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Because while consumers value “inefficiency” (high design, wonderful prose, beautiful images, great usability) they don’t want to actually pay for it. Producers have to become extremely efficient without revenue, and are stuck with a choice: Produce at a loss, stop producing, or seek payment from another source (sponsorships, ads).

> This is a measurement discipline: when someone offers you a test pass rate as evidence of a safety property, check whether the test suite measures that property. Behavioral equivalence and memory soundness are different axes. A green test suite tells you the new thing acts like the old thing. If the old thing was a body of manual memory management and the new thing is a faithful translation of it, then green tells you the translation is good - and tells you nothing whatsoever about whether the thing is safe. The number that would actually answer the question is the one nobody can produce yet, because producing it is, for now, an unsolved problem.

Bottom line is we didn’t have a measurement of safety before the port, and we don’t have one now.

What we do have is a known list of unsafe blocks, and we can use that as our safety measure. (I’m neither a Zig not Rust programmer, but I’m guessing that the unsafe parts of the Zig codebase were also mostly measurable so we could have had this measure.)

I do wonder if the next step is to move bun into WASM for an additional layer of security. Those unsafe blocks might be neutered by not granting WASM the ability to run them. That would give anthropic a “sandboxed by default” opportunity.

It’s a fun project to watch!


Lovely!

I mean, yes? Anthropic’s investors are seeing more upside now and valuing the company higher. Your thesis is that this additional value is driven by better marketing rather than a superior model. Could be! The truth is we’ll never really know with certainty what factors are doing the heavy lifting here, we can only guess and argue over who’s a better guesser.

Literally the next sentences:

> It’s one that we’ve been facing for quite some time. The reason we wrote this report, however, is to highlight the fact that we’re sort of in this moment in time right now, with our relationship with the U.S. deteriorating and us trying to diversify our trading partners, to highlight the fact that we are still not really all that competitive. Our productivity growth is quite low and has been for a few years now. So, banging this drum about wanting to raise this issue around competitiveness, that was the goal of this.

With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.


> With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.

Even if the US was still benevolent (ish), Canada needed to up its game. I have heard Canada be described as "European wages with American working hours".

It's a great country with good people and lots of beauty, but they need an economy and job prospect beyond real estate, mining, banking, automotive, and government funded. The country seems to lack diversity in prospects and relatively uncompetitive wages.

For those leaving after completely undergraduate schooling that is taxpayer subsidized, there should be both carrots/sticks to discourage it - carrots would be to substantially juice tuition tax credits to give young people a better shot to save coming out of school. Sticks would be that if you are leaving soon after graduating, you are maybe on the hook for paying back some of that subsidized education. I'm not married to the exact carrots and sticks, but the country probably needs to do something short term while they also sort out future economic growth sectors.


Not that realistic, my salaries have always been about double of what's offered in Europe (or more). Also "Europe" is vague, average salary in Italy is low enough to be a joke

Cost of life though, is completely fucked up.


Post secondary should be setup as a loan for the subsidized portion withloan forgiveness prorated over a decade. If you leave the tax net it converts to payments like any other loan. Everywhere should be doing this, its just good policy. The carrot is way more of a problem because this place needs to be less junk on nearly every measureable dimension. the examples are too numerous to list but housing needs to be a lot more affordable and there is probably a hundred things to fix to make that one thing function betteras one example.

The monumental obstructions to getting anything done in Canada, from bloated beurocracys that are in the business of denying the service they were created to provide is a huge obsticle to starting a business here in Canada, hence the fever dream of joining the EU and exploiting millions of imigrants to do the actual physical stuff for cheap and obiediently, lest they run afoul of the many rules ,regulations and conditions on which there forever pending citizenship depends, which favors existing LARGE businesses to scale up,leaving high talented people with little real oportunity. So ya, a lot of people set out to get a grub stake or just give in and take the highest bid.

No, it’s actual insurance:

> Iran has started a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for Iranian shipping companies that want to transit the Strait of Hormuz, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, citing documents obtained from the country’s Ministry of Economy and Financial Affairs.

> According to a screen shot of the insurance company’s website, dubbed Hormuz Safe and shared by Fars news, it “provides Iranian shipping companies and cargo owners with fast, verifiable digital insurance.” Fars didn’t give a detailed break down of how the insurance works and whether it’s available to foreign shipping companies and vessels.


That appears to be a long winded description of extortion under the cover of insurance, like the gp said


Why would a brand new car not be road worthy? Is it common for new cars to be unsafe to drive?


How would you know unless you inspect them? I'd just assumed every car needs to be inspected, new cars after they're built, but never bought a new car so I don't know how it works. I guess the manufacturer then self-reports that the car is roadworthy after the construction?

I'm currently sitting and thinking about importing a second-hand car from another country, neighboring country also in Schengen, EU and EEA, just like us, even if that car passed all their local inspections, I'm gonna have to make it pass through our local inspection before I can register it here. Kind of felt like it'd be similar with new cars, but also, I don't know.


> How would you know unless you inspect them?

By making the seller lose their license if they sell cars that are not roadworthy? Why should the risk and liability be on the buyer?


New cars are certified by the manufacturer to meet safety standards when built


You’re not an example of what we’re taking about here. Congratulations!

A better example would be if you’d changed the behavior of the library as you did this work, and the library changes introduced hard-to-detect bugs across the application.


Yes exactly. the GP isn't what we are talking about it and huge PR isn't what we are talking about either.

PR can be huge that's OK. For example, codebases that moved from Python 2 to Python 3 would have had huge PRs but the cognitive load was well understood.


Same article syndicated on msn.com, without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/new-york-californi...

The issues:

> The New York and California pension systems would become holders of SpaceX shares through their passive allocations if the company is admitted to major U.S. stock indexes.

> The officials… objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including:

- voting control over the stock,

- veto power over his own removal as CEO, and

- protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.

> …

> In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to:

- adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years;

- install a majority-independent board and separate the CEO and chair roles;

- eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval;

- scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party transactions with Musk's other companies.

(Formatting mine; moved paragraph about becoming holders above the lists of concerns and recommendations.)


I’d love to hear one of you staunch capitalists tell me why the description of this persons control over 13,000+ employees is any different than a feudal “Lord”

Over the entire lifetime of SpaceX Nearly 100% of the revenue comes from the government

They pay gifts and tributes to the government

They spend an absurd amount of money on lobbying and writing laws to take monopoly control of the subsection of the market

What am I missing here? Pretty sure there’s Universal agreement that the feudal system is not something anybody should be promoting


The vast majority of those 13k workers are highly skilled and in very high demand. They could work elsewhere or start their own company. In addition, they are far better educated and have more welfare options than anyone living under a feudal system.


Oh yes the classic “but the standard of living has gone up and now people have televisions” argument

They are living under a feudal system

Any one of the 13,000 could be fired on whim of Musk and even if it was in error they would have months if ever to get restitution. The employees describe him as a “tyrant” that fires people based on ego

The fact that people aren’t dying of scurvy is all you’re pointing to?

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employee-survey-elon-m...


Maybe you replied to the wrong comment? Peasants under a feudal lord couldn’t work elsewhere. If an engineer was fired from SpaceX they’d have another job before the end of the month… and if they didn’t then they wouldn’t starve to death because of welfare. That seems materially different.


> If an engineer was fired from SpaceX they’d have another job before the end of the month

This is just wrong

Have you not been paying attention to the last five years of layoffs and a decimated technology labor market?


Why lie about something that's easily proven false with a Google search? Over last 5 years government revenue is under 25% and if you go off of last 2 years its closer to like 10-15% (and declining!) Starlink is the vast majority of spacex revenue


You don’t need to accuse someone of lying when correcting them.


You need if they are doing it on purpose.


Actually you don’t. Why are you lying about this?

It’s enough to show that they’re wrong - and if you guess wrong that they are lying, and they were just wrong in good faith, you’re much more likely to convince them (and others).

And, from the HN guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.


[flagged]


SpaceX had to literally sue the military to even be allowed to bid for projects. And won. And then won the contracts.

The guy who landed on the Moon testified in congress opposing giving SpaceX any money.

The government wanted nothing to do with SpaceX.

SpaceX won the contracts despite the government, not because. They won the contracts because they offered the best product at the lowest price.


> SpaceX had to literally sue the military to even be allowed to bid for projects. And won. And then won the contracts.

This is literally how government contracts work on massive multibillion dollar systems.

Palantir famously did this with the Army: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/03/29/palantir-who-suc...

Every gov-tech company on the planet has a team of people hired and dedicated to suing the government via a well understood process that is intended to filter out organizations that do not have the financial capacity to deal with the government.

As an AF SES I owned $300 million worth of contracts for the Air Force starting in 2020 and by 2022 my acquisition portfolio for AFLMC was $6B yearly. Guess how many of those contracts had actual competition despite months of solicitation? Almost none because the FAR is written/updated by corporations such that the barriers to entry are impossible to meet.

Go tell me how quickly you can get a piece of software running on a govt network and come back to me and tell me that there’s equal competition.

You have no idea how much corruption is baked into the structure of government contracts.

The corruption is not that someone violated the acquisition system; the corruption is that the acquisition system legally converts concentrated contractor influence into unequal access, unequal rule-shaping power, and unequal probability of award.


The government was a customer that paid for a product/service. Are you saying all entities that sell to the government are being "propped up" by the government?


Yes

There are no non-corrupt government contractors if for no other reason then the government contracting market is not a open and free market it is regulated specifically by the federal acquisitions regulation which was in large part written and consistently adjusted by non-elected corporate leaders: https://www.jacksonlewis.com/insights/dod-seeks-contractors-...

Read war is a racket and it will be clear: https://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket


Feudalism is a political system whereby land is granted to vassals on the conditional basis that they provide levy or taxes to their lord. While the system is notionally a reciprocal system (the fief is a conditional grant, both sides have obligations to each other), by comparing it with the dominant form of taxation that preceded and succeeded it--tax farming--it's fairly clear that the locus of power is decisively with the vassal here and not the liege. Whereas a state who engages in tax farming lets out a new contract every few years, and usually to the same people, a fief is an explicitly hereditary instrument that is abrogated by the liege only at great risk, since the power he has to enforce such a decision comes from his other vassals and his ability to personally persuade them of a course of action.

That is to say that the hallmark of a feudal society is one with very, very weak central authority and powerful local authorities, mediated by the personal interrelationships within and across different levels of authority. Apply that to your analysis of SpaceX and the mismatch is clear. In your analysis, SpaceX is an entity that is utterly dependent on the government for its existence, and need to invest a large amount of energy in acquiring the beneficence of said government. That's not the behavior associated with a feudal society but rather the absolutist monarchies that replaced them, pretty much the antithesis of a feudal society.


> That is to say that the hallmark of a feudal society is one with very, very weak central authority and powerful local authorities, mediated by the personal interrelationships within and across different levels of authority

This is precisely the state of affairs in the United States today. Where people get confused is that the idea of property being specific hectares of land rather than what property is at maximum is capitalism which is simply paper contracts and debt, per graeber

> In your analysis, SpaceX is an entity that is utterly dependent on the government for its existence, and need to invest a large amount of energy in acquiring the beneficence of said government. That's not the behavior associated with a feudal society

It is the behavior of a Lord.

The United States is not an absolute monarchy and it has a rotating set of governors

What doesn’t rotate are the capitalist leaders (investors) for the top 100 corporations and they are the actual governors of this society

Because they determine where capital flows they are the ones who you have to pay homage to in order to get property so that you can then become a Lord


Isn’t a change to the code that incorporates your suggestions enough acknowledgment? Presumably the code change would be required to get your approval?


Of course! I didn't state it explicitly, but what I was referring to were comments that went completely unacknowledged in any way, be it explicit or implicit. No changes. No reaction. No "resolve comment". Radio silence.

As mentioned, I've experienced it too many times where not addressing a question/concern I put on the pull request led to outages that could have been avoided. I think it's typically a certain personality. It's not a common occurrence, but I have experienced it.


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