limited by the type of guns they had access to, only managing to kill 15 despite having all the time in the world. An Ar-15 or similar weapon could have been used to slaughter that 15 in under 15 seconds.
In the sense that there are more private registered guns than ever before in Australia, sure.
> Most importantly, Australia removed "self-defence" as a reason to own firearms.
More importantly, it unified gun laws - before the Port Arthur shooting, Queensland, Tasmania, the Northern Territory, probably the Australian Capital Territory were all unregulated.
Unregulated states with no border control effectively made the entire Federation of States unregulated.
Regulated states, at least the ones that I lived in prior to Port Arthur, didn't have "self defence" as a reason for owning gun - it was always about hunting, feral control, specific security (regularly carrying money) etc.
The last I checked, the emphasis was more on where you intended to use / carry a gun; shooting club (common), carry for security in street (rare), rural (property owner or have letter of authority to shoot from a property owner).
> There was a near-total ban on "military style" guns.
Sure .. they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines is pig shooting, maybe camel control, and rat shooting.
Rats can be shot with professional BB guns .. a better choice when shooting in sheds, silos, etc - no spark or risk of punching holes in tin walls.
If you're pig shooting in bulk, that's a contract shooting licence.
> they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines ...
Did the Australian ban of "military style" rifles include a blanket clause that covers all semi-automatic fire? Or is it an almost entirely aesthetic category as it tends to be whenever such measures are proposed in the US?
When it comes to automatic fire there's a rather famous US case where someone was ultimately convicted for possessing a shoelace (IIRC) attached to some fastening hardware. As to larger magazines, those probably don't even meet the bar for an introductory level highschool shop project.
From what I understand most semi-auto guns are banned in Australia, but of course they never had a ton of those to start with. But there are still plenty of pump action, lever action, bolt action, etc guns which aren't meaningfully less capable. Shooting twice as fast doesn't mean you can kill twice as fast because you can't aim twice as fast. Like the majority of guns Afgan insurgents had were 60 year old bolt-actions which were quite obviously still capable enough to be deadly even to the top military in the world.
Extrapolating from experience in the USofA to other countries in the world is generally not a good move.
The actual numbers, from the time, suggest maybe 10-15% of guns in Australia were "self loading"
( 20% of guns purchased back, not all were semi-automatic, a good many were old unwanted guns that now faced a registration fee if kept )
From a US academic type study that looked at the Australian (and other) gun buyback scheme post Port Arthur.
Between 1996 and 1997,643,726 prohibited firearms were handed in.
Prices were set to reflect "fair value" (market value). Individuals with permits could also turn in firearms that they had failed to register.
Total public expenditures were about $A320 million ($U.S. 230 million33), approximately $A500 ($U.S. 359) per gun. The buyback program was financed by an additional 0.2 percent levy on national health insurance.
Estimates of the total stock of guns were few and drew on limited survey data.
Estimates ranged as high as 11 million, but the high figures had no known provenance. Gun Control Australia cited a figure of about 4.25 million, building on the only academic estimate, then roughly twenty years old.
The most targeted population survey of gun ownership was conducted by Newspoll; the resulting estimate was approximately 2.5 million firearms in 1997, after the gun buyback.
If that is approximately correct, it suggests that there were about 3.2 million firearms in 1996 and that the buyback led to the removal of approximately 20 percent of the total stock.
In U.S. terms that would be equivalent to the removal of 40 million firearms
> We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.
Good for them. As an American, I'm quite happy with our Second Amendment rights, I'm not looking to roll that back in the slightest. And if anything, with the recent rise of the fascist authoritarian regime that we've seen, I'd think that maybe a whole lot of "anti gun" people here would be well on their way to becoming "formerly anti gun" people.
All my life I've heard that an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government. Now that we have creeping authoritarians running the country, where are all of those "second amendment solution" people? What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?
Recall that this authoritarian won the popular vote ~18 months ago.
The protection is against a minority authoritarian government. If half the populace supports the guy in charge then taking up arms is effectively a declaration of civil war. That's a case of the cure being worse than the affliction.
Fast forward a year or so, suppose popularity has hit single or low double digits, imagine a blatant attempt at subverting the election process, that's where an armed populace comes in.
Look, I could pick up a rifle tomorrow, and march on DC by myself with the intention of toppling the fascist regime. And what would result? I'd be quickly arrested or killed and nothing would change. So what's the point?
But if I was part of a group of 1,000,000 like-minded people, then I might still be arrested or killed, but at least there's a much higher likelihood that some actual change would take place.
Now, as a lifelong believer in the "an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government" mindset myself, I have to say, I am extremely disappointed in a lot of people right now. People that I grew up with, that I've always trusted, respected, and maybe even admired. Because while fascism metastasizes and spreads through our country nearly completely unchecked, they all seem unwilling to even speak up against what's going on. And I can't defend their choices, but I can say that I still believe that there is a tipping point, some event, or sequence of events, that would kick things into into gear if needed[1].
[1]: I say "if needed" because it's not 100% clear to me that the only possible way out of this mess is an armed uprising. We might still be able to "vote our way out of this" and the optimistic take is that many Americans are sitting on their hands as long as they hold a shred of hope that that is still possible.
The more pessimistic take is that a majority of the "second amendment to protect us from authoritarianism" crowd are hypocritical ass-clowns, who are actually OK with authoritarianism as long as "their guy" is the one in power. :-(
But you won't get that critical mass without a spark.
People need to see action and see it work without repercussions to the actor.
People will take notice when someone like Thiel, Bannon, or Miller are taken down with a drone and the drone operator escapes arrest.
They'll think to themselves "Wait a minute, if someone can take out a billionaire I can take out that cop who raped my cousin and got a paid vacation as punishment for it."
What comes after that is anybody's guess but I predict an impending moment where individual citizens realize that they're not as helpless as they have been lead to believe and that technology can help them eliminate long-standing criminals operating in positions of power with immunity in theiry local communities.
As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime. What scenarios relating to authoritarian regimes (be specific) do you find having a gun at home would help with?
> As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime.
See my reply above. But loosely speaking, you are correct when looking at things from a purely individual point of view. No one of us is going to topple an authoritarian regime by ourselves. But I don't think that was ever the point. It's an assemblage of large numbers of like-minded armed individuals who can effect change.
And just to be clear... I'm a peaceful person at heart (but not a pacifist). I don't want blood-shed, and I don't want to see an armed uprising or a civil war on many levels. But I'd at least like to see many of my fellow #2A advocates being more vocal and visible about stating our displeasure with the current environment, and our willingness in principle to take action if/when it becomes clear that it is necessary. That, ideally, in and of itself reduces the need for actual violence, by acting as a strong deterrent.
Aside from the obvious (being ready and able to form an armed resistance) there's the deterrent. When you know that your populace has certain options available to them that will inform your actions.
I’m not usually one to complain about AI being used to generate content because I find this an especially interesting topic, but it really took me out of it.
More relevant to the topic at hand, I feel like I didn’t put that much thought into designing my interview questions, but I’m always astounded when I read these sorts of descriptions of other interview questions. There should perhaps be some formal training or certification or something for asking good engineering interview questions.
There was one person on this site who looked down at candidates (for a normal software development job) who didn't answer his interview question well. And by well, I don't mean being curious and working it out on the fly, I mean that if the candidate didn't know the answer of the top off their head, the HN commenter deemed them uncurious and unsuitable. The question?
Interview questions get absurd when people are gatekeeping for various reasons.
People steal/phish resumes off sites all the time, and it is really hard to remain polite while listening to someone lie. I've met 300lb round cons that claim they regularly climb broadcast towers =3
> If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero
I think, then that the value of all knowledge work will have dropped to zero. Software engineering is, to my mind, “intelligence complete.” If you can do it with knowledge work, you can have software do it.
That’s not the point of nor the reason for knowledge work.
The fundamental mechanism of knowledge work is people. They haven’t changed at all. And what they need to understand and learn hasn’t changed. All the agents in the world and all of the methane guzzling data centres can’t tell you what to write in the specification nor if what the computer has generated faithfully implements that specification.
Yep. Most knowledge work is about coordination between people and transporting the right information to the people that are thinking and the people that are doing (not always separate groups, but can be one group switching mode). You need people because there's a lot of shared context between individuals in society that is not encoded anywhere.
A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn’t write functional code. A few months ago people started saying they need to be operated by people who could otherwise write the code.
It sounds like we’re headed towards… the guy in Office Space who took specifications from the customer via a secretary and gave those to the engineers (and we know what happened to him).
But I’m not sure that’s a thing, at least for long, either. The original super power of these things wasn’t that they could write code. It was that they could very competently extract meaning from natural language, debug what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate competent answers.
That doesn’t sound like a comfortable place for former devs to sit for the next few years.
> A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn’t write functional code
Even ChatGPT could write code when it came out.
> It was that they could very competently extract meaning from natural language, debug what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate competent answers
“Competent” is doing a lot of work here. If it were so, AI woul take change requests directly from the business side and put the implementation immediately in production. But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda to get devs to adopt the tool with no asking if it actually helps the devs do their job.
>But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda to get devs to adopt the tool with no asking if it actually helps the devs do their job.
If (big if) LLMs/AI take over all of knowledge work the first thing you'll notice is that the first company getting to the point of automating all knowledge work will close off their models to the public, not advertise it, and take over every business on the planet.
You wouldn't waste a dime on advertising, influencers, or convincing people to use your product.
Taking over every business in the world seems more lucrative than selling $20 subscriptions to people.
There's not going to be a single point at which that happens.
More likely what we will see (if this happens) is AI companies entering close partnerships with other businesses, building up their models ability to do that sort of work, then either acquiring their partner or directly competing with them.
Similar to how Apple monitors developers having success on their platform and then launches a first-party offering.
This might be happening, too, however B2C advertising and heavy astroturfing is a sure sign that they don't even think they're close to this goal.
The average consumer pays the least for subscriptions and asks most uninteresting questions to the AI in terms of gaining insight. The only goal here can be upholding the narrative that everything will be AI soon™.
I have an idea for an “evidence editor.” Claude is waiting for me to tell it exactly what I want this thing to be. But I don’t know. I haven’t figured out how to square the various circles, even in my fantasies. Until I do, Claude sits and waits. And waits…
Yes, exactly. In the realpolitik of organizational IT security, there's less of an emphasis on making systems more resilient to attack, much more of an emphasis on having an audit trail, so that in case the company is sued over a data breach they can claim "we did the very best that could be reasonably expected of us with the knowledge we had at the time" and provide receipts to back up that claim. Implicit in that claim is also "we used the same tools that everyone else is using so you can't blame us specially for unwittingly choosing something vulnerable to compromise". Hence the proliferation of shitty single-point-of-failure "endpoint security" software that leads to events like the 2024 Clownstrike incident.
> Nuclear weapons are a MAD red line that will result in total annihilation of the attacker. They are only useful in a defensive capacity.
Also in a "if I'm going down, everyone else is going down with me", which is Ian's strategy in this war (for good reasons). If the IRGC had nukes, and was severely threatened (like, killing the Supreme Leader and threatening to kill all of the replacements until they bend to the US/Israel will), they might have decided to go out "with style".
Yes, but the whole point of having nukes as a deterrent is that the US wouldn't have arbitrarily killed their leader in the first place. "If i'm going down, everyone else is going down" is the feature, not a bug.
To be clear I don't like the idea of MAD one bit. But this is indeed how it's meant to work.
Nothing geopolitical about it in the sense I intended, except as a reference to the Vietnam-era catchphrase. It's simply a case of "putting spyware on everybody's corporate PC for security is like fucking for virginity".
I think it’s possible they already have nukes and want to wait for Israel to over extend themselves so that they can use them for a first strike with maximum efficacy. They’ve done a lot for Russia. The idea that they don’t have nuclear armament is somewhat hard for me to believe.
I was thinking about this in recent weeks and I think I’ve actually changed my mind on it.
It’s not really possible to measure how much it would cost to not have a meeting, and I think it’s pretty obvious that if there were no meetings ever, it would hurt a company a lot
Yeah, I agree it's a silly metric. But it's kinda also a good reminder that meetings do have a cost associated with them, so they should stay short, focused, and held only when necessary.
"This could have been an e-mail" should never need to be said.
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