I don't really agree with this authors analysis of Austen. Like on Pride and Prejudice, "Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance." Elizabeth grew up with her parents fairly disastrous marriage (where her Dad doesn't respect her Mom) and inability to think in the future which put the girls in such a bad situation (her father should have saved money up instead of just assuming he'd have a son eventually). She is reacting against that, wanting a husband that will have mutual respect AND the economic security of someone who is responsible. She wouldn't just want to marry someone for love who wasn't able to provide her economic security, just like she doesn't want to marry Darcy she doesn't respect him. This article makes it sound like she is rejecting the social expectations of her society, but only her mom really wants her to marry Mr. Collins and as seen by her own marriage and support of Lydia's marriage she is a pretty bad judge of what's going to make a good life. Later they say "They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of" But that just describes basically everyone, none of us have no agency, but all of us are also caught up in larger systems we can't opt out of. But even within Austen you have Emma, who is entirely economically and socially secure and doesn't need to worry about anything and Fanny who lives entirely at the whims of others.
I haven't read Austen, but there's an infamous exchange in the original series where the ceremonial head of the Space Nazis compares his son, the acting head of the Space Nazis, to Hitler. The son replies, essentially, "Thanks." There's a tension in Mobile Suit Gundam and its direct descendants. The Space Nazis (Zeon) are also sort of, kind of a stand-in for Imperial Japan during WWII, and between the implicit relatability therein, and the charisma and popularity of series antihero Char Aznable (a Zeon officer), there is an enthusiasm in fan circles (leaking into later productions) for humanizing grunts on the "villain" side while emphasizing the corruption of the side the heroes happen to be on. But this as subtext to the headline narrative of Zeon being mass-murderers and the Earth Federation trying to stop them. There's also running, unspoken theme of the various corporate conglomerates playing governments and ideologues against each other for profit, and occasionally stepping in (usually with a particularly powerful prototype robot) when one side threatens to blow up the Earth Sphere for realsies. The end result is a lot of people dying for no reason, and constant backsliding into a state of war, and main characters who realize how ridiculous such circumstances are, but (as per TFW) don't have much power to do anything other than try to survive and protect their loved ones. Viewers are able to see where the shape of that society is warped. That's without speaking much to the alternate universes. In Gundam Wing, the greatest threat to a global aristocracy-cum-junta is a small, loosely-associated paramilitary group made up of 5 teenage boys and their supporters. The machinations of colonial-era Europe are so philosophically feeble as to be legitimately challenged by NSYNC and Greta Thunberg.
Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I care a lot more about chunks and AI could reasonably validate . Instead of thinking “what’s the biggest chunk I could reasonably ask AI to solve” I think “what’s the biggest piece I could ask an AI to do that I can write a script to easily validate once it’s done?” Allowing the AI to validate its own work means you never have to worry about chunking again. (OK, that's a slight hyperbole, but the validation is most of my concern, and a secondary concern is that I try not to let it go for more than 1000 lines.) For instance, take the example of an AI rewriting an API call to support a new db library you are migrating to. In this case, it’s easy to write a test case for the AI. Just run a bunch of cURLs on the existing endpoint that exercise the existing behavior (surely you already have these because you’re working in a code base that’s well tested, right? right?!?), and then make a script that verifies that the result of those cURLs has not changed. Now, instruct the AI to ensure it runs that script and doesn’t stop until the results are character for character identical. That will almost always get you something working. Obviously the tactics change based on what you are working on. In frontend code, for example, I use a lot of Playwright. You get the idea. As for code legibility, I tend to solve that by telling the AI to focus particularly on clean interfaces , and being OK with the internals of those interfaces be vibecoded and a little messy, so long as the external interface is crisp and well-tested. This is another very long discussion, and for the non-vibe-code-pilled (sorry), it probably sounds insane, and I feel it's easy to lose one's audience on such a polarizing topic, so I'll keep it brief. In short, one real key thing to understand about AI is that it makes the cost of writing unit tests and e2e tests drop significantly, and I find this (along with remaining disciplined and having crisp interfaces) to be an excellent tool in the fight against the increased code complexity that AI tools bring. So, in short, I deal with legibility by having a few really really clean interfaces/APIs that are extremely readable, and then testing them like crazy. EDIT There is a dead comment that I can't respond to that claims that I am not a reliable narrator because I have no A/B test. Behold, though: I am the AI-hater's nightmare, because I do have a good A/B test! I have a website that sees a decent amount of traffic ( https://chipscompo.com/ ). Over the last few years, I have tried a few times to modernize and redesign the website, but these attempts have always failed because the website is pretty big (~50k loc) and I haven't been able to fit it in a single week of PTO. This Thanksgiving, I took another crack at it with Claude Code, and not only did I finish an entire redesign (basically touched every line of frontend code), but I also got in a bunch of other new features, too, like a forgot password feature, and a suite of moderation tools. I then IaC'd the whole thing with Terraform, something I only dreamed about doing before AI! Then I bumped React a few majors versions, bumped TS about 10 years, etc, all with the help of AI. The new site is live and everyone seems to like it (well, they haven't left yet...). If anything, this is actually an unfair comparison, because it was more work for the AI than it was for me when I tried a few years ago, because because my dependencies became more and more out of date as the years went on! This was actually a pain for AI, but I eventually managed to solve it.
Your claim is weird. No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard. The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results. If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents. Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now. The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own. The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures. In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
> But why should they even care to begin with? Why should they care about something that they feel will hurt them financially when they're already struggling and restrict their freedom on top of that? Why wouldn't they care? > Just because the news and media made them aware of congestion pricing? Uber's "surge" pricing was what first introduced many of them to a world where the price of something they depend on changes from moment to moment. Dynamic/discriminatory pricing schemes have been worrying people for a long time now. People don't like it, they consider it scammy, and they don't want it to spread. I think that if NYC had just jacked up the toll price all the time it wouldn't have set off as many alarms, but ultimately people in other places aren't really worried about congestion pricing in New York, their worry is that it will come to where they drive and they can't afford people taking more money from them. They're struggling to keep food on the table and are drowning in record high levels of household debt. Of course they're scared of congestion pricing catching on. Mind you, while some of their fears are reasonable, not all of them are. I've seen some of the more conspiratorial people talking about it as a way to control and restrict the movement of poor people (something shared with criticisms of 15-minute cities). The core of the problem though is that their standard of living is declining, their trust/confidence in government is bottoming out, they know that they're getting screwed over by the wealthy and they're on edge. They see NYC using some scammy pricing scheme to take more money from people like them while the wealthy are unaffected and it hits a nerve. They'll have plenty of skin in the game if congestion pricing spreads (and its success makes that increasingly likely) and that skin is already stretched thin which is making them feel highly skeptical of government, suspicious of people's motives, and angry over being asked to make their lives worse for the convenience of the wealthy. They worry about driving where they need to go becoming a luxury they can be priced out of, and as bad as NYC's public transportation is (compared to what's seen in other countries) most of them don't have anything even close to it in their own cities. That's what I'm seeing in discussions surrounding this issue both online and offline anyway.
> Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing? Because in all likelihood this isn't going to be limited to Manhattan, and I'd argue (like many others) that it probably shouldn't be. The fact that it's been so successful makes it all but inevitable that the practice will spread. Why would people wait until they're forced to choose between driving to work and affording groceries before they speak out against it? > None of these things are actually related to why people are stretched thin and getting screwed by the system I think a lot of people would argue that dynamic pricing schemes and governments taking increasing amounts of money from their pockets is, at least in part, why they are stretched thin. In any case, regardless of the cause of their struggles they are struggling. If they were feeling financially secure they might grumble at the increasing likelihood of paying fines to drive where they want to, but they wouldn't be panicking over it like they have been. Congestion pricing isn't seen as something that's screwing them over right now, but it is seen as the latest scheme cooked up by government that will be screwing them over if they can't put a stop to it. I think we'd agree that congestion pricing isn't the biggest issue impacting the struggling American family right now, but I can understand why it's being seen as a concern and as something they want to keep out of their own cities. For some that means putting a stop to the practice before it spreads.
There are a few different angles to this. 1. If any other state had done this, we'd be correctly calling this a terrorist attack and there wouldn't be any question about it; and 2. Palantir was a partner in developing several AI systems used for targeting missile strikes in Gaza. Collectively these tend to be called Lavender [1][2]. Another of these systems is called "Where's Daddy". What does it do? It targets alleged militants at home so their families with be collateral damage [3]; and 3. These systems could not exist without the labor of the humans who create them so it raises questions about the ethics of everything we do as software engineers and tech people. This is not a new debate. For example, there were debates about who should be culpable for the German death machine in WW2. Guards at the camp? Absolutely. Civilians at IG Farben who are making Zyklon-B? Do they know what it's being used for? Do they have any choice in the matter? My personal opinion is that anyone continuing to work for Palantir can no longer plead ignorance. You're actively contributing to profiting from killing, starving and torturing civilians. Do with that what you will. In a just world, you'd have to answer for your actions at The Hague or Nuremberg 2.0, ultimately. [1]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticias/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/ [2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ [3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-daddy-strikes-hamas-family-homes-2024
> 1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that... It's amazing how similarly zionists/israelis and nazis rationalize. > 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews. "Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples." --wiki > 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste. Germanic is a language group and an ethnic group. Using your logic, germans are not germanic peoples because germanic is a language group. > Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry, They have less documented middle eastern ancestry (none) than elizabeth warren has of native ancestry. > The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim. Considering that most "israelis" are ATHEISTS and most "israelis" are non-semitic and most "israelis" do not adhere to or respect the torah, it is a factual claim. > 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity. Why do you lie? People can literally google "semites" or "semitic peoples". If you lie about something like this, what are the odds you are lying about israel killing civilian semites in palestine?
> Suppose a venezuelan living in America just looks up a bunch of US generals addresses online, and then sets all their houses on fire killing them in their sleep in their McMansions in suburbia. I don't think the analogy is apt. Members of Hezbollah do not occupy a positions of similar relationship to Lebanon as US generals does to the US. As far as I've heard, flag officers and others are escorted by personal security for an attack of any sort, such as the 2009 Ft Hood shooting. [0] Moving past that, a civilian citizen of Venezuela in the US who performed actions against US military targets would not be a valid military strike since that person would not be an identifiable member or Venezuela's military. It would more akin to a spy or assassin. Below is an excerpt from an article representing a US-centric view of history [1]. But the right to kill one’s enemy during war was not considered wholly unregulated. During the 16th century, Balthazar Ayala agreed with Saint Augustine’s contention that it “is indifferent from the standpoint of justice whether trickery be used” in killing the enemy, but then distinguished trickery from “fraud and snares” (The Law and Duties of War and Military Discipline). Similarly, Alberico Gentili, writing in the next century, found treachery “so contrary to the law of God and of Nature, that although I may kill a man, I may not do so by treachery.” He warned that treacherous killing would invite reprisal (Three Books on the Law of War). And Hugo Grotius likewise explained that “a distinction must be made between assassins who violate an express or tacit obligation of good faith, as subjects resorting to violence against a king, vassals against a lord, soldiers against him whom they serve, those also who have been received as suppliants or strangers or deserters, against those who have received them; and such as are held by no bond of good faith” (On the Law of War and Peace). 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting 1. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/assassination-law-of-war/ Edit: /Hamas/Hezbollah/
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