I'm going to be fascinated to see how the regulatory arbitrage shakes out long term. What legal provinance applies to infra in space? Does GDPR apply? Can you even enforce GDPR? And you have line of site to users who could connect to it directly, bypassing government-regulated backbones.

GDPR applies regardless of where the data center is located because it applies based on where the user currently resides. Similarly, US laws (including those enabling warrantless surveillance) apply regardless of where the data center is located as long as the owner/customer/controller lives or is based or registered in (or is a subsidiary of an entity that is based or registered in) the US - or if the US decides it has jurisdiction until proven otherwise (cf. Maduro).

You enforce laws the same way you do otherwise: if they are in your jurisdiction and don't comply, you arrest them; if they're in a jursdiction you're friendly with you ask for extradition; if they're in a jurisdiction you're not friendly with and you really need them to cease whatever they ceasen't, you have them accidentally fall out of a high enough window.

You can't shut down a DC in space. But even if someone has moved their DC into space, their terrestial human body is still very easily shut down one way or another. And maybe less gruesomely, so is whatever comms infrastructure they need to maintain in order to actually connect to that DC - if the DC is sufficiently "out of reach" (i.e. not in low Earth orbit) it likely requires optical transmission if it can accomplish any data rate high enough to allow it to be used for something sufficiently annoying and optics are fickle and require careful calibration.

But seriously, us tech nerds routinely underestimate rubber hose cryptoanalyis (cf. XKCD 538). If you can bypass government regulation it's because the government isn't sufficiently interested in making you stop whatever it is you think you need to bypass their regulations to do. If your goal with operating a DC in space is to evade the "regulatory arbitrage", you're literally advertising your intent to operate what will most likely be a criminal enterprise so unless you have sufficient financial resources to exert political leverage in your favor (cf. Musk), you're just asking for trouble.

When I was in college it was raining heavily outside, and I had to walk from the lab to my dorm at some point in the next hour. I started thinking about the secretary problem and derived the continuous case for it (surprise! It's 1/e) to figure out how long I should observe how heavily it was raining before I trying to head out.

I mention all this because modern hiring is nothing like the actual Secretary Problem, which is about when to stop given unknown information on future samples and a known retry limit. No one hires that way anymore, so I don't feel like the author side-stepped anything about it. I guess that doesn't matter, but it irks me as someone who's spent time on optimal stopping.

Author here...

I interpreted hiring as optimal stopping problem because:

(a) we as hiring managers have no idea who's out there that we can hire and train for our requirement, and

(b) traditional hiring pipelines have a retry limit of zero; once rejected, rejected forever, and the open-door retry policy makes it infinite retries (after a cooling off period).

So the idea is to process applications as fast as possible to reject negatives and false positives, at the possible expense of some false negatives. And then try to defeat the downsides with the open-door / infinite retry trick.

That is certainly not exact science. Besides, I'm not a stats / maths / operations research person though, so I do accept I could be wrong. For now, I am okay being wrong because I hope to never have to hire anybody as an indie software builder :D

It's wild to me that people think asking for

"Continuous Integration (CI)"

in the first line of a paragraph of a long article is "going out of your way". It used to be the standard expectation for using shorthand.

It used to be a standard expectation, but that was before google or AI could have answered your question in less time and typing that your complaint on HN required. Especially when the author is writing a blog post for an audience that knows what CI is.

Do you want to be right, or do you want to learn?

It's an authorial expectation that saves everyone from having to search every acronym you use.

Can I solve it by searching? Yes. Is it faster for the author to type it out once or for the reading public to have to search it up? I don't think that time matches up even if the # of people is "me", but it certainly isn't less time than it takes 2 people to search.

I feel like I am asking for the bare minimum and everyone on this sight thinks I am asking for the moon.

This is such entry-level communication/writing skills I am surprised the ai doesn't do it for you...

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/169/

I don't think it would occur to me to write out Continuous Integration because it's basically a nonsense term if you don't know what it means anyway, it's not any less opaque than just CI. The problem isn't the shorthand here, but yeah it's probably good to spell it out anyway so when someone googles it they have more confidence they've found the right thing.

I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on.

The worst offenders release the source but with gotcha licensing, wait for the enterprise to use it, then detect their usage and go in demanding payment or be sued. This happened to my team enough times to be a pattern.

It isn't novel at all, it is going back to Shareware, demos and PD kind of software before GNU ideas took off.

This may come out of left field, but Dario seems terrified to be in charge. I don't get the impression that he ever had a desire to run a company like this. Now that he's a CEO, he keeps trying to make uncompetitive decisions and calls for someone (anyone) to stop him. It regularly blunts Anthropic's edge.

It's the only explanation I can see when it's obvious to any student of history this is going to backfire. It doesn't take much imagination to know how such a governing body will be abused, and I'm sure it will only get wilder in ways we can't imagine right now. Dario does NOT know what he's creating, and for once it's not AI.

I think he’s doing a relatively good job, given the framing he’s adopted, which is that AIs replacing all human labor and decision making is a historical inevitability over which we have no control and no choice.

Do people not realise that it is in fact possible to develop ever more capable frontier models, and just not release them generally? That AI doesn’t need to be available to do literally everything in order to have military advantage?

It’s like Oppenheimer had started Rob’s Big Bomb Company instead of Los Alamos, and started selling a range of affordable nuclear warheads to fit any budget.

I have been saying over and over again that the board ought to fire him (or move him to a nonconsequential "advisory role"). I totally agree that he seems mostly directionless and far more interested in the academic side of things than the product side of things.

Then he should resign

We should, which is why anthropomorphizing the lawnmower is bad. It misdirects you away from who built the mower and aimed it.

Exactly. My comment is a response to "The agents clearly regarded what they were doing as hacking".

Regarding implies it is thinking, judging, considering. Which implies culpability, which removes culpability from whoever is piping the output of these models into CPU instructions.

Language choice is incredibly important here, especially as the rules are being written. Even calling it AI (a battle that appears to be lost) is an anthropomorphism I am not comfortable with. We don't call lawnmowers "artificial groundskeepers".

It's a landing page trope, and I wonder if it emerges out of overtraining on the front door of web sites.

I made this argument at my previous company a year ago and was shouted down by most of the mobile engineers. I have since departed, but knowing how much Shopify's engineering blog is worshipped there they will now say this is the future.

I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.

I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.

I believe if react had made inline styling of components less verbose then tailwind wouldn't exist

Yeah I think if React had adopted Vue’s scoped model early on then CSS Tailwind would be much less popular

(I much prefer the scoped CSS model)