Individual franchise fast food restaurants in the same city can be owned by two totally different groups of people and have very different cost structures for the real estate acquisition cost and build cost, and very different debt loads.
McDonalds restaurants are required to conform to a monolithic corporate identity as part of their franchise agreement but many are individually owned.
I'm not trying to excuse dynamic algorithm based pricing (and personal opinion, McD is crap ultraprocessed pseudo-food), but I'm pretty sure there's a $2 difference between the price of two totally unrelated shawarma vendors for approximately the same product that are within 800 meters of each other in my city as well.
No, I'm describing a documented fact of why specifically McDonalds has different pricing in different locations. It has been that way since basically forever. They are individually owned by franchisees and within a certain range do set different pricing in different retail premises. I don't like McDonalds but it's also very ignorant that people are treating this like it's something new.
Next I'm sure some people will discover and be shocked by the fact that the non-corporate-run starbucks kiosks in some major international airports (run by an airport catering/specialist service company) have different prices than their corporate-run local starbucks.
Now if the topic is, as someone else has described in other linked threads on the same topic that different people using the app are getting different pricing for the same store, that's new to me and certainly something to be concerned about. It sounds like what airline ticket booking/purchase sites are known to do depending on your cookies, IP, useragent, browser fingerprint, etc. Very slimy.
If I was a serious Cloudflare customer I would be seriously concerned about the security of my infrastructure with them. Yes LLMs can code fast but this is an almost frenetic pace of releasing new products, all with fewer staff.
> eventually becoming a monopoly (or part of the big tech "duopoly")
At this point this has already effectively happened. The average person doesn't realize the extent of it, because the products Cloudflare builds are inherently transparent to the average consumer.
They are working on a set of primitives that make building this kind of software easier. With AI, runtimes matter more than ever and languages matter less.
I trust that this is not the case. Check out both the authors. Micah's company was acquired by Cloudflare, and both of these guys actually bring good expertise around this area.
The question is less about "vibe coding" the product, and more about how their acquired teams function. For most products they have released so far, they are backed by a company they acqui-hired. They will usually rebrand the product and absorb the team.
You would not be surprised if this release was from a product for a startup company rather than a large enterprise company.
Cloudflare hired a bunch of folks for sure, but they also fired a lot of folks. What they are doing these days is building products by buying out entire companies, giving them nearly independent authority to build a product like they would build a company.
Listening to Dwark's interview of Noam last week was bewildering. The gall of the figureheads for these companies to say things like "chain of thought monitoring cannot be relied on without potentially poisoning the well", while also saying "we need to pace the frontier but please still trust us [and so called" independent " 3rd party firms which at least in one case is actually a significant stakeholder in Anthropic] to self police" and THEN "chain of thought monitoring was turned off but we have 'more, robust monitoring tools in place now'" is absolutely insane as it is coming out live that your model in training is still committing felonies.
Corporate influence in government in the USA is wild.
For those who don't watch his YouTube channel or read his blog, Jeff is a fantastic spokesperson for for everything self hosting (enjoying the NTP binge of late!). I really hope this is a success as he's an excellent advocate for a healthy and positive community and framework of understanding this stuff, not to mention his quality as an orator. It would be great to see a cultural push back against surveillance capitalism and centralization of compute and we need good voices and responsible advocates sharing their thoughts to those learning the ropes.
I wasn't aware he's publicly said anything like this, but I've always assumed he was quite religious so I'm not particularly surprised.
To be fair, this is a pretty tame and measured expression of disapproval of the modern societal acceptance of homosexuality. I honestly don't know what more I could ask for, in modern societal discourse, for someone I disagree with in terms of how they go about expressing it: the links I read seem to imply he was honest, polite, and clear on his feelings, not inciting hate, violence, or spewing vitriol. Jeff's views are his own, and maybe the crux here is that I don't see politely disagreeing about the righteousness of living homosexually as remotely severe enough to warrant this much attention considering the quality of character of a lot of public figures visible to those of us outside the USA.
I admit seeing a response like this irks me as I feel it needlessly detracts from the mission. That said, it's both A) fair and a good thing to judge and critique any public figure's character and I do think public figures and their views deserve scrutiny, and B) a means to continue to allow powerful people and groups to assassinate the character of and dilute the message of people who run contrary to their goals. I'm genuinely torn on how to feel about how to feel here. I worry we allow ideas to be discarded at the first sign of something we disapprove of in people who share them -which is wrong-, yet several of my best friends are queer and I also could not stand to see them trod upon. Those same queer friends all have views and personality flaws which would be judged just as harshly by others.
Regardless, I don't like you using my excerpt that way. Not everyone's views of "community" mean the classic cancel culture era idiosyncratic definition whereby anyone in any role remotely resembling leadership must share the same specific set of homogeneous views on political and cultural issues to be given any member's "consent" to lead a group. I stand by what I said and still do believe Jeff is an excellent advocate for these ideas. There are obvious limits, to be clear, I would never go to Toastmasters if the local club head spoke about killing jews, but this isn't that and IMO there are so, so many more important battles to go fight out there than this.
Everyone draws their own boundaries based on what is important to them. I do not think your example is unreasonable.
But the homelabbing scene, and many parts of tech in general, are generally more inclusive than many other scenes, perhaps partly because we have a very diverse community in the first place. I think it is important context, and not just a needless detraction, for a physical gathering that the organizer does not share these views.
Regardless, I do not think any interpretation of "positive community" can include the dejection of homosexuality.
> But the homelabbing scene, and many parts of tech in general, are generally more inclusive than many other scenes, perhaps partly because we have a very diverse community in the first place
Also probably because many of us were social rejects growing up. I recall my entire CS graduating class being way more accepting of people different from them as a result.
The guy has an obvious conflict of interest - running a youtube channel/taking sponsorships. I've never undestood why so many people take his word at face value. It's at best attempts to manufacture hype for views and at worst shilling for whoever gave him money to shill for them (i.e. qualcomm buying arduino is good actually)
Just to be clear, I've never taken a dime from Qualcomm, Apple, Raspberry Pi, etc—when I do take a sponsorship from any company I'm clear about it.
I always mark videos as sponsored if anything was provided (eg review samples) and not purchased. That never includes payments or editorial oversight, and equipment is either returned or shelved afterwards for future comparisons.
I've been using AI to help with my genealogical research, and it's been fantastic. I am loving pushing the family history back and catching mistakes that someone who many others share as a common ancestor have made.
I've been doing family history on my aboriginal Australian side, there were a bunch of Lutheran missions, and ever so kindly they digitized 800 pages for me, but it was all written in German. I transcribed and translated all of it.
I sent it back and they didn't acknowledge it, probably for various reasons, and I doubt they would like me linking it above.
Beyond being fascinating in general, I also found that from a different state in Australia there was an aboriginal who became a man of letters came to my ancestral state and was the first to write the language of the tribe, I think (not something easy to prove) it's the first ever written version of the tribal language circa ~1870 of Kuku Yalanji.
> I sent it back and they didn't acknowledge it, probably for various reasons, and I doubt they would like me linking it above.
Because if you study this stuff long enough, you'll find the LLMs hallucinate in this space far more than they do in a discourse or programming project.
It can be close enough to seem useful, but make critical errors that can cause rippling problems.
I've done a lot of the same sort of thing with Latin and chancery and while it can really help in understanding it on a personal level, it takes combing over what it has said and zooming in, comparing it with other information, and understanding the historical context. Otherwise it can completely mangle clauses, contexts, etc.
It is remarkable how well they can start to read things like chancery script, but again, many errors. Not reliable, especially in such large volumes. It would require extensive review. And they are probably getting flooded wth things like that now. And not all of them will be benevolent. History is laden with intentional corruptions and the flat, context-less reading that LLMs give can bury that even further.
Don't inundate researchers, churches, and records offices wth this stuff. But it is absolutely a space where it can help, with proper organization and engagement.
Or, more simply, affairs, unwed couples, incidences of rape that were a dark stain in the victim’s life, etc.
A friend of mine loves to think about heritage and genealogy and when I brought up genetic testing and “wouldn’t it be neat to find out if someone in your lineage wasn’t actually in it?” they were quick to point out that they’re not interested in that because it doesn’t matter and her parents are her parents (and her great great grandparents are her great great grandparents).
Discovering infidelity and/or abuse in your family tree 2-3 generations back often (but never ever always) does little but harm to one’s own genealogical journey.
I'd caution others with believing caught "mistakes". (But am also interested in how you use it)
There is a farm cited as an ancestor origin by multiple deceased genealogist. Its a common POI that people with this shared ancestor try to find. Finding it could solidify the established line theory and finally debunk a small ancestor fraction's alternate theory.
Different LLM searches keep returning the same colony with invalid/made up references that don't even cite a partial name match. Manual searches throughout that area returns nothing as well. But since the LLM said so, a century+ of various research and work by professional genealogist gets severed from a crowd sourced public tree because "AI" returned a colony name that ended up helping the alt line.
I did eventually find what I believe is the origin farm, and it strengthens the history written by previous genealogist -- I tried to send the information to the tree maintainers and was outright ignored. LLMs fabricating locations apparently beats a listing in the National Heritage List for England of the exact place name, buildings from that time, and in one of the areas the larger english family is known to have been present.
Once you trace back centuries, in my case early 17th century, you run into issues of everyone having the same name, scarce scrapes of documentation, and other issues that can produce more than one plausible ancestor line. This ancestor was in successive junior lines so it's a lot of implication -- showing a pedigree chart with "Henry" born to "William" in 17th century England -- that isnt very helpful without piecing together a lot of scattered context from multiple sources and without being able to see what documents/evidence those researchers had.
So, theory is a common term used. Established theory because the family is included in 3-4 books written from the late 19th and 20th century covering large swaths of the related families and areas/interactions/movements etc.
Once you start getting back that far in time the people who trace genealogy for money and writing books, tend to be more through and understand the quirkier nuances that can tease apart families that your typical internet sleuthing researcher (me for example) can miss/conflate.
Make sure you document why/how you determined that a previous research conclusion was a mistake -- generations after you may discover additional information and should be able to weigh the same evidence rather than simply accept (or reject) your novel conclusions.
Current models are amazing at one shot decoding hand written vital records. I thought there might be some friction, but if there is, I haven’t found any. I’ve unlocked lots of detail from records I already had just because I didn’t try to translate the handwriting due to the time required.
I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).
So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.
- ask it to generate Lean 4 proofs based off centimorgans
- extract subject, object, subjects from all source texts and create a graph database (maybe someone mentioned a red dog in their oral history, and someone else mentioned a sick dog in a eulogy, ask ai to explore weakly correlated connections, sometimes pays off)
> ask it to generate Lean 4 proofs based off centimorgans
That's not confidence inspiring. It'll give you proofs I'm sure, but with what assumptions? You need a full blown model for crossover, and even that would hardly help, because you don't know what assumptions went into the segment match. What size segments are filtered out, how many mismatches are ignored, how interpolation is done, how no-calls are treated etc. Let alone the cM value for services which don't give segments!
And then there's that the question for instance Bettinger's shared cM project asks (given this relationship, what shared cM level do you expect to see?) is actually very different from the question we most often ask (given this shared cM level, what relationship should I expect?). When you get into the distant cousin range, those questions can be very different indeed. And we're not even getting into endogamy.
They say the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. I'm worried that AI can be really powerful self-fooling tools!!
aha I appreciate the rant, and you obviously know what you are talking about.
I have used the Lean 4 approach and I wasn't proposing it solves the problem, but it has reduced the search space for me in certain circumstances. At best it's a nice way for agents to keep in their context windows potential relations, I made it create enormous amounts of hypothetical nodes and then visualized it so I could talk with my relatives about potential paths.
As a side note, I believe, if we had a better DNA site that had great API access (and exposed genomes), I think agents could probably solve genealogy, even as far as complex endogamics.
(I don't think centimorgans is that useful past 4 generations kind of thing)
My unlock in genealogy research was using https://www.familysearch.org/ with from Claude Code with Claude-in-Chrome (for browser control). You may need to occasionally confirm your humanity and limit Claude’s bot-ness, but it can still move quickly to gather the info.
familysearch.org + ancestry.com + genealogybank.com + archive.org + random institutional websites or government sources have been my top so far.
I throw it all together into a multi-agent team doing fact and source gathering, network tracking, location processing, and coverage analysis. Basically industrializing the research and creation of genealogical profiles of ancestors.
I’ve written my own genealogy app as well, it has reinvigorated my efforts. I have a multi-level data model (evidentiary below, curated above) that has helped me piece together people across a multitude of disparate sources. Claude has been my sidekick, and it’s amazing- especially for the more toilsome tasks like extracting people’s details from newspaper articles.
I have split up the data model into a handful of layers in order to separate concerns. The evidentiary layer are the raw bits - the media, sources, clippings, photos, etc. From there I derive "personas", which are the (incomplete and possibly inaccurate) representations of people from those media bits. Above that is the curation layer, where the curator takes those personas and compiles persons from them.
So if there are a bunch of articles that talk about someone's birthday but a couple give conflicting data, that is all present and recorded in the evidentiary layer, and it is the responsibility of the curator to decide which is the actual birthday for that person.
edit: the "below/above" terminology is a dependency relationship. The facts undergird the conclusions drawn from them. To flip that relationship would be to "retcon" facts to fit the conclusions a curator has already drawn, which would be a mistake.
The more I actually look at projects I care about the more and more I'm noticing just how extensive their support is. I wish more governments and philanthropists would do like them.
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