I wouldn't believe this until it happened to me. New bedding on prime day - came used and stained. This is fucking disgusting.
Amazon is like - we will send you a replacement but you have to print a label, box it back up and drive to a UPS store to return. Why are we working for them for free? You send me soiled bedding and the reply is to make us do work and then get the product we originally bought.
I tried quitting these people years ago, its hard to do.
For me it was a Noctua fan that had a thick layer of dust built up. Who the fuck returns a $20 fan with thousands of hours of use? And why did Amazon think it was appropriate to send that trash to me when I paid for new??
A previous customer paid money for a new fan, and then they got a refund by returning the old fan as new.
Now they have a new fan, and they have their money back. The shitbird customer is pleased with their infinite-fan life hack.
Their return goes back normal stock.
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It's ugly and reprehensible. It happens all the time. It happens with places that are down the street, too.
Like: Auto parts. When you stop in at Autozone to get a new water pump for your Ford, the person there retrieves it, brings it to the counter, opens the box, and looks at it.
The primary thing they're looking at is the condition. They want to make sure it looks new before they hand it over to you.
Because distributors sometimes send out used parts as new. Because customers are scumbags sometimes, and people are lazy sometimes, and shit gets put into the wrong piles sometimes, and -- like any other aspect in life -- it's imperfect.
The switcharoo could have happened anywhere. Maybe even in another store with a different marquee in another state. It might not have even been deliberate.
ah this is what I do too, I understand there are things like woodpecker but wish there was just some community docker image that handles this all for you.
Assuming the code is black box, an outside observer would need no more than a thousand observations before they could definitely say something was off about your rand_1_to_10() mod 3 code (with 95% confidence).
But in the case of the random_u64() mod 10, you would need the heat death of the universe number of samples before that bias would be noticeably distinguishable from random.
Is there an actual example of where that specific case could be significant for anything other than maybe nation-state cryptography?
I am using pi the same way everyone uses Codex and Claude, but pi makes it very simple to make folders to make the agent behave a certain way and that was easy for me to understand.
ChatGPT Desktop seems to intentionally hide what they are doing and where they are storing state, sessions, config, I never had any idea what is in context or what "archiving" even means. I got sick of OpenAI hiding how ChatGPT Desktop was working. I opened pi and the default behavior shows me how much context I am using, how much that costs and tells me where it stores my session data.
Suddenly it was all demystified and that is why I use pi. It has nothing to do with a functional gap, it was the joy a using a harness that was transparent about how it worked.
Everything is stored locally (expect cloud runs) in ~/.codex
It lists down everything: conversations, skills, prompt plugins, mcp, conversation history.
These are all Supreme Court cases that were specifically about the 4th amendment and happened in the last 10 years.
The 4th amendment is over 200 years old and yet requires constant supervision by the Supreme Court to define the word reasonable or to police the lower courts understanding of precedent.
So you are wrong, with whatever presumption you are making that the word "unreasonable" is well defined.
I defy you to read my post without understanding a single lick of it. It is remarkable how far away from the point you landed.
The entire point of my post -- nay, the entire point of the jury system in the United States -- is that until a jury is empaneled, the word "reasonable" may as well have no meaning whatsoever. No one is ever going to define that word short of a jury. You may think you know what is reasonable, they may think they have set forth reasonability in the law, but the only judge that's ever going to make an applicable decision on the word is a juror.
The Supreme Court may decide whether a reasonable jury could have come to a certain conclusion (about whether something was reasonable) but the Supreme Court is also not the place to look for this definition.
I see no evidence that in our nation's 250 year history or the broader practice of law (specifically adversarial law), that lawyers are working to make their job more efficient, legal outcomes more reliable, or legal tools more accessible.
Burn their entire industry to the ground. I welcome making the practice of law an AI-only field and ban humans from working in it to remove prejudice, misconduct, expense. As a former foster parent, I've seen children being delayed justice for weeks because two lawyers couldn't find time for a 15 minute conversation in front a judge. I've hated all lawyers ever since. Gatekeeping priesthood of the 21st century.
The priesthood metaphor works quite well as well since everything they touch ends up in a fashion that may as well have been written in Latin. And it's all wholly unnecessary since, contrary to the common perception of law operating on esoteric interpretations of a comma, lots of things in law come down to reasonable discretion. Of course exercising that reasonable discretion oneself requires first decrypting the text, which is outside the bounds of most laymen. So lawyers get paid lots of money to decipher texts that lawyers were paid lots of money to encipher using a legal system composed by politicians who were themselves, overwhelmingly, lawyers as well.
The legal profession is hardly a priesthood. If you're referring to contracts, most of the language is pretty simple. You have to learn a bit of jargon but much less than in software development. I think a lot of people are just intimidated or lazy and don't even try.
It's a critical law currently working its way through congress. It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. And that's a trend - when things were done by people and for people, they tended to be brief and clear. As lawyers got involved, everything became a convoluted indecipherable mess which may as well be written in Latin.
> It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution.
I took a look at a few random sections of it and didn't see anything undecipherable, other than maybe things that lack enough context because it is written as a diff from the current law.
The comparison to the length of the Constitution makes little sense to me. The Constitution establishes a framework and some power allocations. It says almost nothing about the bazillion lower level details necessary to actual have a functioning county.
The point I'm making about the discretion is that in the past the law would lay out a general framework, and that framework would be interpreted with some reasonable discretion assumed for its legal interpretation. And that is still the case. The only difference is that now laws are written in such a way that they're largely incomprehensible to non-lawyers, and I suspect even to most lawyers outside their domain of expertise.
Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.
> [...] but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government.
OK, but now in addition to understanding the structure of US government from reading the Constitution try to understand those things you ask of the bill: the incentive for passing the Constitution, its implications, and so forth.
At the least you also need to read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, many early debates in Congress over what the heck the Constitution means, many early Supreme Court cases, and probably a fair bit of history to understand the issues the country had under the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was supposed to address.
Same for the Bill of Rights.
In modern terms things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are prompts. Bills and case law are implementations.
The implementations are complicated because (1) law concerns people and what they do and people and their endeavors are complicated, (2) we have a whole lot of people in a large interconnected and interdependent economy, and (3) a whole lot of people look for any ambiguity they can find and try to exploit it for their own gain, often to great detriment to others, so bills need to be explicit to cover the edge cases.
Look at the language in that bill, or any, and you'll see that when it all comes down to it, it no in way whatsoever, covers all edge cases. The law constantly uses broad strokes and relies on reasonable interpretations to clarify ambiguities. And this is the same for all bills. The law isn't like code, and doesn't try to be like code. The obfuscation is completely unnecessary.
Similarly when I speak of the motivation for things, I'm not speaking of some subtle and nuanced historical understanding of motivation, but simply what something does and why somebody might want it. If somebody is of average intelligence they can easily infer such from the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. But in that bill I referenced, you can't even ELI5 the law, let alone why or what it would change. It's an obfuscated mess. And none of this is necessary at all.
The retailer or distributor can also be named as a defendant if the manufacturer is difficult to track down, bankrupt or overseas according to me spending a few minutes reading about pressure cooker lawsuits.
I have lost track of the metaphor, but man pressure cooker lawsuits are more common than I thought.
I would be interested in the broader objective. Was the goal to misrepresent the student population?
Photographers have always had discretion and can present their portfolio as if it were a random sample of an event even if it was actually curated to appeal to a statistical goal. This has been how colleges have lied for years about their demographics.
> Was the goal to misrepresent the student population?
The goal was money. In our society we have made mainstream the idea that a certain mixture of people is better than others, so naturally some institutions try to appear that they have the right mixture to attract more clients err students.
Is it possible to construct a control system where bad, fast and cheap can become good, fast, and cheap through repeated sampling and a strong spec/eval harness?
I am trying to keep an open mind with AI, but I also have little understanding of control theory, trying to learn.
You can, but you need to break the problem into much smaller tasks, then check those answers, and finally have a harness that handles all the context, task breakup, task definitions, and validations each round.
Amazon is like - we will send you a replacement but you have to print a label, box it back up and drive to a UPS store to return. Why are we working for them for free? You send me soiled bedding and the reply is to make us do work and then get the product we originally bought.
I tried quitting these people years ago, its hard to do.
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