It's always been CYA. They know people are using it for this, and they want to keep answering these sorts of queries. The changes just reflect the latest guidance from their legal team, not a change in strategy.
Modern LLMs are already better than the median doctor diagnostically. Maybe not in certain specialties, but compared to a primary care physician available to the average person, I'd take the LLM any day.
These things go slowly an then all at once. The catalyst will be one or a few of the AAA November titles shipping with Linux support. That will eliminate most of the gaming crowd's last reason to cling to Microsoft.
It may even kill console gaming because the Steam Deck is already a fantastic experience just waiting for more games.
It's not a small demographic either, it's something like 40% of males age 18-35, plus all of the people in their circles who come to them for tech support.
Once market share gets up to 30% or so it becomes a cool trend, that other gamers want to emulate, streamers and influencers get involved.
Then around 50% market share the bullying starts. "Windows is for people too stupid to figure out Linux" says a Linux Mint enjoyer to a Windows 11 plebian.
Valve has done a great job getting things started, but it's the studios' turn to make a move now.
> It's rarely a good idea to do a bunch of work on a big change to an open source project in a direction that has not been validated by the maintainers.
While this is good advice in general, it doesn't tell the whole story in the case of this specific project. The helix maintainers have a track record of giving very slow "no"s and wasting contributor time. They encourage contributors to fix various odds and ends, until the PR has been nit picked to death, and then finally the concept is rejected. Totally backwards, good project leadership would front-load the conceptual yay-or-nay before reviewing any actual code.
1. While Helix dev is on the slow side, I think what you’re describing as specific to Helix is in fact the typical case in open source
2. In this case the author did a bunch of work up front and the maintainers said no almost immediately after the PR was posted
I agree they could be faster to say no, but I think part of it is that the maintainers would have to agree themselves and as far as I know they are not getting together to come to consensus about random Helix PRs every day.
> but they can be… stubborn about what gets into the core.
Yes, as an onlooker who is similarly cautious about moving to helix, I consider this to be a major risk factor.
I've watched the maintainers waste dozens of hours of contributors' time, and leave the project with no improvement afterwards.
I would actively warn against anyone trying to contribute to the project.
The maintainers simply don't know how to run an open source project, and it's unlikely you will be able to accomplish anything.
It's fine for a project to not accept contributions, and if you don't have the skillset to leverage contributor labor, then it's better to be upfront about it.
That being said, I hope they figure out the plugin system, or someone forks the project to add the missing table stakes features.
> The maintainers simply don't know how to run an open source project
Can you explain why you feel this way? From an outsider’s perspective, Helix seems like an impressive piece of software with a growing community. I don’t see what the maintainers are doing so wrong
Being able to build high quality software alone is a distinct skill from being able to make a group of engineers productive. Neither are soft skills, it comes down to how the software is architected and how well you can produce, understand, and communicate designs with the other collaborators.
I do consider helix to be an impressive piece of software, and I agree that the user base is growing, not necessarily the set of effective maintainers though. The maintainers don't seem to have any aptitude for coordinating engineering effort. That would be fine, if they were honest and direct about it. SQLite is a project which does not accept contributions, I think helix should do the same.
Put differently, I don't expect the large community to have a meaningfully positive effect on the quality of the software, because the maintainers have not demonstrated the competency to effectively utilize that labor. I expect helix to continue slowly improving at whatever rate the maintainers can make important changes themselves.
It’s a ridiculous and inflammatory claim to make about a clearly successful project with an enthusiastic community of users who love it. The maintainers have day jobs and have a clear and narrow vision that they don’t want to mess up by carelessly expanding the pool of maintainers. That is the entire explanation!
This is what killed all the momentum that Elm had at one point. While that's a language and not an entire editor, it does serve as an illustrative example of being far too strict about accepting changes to core.
For projects without funding, there is typically a trade off between a polished coherent product, which means saying no a lot, and a bloated product that has enough maintainer bandwidth to stay around. The second means saying yes to things which may not make the product better, in order for newcomers to feel bought into the project and want to maintain it.
For something like an editor, where whole features can be turned off by default, there's quite a bit of leeway to add bloat and get newcomers to buy in, without actually making the product worse.
For a programming language, a feature in the language has to be used by everyone. So the leadership has to say no a lot to keep the language high quality, and that makes it hard to get newcomers to buy in.
Unfortunately you can't have it both ways without paying people to maintain the project. Elm was good because the leadership said no...often.
It's dead because the leadership said no so often that no one wanted to help maintain it. No one is going to waste their free time working on a project that won't accept their ideas, nor should they.
A language like Go doesn't have this trade off. If the Go leadership rejects a google employee's proposed language change, the employee still has to do maintenance chores as directed to keep their job.
> That being said, I hope they figure out the plugin system, or someone forks the project to add the missing table stakes features.
They decided on an obscure Lisp flavor as the language (instead of WASM), so I don't hold my breath for a powerful plugin system, more like slightly more convenient configuration language.
It’s not even an obscure Lisp flavor. It’s Scheme. You’re getting thrown off by the fact that they need their own embeddable interpreter for it written in Rust.
Polymarket is not even close to the same thing. Sports betting allows a blessed few corporations to run rigged markets and intentionally prevent price discovery by keeping the smart money out.
Polymarket uses open orderbooks where you match against someone else who wants the other side of the trade just like the stock market. Prices are set by the market, as they should be.
And people shouldn't be constantly buying mechanical keyboards and keycaps for farming social media karma and affirming their identity when they probably only have a few devices that need keyboards anyway. There's a whole rabbit hole of vice out there if you're interested in looking.
While we're at it, I propose a Board of Ethically Allowed Activities that make sure we can only do the good and moral things.
I'm not saying that we should restrict it. I'm just saying it's not productive or healthy.
The difference is that hobbies are fun. Gambling is fun in the same way smoking is fun. It's not, but you have to do it. I know, because I was a smoker.
Also, on the topic of morality: morality is stupid. Gambling isn't immoral. Or maybe it is, I don't care. Gambling is self destructive. It can pretty much exclusively only make your life worse.
Unless you have a family with whom your finances are intermingled. This is like saying alcoholism only makes your own life worse, because obviously your actions have no effect on the people around you, right?
You parsed the person you’re responding to wrong. They didn’t say that gambling only affects your life and not anyone else’s, they said it has an exclusively negative outcome and not a positive one.
It’s not that hard to look at lines at Pinnacle and Circa and make estimates about the fair value of a wager. Open accounts at every book and line shop and maximize expected value.
Also you are ignoring platforms like Novig which are like the polymarket for sports betting.
My experience (though I have never bet on these platforms) is that Pinnacle-like platforms almost never let you withdraw your "earnings". They are essentially a bookie.
Polymarket on the other hand, is just an exchange. And they use Defi to make sure you can always withdraw your bounty even if you get "front-end" banned from their platform.
So to affirm the previous poster: These companies are not in the same business.
They absolutely let you withdraw earnings. I place around 20 wagers a day. Pinnacle and Circa are used as measures of what the market is actually pricing in. You can devig lines to arrive at event likelihoods. From there you can line shop such that your expected value is positive over the long run.
Betting platforms specifically work to identify customers who act in such ways and ban them from the platform. Developing accurate odds costs money, it's cheaper to just identify "advantage bettors" and ban them.
I'm not sure this applies to these prediction markets. Normally when gambling you're at a casino playing e.g. blackjack, where if you're winning more often than expected you're taking the house's money.
But this is more like playing poker, where overall the casino could care less if you're continuously crushing the other players, as long as people keep turning up to play and they keep getting a rake.
What do you mean here by front run? Don't most of these exchanges use normal limit books with visible resting orders available to trade against?
My understanding was that these shops were acting more as market makers, with the idea of guaranteeing liquidity and tight spreads in some number of markets.
If you think the listed bid-ask spread is mispriced you're more than welcome to move the market to whatever price you think is more appropriate.
Yes, as long as the passports implement a signing scheme, and the set of valid public keys (the electorate) can be agreed upon. If you can sign arbitrary data, then you can sign other public keys, including whatever the voting system requires.
Vitalik has a great blog post about blockchain voting.
You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.
Can it be anonymous though? Ie you as a citizen can check that the outcome didn't count illegitimate votes, and that it included your vote, but can't tell who voted each way or at all.
Yes, it is possible to anonymously aggregate votes from a set of public keys, and ensure that no key has voted twice.
It's also possible to ensure that one's own vote was included in the total.
The fact that this is even possible is deeply un-intuitive as it requires some of the most sophisticated cryptography.
That's probably the greatest barrier to adoption.
When people think of electronic voting, they think about trusting a company to make machines that operate on plaintext, and require humans to guard access to the machines.
They aren't thinking about systems that are provably correct, where it is more likely for an asteroid to wipe out the country conducting the election than for the election results to be incorrect.
For the details and tradeoffs, I highly recommend Vitalik's blog.
The problem is ensuring that the set of allowed public keys you have is actually the set of allowed public keys you want.
As others in the thread have said, there's nothing stopping the government from manufacturing millions of fake passport (or even just generating millions of fake passport keys) and using them to rig the election.
For the purposes of this, I was assuming 1:1 passport to citizen and just wondering if that can be made anonymous. The real idea with an untrusted passport authority doesn't work ofc.
>You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.
Even if you're using a separate key for voting, the passport key had to sign it. How do you prove legitimacy of the voting key without exposing the passport key? It's not like in blockchain where your anonymity normally comes from people just not knowing which irl person owns a pubkey. (Though I know Monero etc use homomorphic enc for anon payments)
I'm also assuming here that the govt is signing all the passport keys, cause idk how else that would work.
This seems like navel gazing. Under OP's constraints it wouldn't matter what the tally is. The authoritarian won't cede power because they lost by a cryptographically secure election. They'll either
A. Force the cryptography to be weak to provide plausible deniability
B. Issue more passports for "citizens" that "voted" for them
C. Refuse the count and just keep power
Leaders don't cede power because their citizens are angry. Especially not in authoritarian countries.
I agree with the sentiment; I also want to control where things are installed. But the framing of the technical problem here is totally backwards.
The operating system or application manager within the operating system (what does flatpak consider itself?) should decide where all application state goes. The application shouldn't ever prompt the user for this, it should just assume a path inside a sandbox. That path inside the sandbox will get mapped to where-ever outside the sandbox, and that's where the user exercises control.
We already see this pattern emerging with docker images. Everything assumes `/data` is a good place to store things, and `/config` is a good place to read configuration from. I want every application to do this. If I want it to store state, then I'll decide to map those to directories that are persisted.
But what about for state that the application doesn't really "own"? e.g. I want to open a PDF in an editor.
The PDF is in my documents folder, and I don't want to expose all of my documents to the application in its sandbox.
Fine grained access to single files should be given out using a file picker. The application manager passes in a socket to the application sandbox. The application connects to that socket using a known hard-coded path. It sends a message (client->server) over the socket, the listening file picking process opens a new GUI window to prompt the user to select a file. The user picks a file and a file descriptor is sent over the socket to the application (server -> client).
Spoken like a Linux software developer, I suppose. As a Windows user of generic software (image editing, video players, games, etc.), I want to be able to control such crap. I have a media player that can easily fill a small HD with its mindlessly huge DB, for instance. Rather than manually cleaning periodically, or upgrading my $y$tem, it's easiest to say "Software, store your data here".
These techniques are pretty general purpose. They aren't merely a cultural artifact of Linux or FOSS.
Anyone trying to sanely deal with authorization is going to stumble upon sandboxing, and capabilities, and the principal of least authority, etc. if they look hard enough.
A democracy cannot function if the electorate is not well defined. They are vulnerable to Sybil attacks, same as the distributed ledgers and hash tables.
> I'd challenge someone to provide competing articles on a controversion topic from Wikipedia and Grokipedia and demonstrate how the Grok version is less-factual. Just because it doesn't adhere to your ideology, doesn't mean it's wrong.
Yeah, it's too soon to be making claims about misinformation campaigns. The Grokpedia approach should be on the same footing as Wikipedia was when it was launched.
Use it cautiously and wait for the apples-to-apples comparisons to come out.
I suspect your 2nd paragraph will be less well received here.
> Can anyone give a coherent explanation of why the intention behind Grokipedia is... bad?
If one takes Musk at his word that his only intention is to provide an alternative Wikipedia, there is no problem; it is simply an alternative Wikipedia with a different editorial bias. If one believes that Musk is the modern day Joseph Goebbels, then his stated intention is likely false; Goebbels' strategy was to provide 60% truths and 40% lies, which is expressly facilitated with something like Wikipedia (Grokipedia in Musk's case). There are many possibilities in between the two which seem to suggest the likely fallibility of Grokipedia. All things considered, especially Musk's track record with the truth, it is reasonably assumed that this is a propaganda tool more than an education tool.
Please remember that you asked for "a coherent explanation" rather than something you will necessarily agree with. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who believes the opinions in this explanation.
"an alternative Wikipedia with a different editorial bias"
I think the stated goal is to reduce bias, not to just rotate it to another view. Of course some things are difficult to reduce to facts, but plenty of others are not.
There is an objective truth, but many people know it by the alternative name "left-wing bias". You see the problem? (Or, if you prefer, pretend I wrote "right-wing bias")
Flat earth may be a better example, since everyone HN user is hopefully a round-earther. Suppose you are talking to someone who thinks the earth is flat. Flat-earth belief used to be a joke, one or two decades ago, but now these debates actually happen with some regularity and the round-earther never wins. Do you think you could do better than every other round-earther? The proverb about playing chess with a pigeon is relevant here. What you call "objective reality", they all "round-earth bias".
> You're saying there is no objective truth, and there is not point in trying for it?
Not exactly but kinda. I'd like to think it's less nihilistic than this makes it sound, at least. Here's a definition which I think is a good working one:
> A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment.
To attempt to answer the question directly, there is still agreed truth, such as in the practice of law where a judge decides what facts are relevant to the case. In that context, the legal framework is, barring appeals, simply to accept the judge's "truth"; at least, once they've made their decision. To prevent that from devolving into madness, we train lawyers and judges to understand the meaning of certain legal terms so that they all have a similar understanding and can argue using terms which have an agreed-upon meaning. Still, there is much bias in this. If there wasn't, there would be no need for lawyers. The closest thing we get to objective truth is something like 1 + 1 = 2, but it's still agreed truth.
There are facts, but even the reporting of facts can be biased. Which facts you report, the context in which they're reported, the details that are included, the order in which they're reported. These choices have an effect on how the facts are interpreted; they are a bias. If I want to say, "The sky is blue and the Blue Man Group are entertainers," but you want to say, "Mars is called the red planet and Mars Attacks! is a movie," who is being less biased? Is a news article that reports, "Mars is called the red planet and the sky is blue," more or less biased than either of the other statements? Is one more objective than the other? How come the author didn't mention the tall smurfs if they're unbiased? Surely reporters aren't required to report all of the facts in every instance. How do they, unbiased, decide which facts are relevant to their report?
With the idea of "reducing bias", it is obvious that in order to verify that bias has been reduced, one must accurately measure "how much" bias there is. So how do you do that? Further, how do you do it in an unbiased way? How do you even know if you're doing it in an unbiased way without an unbiased measurement?
Another way to think about it is in terms of opinions. How do you express an opinion without bias? How do you express the same opinion with less or more bias? Is, "I don't care," less biased than, "I care a lot."? Is, "This makes me angry," more biased than, "I'm indifferent to this."? I would say they're equally biased. At least, I can't come up with a good reason to claim that indifference is not a bias. So, neutrality is a bias. I'm not sure what isn't a bias. I guess a bare fact. But, again, that doesn't mean the presentation of a fact is not without bias.
To give an example, it is a fact that Donald Trump is serving his second term as President. Do people often present that fact without bias? It's also a fact that Donald Trump has not served two consecutive terms as President. Is that presented without bias? Both of those decisions are biased: minimally, why would one present either of these facts in a given context?
Or an example of indifference: if someone says, "I don't care about Biden's capability to serve as President," does their indifference suggest a lack of bias? Is it more or less biased than, "I think it's bad that Biden is President given his apparent senility."? Is it more or less biased than, "I think it's good that Biden is President given his apparent senility."?
Biases are simply different or the same, neither lesser nor greater. I don't know how I could even go about measuring bias without introducing bias.
A lot of people are critiquing the statistical methods and quality of the study, which is fine. But it's worth pointing out that you—the individual—should not be concerned with someone else's p-value. You should be concerned with maximizing your own utility. A safe, possibly effective, and cheap intervention is probably worth trying. If it was more expensive or less safe, it would require more evidence to try.
Modern LLMs are already better than the median doctor diagnostically. Maybe not in certain specialties, but compared to a primary care physician available to the average person, I'd take the LLM any day.
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