I hope commenters will dig into the author's citations' data, in line with HN's discussion guidelines, instead of just expressing a negative opinion about the thrust of the article. The quantifiable impact of genAI on code productivity is an important research question, and very much an open question subject to bias from all the players in the space -- especially once you factor in quality, maintainability, and bugs or revisions over time.
The GitClear whitepaper that Marcus cites tries to account for some of these factors, but they're biased by selling their own code quality tools. Likewise, GitHub's whitepapers (and subsequent marketing) tend to study the perception of productivity and quality by developers, and other fuzzy factors like the suggestion acceptance rate -- but not bug rate or the durability of accepted suggestions over time. (I think perceived productivity and enjoyment of one's job are also important values, but they're not what these products are being sold on.)
I think people in the US overestimate how much upzoning "has to" affect most neighborhoods, especially infill development or removing default single-family home zoning. I used to live in Minneapolis, which has lots of century-old duplexes and fourplexes mixed in with single-family homes on similar lot sizes. Traffic, activity/noise, appearance, and overall "niceness" were almost the same as on single-family-only blocks -- but the bump in density supported lots of corner stores and restaurants in walking distance that made people want to live there or visit the neighborhood for the day.
Part of the apprehension might be caused by the difficulty of rezoning itself. The only people with the determination and money to get a zoning variance are big developers who need a big building to make it worthwhile. That's how you get 50- or 100-unit apartments going up in single-family neighborhoods, and a "missing middle" of density and affordability.
Is it not contradictory to say that traffic/activity/noise are almost the same, but it'd support lots of corner stores and restaurants and people would want to visit the neighborhood? The entire point of living in a suburb is that people who don't live here have no reason to be here. I actively do not want a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop a block away from my home.
As counterintuitive as it seems, that was my experience living in one of those neighborhoods and visiting others over several years. A handful of small stores on one block or corner every half-mile really doesn't induce that much traffic. It's an entirely different scale from a commercial district or even a car-oriented strip mall.
Honestly, yeah -- it's not a cheat code, it's facing two sets of pressures from discrimination, not seeing many like you in your field, what you deal with outside of the workplace, etc. And it helped me to see how many people before me succeeded regardless of all that; learning about Lynn Conway ~15 years ago was really important to me.
Local hosting/processing is a good thought, but it only helps in limited circumstances, because partners you haven't separated from yet are likely to have physical access to your devices.
It's one of the big criticisms of Microsoft Recall: the database is locally generated and encrypted at rest, but practically, any user in the same home with device access can probably access it, and bypass any efforts you've made to delete your browsing history or messages.
Remember that abusers are often controlling and suspicious, so disabling Recall, denying them access to your devices, or changing your passwords is enough to set them off because you appear to be hiding something (maybe making plans to leave or report them).
Plausible deniability can be an important feature for activists and regular people alike. You can't always predict when a relationship goes south like this, or get out of it as soon as it does, or afford and hide a burner phone.
One of my friends remarks (edit) that tech companies should have a social worker and a public defender on staff for threat modeling these things.
I don't think the Big Three record labels will want to stop this, even if it's massive copyright infringement, because it's not a threat to their business model. Labels create a whole ecosystem around a limited set of artists through marketing and tastemaking, then capture multiple revenue streams (streaming, licensing) for the few artists who people mostly play and pay for. They aggressively persuade musicians to sign away the rights, so the labels control the terms of payment, and they work together with a tiny group of companies in streaming/radio/etc. who have the same self-interest.
Everything outside that structure is an afterthought. The occasional indie hit songs and labels have failed to upend the music industry power structure for a century (they tend to get acquired if they get big enough). Tons of people making songs mostly for themselves will only dilute the power of smaller players.
The labels will probably extract some licensing fees off the stolen copyrighted training data, but they famously don't care about their musicians earning a livelihood.
Edit: Other commenters report that Android will silently re-enable cell data under various conditions, so this isn't a surefire solution, either.
The Grugq created a tool for this a decade ago (sadly unmaintained): https://github.com/grugq/portal as part of a presentation about operational security for hackers. It's a great watch if you're interested in how various (in)famous hackers thought they were secure and got busted anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU
It's expected. The people who own the phones aren't in control of the OS and the wireless chipsets are closed/proprietary. Cellphones really shouldn't be trusted by anyone.
Correct, the baseband usually has binary blobs. Although I am curious why Google/Apple decided not to make their own baseband, given their new silicon manufacturing expertise.
IIRC Apple has tried/is trying, but it is ridiculously complex to the point that they had to go back to Qualcomm as there really is no other option. Read: The biggest tech co on the planet stumbles with this, it should be considered a magic box as this point.
Google is sort of trying by using a Samsung modem (instead of Qualcomm) with an IOMMU in between, so at least the modem doesn't have access to the whole address space like on other phones. But they get a lot of flack for it.
Right now we have no alternatives, but it's not technologically impossible to create mobile devices that give us root access to a mobile OS, or to create open wireless chipsets with open firmware.
Both Android and iOS will do that when you receive a MMS.
Even if the MMS is supposedly on an intranet, it wouldn't surprise be that a poor implementation might expose the rest of the system to internet for a brief moment.
i'm almost certain i've had it happen on iOS, too. only reason i can't definitively say—is because i can't rule myself out always having to manually toggle cell data on/off, both radio-level and per-app, when i'm coming/going from my own networks to my mobile VPN.
People have been anecdotally reporting and investigating similar problems since at least last year[0], and it's entirely possible that changes to improve one aspect of a model could make it much worse at other aspects without careful regression testing and gradual rollout. I think models intended to solve every problem make it very hard to guarantee they can solve any particular problem reliably over time.
Imagine if a million developers simultaneously got much worse at their jobs!
I encourage people to look for a variety of opinions on this bill -- and its various parts -- so you can better figure out which parts you actually want to keep, change, or remove, and give your legislators that specific feedback.
Alliance for the Future is a lobby group of effective accelerationists who endorse some of Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel's views in their manifesto, and based on that plus this article, they seem to oppose the bill entirely.
A place to start for a breakdown of what's in the bill is the Context Fund analysis that AFTF links to. That analysis cites similar critiques from EFF, the Software & Information Industry Association, and others. All of these are from the perspective of voting against or substantially changing the bill.
I haven't found "pro bill" opinions as easily, but I haven't been plugged into the conversations around this, so I'm missing anything that doesn't appear on the first few pages of Google or DDG.
The GitClear whitepaper that Marcus cites tries to account for some of these factors, but they're biased by selling their own code quality tools. Likewise, GitHub's whitepapers (and subsequent marketing) tend to study the perception of productivity and quality by developers, and other fuzzy factors like the suggestion acceptance rate -- but not bug rate or the durability of accepted suggestions over time. (I think perceived productivity and enjoyment of one's job are also important values, but they're not what these products are being sold on.)
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