That has also been implemented recently. With staged publishing the author must verify a new release with 2FA so automated attacks dont work anymore. Some human in the loop must verify a release.
I remember working for a company that did a lot of business in logistics. We were strictly prohibited from using any Amazon Web Services because several of our very high profile customers didn’t want anything on AWS. The higher ups were thoroughly convinced Amazon would copy it (and I mean, they came out with a product that competed with us, so they weren’t wrong!)
This kind of stuff “but they’ll copy us” is always weird (and wrong). Logistics isn’t some secret sauce. It’s taught in operations degrees across colleges. If a company is worried that all it takes is another company “copying” their IP to supersede them, then you don’t have a company, you have a simple app.
Amazon didn’t “copy” logistics from Apple. But both of them use similar underlying processes and optimizations. They both excel at it, and neither is eating the other’s profits. The same goes for smaller companies. Or the logistics providers like UPS.
To add to the other posters, keep-the-lights-on usually means a product has no active feature development. It’s just supported with on-call and maybe some bug fixes depending on capacity.
I can (honestly) tell that exact same story, except offset by three years so it was before AI and I did the same exact steps and had the same insights except with Google results instead of an LLM providing the key unlocks.
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Stephenson's works.
In general if you are new to Stephenson I would recommend reading Snow Crash first otherwise the transition from his other better written books will be jarring.
Swordfight (which is very stephenson to have in the ending) and nuclear-powered robot dogs showing extreme loyalty to the person who saved one of them from overheating.
The second half differs dramatically in tone. If you were really into the specific feeling of the first half, it is very jarring.
I found the whole thing very interesting and enjoyable, but I can imagine being excited for more content similar to the first half and being disappointed by the drastic shift in scale/tone/focus/etc.
Was visiting a university bookstore few months ago and came across it used in paperback. Never read it but know it has modern/tech significance. Read some of it and went "well, naah" and passed. Ironically the book I ended up purchasing instead was really bad and I couldn't finish it (something by Maureen Down the NYT columnist, I love her opinion work but the book was horrible)
There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.
I experience this as me being a ridealong on my friend's random diatribe. Oftentimes it feels like something he just learned and needs to tell someone about.
I believe REAMDE included an entire page dedicated to the virtues of lashing tires to fishing craft.
Isn't that Stephenson driving home the faceless drone, cog-in-the-machine characterisation of YT's mom?
I mean, literally not giving the character a name fits right in with the alienating working conditions of the quote above, and the fact YT's mom is working on a software cog with no understanding of the machine it fits into.
I haven't read it, but if it's written in the first person with the narrator referring to themself as 'YT', then it's at least consistent? If yours truly suddenly referred to my mother, or indeed if I referred to yours truly's mother, that would be more jarring I think?
That’s not what’s happening. Snow Crash has an omniscient 3rd person narrator.
A protagonist (but not THAT Protagonist!) is named Y.T. (street nickname for Yours Truly) and her mom doesn’t matter. She’s environmental set dressing.
I'm not sure she's actually addressed as such by others in the story, but it's how the narrator addresses her. And IIRC how she introduces herself to the hero protagonist (Hiro Protagonist) on first meeting.
In a later work she's referenced as Miss Matheson.
WTF, why chime in without any additional research if you haven’t read it in the first place?
No, it’s an omniscient third person narrator. Yeah, YT is probably the “true” viewpoint, esp if you take diamond age into account. “Chiseled spam” and all that.
In reality, even if they did recognize the severity of this problem, they likely view the cost to remediate it as prohibitive, as it would involve reworking their whole weird janky system. So better to pretend they don’t have to deal with security.
> This post is already getting too long, so I won’t cover all the extra problems besides the big two.
> There’s no estimate of the environmental impact of all the extra processing
The “environmental impact” of this data processing is one of the “big two” problems with the proposal? Maybe this was just a backup filler argument but it is such a silly point that it immediately makes me question the entire article. This is a massive tell that someone is arguing in bad faith.
From context, it seems there was an API that was internal for support use but was supposed to be gated by some required process of convincing the support agent you were who you said you were (also vulnerable to social engineering) but they didn’t really evaluate whether tools intended for conscientious human use should be provided directly to the LLM that replaced the former support agents.
People are wont to stick to their pet theories even after they’ve been contradicted by facts. The idea of a Bluetooth speaker named “boom” filled the initial vacuum and became a meme that won’t die.
Not running lifecycle scripts by default is eventually going to be the default behavior. Late is worse (edit: I meant better) than not at all. https://github.com/npm/rfcs/pull/868
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