Same argument applies. Driving slowly for 1km 0.01 under the speed limit, over legal blood alco limit is safer than driving at the speed limit for 10kms just under the alco limit.
It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.
The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.
That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.
To an LLM, answering “no” and changing the mode of the chat window are discrete events that are not necessarily related.
Many coding agents interpret mode changes as expressions of intent; Cline, for example, does not even ask, the only approval workflow is changing from plan mode to execute mode.
So while this is definitely both humorous and annoying, and potentially hazardous based on your workflow, I don’t completely blame the agent because from its point of view, the user gave it mixed signals.
The point is that if the harness’ workflow gives contradictory and confusing instructions to the model, it’s a harness issue, not necessarily a model issue.
First it was a model issue, then it was a prompting issue, then it was a context issue, then it was an agent issue, now it's a harness issue. AI advocates keep accusing AI skeptics of moving goalposts. But it seems like every 3-6 months another goalpost is added.
The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).
There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.
Im reading through all these comments and it amazes me how the perfect is the enemy of the good, for many computer people.
Ofc there are edge cases. So since there exist a handful of edge cases where a zip code maps to two states, or the more frequent (but irrelevant in the US) case of two or more city names per zip code, we should make everyone suffer?
Ofc if you are making a web form you should ask for the zip code first, and auto complete state and city. Let the user edit them if they don’t like what you chose. Or do as some have suggested here and present the official USPS data as a drop down of 2 states or 2-3 cities; thats way better than having to type all of it.
And I curse everyone who thinks it’s a good idea to break zip code or phone number or OTP into multiple fields, or if you’re too lazy to set the input type to number.
I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering.
I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.
It seems to me that there's a strong Pareto law inclination to this. 99% of non-profits are going to the local volley ball club type organizations that indeed don't make any money at all, or maybe a few hundred at most. I am in the board of a local chess club and you should see the amount of discussion that sometimes happens around a budget of no more than the equivalent of several hundred USD. I honestly can't imagine anyone is using us to launder money. (How, even? Yearly contribution is less than 100 EUR and even major sponsors for tournaments etc are easily traceable local companies that contribute <1k EUR each)
Then there's a relatively tiny amount of organizations that processes the vast majority of funds. Universities, hospitals, big FOSS organizations, etc. Those are the ones that are actually interesting.
I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives.
I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example.
And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.
For a huge chunk of non-profits, the non-profit work is the labor of their members. Their goal is not and has never been to pass revenue through to the community - what would that even look like for a hospital? There's a million different examples here.
Directors of non-profits that have enough money for this to matter are doing this as a full time job - are we going to eliminate every competent director from working here if they can't afford to stop getting compensated for their work?
Your suggestion would cripple non-profits doing all sorts of important and beneficial work.
My non profit is genuinely helpful. We spend less than $1000 a year.
At most I advertise my for-profit website and try to gain personal fame, but if I was trying to do those 2 things, I'd spend it directly on those 2 things.
This would be great. I would also like to see non profits close shop once their goals are reached or fail rather than transform into a new thing just so the top people who make up the organization can continue to have a paycheck.
Nobody wants to give you a huge grant to continue doing what you're already doing, you only get grants for doing something completely new and grandiose. If you're lucky, you may get like 20% of the grant to cover your other expenses that don't come with a caveat of having to spend it on something completely new.
This article is mostly about universities and hospitals. Not really clear how either of those could possibly pass 75% of funding through to the community.
> I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering.
Actually most non profits are a massive jobs program for the middle and lower middle class. The side effect is that some problems that the government or the private sector won’t touch, get a slight more attention while providing tax benefits to people who contribute.
I reached a similar shape (Figure 11 in my pdf: https://jimishol.github.io/thoughts_on_harmony_en.pdf#page=2... ), but the specific, even arbitrary, twisting I used to realize the torus topology gives it a unique advantage: it immediately reveals the "hinge note" of a scale.
I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.
Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.
I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.
I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.
I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.
And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.
I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.
It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.
Raymond generally discusses public things and history. That's allowable plenty of places.
Bruce Dawson was publishing debugging stories (including things debugged about Google products done as part of his job) for the entire time he was working at Google: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
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