341–350 of 566 posts
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Sounds like my CTO. Overuse of LLMs in c-suites is like overuse of weed by teenagers - it may not cause delusions, but it sure seems to make them worse.
Don't worry, I'm positive that we're only a few years out from realizing just how damaging both were/are.
There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.
it is straightforward to build this for real, here is my nearly one-shotted tldraw clone from a couple of weeks ago, https://x.com/c_pick/status/2028669568403578931 - the implementation side never saw the code, only the spec (in reality it did see the tldraw code in its training data, but you can't escape that anymore)
I feel like this is related to these issues (with somebody attempting this approach for real): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
It also shows why this approach is questionable. Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access can provide chardets source code in full from memory/training data (ironically, including the licensing header): https://gist.github.com/yannleretaille/1ce99e1872e5f3b7b133e...
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/5.0.0/chardet/mbchar...
It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay…
I am only 50% certain that your idea is expanding on the satire, if not: project owners can provide dual licensing. I'm sorry if you are serious and didn't understand you.
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Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment. Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz. If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged,…
Code is Law is pretty much demonstrates that it is not possible to precisely define law. https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks... Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.
An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
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You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 196…
I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out com…
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This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option. If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).
There is an upside: oppressing people who consistently engage in antisocial behavior is good and necessary.
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> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences. Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an a…
The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me. In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes. In other words, you just significantly increased your…
If my wife is having a stroke, I can definitely pick her up, toss her in the car, and get to the ER faster than an ambulance can reach my house.
As I'm sure you know, every second counts when it comes to recovery from a stroke.
What kind of first aid do you give to someone having a stroke anyway?
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