thephyber

We killed off both IE6 and Flash during my web developer career. Eventually the pain of Electron will subside, but it may take a long time.

"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"

This is basically the crux of what I have been thinking about. Will some of these inefficient programs start to get optimized while we are at a plateau of memory for our desktops/laptops?

I think the frustration with changing policies is valid, but we should also consider their side of the situation.

Unis usually watch industrial revolutions from far and have several years to experiment and come up with an approach that mostly works before pushing students through those policies and coursework. This revolution threatens to destroy their business, so they feel an urgent need to do something, even if slapdash policies much better changed quickly.

AI is throwing a wrench in the normal workflows because:

(1) it can be seen as an existential threat to Unis (either their business model or the value of having their diploma),

(2) it is undercutting the value of a Uni degree because that diploma doesn't increase your odds of getting a good job right now,

(3) even people in the workplace using AI aren't working with consistent policies. Tokenmaxxing, then Token-efficiency. You might be prosecuted for a crime if you put confidential customer data into the LLM machine (my CEO sent an email warning about this to all employees), but all of your incentives are to move so fast that might be the only option available. Most of the time it has more to do with negotiating the uncertainty around what is the role of the human in the SDLC (ideation, planning, design, coding, testing, review, maintenance, iteration, coordination, etc) and what is the role of the many agents.

(4) Students are coming to Uni with AI as a habit and might need to change those habits to adhere to Uni policies. The little ones are getting access to LLMs early so the habits are formed early.

(5) Teachers / professors have always had to contend with cheating (how to detect and how to punish). Teachers can use a calculator to build the test (eg. Ensure the contrived numbers on a math equation are solvable and to verify the answers on their answer sheet). That doesn't mean that students should have access to a calculator if the purpose of that unit is to learn the concept without the use of tools.

As frustrating as it is for you, it is almost certainly as frustrating for the professors and department heads.

The cost cutting is a normal headache in all aspects of life. Welcome to capitalism.

I enjoy the CloudFlare tech blogs and I'm pretty familiar with you and the company.

I worked with 2 of the cofounders at their previous company and some of the original prototype was written at my apartment at the time.

I have been wondering if the memory scarcity would lead to a desire to optimize software to be more efficient.

Curious what the R&D / efficiency development ROI is on reducing memory footprint. I suppose we should both consider current ROI and near future ROI (as the price of memory will likely stay high for at least another 1-2 years).

My "supposedly" is based on previous Flock events where reporting found out how many searches matched data in their city's jurisdiction. Flock's PR statement was that "this is what the city's account settings allowed, save for one jurisdiction which was configured in the wrong state".

It's quite possible that Flock has different sales contracts, so if a city manager (or whomever signs those contracts) doesn't have a lawyer review the contract or if neither the manager nor lawyer consider data sharing with the Feds to be a concern, then of course my assumptions are off.

But Flock's current PR cycle pins all of the blame for too much data sharing on the customer's permissions settings.

The Flock search system is supposedly limited so the city/police employee has to choose the permissions (eg. Which other jurisdictions will search results show up for).

If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).

I suspected that Flock cameras also notified repossesses, but a quick Google search suggests that police contracts don't, but that private property Flock installs (like shopping malls) do/can.

Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.

I'm hoping that they are inundated with thousands of jurisdictions trying to back out these days so they are legit out of bandwidth to deal with cancellations in real time.

If nothing else, this is a good example of why the contract terms for government vendors MUST be public records and NDAs of private companies on public officials for the purposes of sales should not be legally enforceable.

The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.

Yeah.

The NYPD has their own terrorism and counterintelligence divisions. They are pretty much an FBI governed at a city level (minus all of the cool forensics science).

I wouldn't put it beyond NYPD (in theory) except IIRC the NYPD actually drives him around in their SUVs and he has an NYPD team that does his personal security.

I live in a county where the Sheriff was investigated by her deputies for requiring bribes from Apple HQ's head of security (to approve armed security guard's right to CCW). The didn't actually charge her (the Sheriff), but it was kryptonite against her running for re-election, so there was a bit of justice.

You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.

I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.

Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.

Yes and no.

We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.

I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.

Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.

We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.

Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.

That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.