You all are. Why not just concede it's an embargo not a blockade and move on?
> Is the US preventing most oil from reaching Cuba or not?
Sometimes questions like that obscure more than they elucidate. If you're debating if a killing is murder or involuntary manslaughter, it doesn't prove your point to ask if the man is dead.
Ok but if it is a murder/involuntary manslaughter-esque distinction, why not just say that? I feel like I made it really easy to do that and wasn't couching it in an accusation or any kind of hyperbole.
Just, please, tell it to me straight, I'm a little slow. Is that what we are saying? That everyone is claiming murder, but actually it's more involuntary?
The fact that oil imports are being curtailed by an embargo rather than a blockade is not minor semantics. The former is when countries voluntarily cease to trade with someone. The latter is when a country deploys its military to seize vessels trying to reach the blockade target. It's also an act of war.
If people really think it's a minor semantics difference, then they should just be honest and correctly refer to the situation as an embargo, not a blockade.
No what? The US's embargo and threats to tariff countries that don't match this embargo is blocking most but not all oil bound for Cuba. Russia, for example, continues to trade with Cuba because it's willing to tolerate increase in tariffs (not that Russia is trading much with the US anyway).
If this were a blockade then the US would be boarding Russian oil tankers even if they're legally flagged as a Russian vessel.
If you really think the distinction between blockade and embargo is irrelevant then we can just acknowledge that it's an embargo, not a blockade, and move on.
Ok! So the answer is in fact 'yes', with once again the rider that it is not something we should call a blockade. That seems fine with me, I think we agree about the important thing here.
My VW wrongly reads a speed limit off of frontage roads instead of my actual road every single day. When the car was new I tried the speed limit beeper just to see and it isn't worth it.
The speed limit display is great for simple highways and I appreciate the warning when I reach a speed zone, but not ready for anywhere complicated.
In some countries the speed limit can change without a explicit sign (speed limits cancelling out at intersections / changes in pavement, etc.). In my experience, in multiple instances the systems offered a speed limit that is higher than the actual one, which can be dangerous if you're just blindly trusting the clanker
The signs also seem to take priority over GPS, I was on a road with a 50mph speed limit tonight and the car read something it thought was a 20mph speed limit sign. I have the beeps disabled but it still displays the red 20mph sign on the dash to let me know it thinks I'm breaking the law.
If your competitor is cutting jobs because of AI you can either race them to the bottom or you can use the humans you already have to leverage AI to expand your product offering, become more competitive, tackle more work, deliver better quality results etc. I don't see a world where AI does the work and humans sit around poor and idle.
People always say this but it’s misguided imo. Yes LLMs are not deterministic, but that’s totally irrelevant. You aren’t executing the LLMs output directly, you’re using the LLM to produce an artefact once that is then executed deterministically. A spec gets turned into code once. Editing the spec can cause the code to be updated but it’s not recreating the whole program each time, so why does determinism matter?
In my experience, I'm using LLMs as my abstraction to "junior engineer". A junior engineer isn't deterministic either. I find that if you treat the LLM output like a person's output, you're good. Or at least in my projects, it's been very successful. I don't have it generate more code than I can review, or if I give it a snippet to help me fix it, if it ends up re-writing it like an ambitious engineer would do, I tell it to start over and make minimal changes.
I guess I'm not spun up about the determinism because I've been working at the "treat it like a person" level more than the "treat it like a compiler" level.
To me, it's really like an engineer who knows the docs and had a good memory rather than infallable code generator.
I work at a small company, so we don't have tons of processes in place, but I imagine that if you already had huge "standards" docs that engineers need to follow, then giving the LLM those standards would make things even better.
The thing is you can quickly teach a Junior how to respect a specification contract, so that with very minimal oversight, you get the wanted implementation. And after a few years (or months), the communication overhead get shorter. What would have been multiple rounds of meetings and review sessions are a short email and one or two demos.
What I've been learning as a 20% "harness engineer" is that in order to get the models to "learn" you need to add both documentation and static checks, as well as often custom skills. My main project at work has issues where the AI will often get super confused and step on itself trying to run tests - so the answer is writing better docs (AGENTS.md) and providing deterministic tools to work with the projects.
Large software projects (I'm thinking google3) often have large amounts of both of those things, as they're always getting new developers joining.
> Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code.
Writing code results in a much better understanding of the code than reviewing it
In fact I would say that in large complex codebases, in order to develop the same understanding of what the code is doing might actually take longer than writing it from scratch would have
this is the way LLMs _should_ be used, as an assistant to create reliable, deterministic code. and honestly, they're fantastic when used this way. build the thing you need with the LLM, then put the LLM away.
but in practice, the current obsession with agents means people are creating applications that depend entirely on sending requests to LLMs for their core functionality. which means abandoning the whole idea of deterministic software in favor of just praying that all of the prompts you put around those API requests will lead to the right result.
try distributing this spec amongst your team members, ask each of them to drive it to completion. no follow up edits. deploy to individual environments and then run a rigorous test suite against all of the deployments. see if all of them behave the same way.
Because if you were building GitHub from scratch today you wouldn't build it the same way and would benefit from many of the technological advancements of the last 2 decades (nearly).
Last time they tried this they laundered it though an employee's personal github to distance it from google itself, then framed the proposal in the most disingenuous manner possible, as if it was something that users wanted rather than another mechanism for google to exercise control
Last time this happened we got a bunch of Google employees downplaying the impact of WEI and calling it a nothingburger, that people were being hysterical. I just checked, and everyone I saw defending it has since left the company. I'm sure another wave of Google managers, keen to appeal to the higher-ups, will be here to defend this new initiative any minute now.
right but feel like comment count is a poor proxy for flamewar in an age where cheap intelligence to semantically classify discussions is available, so that, as affected me in the past, an author of a post simply enthusiastically engaging with every reply is not punished.
maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity.
one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"
