The status page is essentially an admission of guilt. It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.
> It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.
Is that true in this case or are you speculating? My company runs a cloud platform. Our strategy is to have outages happen as rarely as possible and to proactively offer rebates based on customer-measured downtime. I don't know why people would trust vendors that do otherwise.
I don't have any special knowledge about the companies involved in this outage. I do know most (all?) status pages for large companies have to be manually updated and not just anybody can do that. These things impact contracts, so you want to be really sure it is accurate and an actual outage (not just a monitor going off, possibly giving a false positive).
Inter alia, "is essentially", "it can", tell us this is just free-associating.
We should probably avoid punishing them based on free-associating made by a random not-anonymous not-Googler not-Xoogler account on HN. (disclaimer: xoogler)
Is this because the models improved, or the tooling around models improved (both visible and not visible to the end user).
My impression is that the base models have not improved dramatically in the last 6 months and incremental improvements in those models is becoming extremely expensive.
At the same time, we have the first really useful 1mm token context model available with reasonably good skills across the context window (Gemini Pro 2.5), and that opens up a different category of work altogether. Reasoning models got launched to the world in the last six months, another significant dimension of improvement.
TLDR: Massive, massive increase in quality for coding models. And o3 is to my mind over the line people had in mind for generally intelligent in, say, 2018 — o3 alone is a huge improvement launched in the last six months. You can now tell o3 something like: “research the X library and architect a custom extension to that library that interfaces with my weird garage door opener; after writing the architecture implement the extension in (node/python/go) and come back in 20 minutes with something that almost certainly compiles and likely largely interfaces properly, leaving touch-up work to be done.
I use LLMs every day, so I get my news from myself (I couldn't even name a Brooklyn journalist?). My experience so far is they are good for greenfield development (i.e. getting a project started), and operating within a well defined scope (e.g. please define this function in this specific place with these constraints).
What I haven't seen is any LLM model consistently being able to fully implement new features or make refactors in a large existing code base (100k+ LOC, which are the code bases that most businesses have). These code bases typically require making changes across multiple layers (front end, API, service/business logic layer, data access layer, and the associated tests, even infrastructure changes). LLMs seem to ignore the conventions of the existing code and try to do their own thing, resulting in a mess.
Def a pain point. Anecdotally Claude code and aider both can be of some help. My go to method is: dump everything in the code base into Gemini and ask for an architecture spec, then ask for implementation from aider or Claude code. This 90% works 80% of the time. Well maybe 90% of the time. Notably it can deal with cross codebase interfaces and data structures, in general, with good prompting.
Dumping it at Claude 3.7 with no instructions will 100% get random rewriting - very annoying.
I kind of thought popular runtimes would just be bundled with the browser if we could get an "official" enough source (e.g. Python Software Foundation or Google). Then users wouldn't need to download a million different versions and sources of Python for each website.
Many industries are uninvestable in their early days. How many get to the point where private funding makes sense without initial government funding for fundamental science and research? Where will we be in 15 years if the government starts pulling funding like the NSF? We might find the private money at that time is funding those future industries in other countries instead.
Seeing all the recent tariff fights and actually finding out what the story is behind some of the different industries, I am becoming much more of the opinion that other countries take over industries as the result of specific agendas targeting those industries and maintaining a large degree of monopoly over them. The US has not reacted much because each country only took one industry or so and it was a way to manipulate them or appease them or whatever, but it is turning into death by a thousand cuts. I definitely think the US government needs to be a lot more involved than they have been in a range of ways. That list of ridiculous-sounding cancelled NSF grants wasn't it though. If you're talking about the SBIR program, that is pretty tiny. I assume it will continue, it is legally set to be at 2% or whatever.
LLMs aren't the cause of mass layoffs and hiring freezes. The end of ZIRP, uncertainty in the macro and offshoring are the cause. AI is just something executives like to say recently when they do layoffs ("we'll be more efficient with cutting edge technology!").
I think there's real pressure from investors to show that some of your human costs will be going away.
After all most of those investors are deeply invested in AI technology already. At the valuation, they need to be able to show that it replaces human workers because that's the specific kind of greed that is driving the value of the stock.
And if you see your competition tighten their belt then you should tighten yours right? So without proof companies are acting like they can use a small number of human-ai hybrid workers. There's strong peer pressure to think that way as a direct result of AI
New York State just passed universal free lunch and breakfast for public school students. Of all the things that we spend our tax dollars on, this feels like a no brainer. Making sure children are fed should be at the top of the list.
Stuff like this seems like such a dividing line to me. Like, in theory when people believe things that are morally wrong, I want to reach out to them with compassion and respect and try to gently persuade them to my side because we're all, in theory, on the same side. But if you don't want kids to be fed, I really am not sure we're actually on the same side any more and I really am not sure what to do with that.
Even outside of morality it's a straightforward issue. Investments in children benefit the whole economy and society, for decades. If a person can't see that then they could be immoral but they might just be stupid.
Plenty of human beings genuinely and earnestly believe that investing in the "wrong kinds" of people would be harmful to society as a whole. This is not limited to regressives or conservatives either, with plenty of savants on tumbler and reddit reinventing eugenics "against rich people this time".
"It's not that I don't want kids fed, I would just rather that kids go hungry than feeding them with the inefficient and corrupt system that I imagined."
> And what I like about leftists is their sympathy. What I dislike is their lack of real-world knowledge
The problem is that leftists have more real life knowledge then far right, maga and Trump.
It was not leftists who voted for administrations that blow up deficits the most while complaining about deficits. It was leftists who were 100% correct about what conservatives plan and do. And it is not the left who pointificates about health and education ... while actively making them worst and actively slashing ways to measure how they are performing.
> It’s not that I don’t want kids fed. It’s that I know deep in my soul that $100 will be spent per child, with $99 extracted along the way by various politicians / consultants / unions, and $1 of disgusting food will (sometimes) be provided to a child.
If you oppose any actual steps to feed kids, then you don't want the kids fed. The rest of this is just you justifying why you don't want the kids fed.
If you want the program to feed the kids to be efficient: guess what, the left wants that too, and we're really happy to work to make that happen.
But the fact is, the right is happy to simply throw out the program and let the kids starve rather than tolerate any inefficiency. And notably, that inefficiency is often created by right-wing policies which attempt to prevent anyone perceived as not deserving aid from receiving aid.
If you vote Republican because you want the government to be more efficient, you're piling on even more bullshit. The national debt consistently increases more under Republican presidents than Democratic ones[1]--the perceived austerity of conservative government is entirely nonexistent. This problem is only worse under Trump: DOGE has made things less efficient by firing and rehiring half of the workers in government without even a basic understanding of how the programs work and or could be improved[2].
> And what I like about leftists is their sympathy. What I dislike is their lack of real-world knowledge
I'm well aware these programs are inefficient, though they're certainly not 1% efficient as in your made up numbers. It's just that I'm not willing to stop helping people because it's inefficient. I'd like to make it more efficient, but it's pretty hard to make programs more efficient when people like you are constantly trying to get rid of them and defund them.
The arguments are so facetious and facile. India has more corruption then the US and they can handle a free lunch program for all kids. Why can't America?
Because many of the people that need it the most keep voting against their own interests. Because education is terrible in all the the states that vote red.
>If you oppose any actual steps to feed kids, then you don't want the kids fed. The rest of this is just you justifying why you don't want the kids fed.
Don't be ridiculous. It won't win you any arguments.
My country (Canada) gives every parent money every month for each kid they have. It’s enough to pay for food, so there’s really no excuse to not feed the kid. We don’t have school lunches and it’s not a problem. Do you think Canadians are all ghouls?
You can want kids to be fed and fully believe that the government giving out free meal to all kids will eventually lead to kids not being feed. I can think of lots of arguments
Budgets might be cut directly, so can not feed some percent, budgets might be cut indirectly (less tax revenue). Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient. The "give a man a fish he eats for day, teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime", type of thinking. Some people might believe it encourages parents to be irresponsible. Back to budgets, it might remove money from other school needs. I guess the thinking would be, schools should teach, food is not their responsibility. If it comes their responsibility then they'll do less teaching which is back to not helping make their students able to ultimately fend for themselves but instead makes them dependent.
I'm not saying I buy those arguments but I can see them as valid arguments.
Helping directly is not always helpful. There's plenty of examples of that. Whether that's true in this case I don't know.
> Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient
To be clear, the subject is still children, right? Refusing to feed children to "teach" them self-sufficiency is, IMO, right up there with a non-ironic "the children yearn for the mines". What could a self-sufficient 6th-grader even do for money? Steal baby food and small electronics from Target for fencing?
I (British) am familiar with the term, especially as a verb like "fencing stolen goods". You can find British newspapers reporting this in the last decade.
Note, I'm not saything this is how it is. Nor am I saying I believe free school lunches are bad. I'm saying the position that they are bad is a valid defendable position to take.
I feel it on those concerns, though after all, I think the point of some people's stances is that everybody should be able to take free (and dignified) student lunches for granted, as sensible as the fish-vs-how-to-fish adage is in general.
I think the concern about entitlement better applies when looking out for vultures taking advantage of these campaigners' goodwill by trying to wedge themselves into the middle of any cashflow for as-optimizably-marginal-as-possible contribution to those pipelines. Of course, I'm thinking of this more in some context of if there was a sort of centralized campaign to scale up efforts, say, statewide or nationwide (pardon my U.S-centric perspective), to solicit donations to pay off a bunch of schools' lunch debts in a region.
> I think the concern about entitlement better applies when looking out for vultures taking advantage of these campaigners' goodwill by trying to wedge themselves into the middle of any cashflow for as-optimizably-marginal-as-possible contribution to those pipelines. Of course, I'm thinking of this more in some context of if there was a sort of centralized campaign to scale up efforts, say, statewide or nationwide (pardon my U.S-centric perspective), to solicit donations to pay off a bunch of schools' lunch debts in a region.
What on earth does this paragraph have to do with the position that school children should receive free lunch?
> Budgets might be cut directly, so can not feed some percent, budgets might be cut indirectly (less tax revenue).
Stop talking as if there's no human actor involved in this. If budgets are cut (less tax revenue) it's because the same people who oppose feeding kids oppose taxing rich people. This is just people saying, "We can't feed kids, because we might decide to not tax rich people instead." I'm not confused about this possibility or missing this possibility: I'm saying "don't be an asshole, collect enough taxes to feed the kids".
> Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient.
Stop talking about "people" as if you've forgotten these are children. Kids should feel entitled to eat, because children are entitled to receive food. Obviously we should be preparing them to learn to feed themselves as adults--nobody is confused about that--but it's going to be a whole lot harder for a child to learn if they're unsure about their next meal. And again, it's the same people who oppose school lunches who oppose education programs.
Giving a child a fish and teaching the child to fish are not mutually exclusive. And US conservatives oppose both.
> Back to budgets, it might remove money from other school needs. I guess the thinking would be, schools should teach, food is not their responsibility. If it comes their responsibility then they'll do less teaching which is back to not helping make their students able to ultimately fend for themselves but instead makes them dependent.
Again, stop pretending there's no actors doing this. It's conservatives who are creating these artificially constrained budgets. It's conservatives who are not allocating enough money to both feed and educate children.
I'm simply not interested in any argument which involves pretending there isn't enough money to feed children. There is enough money, you simply don't think feeding children is important enough to collect taxes to do it.
I'm simply not interested in arguments about who should be feeding children. I want the federal government to fund schools to feed children because that's the only viable path to all the children in my country being fed on the table at the moment. You haven't presented any alternatives that work, and you won't, because you are more interested in avoiding taxes than you are in feeding children.
People generally don't want the Federal government involved, thats where the consensus has been lacking.
this is exhibit A of showing that these country sized states are fully capable of handling their own affairs and universal access to things, the same as the 21st century developed nations that do the same thing
You and the other parties actually agree that it isn't controversial, there are many funding sources if its deemed important, keep the federal government out of it
This is simply not true. Multiple states have tried and failed to pass state funding for universal free lunches - because in each state there are groups who argue giving free lunches to all kids is bad. It’s not an argument about where the money comes from.
I'm not sure how the observation that other places also lacked consensus at the state level discredits anything.
Some people dislike it on the federal level, and are fine with it at the state level, as they are two different organizations. My comment was only about them.
> Some people dislike it on the federal level, and are fine with it at the state level, as they are two different organizations. My comment was only about them.
You said:
> People generally don't want the Federal government involved, thats where the consensus has been lacking.
So no, your comment was a claim about "people generally".
If you'd like to say you misspoke, fine, but everyone can read what you said, so there's no point lying about what you said.
Except none of that is actually true. Unconvinced? Go look at a heat map of poverty in the US and then check out which states get bulk of federal assistance dollars. Note none of those states is running a massive budget surplus. While I have you I'd like to also point out that "hrrr federal government bad" is not only tautological, as an ideology it's deeply stupid . States frequently encounter problems that require a bigger budget than they can muster to solve (see also: disaster recovery).
"hrrr federal government bad" is not my argument. I don't think the federal government is bad. I think its budget is not balanced and its funding has strings attached that undermines the sovereignty of independent institutions.
Disaster recovery is also not the topic nor does it provide any introspective ability on this topic.
yes, I agree if something is not within the budget, and there is also no consensus, then it won't happen. I'm not sure that even needed to be said, but I am familiar with people that would try to make programs happen in those situations too. I would vote no on those proposals in those cases.
> I think its budget is not balanced and its funding has strings attached that undermines the sovereignty of independent institutions.
1. The budget of most Red states is not balanced.
2. States aren't sovereign institutions.
3. Funding being provided without strings attached is practically nonexistent. Money is allocated for a purpose. Allocating money with no string attached is simply not a thing that state or local governments do, so it's bizarre that you'd think states do this any differently from the federal government.
4. If you want the federal budget to be balanced, definitely you should vote for Democrats, because Republican presidents have increased the national debt more than Democratic ones consistently. Republican austerity is a total lie not borne out by any facts.
Frankly, this is a blatant distraction. I don't give a shit whether it's states or the federal government that feeds kids, I just want a government to feed all the kids in my country.
The only reason conservatives give a shit about state's rights is because being in favor of state's rights sounds a lot better than being against feeding children. But the fact is, when states do things like pass gun regulation or refuse to bypass due process to arrest immigrants, suddenly conservatives are against state's rights. And make no mistake, whenever there is any major movement for states to individually provide school lunches, it's conservatives that oppose it.
I never mentioned any party or conservatives or democrats.
I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is.
I never mentioned any party or conservatives or democrats.
I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is.
You are bringing up other positions to discredit a position you assumed I have, because you saw something that overlapped with something partisans say, when the only position I have is that the federal government doesn't need to be involved. and this subthread is about the federal government not being involved, because a state did it on their own. the article is about an individual doing it on their own, the article is about a foundation that does it on their own.
that's the whole position the whole time.
and I don't care who does it, the federal government doesn't need to. not everyone that would be against one particular organization doing the action with money is against the actual action occurring. that's what I think gets lost here, and how its masquaraded as controversial to suggest a different organization is capable of doing it. this article and thread is exhibits a, b, and c of different organizations doing it.
If it quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, swims like a duck, and fishes like a duck, it probably is a duck.
If you spout all the verbatim opinions of a neoconservative, you're probably a neoconservative. I don't care if you identify as a libertarian or an attack helicopter. You're in this thread opposing the only proposed solution to feeding children, so it's pretty clear what you are.
Please don’t respond with a fake quote; double quotation marks are for direct quotes (which are assumed to be from the parent unless otherwise attributed). If you’re going to make something up, please use single quotes, and make it clear that the parent didn’t actually say that.
I'll play devil's advocate, and you tell me the immorality of the position.
Say you have no children. Is it an acceptable position to hold that 'those people who have children should also be the ones to look after them'? Shouldn't you have considered these sorts of expenses and being able to meet them, rather than expecting to receive handouts?
You are not denying food to the parents, you are denying food to the children. They did not choose to be born, and they certainly didn’t choose the fiscal responsibility of their parents.
Maybe there is room in there to shame the parents or give them a slap on the wrist, but the kids are blameless and denying them food makes you probably a monster.
In the wake of a demographic collapse, you're arguing against helping feed children - future tax contributors, caretakers, social workers, healthcare personnel...? Who will pay taxes for you when you won't be of working age anymore? Who will be your caretakers?
Contributing to the next generation's upbringing is the least we can do, even if some won't have kids of their own they would still (directly) indirectly benefit from this.
How about this: we give all people all meals, clothes, housing, heating (all essentials) and spending money so that they can explore their interests, travel, etc?
If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.
These are both obviously silly examples. The 'Where do we draw the line?!' answer can in this case be answered with 'On the side that feeds hungry children'.
> If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.
In that case, people will always self-organise such structures anyway. Even amongst the most failed of the failed states, eventually you will end up with at least someone claiming to be the chief law enforcer (of whatever kind), someone to look after the kids (i.e. education) while the rest works to provide for food, and some sort of fire brigade.
It will just be many orders of magnitude more inefficient than what a large government that governs more than a few dozen to hundred people can establish.
That's how most of Europe actually works: we assist those who for whatever reason are unable to support themselves.
Granted, our systems aren't perfect either. People fall through the cracks sometimes or have to deal with inane bureaucracy. But you generally won't see large encampments of homeless citizens openly defecating on the sidewalks or school children being shamed for their parents not having lunch money.
Somebody should individualistically autonomously amass enough tanks so that they can point them at individuals who think like you so they can make their autonomic individualistic decision that they'd rather feed children than be shot at by a tank.
We know that's how humanity does collective action nearly 100% of the time, but it doesn't apply some linguistic shortcuts fro the sake of moving the discussion along.
Morality is written by the guys who had the most tanks last time.
i say this genuinely, with as much love as i can muster for a stranger on the internet: this line of thought is annoying to most people who understand that living collectively requires sacrifice and accepting imperfect solutions in the pursuit of good. individualism is a weird personality myth that 99.9999999% of people will never realize. kids are hungry and we can feed them. one thing cannot be concretely addressed and the other thing can.
> should I have my wealth forcibly extracted to do so anyway?
if you have amassed anywhere near what most people would consider "wealth", then yes, you should.
> is it ok to force people to pay for stuff that they don't want to?
Yes. Happens all the time. Money doesn't exist unless people are forced to use it to pay for something they don't want to. (read Graber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years.")
I don't want to pay for nuclear weapons. Why am I forced to pay for it through my taxes? Because if I don't, the state will use its power to punish me.
Pacifists can't direct their tax monies to avoid military expenditures.
Adherents to one faith can't say their taxes can't be used on apostates.
You sound like this is a surprise. Like you don't understand why people have to pay taxes for schools even if they don't have children, don't understand why people who don't drive still have to pay taxes for roads, don't understand why people who don't swim still have to pay taxes for public pools, .. the list is very long.
Your comments sound very much like 1980s Thatcherism - "There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
The last 40+ years of neoliberal thought hasn't turned out so well, as those who have money no longer feel pressure or obligation to distribute it, resulting in a return to Gilded Age power concentrations.
That's what you want, it seems.
> such as increased salary and pension contributions
Such as tax cuts for the rich. Make Gates "only" a billionaire and we can use the remaining $100 billion to pay off school lunch debt (works out the math) ... forever.
$2.8 million debt for Utah with a population of 3 million people. US population 340 million. Call it $300 million in school lunch debt. Probably within an order of magnitude. That's less than the interest on $100 billion.
Yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would have an actual positive impact on education if, instead of funding projects that trained educators knew would fail - and eventually did fail - they has simply put their $10+ billion into funding school meals.
Instead, rich people get to fund "non-profits" that they control - reducing their taxes while not relinquishing the power and influence tied to their money. Gates' wealth gives him a very undemocratic and malignant influence over US education policy.
And you want to blather on about supporting student lunch debt?!
>How about this: we give all people all meals, clothes, housing, heating (all essentials) and spending money so that they can explore their interests, travel, etc?
But it's the logical continuation of the argument. It's not like we're going from "something something unlimited free speech -> something something more bullying something something more suicides" - which is a slippery slope fallacy if you don't show the logic or proof that one leads to the other. The argument for free school lunches is exactly the same as the argument for free school breakfasts, free dinners, and free clothes.
An adult can either be a net tax contributor or a net tax burden over their lifespan. The probability of them being a net contributor is much higher if they are well educated and not malnourished. The effect is stronger at younger ages. It’s good ROI for the tax payer.
I'm glad that you're saying this, but honestly, it's disgusting that this has to be said.
I want my country to feed and clothe children because it's the right thing to do. The sort of person that wants an ROI to agree to that, is not a good person.
What is the purpose of this pedantry? Plenty of children do not get the appropriate nutrition during the day due to food insecurity, and for many the only consistent meal they get is at school. Why argue over technical definitions of starvation?
What is the purpose of using a word that means something different than what is currently being discussed? Why not say that children are suffering from malnutrition or food insecurity, rather than using a term used to describe a cause of death?
You wouldn't say that someone who choked on a glass of water to have drowned, or someone who received a momentary shock from frayed cord to have been electrocuted.
Words have meaning, it's not pedantic to comment on the usage of a word that has a different meaning entirely from manner in which it is being used, in what I suspect is an attempt at an appeal to emotion.
I think most (all?) people would understand "starve" to mean to suffer from hunger, rather than to literally die from hunger. Especially from the context.
One would think that the actual dictionary definition of a word, rather than hyperbole, would be the most widely (all?) accepted and understood meaning of a word. Being defined, in a dictionary, and all.
What is the outcome of a flame starved of oxygen? A plant starved of light? A person starved of food?
many problems with your argument. I will enumerate just a few off the top of my head.
- if a child was born with poor planning from the parents, it’s too late and unhelpful to say “i told you so”. Feeding a disadvantaged child raises their chances of doing well in school and reduces their chance of being a much larger burden on your tax dollars down the line. Are you saying we should save $5 on this child now so we can spend $100 in the future (subsidizing their social security payments, maybe jail time, maybe homeless, etc)? Sounds like a smart business move! (sarcasm) Feeding kids is good ROI.
- it’s possible to get pregnant even when being responsible. No protection is 100% except for abstinence your entire life.
- you can “plan” for these expenses all you want. Sometimes a spouse dies. Sometimes a person needs to spend money to support their aging parents, AFTER their child is born. Or a divorce ruins one’s finances. Or someone loses their good job due to layoffs. Life is not a simple path, not sure what gave you that illusion.
- congrats you don’t have children. Guess what? When you’re old and need a diaper change in a nursing home, who do you think will be wiping your ass? One of the nurses… one of those kids that is not yours. Who will be delivering food to the grocery store? That’s right, one of those other kids. Who will be your doctor? Right again! One of those other kids.
- it’s easy to be smug until you’re unlucky in life. What if tomorrow you’re hit by a drunk driver and you go bankrupt trying to pay for major medical bills. Suddenly it’s not so fun saying nobody deserves a handout. At the end of the day, this mindset is an empathy problem.
It seems like _most_ of my fellow americans have an empathy problem. Are you all dead inside? Anyway…it’s useful to invest in our society. Not everything is about me me me.
You don't really "have" a child. A child is new separate human that will eventually grow into free separate adult human. The question is, do you want there to be more humans in the future or are you fine with the ones that are already here until they die. And should they be starved or dumb?
And importantly emphasizing "universal", we're not spending a bunch of money on the bureaucracy of figuring out who gets it and who qualifies and hearing people complain about fraud. They're kids, everybody gets it, nobody set up a test as to which gets get free food.
I pay both MN and NY taxes and couldn't be happier about this expenditure.
If you don't know about lawyering, then how do you know if the literature review is any good? It's the same thing as a non-programmer asking an LLM to vibe code an application. They have no idea about the quality.
I think the point with most applications of LLMs is that the users don’t care if it’s good, only if it’s good enough. How much despair this induces is down to your bias for whatever subject is being reduced.
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