These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
> there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
Seconding "dismiss with prejudice", it's a concept in US legal proceedings to keep a prosecutor from continuing to pursue a case and it would make a lot of sense in the context of the EU. It seems like it's a common problem given the organizational structure, it seems like a very key missing mechanism.
That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
Then again, some governing actually does need to get done. That’s not much time to do anything that requires patient coordination and thorough consideration—especially anything of any complexity—even when people broadly agree that it needs to happen.
It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.
It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists.
Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
People get all of their information about what's going on in the world from people who are pushing these laws. People who contradict this information are suppressed or actually prosecuted by people who are pushing these laws. That is what these laws are intended to support. There are too many people talking to too many other people.
You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.
If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.
I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.
Yeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren’t some sort of rare event. I’m primed to expect rolling brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
There were significant power shutdowns in California in 2019 (affecting millions of customers in aggregate); the reason for the shutdowns was different from 2001 (preemptive shutdowns when the risk of downed power lines starting wildfires was thought to be high) but the impact on customers is the same: no power for an extended period.
It’s great if you have relatively simple CI. If you have anything slightly more complicated (like multiple child pipelines for a monorepo) you’re going to have a rough time.
Every time I thought I understood GitLab CI, it would fail/behave in non-obvious ways.
OMSCS grad here. The awesome thing about the program is its flexibility. Some of the courses are definitely more time intensive, but I think if you took only one class and dedicated about an hour a day to the course materials, you'd be in good shape. (I know that's still a lot to ask of someone with two young kids.)
There's no way to get through the harder courses in the program on 1 hour a day. And you're not getting value from the degree if you aren't pushing yourself to take those hard courses, unless you just need the diploma.
It's almost as though the LLMs were trained on all the writing conventions which are used by humans and are parroting those, instead of generating novel outputs themselves.
They haven’t picked up any one human writing style, they’ve converged on a weird amalgamation of expressions and styles that taken together don’t resemble any real humans writing and begin to feel quite unnatural.
As someone who uses em-dashes a lot, I’m getting pretty tired of hearing something “screams AI” about extremely simple (and common) human constructs. Yeah, the author does use that convention a number of times. But that makes sense, if that’s a tool in your writing toolbox, you’ll pull it out pretty frequently. It’s not signal by itself, it’s noise. (does that make me an AI!?) We really need to be considering a lot more than that.
Reading through the first article, it appears to be compelling writing and a pretty high quality presentation. That’s all that matters, tbh. People get upset about AI slop because it’s utterly worthless and exceptionally low quality.
The repetitiveness of the shell commands (and using zig build-exe instead of zig run when the samples consist of short snippets), the filler bullet points and section organization that fail to convey any actual conceptual structure.
And ultimately throughout the book the general style of thought processes lacks any of the zig community’s cultural anachronisms.
If you take a look at the repository you’ll also notice baffling tech choices not justified by the author that runs counter against the zig ethos.
(Edit: the build system chapter is an even worse offender in meaningless cognitively-cluttering headings and flowcharts, it’s almost certainly entirely hallucinated, there is just an absurd degree of unziglikeness everywhere: https://www.zigbook.net/chapters/26__build-system-advanced-t... -- What’s with the completely irrelevant flowchart of building the zig compliler? What even is the point of module-graph.txt? And icing on the cake in the “Vendoring vs Registry Dependencies” section.)
Yeah and then why would they explicitly deny it? Maybe the AI was instructed not to reveal its origin. It's painful to enjoy this book if I know it's likely made by an LLM.
If you find it useful no harm in enjoying it! The main problem with AI content is it's just not good enough...yet. It'll get there. The LLMs just need more real-world feedback incorporated, rather than being the ultimate has-read-everything,-actually-knows-nothing dweeb (a lot of humans are like this too). (You can see the first signs of overcoming this w/ latest models coding skills, which are stronger via RL, I believe.) (Not first hand knowledge tho -- pot kettle black situation there.)
I always find the X% of developers use AI tools for their work suspect because I know many people who are being pressured by their company to adopt AI tools for their day to day workflows.
As they should be. It’s a necessary tool to learn. If your entire dev team circa 2010 was writing code in notepad++ and sharing code versions in a zip file, you would push them to use an IDE and source control. It’s the same concept.
Did you read the article? It cites the METR study[1] which showed that while people using AI tools to program report feeling like they are producing more, they are in fact producing about 20% less than without the tools.
Ironically you could get the same effect and save compute fees by simply having programmers stay home one day a week.
That study is straight out of the school that measures productivity in kLOC. Completely worthless except as fuel for Internet arguments and poorly-informed policymaking.
You act like that's a "gotcha" instead of a normal thing. All they mean by that [0] is that can't mathematically prove their developers/tasks/tool are representative for of the majority of worldwide developers/tasks/tools.
You're demanding an unreasonable level of investment for anyone to "prove a negative."
The burden of proof lies on the people claiming zillion-fold boosts in productivity across "enough" places that they don't really define. This is especially true because they could profit in the process, as opposed to other people burning money to prove a point.
If you want to shit talk LLMs, you better come armed with research, buddy. Claims about how it will revolutionise every profession just need n=1 anecdata though.
Historical comparison: "I just had a pizza delivered on the new Segway and it was super duper cool because they came right into the conference center, so say goodbye to cars and bikes, by 2025 it's all going to be Personal People Movers!"
That said, I think LLMs will have a bigger effect than a self-balancing scooter, both positively and negatively.
Correct, the study showed that it slows down experienced developers. We don't know what it does to inexperienced developers so that sounds like a good research topic. But it still leads to the question of why experienced developers should be told to adopt it, given that it slows them down.
The US really needs formalized processes for snap elections and easier ability to recall elected officials. The fact that this is happening and we all just have to sit on our hands and wait for the next election is wild.
This is being done by the people America collectively elected. Moar Elections is not going to help. Enough Americans want this chaos and deliberately voted for it.
Unless your theory is that the median voter is kind of an idiot who doesn't understand how the government works and goes based on vibes.
Such a person would ignore any issue short of, say, their paychecks or SSA benefits not arriving on time. After that, who knows who they would support?
Democrats have a lot less to lose than the GOP right now. The party is unpopular and locked out of power. There's only upside to shutting the government down, if you ignore the very serious impacts on normal people.
Trump is not capable of seeing this because he reflexively has to win every conflict he's involved in.
There was nothing to stop the Republican party from unilaterally averting the shutdown, and there's nothing stopping them from unilaterally ending it. They have the majority in both houses as well as the presidency, so they can pass anything they like.
The only road bump in place is the Senate filibuster rule - but that's a rule that can be (and has been) tossed aside when inconvenient. Recall that Republicans removed the filibuster from judicial appointments when they wanted to ram through multiple Supreme Court justices and hundreds of lower court judges.
The underlying problem is that the current Republican party wants this shutdown because it reinforces their half-century-long message that government is broken and gives them cover to remove federal workers.
It also doesn't help that the House is remaining closed to delay seating an incoming Democrat representative from an Arizona special election.
> Unless your theory is that the median voter is kind of an idiot who doesn't understand how the government works and goes based on vibes.
I think the median voter looks at what a politician says they are going to do, assumes they are going to do it, and votes based on that. Say what you will about the Trump administration, they are doing exactly what they were shouting from the rooftops that they would do. Grief people they don't like, sow chaos and division, start a devastating trade war on multiple fronts, and cause daily chaos and drama. They said it loud and clear for years before the election. They got elected. And, then they did it!
If I had anything good to say about these guys it's that they were 100% transparent about their plans and they followed up on them right out of the gate. Exactly zero people should be surprised at what they delivered. It's actually pretty impressive how faithfully they are delivering on all of their promises of destruction and chaos! In fact, polls of Republicans show consistent, strong and enthusiastic approval of the administrations actions, as they themselves fall deeper into poverty and hopelessness.
Of course, he does! That’s why in the first place he ran for the office! He’s the most corrupt MF in the history of our planet. But, here’s your confusion - did he ever say he accepts or asks for bribes? No!! He wraps it all up in patriotism and his stupid followers suck it all up.
> Unless your theory is that the median voter is kind of an idiot who doesn't understand how the government works and goes based on vibes.
Um.
Yes that’s basically true, to the best of science’s reckoning, anyway. Like, you pretty much nailed it.
Political scientists had figured that out with very solid evidence by around the middle of the 20th century (solid evidence in part because this is obviously alarming so they did a lot of double-checking) then spent several decades trying to figure out an angle by which they could say “but it’s, uh, fine somehow?” or maybe even “but actually that’s good” before finally giving up on that and admitting it’s kind of amazing democracy works at all, and the whole thing’s scary-fragile.
From a non-EU perspective, it seems like the EU tries to push something akin to this every couple of years. So I guess it’s settled for at least a few years…?
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