"They're driven by values" is meaningless praise unless you qualify what these values are. The Nazis had values too, you know. They were even willing to die for them. One of the core values of the Catholic church is probably compassion. Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.
So what core values led "Dario, Jared, and Sam" to work with a government that just tried to rename the DoD to "department of war" and is acting aggressively imperialist in a way like the US hasn't in a long time.
And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are mentioning? Does this list include the autocrats the US government is working together with?
Yeah, values on their own don't lead to positive outcomes. I agree that many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.
I do think that they're acting with positive intent, though, and are motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI go well.
Many folks on HN seem to assume the primary motivation is purely chasing more money, which certainly isn't the case for for many – but not all – people at Anthropic.
That doesn't guarantee a good outcome, and there's still a hard road ahead.
The very fact that they referred to it as the Department of War instead of Defense tells me that they're still bootlickers, and just trying to put a good spin on things.
Careful speaking truth to power on this site, remember that YC is deeply enmeshed with Garry Tan, Peter Thiel, and of course Paul Graham who as of late has made a habit of posting right wing slop on his Twitter
> Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.
I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples regarding the personal relationships of its members (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.
But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several independent former students and even some of the staff backed the students claims with first hand accounts of him having been alone with some of the students at the time. This supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the pre-smartphone era.
The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest house and he called the group telling them, that they should go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have happened at another short stay of the group where they spent a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.
Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me learning about it in the news.
I'm confused. You heard about someone you knew being wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn't commit and you could have provided the testimony to clear him, but you just decided not to? Why not?
I never was contacted during the trial and only read about it almost 2 years later in the news.
Also, he's a man of strong faith, not that he knows he'll win in the end, but more like that it just doesn't have the same importance for him as it would have for us. I only had a short opportunity to ask him about it since then and basically he doesn't think there is just about any chance to win this, what he's most worried about is ruining the public image of his students (including his accusers) and since his order allowed him to rejoin and start over, in practice, he got all he wanted to ask for already.
Does it have to be /pol to be pissed off that one's country loses almost a century in its development due to communism and post communist transition period. Stalin killed more of its people than Hitler did. Mao's body count was bigger than probably all of the war casualties combined. And pol pot was the most charming communist of them all in relative terms. Oh and North Korea.
Eastern Europe bore the brunt of the war's damage and was left for 50 year under the oppressive boot of the stupidest ideology the world has ever known. And poorly executed to boot.
Because I find LLM-generated content very annoying to read. It's sloggish, bloated, and the speaker always has this cringe way of trying to connect to the audience.
I don't believe the story itself is made up by an LLM but I'd argue that if you have an LLM write your story then it's no problem for you to have it add a TL;DR at the top so we can skip the slop.
I don't see an advantage over C's usual error handling, because this type is lacking the support functions (like bind and fmap in functional languages) or syntax integration (like the try operator in rust) that would make it useful.
It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos
I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
I think gambling came in more in later waves. The first wave of popularity (mostly StarCraft, LoL and fighting games) tended more towards funding from sponsors, and not gambling ones (red bull, monster energy, gaming peripheral makers, the game devs themselves, mobile games).
I don’t know much about lol or fighting games but the starcraft pro scene exploded after a gambling/match fixing scandal back in 2010! The first wave absolutely had this problem
> I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
I worked in online gambling for about 10 years in the UK. I found how charities and local/national government worked far worse and I was far more frustrated with their attitudes.
e.g. I found an SQL Injection vulnerability with dynamic SQL in a large UK charity (I won't say which one). I reported this to my boss. He kinda just shrugged his shoulders. Similar attitudes were present in local government. The gambling industry was the complete opposite and took security very seriously.
What bothered me the most about charities and government was that on the outside they were giving the impression of having a virtuous purpose. Whereas the gambling sites didn't, it was simply "Try to win some cash".
As a former addict (alcohol), I don't have much sympathy for people that blame the companies for the problems of addicts. The problem ultimately lies with the individual. I was the one that choose to drink. The brewary, the bar, or the off-license never forced the drink down my throat. People choose to go to the casino, in the same way they choose to go to the bar.
> The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
Many of the classic videos games were made to relieve you of change in Arcades. Nearby to where I live there are still classic seaside arcade. They still have machines similar to Sega Rally and Time Crisis there. Video gaming and quasi-gambling have been intertwined since the birth of the industry.
> The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
This is all professional sports (even going back to long ago as the Roman Empire). There is nothing special about professional video gaming.
The industry saw that people were interested in watching matches between highly skilled people. Any form of entertainment/news/sports is bankrolled by advertising and/or gambling.
Many of these large events came out of more grass roots events like large lan parties. These were pretty big in the late 90s to early 2000s.
> (Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
Gambling tends to attract the more profit orientated which roughly aligns with what is considered "right wing" (at least in the US). I found the industry to be pretty apolitical as a whole. Many of the C-suite and above seemed to be actually relatively left-wing at least in some view points. It was odd when the top executives were far at least on somethings far more to the left than I was.
This doesn't look like a standard .net config (appsettings.json) to me. It looks more like a simple json serialization of an object. To get the framework behavior that replaces secrets with e.g. env vars one would have to feed this json into a .net ConfigurationBuilder first.
Considering that this represents one of many possible workflow objects (probably organized in a data structure and managed by other objects/methods), implementing secret replacement using a ConfigurationBuilder seems like abuse.
> This doesn't look like a standard .net config (appsettings.json) to me.
Having done... enough .NET I don't see a serious consensus and it frustrates me. My favorite was the project that used dot ENV files. I have tried to convince them of it here, but nobody cares enough about the craft I suppose, of course there's more important things to be worked on, momentary change for increased dev experience is not worth it the business.
> I don't see a serious consensus and it frustrates me.
If you're saying that there's no one right way to do it, then I broadly disagree. There's the (very flexible) .NET Configuration system (1) - that is the right way to do it. You should start with appsettings.json and other sources, and end up with injecting IOptions<T> into your code. Consistently.
If you're saying that in your experience, far too many people don't use this system, then who am I to disagree with your experience? Sure, it happens. YMMV. I would be insisting that they move to the .NET Configuration system, though. If they're serious.
Actually I think .NET config is pretty good. You define a file, which can be overridden by environment variables which in turn can be overridden by command line parameters. Just reading environment variables is fine as well but then you have to do source .env before you run anything (unless you are talking about Python like approach where .env is just another config file essentially).
> Actually I think .NET config is pretty good. You define a file, which can be overridden by environment variables
Agreed that it's good. Partly because it's even more flexible than that. There are good defaults, but you decide which sources in which order are use. e.g. in our case it is
There are also providers for places where secrets are stored, such as Azure Key vault (1), which would be layered on last. And a test provider where you just supply some key-value pairs from code (2). Or roll your own (3).
By strategy, do you mean, the various hierarchies that people use? If so, I agree that sticking to a flat set of key / value pairs is usually fine. A little resistance to hierarchy is generally a good thing in software.
For the really simple flat case with key / value pairs and no grouping or hierarchies, I would recommend that you still use the .NET configuration to define and read the config sources.
Then when you need to read a value, inject IConfiguration and call config.GetValue<string>("someKey") or config.GetValue<int>("otherKey") etc. to get values from it in a flat manner.
If you do that enough, you might extract common code or but some other class over it for related settings. At which point you might as well declare a DTO and use IOptions<T>
However what OP has is a whole 80 line workflow definition. I don't recommend storing that kind of thing in the .NET config system at all.
Then if such a large file has sensitive values such as passwords, it will need some find/replace templating system to substitute them from config. e.g. handlebars with "{{somePassword}}" in the file.
Yes, agree about using the regular .NET configuration. That was my suggestion a few comments up. I can see why people might want to do something different (i.e. .env) but I wouldn't use that in a .NET project despite how ugly it is. It is ugly but works well.
>> If you do that enough, you might extract common code or but some other class over it for related settings. At which point you might as well declare a DTO and use IOptions<T>
I think it rarely needs to be that complicated. I overengineered the configuration system for something before and regretted it. People understand GetValue<T>(key) anything else makes them have to think for no reason.
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