evil-olive

this dismissive attitude, with the scare quotes, is so bizarre to me.

to make an analogy to physical health:

someone has chronic gastrointestinal pain, but they just live with it and have never talked to a doctor about it.

they watch a video from someone talking about having chronic GI pain and getting diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.

they go to a doctor and say "I think I have ulcerative colitis"

the doctor runs tests, and they come back negative.

I get that it's tempting to say "oh this person was misled by a video on social media"

but, the pain they were feeling was real. even if they jumped to an incorrect conclusion about its cause.

and after those negative tests, they can work with their doctor to find out "ok, what else might be causing my symptoms?"

"no one lives in SF anymore, it's too crowded"

> would’ve had to be assembled in space

> ...

> this all would’ve been very completable in 1977

first flight of the Shuttle was 1981.

I think you're vastly overestimating the ability of 70s-era spacewalks to assemble a spacecraft in orbit, including handling 600 pounds of radioactive material

> If you don't log into the app for months

> After 90 days of countdown, 21 days of warnings, and 14 days of grace, the envelope opens

vs

> it needs that company to still exist and be honest on the day it matters

> there's no company in the middle

which is it?

there's no middleman, but also I need to log in to your app regularly to avoid being declared dead?

based on reading through the transcript, this appears to take 10 minutes to say "it doesn't store the entire file as one file, but instead breaks it up into chunks with erasure coding"

godawful clickbait garbage.

> But until now, each machine needed a separate Herdr client, usually in a different terminal tab. You had to remember where each agent was running and switch between those tabs to check on them. That was the bottleneck.

is it, though?

I can imagine having a local Herdr instance and one running on a remote box somewhere, but I can't think of a use case where I'm trying to juggle N different Herdr instances and that overhead becomes a meaningful bottleneck.

> Getting to 1.0

> After this update, what I want is to make connecting those machines more convenient. You shouldn’t need to think about SSH or deal with complicated network setup. It should be easy to connect any machine, anywhere, through one Herdr account.

(emphasis added)

sigh. I'm a daily user of Herdr. I don't have a Herdr account today. I don't want a Herdr account. I don't need a Herdr account.

the product is not even to 1.0 yet and already the writing is on the wall for the path towards enshittification & acquisition by $bigco.

of course, I'm sure there will be some "usage without an account will still work" platitudes, but the trend of development is clearly going to be in the direction of features that "integrate" with the "developers using Herdr pay us money and/or we collect their data" business model.

emphasis added:

> NBC News' Tom Llamas speaks with Tau Robotics CEO and co-founder Alexander Koch about how the robots work and the challenges of making them fully A.I. powered.

sounds like it's another "oh, it's totally a robot, trust us...yes, a worker from overseas might teleoperate it some percentage of the time. how often? well, that's a trade secret, you see"

by focusing your question on "what is China doing?" you're already buying in to the framing that this propaganda is pushing - that Chinese people are sneaky and deceitful and we should be worried about what they're doing because obviously they must be doing something aimed at fucking with the US.

> X said Thursday night.

this is a news story reported as unambiguous fact, but only based on claims from a single source.

and that single source has a pretty strong motivation for why they might lie or exaggerate the claims - X runs AI data centers and is facing criticism over them. it's in their interest to be able to portray that opposition as astroturfed by foreign interests.

> At this point, I do not see much value in sitting alone and building more projects just to prove that I can build software.

did you see value in doing this, before LLMs? if so, why?

> pro tip: if you don't understand a word that appears, and it turns out to be physics jargon, perhaps take a step back and consider the person may actually know what they are talking about.

if you're going to be condescending like this, and then on top of that imply that you have some expertise or qualifications that I lack...

go ahead. tell me what that expertise is. don't be shy. PhD in marine engineering from the University of Panama? Six Sigma Black Belt certified in water pump maintenance & repair?

> But don’t call them Enron. Enron caused the Enron crash.

it needs to come from the Enron region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling creative financial engineering.

> It’s highly unlikely that fraud at that level is being perpetuated now by these companies.

if we're going to have someone make a full-throated defense of the balance-sheet shenanigans AI companies are engaged in - shenanigans he himself describes:

> This way Meta gets its datacenter but most of the debt incurred to build it is not shown as a liability on its books.

...I would really like to hear a stronger claim than it being "highly unlikely" that fraud is occurring.

Meta is a public company. one of the tradeoffs we require public companies to make, in exchange for the larger pool of possible stockholders, is making their financial information publicly available.

so this author, or another journalist, should be able to look at that published financial information and definitively say that large-scale fraud isn't occurring.

but that's not possible, precisely because of the shell game the author is defending, where the liability is not on the books of Meta, but a company named Special-Purpose Vehicle That Is Totally Not Meta, LLC.