I don't know about just the past 6 months, but past 10-20 years, sure? I think software today has to handle much more varied and complicated I/O at a much bigger scale than it did in the past. Website UI/UX has to accommodate not only numerous browsers, but numerous devices with different viewing spaces. Think of how much broke when Python was rejiggered to not implicitly typecast unicode data. Think about all the legacy databases that can't handle spaces or various non-alphanumeric characters.
The userbase for software in the early 2000 was built for a much, much smaller audience than it is today. And I'm not sure the huge improvements in testing/debugging and general software development would totally mitigate that, in the same way modern military defense systems is still way behind modern offensive weaponry.
I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
Bad news #2:
2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.
Good news:
I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.
As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business.
Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.
Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.
It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).
My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t.
By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.
I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.
Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots. For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.
We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.
What a life. Survived the Vietnam War, tried to become a lawyer, became a music composer. And he got married to his soulmate at the age of 60, one year after receiving a lifetime achievement award for his video game music.
Being reminded of this anecdote from NYMag's recent cover story (which had previously been reported in a WSJ story[0]) about a Disney engineer who downloaded an AI-gen tool from Github and "checked the code himself, it had looked legitimate":
> He had no idea why the hackers had targeted him or what their plan was, whether they would drain his family’s finances or stalk his home. Eventually, after running another anti-virus program, he found a piece of malware hidden in a plug-in he had downloaded from GitHub, the open-source coding site, one day in February when he was messing around with an AI image generator. He had checked the code himself, it had looked legitimate, and others had reviewed it positively. But it seems it contained a Trojan-horse virus that gave the hackers free rein of his PC. Once inside, they just had to wait for Van Andel to log in to 1Password. From there, they were able to steal all his credentials, plus many of his multifactor-authentication codes, so every time Van Andel logged in to an app, a website, or an account, they could follow behind him. They’d had access for months.
At the surface level, this sounds very similar to Theranos's mission: create a non-invasive testing method that replace traditionally invasive/costly testing methods so successfully that it becomes silly not to gather and sample as much of your health data as possible, in the hopes that more data will eventually translate to better diagnostics.
Of course Theranos failed because they faked the testing tech (and allegedly also the test results) during their failed journey in developing their novel testing tech. Ostensibly, Midjourney is not going down that path, but I wonder why Midjourney thinks its brand is valuable when introducing this product? Because if someone were to accuse Midjourney of being the next Theranos, then Midjourney's fame for a AI-image generation service would slot in perfectly with a grift selling miraculously cheap body imaging tech.
I was using Fable to review my codebase and came back from the gym an hour later to find that I had suddenly used up my entire Max plan quota for the next 5 hours
(I have never had an agent do enough to burn up the 5 hour quota on Max)
(edit: just switched my CC model to 4.8 and my 5-hr cycle reset back to 0%, even though it previously had 2 more hours to go)
Back when image-gen was made widely available (2023ish, feels like eons ago), there were people who took genuine satisfaction with their art prompting skills. It did come off as a bit cringe though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/s/KxwhqJ5hrU
The article says they looked at CS 10 and 61A, which IIRC are the intro classes at Berkeley. Why do you think that amounts to “cherry picking” versus being a reasonable starting point for analysis (esp if those classes, as they are for one of the quoted professors, aren’t graded on a curve)?
> With that responsibility in mind, Instructure reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident. As part of that agreement:
> The data was returned to us. We received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs).
> We have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise.
> This agreement covers all impacted Instructure customers, and there is no need for individual customers to attempt to engage with the unauthorized actor.
> there were hordes of people standing lifelessly in a huge line waiting to check themselves out
Where are the retail experiences where people waiting to checkout are expressing an abundance of joy in life to you? Is the problem the “horde”? Sure, popular places tend to have a lot of people. I’m not sure why Costco customers act way less fun to you than at other places? This whole comments reads like a petulant “everyone is a NPC but me” screed
Sorry but this is rich. The vast, vast majority of times that Github goes down, even though the issue is almost always resolved within the day if not in the next couple of hours. Yet we'd all agree that "Github is down" posts are worth their time on HN, even though everyone knows how to access to status API, because it's not so much about being notified about the outage but understanding why it happened.
What exactly is "clickbait" here? Is the disappearance "mysterious" or not here? I'm not a banking tech engineer, so I don't have the slightest clue how a bank's app could completely glitch out for days about something as critical to people as their life savings. Were you even aware that this is something that could just happen? Do you have a notion that this issue would have resolved itself without the aggressive petitioning by the account holder? Explain to us how you would go to the FDIC with a claim when the FDIC covers customers with provable losses, and the article reports that this person was so ghosted out of the system that Fidelity's customer support was telling her, “Are you sure you shouldn’t be calling Schwab”?
From the article:
> Ms. Gruntmane felt she had little choice, and was forced to cancel her 20 or so patients for the day. After a quick stop at home to retrieve her personal computer, identification and other records, she got back into her car and started driving. “It just felt out of, like, a psychological thriller,” she said.
> As she was driving through Vail, she called her mother, who suggested trying to reach Fidelity’s fraud department one more time. She pulled over, and finally reached a rep who was more helpful. He also couldn’t immediately find any evidence of her accounts, but she had found one account number to share with him. After a second hourlong call, he promised they would continue to investigate, but said it was most likely a systems-related issue.
Explain to me how this isn't of interest to people who touch online systems? Is there a status.fidelity.com that we have access to, that you could point out how systemic or non-systemic this kind of incident is?
Genuine question: is the cost to keep a persistent warmed cache for sessions idling for hours/days not significant when done for hundreds of thousands of users? Wouldn’t it pose a resource constraint on Anthropic at some point?
Formerly: teaching at Stanford and programming+newsing at ProPublica.
Blog: http://www.danwin.com
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