TheMagicHorsey

This is the kind of "paperwork maximal" nonsense that is killing Europe.

Google DID apply for the right permissions, and they even had a consultant on the ground with years of experience who was supposed to navigate these complexities ... and even WITH all that, you get the result of idiots saying "Google BYPASSED OUR LAWS!!!!!"

Sit in the shoes of a Google lawyer trying to navigate all of this nonsense. Why is there not one government entity telling Google, okay, you need to do XYZ to do this. Instead, they got the ok from several Finnish agencies to go ahead. And then, even as a surprise to the exiting Finnish government agencies they were working with, yet ANOTHER agency shows up and says OH YOU DIDNT DO ABCDEFGHIJK steps.

You people are just ridiculous.

This is such a good initiative. Acting individually is commendable.

I do wish more education in developing countries was focused on the tangible outputs that developing economies need ... healthcare/nursing/medicine, development work, engineering, agriculture, animal husbandry, construction, etc.

Perhaps I am wrong, but studying languages sounds like an inversion of the classic aphorims ... I study war so my daughter can study engineering, and she studies engineering so my granddaughter can study art.

Meanwhile, the brightest engineer they know left to work for a startup in San Francisco.

Do judicial rulings have much effect on this administration anymore? It feels a bit like the judges are goalies trying to block penalty shots, and this administration just keeps kicking balls at the goal, and eventually something gets in ... because the judicial system itself is a bit stochastic.

Rust's more powerful type system seems like a better match for LLMs ... better guardrails. But Rust is so painful to read that LLM code becomes inscrutable. If I'm never going to read the source, probably Rust would be better.

If I'm reading the source then Go or Zig.

China has basically no domestic patent litigation. The way you stop the litigation is to just remove the legal rights associated with patents. Let everything become a free for all. China is just lapping everyone else right now. The lack of strong IP rights is not hurting them. Companies over there are not suffering due to not being able to invest in technology. They invest despite not having strong IP protections. Not because they have strong IP protections. And they know they can't get a monopoly with a piece of paperwork ... a patent. So they continue to innovate at a breakneck pace just to stay ahead of everyone else.

America needs to learn how to evolve our system of industrial production. Our society of lawyers and paperpushers is going to get annihilated in the next ten years at this rate.

Anyone who has ever taken part in a software patent litigation ... or in the creation of a software patent, knows intimately that its a bunch of bullshit.

The boogieman that software patent advocates raise is that IP theft and free riding will destroy America if we don't have patents. But literally nobody is creating software to get a patent on it, and software patents don't stop anyone from replicating software.

Instead software patents are just a way for mediocre lawyers to live parasitically off the tech industry.

Imagine a world where we were so worried about bullying that we created a department to monitor all speech on the Internet, and you had to run your speech past lawyers for approval before saying anything. And you could be sued for saying anything by anyone if you didn't get lawyer approval. That would be a world with dramatically less bullying than the Internet today. AND a much worse world with much less communication. AND in that alternate world, the lawyers would argue that there would be more bullying if we put that ridiculous system to an end. And they would be right that there would be some more bullying, AND it would also be right that that degree of bullying would be worth it to have free speech.

Similarly with patents. Yeah, on the margins there might be more IP theft. SO WHAT. This system right now sucks.

Reminds me of the ship names in the Culture novels by Iain M Banks.

This phrase could have been authored about every single community leadership committee I've been a part of for the last 20 years.

I have about 20 or 30 fountain pens. I do system architecture diagrams, with notes in the margin, using pen and ink. It does help me think. I actually find it relaxing and fun.

There are certain influential people on Twitter, who if you see them start tweeting on a subject, you know the influx of hype and hucksters is coming.

Ha! I had a similar story, Om saw me and a group of other engineers that our boss briefly introduced as he was walking through our offices, and Om remarked: "You are working these guys too hard ... they look like they don't get enough sleep." Which was true ... we were pulling all nighters to get our release in shape for demos. It was nice to see a visitor acknowledge our health sacrifices for the company ... a whole bunch of other journalists came through too ... and nobody else commented on our appearance/health.

Imagine if they applied this same logic to the NBA draft.

One of the reasons I started messing around with Zig.

It's interesting that saying the Earth is more than 10,000 years old is not haram in Saudi Arabia. I thought it would be, since they are so religious, but it turns out the Koran doesn't make any claims about the age of the Earth, so you are free to say that the Earth is billions of years old and not be accused of blasphemy.