For what it's worth, people also felt this way about the printing press and the Internet (also books).
Information propagation mechanisms are often seen as malicious before they're commonplace. To be fair sometimes they are, but by and large humanity has benefitted from increasing the number of bits of information we can consume on a per second basis.
If you're looking for a privacy protecting version of OpenRouter, my friend Joseph Perla made trustedrouter.com.
It's a pretty slick system and if you're building on openrouter today and are worried about stripe integration messing up the product, this is a good option to consider.
Separately, congrats to the OpenRouter team. They are selling at the right time in what is undoubtably going to become a contentious market.
Your button was not important and should not consume
resources of any kind and definitely not engineering resources. It taking a week was a feature, not a bug. It meant engineering properly evaluated the priority and urgency of tasks.
Your magic slotmachine will enable a level of shit-producing and warped perception of engineering effort of breathtaking scale. It will have consequences.
For years almost all the engineering effort at all the tech companies went into engineering things which grab as much human attention as possible. Almost any use of engineering time, or AI or whatever would be better than that.
Sometimes latency matters more than throughput. A simple change can and should go in quickly if the manager wants to see it. Except sometimes it can't because the team is strangled with red tape.
>I love that people can just bang stuff into existence now.
I need to see if it can build me a fabulous todo app.
4-5 years ago I spent around a year refining a paper-and-pen daily planner, and I went 100% into it and liked it. The paper planner though had a non-ideal workflow, and so I wanted to look into some automation of it. I got a Kindle Scribe hoping they might grow its capabilities. It had a great "it's like paper" experience, but no automation or tools or apps seemed to come along. So then I tried a fairly high end Boox, I got it and then used it only a couple weeks and then stopped doing that daily planner process entirely.
But if Fable could build a Boox or reMarkable app, that might be a big win.
I've tried task warrior, and todoist, and in the end I just keep going back to a straight text file I edit.
The funny thing is, making the input/output mechanism is way less impressive and especially way less useful than the underlying LLM tech that hackernews loves to deride.
For me, once a couple words loaded the cadence/pace of the streaming words in the response was so recognizably “ChatGPT” it immediately lost the sorta eerie mysterious feel and almost veered into parody/comedy.
Like imagining the wizarding world full of Hogwarts students writing out prompts for “Write a 500 word history of the polyjuice potion, sound natural using my own voice, do not use em dashes, no mistakes.”
I expected, from the description, it to look like text was being written by hand -- with the letterforms being stroked at roughly human pen speeds. Not just a fancy font over a text box being entered character by character. The description WAY oversells it.
I remember for roughly a month after Elon bought twitter he opened the site up again and public viewers could browse it. Now you can't even click play on a video lol.
An incognito window let me watch the whole 25 seconds with the user writing something and three book writing back, but I don't know if my IP or incognito cookies or anything else are special.
It would be ironic if you have to actually sign out from Twitter, not just use incognito mode, to bypass the signup nag. Or if they mark IPs as “signed up” or something. Thanks.
Doesn't work for me, Chrome on Mac. Used a private window to test not being logged in. Got nothing against Twitter, but if I didn't already have an account, definitely wouldn't bother making one just to watch a video.
Can't use the Twitter links if you don't have a Twitter account. Also, why make the user click away when they're trying to understand if your product does something interesting, and why do they need an account on an unrelated service when an image/gif embed would get the message across in 5 seconds?
There are many workarounds like xcancel and nitter.net and xcancel.com that have been operating for a couple of years now. This is Hacker News, not Consumer Reports.
Your confident claim here piqued my curiosity. It seems there's at least some amount of controversy about it. At least in finland it has been suggested that the sami may have been pushed north by colonization around the 14th century.
In any case your statement clearly doesn't hold for the northern part of sweden.
"Some amount of controversy" means that your confident portrayal is a form of intellectual dishonesty. Not everyone would agree with your statement as written.
"Some amount of controversy" about the earth being flat means that your confident portrayal of a round earth is a form of intellectual dishonesty. Not everyone would agree with your statement as written.
The thing is... under the laws as they're written today, if US Gov wants to take a peek at your stuff on FB and friends servers, FB can be barred from informing you that such a request has come in under the National Security Letter (NSL) guidelines.
Unfortunate but true, I feel we could rise up and stop things like this but most people these days are either unaware or are too busy struggling to do so
I don't mean to be some annoying contrarian or something, but couldn't it be the case that if the govt was investing someone who was planning a terrorist attack, then notifying the person being investigated could work against stopping them?
Not saying it wouldn't get abused though, which seems like the primary concern of most people in these discussions..
You mean like those Minnesota soccer mom “terrorists”? It’s hard to assume good faith after repeated bad faith behaviors, hence the reason our justice system is supposed to operate on evidence and a presumption of innocence, rather than “treat everyone like they aren’t a terrorist…yet..but will be if i decide they are”.
When these things come up people tend to venture into hyperbole. Probably because it's an incentives issue (it gets clicks and upvotes). If "preserving order" was the number everyone in the judiciary optimized for all of violent riots and protests against any cause you can imagine wouldn't have happened. But they did, so therefore this concept of "no evidence" is not true.
It's fine to be skeptical about private companies sharing "intelligence" (I would challenge the use of that word) with what are state-sanctioned entities (the police), and there's a long list of reasons to be skeptical. So obviously there is no reason to invent things that are not true.
They could arrest everyone and have perfect order. Short of that, they can only arrest people at the first small sign that person might ever not preserve order. Which is what they are currently doing. Things like loitering, expressing political opinions online, or being LGBT, are signs that a person might in the future not be completely orderly, and they arrest for that.
The actuality is that there is reason to believe it has been virtually nothing but outrageous abuse from inception to now.
In general the need for secrecy is liable to be inversely related to the time required for it to be secret from what we do know and this is under comparatively sane regimes. Our current regime wants to build concentration camps and imprison journalists for reporting on their foibles.
What you SHOULD do is have sane limits with truly independent oversight by parties accountable to congress and the people. After a comparatively short duration virtually everything should become public and any misuse of said systems should result in prison. It's not like we couldn't build a system that with appropriate checks and balances but we certainly don't have one now.
Literally anything that protects people from the law will protect criminals and terrorists too.
Fourth amendment? A terrorist might have a bomb in their trunk that the police aren't allowed to search.
Jury trial? A psychopathic murder might charm the jury into thinking they're not guilty and get released.
Prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? What if the person is actually a horrible criminal but there's reasonable doubt?
We have these protections not because they save ordinary people while still letting the government do everything possible to catch criminals, but because we think it's worth reducing the government's ability to catch criminals in exchange for fewer abuses of non-criminals.
If the target were being investigated for terrorism, then the govt could inform the company of that and - if the company tipped the terrorist off - prosecute the company for being an accessory / aid to the terrorist.
However, if the govt claimed that the person was a terrorist and the company knew for 100% fact that the person was innocent and the investigation was in bad faith... they could tip off the victim.
The NSLs only really help in the latter scenario. As long as the govt has a plausible story, there will be a 50% chance that the target is a criminal and the company will not risk notifying the target. With NSLs they can prosecute the company even though there was no legitimate basis for the investigation and everyone knew it.
> govt claimed that the person was a terrorist and the company knew for 100% fact that the person was innocent and the investigation was in bad faith...
This is the thing tearing at the seams of our justice system in general. Our rules are based around an ostensible checks-and-balances arrangement, but this relies on the assumption of good faith from the parties involved. Implicit in this is the idea that if any body isn't acting in good faith, it will be so repugnant to voters that the state of affairs will quickly come to an end. This assumption is false.
Now we're talking about granting Facebook the right to assume bad faith on the part of the FBI!? Like granting the power to ignore the government to private companies will solve this, or help at all? That bandaid solution is almost certainly worse than the disease.
That's not to say that I agree with secret spying provisions. They clearly violate the Constitution and undermine trust in democracy. I just don't think "if you're a big enough company you get to ignore orders and drag things out in court" is a solution to government overreach. It's individual rights that need protecting, not corporate ones.
> Implicit in this is the idea that if any body isn't acting in good faith, it will be so repugnant to voters that the state of affairs will quickly come to an end. This assumption is false.
The appropriate democratic fix here is to enable citizen visibility into NSLs et al.
The fact that they are indefinitely secret from voters is the root issue.
Better to wiretap everyone just in case.
Why stop there ? After all there a chance any privacy could be used to conceal some terrorist plot, better to record every meat-space conversations too, let's not take any risk.
We could even recruit people to turn their neighbors in for all sorts if terrible acts, like offensive FB posts, or not wearing masks, or having too many people over, or hanging out on the beach by themselves during a pandemic, or...
The party in power always wants control. Whether this is bad or not usually depends on if you align with the party in control or not.
Thank you for exemplifying this point. The justice system isn't about stopping crimes. It's about inflicting punishment. In some cases, the justice system even encourages or creates crimes, so it can punish someone.
Sometimes crimes are created by governments to control behavior or punish those that opposed their preferred views. Think about those ideas about criminalizing not calling someone by their pronouns, for example.
But yours is a ridiculous conclusion that prison does not stop crimes. Of course sending you to the slammer STOPS the crimes you were going to commit.
Also, we don’t have to send criminals to the slammer. We can send them to live with you and your family, but something tells me your performative statements stop short of allowing that. And that is the issue, some people like you want “society at large” to bear the cost of crime, but don’t want to bear the cost themselves. This has to tell you everything you need to know. It’s basically suicidal empathy. I could ask you to ask Pava Lapere how that worked out, but she is dead.
Or they stop using the means of communication that has become compromised and find a new way starting the cat&mouse over again.
This is like saying that an undercover agent must answer "yes" when asked by anyone if they are part of a law enforcement agency. What would be the point of being undercover?
The problem is the abuse of the invasive searching. If the evidence is compelling enough, then present that evidence to a judge and have a legit signed warrant. Unfortunately, there will be judges with a rubber stamp.
I think what gets lost in these conversations is that the government is using very lazy methods to catch low hanging fruit. Instead of extrajudicial spying they should be creating undercover identities and infiltrating criminal organizations. If law enforcement was competent Facebook wouldn’t even know it was happening.
I'm not sure if that's better. The feds have a long history of goading "probably harmless" people into parking SUVs full of half-ass explosives in NYC or kidnapping governors or whatever.
It’s possible for law enforcement to misbehave in more than one way. In fact while they were manufacturing these cases they were also conducting dragnet surveillance. It’s not a competition, or a choice.
Manufacturing cases doesn’t mean undercover investigations are illegal or even unreasonable. It’s just another example of unethical LEO behavior that should be destroyed.
On the other hand dragnet surveillance of US citizens is NEVER ok.
> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not?
I am perfectly capable of writing specs, and feeding them to 3 separate copies of Claude Code all by myself. Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. This workflow is fine for some things, and deeply awful for others.
Basically, if a developer is just going to take my spec and hand it to Claude Code, then they're providing zero value. I could do that myself, and frequently do.
The actual bottleneck is people who can notice, "The god object is crumbling under the weight of managing 6 separate concerns with insufficient abstraction." Or "Claude has created 5 duplicate frameworks for deploying the app on Docker. We need to simplify this down to 1 or we're in hell." I will happy fight to hire people who can do the latter work. But those people can all solve fizzbuzz in their sleep.
People who just "ship code that matches a spec" without understanding the technical details are providing close to zero value right now.
There is an interesting niche for people with deep knowledge of customer workflows who can prompt Claude Code. These people can't build finished products using Claude. But they can iterate rapidly on designs until they find a hit. Which we can then fix using people with deeper engineering knowledge and taste.
But if you're not bringing either deep customer knowledge or actual engineering knowledge, you're not adding much these days.
Tell Claude you want to set up notifications, using "hooks", including "Notification" and "Stop" and anything new they've added. Claude can figure out how to do this for your operating system.
It's not perfect—sometimes a Claude notifies 3 minutes after it stopped doing anything. But it's helpful when I'm running multiple Claudes and also reviewing code elsewhere.
Your brain may feel like someone put it in a blender. Be warned.
Fizzbuzz is such an incredibly simple problem if you can’t do it I struggle to see how you’d be able to complete any task that requires very basic reasoning and very basic coding knowledge. And if an AI system can do those parts, what am I getting for spending tens of thousands of pounds per year by hiring a person who can’t? Wouldn’t I just tag codex on the tickets?
I’m not talking about gotcha level stuff here where the first time it didn’t compile because of a bracket or anything, or even first time wrong. They couldn’t do Fizzbuzz in a language of their choice, at all.
Those that could were always annoyed at having to do such things because how could someone coming for a contract position not be able to do this? Without seeing what a filter it really was.
I feel the same way about inverting a binary tree, but a lot of people act like it's an arduous request. I am guessing it's because they've never read the description of what inverting a binary tree is, but maybe people are just that bad at recursion.
Right. For the first many decades of computing, recursion was just always the wrong answer for a production software system. (Feel free to provide a counter-example, but please begin with an explanation of how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on this platform).
So what tree-traversal/quicksort problems tend to measure is how long it's been since you last did CS class homework problems.
Great. Please explain how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on the particular platform you're proposing to recurse upon.
> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not?
The inability to write fizzbuzz strongly implies their inability to understand what they've shipped. Review is some significant portion of the job. Understanding of the product is also part of the job.
Specs are also in a sense, scaled down, fuzzy, natural language descriptions of a feature. The fuzziness is the source of a bugs, or at least a mismatch between the actual desired feature and what was written down at spec writing time. As such, just matching a spec is just the bare minimum that a good dev should be doing. They should be understanding what the spec is _not_ saying, understanding holes in their implementation, how their implementation enables or hinders the next feature and the next, next feature, etc. I don't think any of that is possible without understanding what was actually implemented.
For the same reason it's important your mechanic can identify which parts of a car are the wheel.
Who cares as long as the car is fixed, right? As long as the mechanic can Chinese-room his way to a working car, why does it matter how much of it he actually understands?
And why hire the mechanic instead of hiring the Chinese room?
First: FizzBuzz is a test to know if you understand the most basic constructs of programming. The kind of thing you learn in the first week of CS101. I forgot what it was, and when I looked at the problem I knew the answer.
More broadly: In the short/medium term, we still need humans who have the skills to understand software largely on their own. We will always need those who understand software engineering and architecture. Perhaps in 25 years LLMs will be so good that learning Python by hand will be like learning assembly today. But not yet.
The field is not ready for new practitioners to be know-nothing Prompt engineers. If we do that, we cut the legs out from under the education pipeline for programming.
It’s about deeply understanding what you’re doing. Like as a kid before you knew how to ride a bike, you could sit on a bike and peddling, but until it “clicked” you couldn’t balance and keep going forward stable. Fizzbuzz tests your ability to reason through a problem that seems simple on its face, but is easy to get wrong and/or overthink.
I can see this perspective, but FizzBuzz is such a low bar that so many can pass, I'd greatly prefer to hire someone that can ship code that matches a spec do this challenge.
It doesn't. It's just a low-end skill filter that got really popular. It could have easily been replaced by other tests like is this word a palindrome.
I wrote the "function to reverse a string" in a job interview once. Then the interviewer reminded me that strrev() had been part of the standard C library since K&R.
I'd been programming in C(++) for ~15 years by then and had never had the occasion to reverse a string. I still wonder whether that makes it a good job interview question, or a terrible one. Some of both probably.
Firing people is problematic. I'd be okay with it if the economy wasn't utter trash. It's way better to do the work upfront and prefer false negatives over false positives.
Even better would be if we had a well-respected credential, so both employees and employers can both avoid these long interview loops. I'd much rather get hazed once in a big way than tons of little hazings over a life time.
