I’ve really been enjoying nix as my package manager on macos. It’s on a separate volume so feels even more isolated from clobbering my macos and has, in my uninformed opinion, better sandboxing and reproducible builds
Yeah, the issue is that it takes one disgusting degenerate who doesn't know how to use a toilet and pisses all over the seat or worse.
I'm purposefully not calling these people uneducated, because I routinely encounter it in an environment full of highly paid and educated people with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, etc... kind of education. These people come from money, earn money and are supposedly educated. And yet, they will happily piss all over the toilet seat and not even bother to clean it.
Agreed it's 100% not an education/money/class thing. I moved into a larger office, high tech company, and the number of times people need to be told not to leave the toilet in a state or to take their rubbish out of meeting rooms when they leave is eye opening. A large number of people from all backgrounds are just animals.
In the line of thinking of educated toilet shitters - why clean up after oneself when there is, from childhood, always some underpaid person of color that does the cleanup for you?
yeah I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if my employer didn't have exclusive license to the glue we use to stick together all that open source code we rely on. Which we now generate exclusively using AI, products of which are of unclear copyright status.
Modern IP law inhibits productivity more than it helps, imo. LLMs have fundamentally changed our line of work, and they have done so by completely ignoring the existing legal framework for IP. We should not defend the current implementation just because some people might suffer reduced earning potential.
Copyright was not designed to maximize productivity. It was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness (or, as stated in the US Constitution, the progress of science and the useful arts).
Unfortunately that will happen irrespective of the law.
If you want permissive rules then corporations will just resell your IP (like we see with SaaS). And if you want tighter rules then you just create a higher barrier for entry that benefits corporations rather than independent entities.
Either way, it’s easier to operate when you already have a leading position.
Then just outlaw big corps. Put a hard cap on company size or capital, possibly on a per-domain basis. Or just put what has to be big infrastructure under direct state control. Worked wonders in practice in France.
Oh, and also put a hard cap on individual wealth while we're at it. No one, no matter how hard working, deserves a billion dollars. And no one should be trusted with that much power, it's too goddamn dangerous.
(The caps should be indexed to stuff like median income or wealth. Wanna get richer? There's a way: help everyone get richer. That way we're actually in this together.)
Linux is a marvel of the world and a large amount of its contributions have been made by people being paid to do so for commercial purposes - and I am not sure that would be true without the GPL. Is there a convincing argument there?
And outside open source there has been a staggering amount of creative work at all quality levels done for commercial purposes under the protection of copyright. Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?
I would love to hear such an argument. In my youth I thought copyright was blatantly stupid and should be abolished. I still sorta think that but I don't have a convincing argument in the face of the absolutely massive amount of good work that has been produced under it.
> Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?
> I would love to hear such an argument.
Fortunately, one of the many tentacles of the octopus most obviously at the forefront of the zeitgeist of the freedom that arises from a culture of free information - The Grateful Dead - had the outcome of producing - in the form of gripping autobiography - an extremely compelling, and seemingly utterly true and beautiful and good, instrument to fulfill your request:
Nonsense. Thousands of new TV shows, songs, and apps that come out every year and put food on the table for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that help produce them.
Yes, some people and companies benefit disproportionately, but those tend to be the ones who finance the process and bear the risk of loss due to failures and flops.
Excuse me for being dense but I'd love to know more, if you can share. So you offer a voice agent for checking appointments and orders and stuff, is that through your app or website or something? So you make a button in your app which says "talk to our AI", and you've got the button set up so that it can send the customer's input query, along with a bit of text saying "our MCP is here, use it to answer the query", to any one of the voice agent providers? then you get some audio data in return that you play to the user?
We use a Twilio integration to make it work over a real phone line, but it could just as well be an app or websocket connection in a browser.
Voice transport medium aside, the actual use case is not quite what you described.
Companies like Eleven Labs and Vapi provide a full end to end voice agent platform. They handle the STT -> LLM -> TTS pipeline and infrastructure for voice agents. Think of a customer talking to a virtual receptionist to schedule an appointment.
On the ElevenLabs platform, you provide them a system prompt (or an entire workflow/graph of system prompts) that instruct the voice agent on how to talk to the customer, tone, guardrails, how to answer specific questions, etc.
At some point we need that LLM agent, running on an infrastructure we don't control, to talk to our "CRM" (for simplicity sake). Enter MCP.
The MCP server we build and host supplies the "tools", like list_appointments, schedule_appointment, cancel_appointment-- whatever they may be.
When eleven Labs voice agent connects, it sees all the tools available and can use them per the instructions in the system prompt.
How is security handled in a situation like this? (I'll end up reading up on it). But I mean things like how does the API let a specific session with a specific user only surface information for that specific user from the available tooling?
You first authenticate via the phone (you can run an initial api call on phone start,) save session credentials in state on 11labs side and can then pass them back to future tool calls. You can then authenticate via a passcode if you wish
God I hope so. My workplace enforces Cursor use, and to see it lose GPT and Claude would absolutely make my day. Much has been invested in getting us to "use the right models", a list in which Grok does not feature.
On the one hand, I'd love to see Cursor/Grok/xAI/SpaceX/Musk disappear forever. On the frustrating other hand, Cursor is the absolute best LLM IDE by such a ridiculously wide margin. Everything else feels so broken and ramshackle in comparison.
My employer let us evaulate all the big providers for a month each before having a vote on which one we'd like to keep. Cursor won almost unanimously. (This was before the xAI takeover was even on the horizon, otherwise I would've voted differently myself.)
Exactly. Without Claude and GPT, we'd be limited to Grok. A lot of ink has been spilled telling us exactly how to use Sonnet, Opus, Sol or Luna in certain scenarios, Grok hasn't ever been recommended by our pointy haired friends even once.
I disagree, a bit. There should always be some contention between manager and developer. It's healthy. But I think many developers just remain silent and are afraid to speak up. They are afraid of losing their jobs, or worse, getting kicked out of the country. It's reasonable, but it is one of many factors that contribute to the negative feedback loop of myopic management.
We've all seen developers who game the system. They hide the bugs just enough so checked out management doesn't see them. They convince themselves that those bugs don't matter, even when they trip over them later. They get rewarded because they appear to move fast, eventually become management, and the whole thing gets worse as time goes on.
It's a structural problem. Yes, the level of influence is higher the higher up in the org chart you go, but there is still "power" at every level. Even the most junior developer has power. The worst thing we can do is become apathetic, shrugging it off, saying "well what can we do?" That attitude is one of many factors that got us to this point. Importantly, it is a factor we actually can influence.
That's why I object to it. Not because I think it is going to solve the problem overnight, but because it is a thing we have some power over. And it is a very different situation when one engineer in a team is vocalizing "our software has issues" while most of the team silently agrees vs several members of the team simply vocalizing agreement. There's no magic single variable fix to problems like these, but we got here because a bunch of little problems added up. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the way to solve it is through solving a bunch of little problems. Each seems insignificant in isolation, but they accumulate
>They get rewarded because they appear to move fast, eventually become management, and the whole thing gets worse as time goes on.
We've got a winner. Devs respond to the incentives set by management, and the message I have received loud and clear, my entire career, despite protestation, is that I should ship faster and not worry about bugs so much, big or small.
That I take pride in what I do is the only reason motivating me to not ship bugs. That and the thought of being the cause of an incident makes me physically ill, even though we have "blameless culture".
> Devs respond to the incentives set by management
But I still hate these types of explanations. We are not mindless automata.
> That I take pride in what I do
And I'm glad you do. I'm glad you don't reduce yourself to a mindless automata. I'm glad you set your own objective functions. I'm glad you see beyond the literal metric and the to the intent.
I just hope that more can. That they don't shirk off the part they play, just because it is small. The world is made by all of us, not just those "above" us.
You probably never had developers working for you. First, if you don’t give them a deadline they will work on it for months trying to get it perfect, but it will still be buggy and do the wrong thing unless you keep very close attention. Second, because you must give deadlines due to the previous point, the result will be buggier still, as they will spend most of their times on what to name variables and how to structure the packages and modules. Their testing will cover their mocks and when put together in the real thing most functionality will just not work at all.
I’ve seen this happen even with senior developers. With juniors it’s guaranteed to happen without a very good tutor.
Take some fucking responsibility. If you deliver software, make sure it’s in a working state. Don’t blame your manager for everything, they did not force you to write shitty code, if you think they can do that you are not ready to work as a professional developer, you are just a code monkey.
Also, attacking good naming and structure belies their claim of knowing anything about dev at all. If you can't tell the quality difference between a well-structured program and spaghetti code consisting of single-letter variables, you don't belong in software.
Honestly, from the tone, I suspect the gp post is just trying to get a rise.
They really are bin chickens for a reason. I remember in Lakemba in Sydney watching a young child trying to shoo an ibis from a bin where it was having its lunch.
For a very long time I believed that they had migrated from Egypt because of their long beak - I think I asked my Mum once and she in tiredness just affirmed it.
why not version control those things? if they're static, there's no changes so version controlling them has little cost. maybe existing tools aren't adequate for this conception of the world, but I don't think that's a good reason not to work towards "version control everything"
Cost of keeping all data (up to +100%). If they dont change, no point of really versioning them. Backup of those is simple either, whatever syncing software (incremental).
Docs that often change, its completly different story. I love VCS like features where I can slam 'dot status' to see whats going on, commit when I feel I need snapshot, sync to whatever device I want. And because I run DVFS I dont even bother with backups because I have multiple copies of repo with entire history.
Absolutely, have warned my juniors of this. Doesn't stop malicious compliance though, I can just prompt and burn tokens with source material from my assigned tickets for no reason perfectly fine.
I look at my colleagues' screens and they're prompting shit like 'restart this program' and 'is [service] running correctly'. I have below average prompt frequency because I know crazy shit like #!/bin/bash and ps aux. It's so goddamn insane.
And to top it all off, my token count is above the average, it's just the prompt count that is low. Got questioned about it earlier this week.
I tried hard to tokenmaxx one month and couldn’t do it as for most tasks, I’ve already figured out the solution while reading the ticket and vim/emacs-fu is more enjoyable than prompting and waiting. And for other tasks, I just knew the technology to do something with the least amount of effort.
To be fair, I've been wanting to move to vim or emacs for a while now, but I've customized and gotten used to my current editor so much that it doesn't feel like a week's task.
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