+1. I was waiting to buy this, but it doesn't really have anything I want over my existing apple tv (which I really like). I was going to add one for a second television, but its just too expensive. I will stick with the Roku there (which I really don't love, at this point, its slow and has lots of ads).
I wish someone would expand this comment into a full-length study on the evolution of regulations and infrastructure within Burning Man. It's a really interesting topic.
You wouldn't need to look much further than the evolution of the BRC DMV
My friends who went in the late 90s recounted shooting at propane tanks from moving vehicles and having to camp inside of a ring of parked cars to protect your camp (from vehicular traffic)
After 2000 you had to show some decent design (not just a golf cart with dingleberries) and that was about it, they passed our moon car and shark van without much question, and the shark van was a giant sharp thing without lights.
Others will have to fill in the regs now, I understand things have gotten progressively more rigorous.
My understanding is that anything built on the playa, including the art (eg. temple of gravity) has an engineer's stamp just like would in Reno. Or just a bit more dusty.
After being made aware of Pauline Borsook and her pioneering critique of cyberlibertarianism in Cyberselfish (published 2000) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866903), I followed some hyperlinks and searched some stuff referenced in the article and found this rather relevant analysis:
Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.
This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.
It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.
When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.
So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.
> Apple is, in some ways, very cynical. It markets utopian ideas all the time. It
markets its products as tools of utopian transformation in a countercultural vein. It has co-opted a series of the emblems of the counterculture, starting as soon as the company was founded.
> At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world
Why would that be revealed preference? If they have option to explicitly negotiate, they negotiate themselves different situation. This is what happens when you take that option away
1.) You cant take a single factor out of multi factoral decision and claim it is "revealed preference". It might be "cost they have to pay for something else".
2.) You cant assume they had ability to predict the future when they joined the community.
3.) You cant assume they have a place to go to now.
4.) You cant ignore women who in fact left those communities.
5.) You cant ignore majority of the women who in face did not joined the community.
And the same thing applies to men btw. You cant just claim that a suboptimal situation in which a man stayed is somehow revealed preference of males.
I'm sorry, I forgot. Women can never be held accountable for their actions. They are just helpless innocent babes in the woods, perpetual victims of the universe. The only crime they can truly commit is being attractive in a sports ad.
Funnily enough a friend of mine recently completed their PhD on a similar topic to this regarding the sociology of burning man, and associated burn events across the world. I will message them for their thesis and can DM it to you.
To begin with, camp fires were a normal -- even essential -- part of BM. Walking around, the city was illuminated by the flickering glow of crackling fires and conversation. And many of the temporary structures would be disposed of by having a big bonfire, often burn-night, or Sunday after, as a part of exodus.
But this caused several problems that demanded solutions. Camp fires can kick off sparks, and sparks in a large dense tent city is bad juju. So they forbid open fires, and required contained burn barrels or stoves. Big fires built directly on the playa get hot enough to bake the clay and leave burn scars. This violated their permits from the BLM. So they required metal insulation below. After a few of revs in the rules, fire in camps became practically forbidden.
It was sad. Campfires were replaced by lighting, and sound systems. Small group bonfire rituals were forbidden. So the warm, inviting glow of a crackling campfire and the murmur of conversation were replaced by the repellent cold light of leds, and edm, like an empty club. Serendipity and connection suffered.
It’s not the same event but I know there is a pretty good docu on YouTube by wendover explaining Glastonbury festival logistics that may be of interest if this is your thing
One thing I learned recently is that Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTI) is float-weighted. That means that SpaceX's percentage in the index is based on the value of the floating shares, not the total market cap. As a result, a fund like VTI, for now, doesn't have that much SpaceX. It will add more as the lockup periods expire and the float increases, but increasing float might also drive down the price.
I find it really strange that there is so much negative commentary on the _code_, but so little commentary on the core architecture.
My takeaway from looking at the tool list is that they got the fundamental architecture right - try to create a very simple and general set of tools on the client-side (e.g. read file, output rich text, etc) so that the server can innovate rapidly without revving the client (and also so that if, say, the source code leaks, none of the secret sauce does).
Overall, when I see this I think they are focused on the right issues, and I think their tool list looks pretty simple/elegant/general. I picture the server team constantly thinking - we have these client-side tools/APIs, how can we use them optimally? How can we get more out of them. That is where the secret sauce lives.
The tools was mostly already known, no? (I wish they had a "present" tool which allowed to model to copy-paste from files/context/etc. showing the user some content without forcing it through the model)
Yeah in fact one thing claude is freaking great at is decompilation.
If you can download it client side you can likely place a copy in a folder and ask claude
‘decompile the app in this folder to answer further questions on how it works. As an an example first question explain what happens when a user does X’.
I do this with obscure video games where i want to a guide on how some mechanics work. Eg.
https://pastes.io/jagged-all-69136 as a result of a session.
It can ruin some games but despite the possibility of hallucinations i find it waaay more reliable than random internet answers.
Works for apps too. Obfuscation doesn’t seem to stop it.
> but so little commentary on the core architecture.
The core architecture is not interesting? its an LLM tui, theres not much there to discuss architecturally. The code itself is the actual fascinating train wreck to look at.
Why are "tools" for local IO interesting and not just the only way to do it? I can't really imagine a server architecture that gets to read your local files and present them without a fat client of some kind.
What is the naive implementation you're comparing against? Ssh access to the client machine?
It's early days and we don't fully understand LLM behavior to the extent that we can assume questions like this about agent design are resolved. For instance, is an agent smarter with Claude Code's tools or `exec_command` like Codex? And does that remain true for each subsequent model release?
It’s a distinction that IMHO likely doesn’t make much difference, at least for the mostly automated/non-interactive coding agent use case. What matters more is how well the post-training on synthetic harness traces works.
I found it a useful overview. My primary question about the client source was - is there any secret sauce in it? Based on this site, the answer is no, the client is quite simple/dumb, and all the secret sauce resides on the server/in the model.
I particularly valued the tool list. People in these comments are complaining about how bad the code is, but I found the client-side tools that the model actually uses to be pretty clean/general.
My takeaway was more that at a very basic level they know what they are doing - keep the client general, so that you can innovate on the server side without revving the client as much.
I can't read this article, but I live in a market that Waymo is just beginning to develop (St. Louis). I have seen two Waymos in our area in the last week. I am really, really looking forward to having it available, but I think it is several years away.
It will be useful for me and my wife, but it would have been transformative for my kids in the pre-driving teen years. We do so much ferrying them around, and to be able to put them in a safe car and get them where they are going would have made such a difference for us. I think it might be here in time to make a difference with my younger child.
For that use case, trust and safety are really, really important to me. That plan only works for me because I suspect the Waymo driver will be safer than I am. I think for companies developing self-driving cars, the safety reputation matters a lot. Right now Waymo is the only one I would consider, because their roll out has been so methodical and competent.
As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
>If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked.
cries in gamedev
Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.
This article is the second time I have seen a news outlet try to 'break' the vending machine experiment. That is definitely really entertaining. In this case, they convinced the AI that it lived in a communist country and it was part of an experiment in capitalism. That's funny!
But I really wish Anthropic would give the technology to a journalist that tries working with it productively. Most business people will try to work with AI productively because they have an incentive to save money/be efficient/etc.
Anyway, I am hoping someone at Anthropic will see this on HN, and relay this message to whatever team sets up these experiements. I for one would be fascinated to see the vending machine experiment done sincerely, with someone who wants to make it work.
The reality is that even most customers are smart enough to realize that driving a business they rely on out of business isn't in their interest. In fact, in a B2B context, I think that is often the case. Thanks.
I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.
The current internet zeitgeist is ironically anti-tech and pro AI doomer communism.
Patent trolls hurt tech so thats now a good thing on new HN (now filled with normies like most tech companies these days). The enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.
Nobody has any real values or beliefs anymore. We’re all just swimming in vibes.
AI has rather superceded intellectual property, since it's apparently fine to distil a derived work of everything on the planet if you have enough investor money.
