What part? NGO/thinktanks operating within a 30 minute drive to the nation's capital?
One such example is James Leibold, a scholar of Xinjiang ethnic policy. He would report on Xiajiang and the claimed genocide. He is an australian. He worked for the Jamestown Foundation based in DC.
On the Board of Directors for the Jamestown Foundation is a man named Michael G Vickers, who was previously the Under Secretary of Defense for intelligence, and worked at the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan War(The one where the US funded the Mujahadeen who immediately began throwing grenades into schools for girls).
Vickers was even featured in the book, "Charlie Wilson's War", about Operation Cyclone and the events which would eventually lead to blowback via 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the second Iraq war.
This is just one example. Any time you see articles like this, follow the sources. They either wont cite anything, or will cite a thinktank/NGO staffed by career intelligence workers and funded by similar groups.
> What part? NGO/thinktanks operating within a 30 minute drive to the nation's capital?
That is a pedestrian fact. Any organization seeking influence in Washington will be located in Washington. This provides zero evidence that Washington pulls its strings or otherwise directs it.
Your whole screed is irrelevant. It gives no evidence regarding Iran Int'l.
Sales gets fired (or not paid) for missing their estimates (quotas, forecasts) and often have little empathy for engineering being unable to estimate accurately.
I've been a CTO (with a lot of pre-sales engineering responsibilities) and a VPE responsible for engineering - sales relationships; I've participated in hundreds of prospecting and customer calls and many years of sales planning/strategy/deal review meetings. I can tell you from first hand experience that sales (and marketing, to a large extent) are both strictly measured and held accountable to forecasts. Forecasting a buyer's behavior, or a lead gen pipeline, or deal timing is not easier than forecasting the construction of a new feature.
Really interesting topic. (I’m actually somewhere in between sales and dev - doing Req. Engineering, Concepts and planning).
Personally I consider it more important to constantly narrow down any uncertainties over time, than having an initial estimate that holds. The closer it gets to any deadline, the less uncertainty I want (need) to have because the less options remain to react to changes.
And frankly, this usually not only applies to estimates but also to things that these estimates rely upon. The longer the timeline, the more room for circumstances and requirements to change.
I’m in the “write new stuff with cc and get great code.” Of course I’ll be told I don’t really know what I’m doing. That I just don’t know the difference between good and bad quality code. Sigh.
The main "issue" I have with Claude is that it is not good at noticing when code can be simplified with an abstraction. It will keep piling on lines until the file is 3000 lines long. You have to intervene and suggest abstractions and refactorings. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. I don't want Claude refactoring my code (GPT-5 does this and it's very annoying). Claude is a junior developer that thinks it's a junior. GPT-5 is a junior developer that thinks it's a senior.
Definitely agree here, have had so many cases where I would like ask Claude for XYZ, then ask for XYZ again but with a small change. Instead of abstracting out the common code it would just duplicate the code with the small change.
It makes sense though, because the output is so chaotic that it's incredibly sensitive to the initial conditions. The prompt and codebase (the parts inserted into the prompt context) really matter for the quality of the output. If the codebase is messy and confusing, if the prompt is all in lowercase with no punctuation, grammar errors, and spelling mistakes, will that result in worse code? It seems extremely likely to me that the answer is yes. That's just how these things work. If there's bad code already, it biases it to complete more bad code.
You can't in good conscience advertise a complex assembly as fit for some purpose without knowing how close the component widgets are to their various modes of failure.
It's my assessment of the professional assessments of experts such as aviation safety consultant and former air accident investigator Tim Atkinson and former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti, as well as the contents of the NTSB's report, and Boeing's well documented history of putting profit over safety.
I believe that it's the opinion of experts that Boeing either misjudged the safety risk of the bearing assembly when they should not have or that they incorrectly downplayed that risk when disclosing the flaw to their customers and I'm inclined to believe those experts because Boeing has already demonstrated themselves to be outright dishonest and negligent when it comes to the safety of their products.
That said, while I would not be surprised if things truly are as they currently appear to be, my assessment is always subject to change if additional information comes to light which makes that less likely to be the case.
They learn pretty quickly to downplay things when their whistleblower collegese either fall down the stairs or kill themselves after telling loved ones that if they die it was not by their own hands.
Says anyone who has tried to do anything requiring the smallest amount of computer science or computer engineering. These models are really great at boilerplate and simple web apps. As soon as you get beyond that, it gets hairy. For example, I have a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding. Just those two features required a lot of hand holding. Figma Design nailed the UX, but the actual guts/business logic I had to spend time on.
I expect that this will get easier as agentic flows get more mature, though.
Then the only place that novelty will occur is in the actual study of computer science. And even then, a well contexted agentic pipeline will speed even R&D development to a great degree.
One very bad thing about these things is the embedded dogma. With AI ruling the roost in terms of generation (basically an advanced and opinionated type-writer, lets be honest) breaking away from the standards in any field will become increasingly difficult. Just try and talk to any frontier model about physics that goes against what is currently accepted and they'll put up a lot of resistance.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how useful it is for writing low level stuff like peripheral drivers on imbedded platforms. It’s actually-simple- stuff, but exactingly technical and detail oriented. It’s interesting that it can work so well, then go wildly off the rails and be impossible to wrestle back on unless you go way back in the context or even start a completely new context and feed in only what is currently relevant (this has become my main strategy)
Still, it’s amazingly good at wrestling the harmony of a bunch of technical details and applying them to a tried and true design paradigm to create an API for new devices or to handle tricky timing, things like that. Until it isn’t and you have to abort the session and build a new one because it has worked itself into some kind of context corner where it obsesses about something that is just wrong or irrelevant.
Still, it’s a solid 2x on production, and my code is arguably more maintainable because I don’t get tempted to be clever or skip clarifying patterns.
There is a level of wholistic complexity that kills it though. The trick is dividing the structure and tasks into self contained components that contain any relevant state within their confines to the maximum practical extent, even if there is a lot of interdependent state going on inside. It’s sort a mod a meta-functional paradigm working with inherently state-centric modules.
> a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding
Wut, what's the purpose of that? Is this just a toy learning project? Would it be to make money off of people who don't know that an ad-free version of HN exists at news.ycombinator.com? Will you try to sell it to Ycombinator?
I am hoping they are developing it as a satirical art project, otherwise... yikes; needing a credit card and an ad blocker to use HN would be very depressing and is counter to everything I enjoy about this forum.
Mostly just learning, to be honest. I'm not trying to replace HN, I'm just fiddling around and seeing what I can do and what I can't.
My long term purpose is to provide the source code for communities/creators that want something simple to set up, and specifically allow creators to gate content behind a paywall. I'm sure stuff like that exists, but I hope what I build will be at least somewhat use-able.
Not a developer by trade. But incidentally, today I took my first stab at "vibe coding". I wrote a little gui program to streamline a process that I've been doing for years. The code is an absolute wreck. But the program works and does what it's meant to do. I wouldn't ever expect anyone to maintain it, but for what it is, I can't complain. The alternative would have been for the tool to have not been written at all. The level of effort was so low that a) it passed the threshold of it being worth my time, and b) if it needs to be re-vibe-coded over again, then no worries.
But, whoever’s doing the redacting sees the original right? What prevents the redactor from saying, “here’s what the document really said.” Or “here’s who’s in the image, I saw it before I redacted it?”
That’s a good point. I would imagine they break it up into pieces - in a reCAPTCHA sorta way - and any given person sees a sentence or a piece of a sentence.
An alternative would be to strip out all obvious known words and only leave unknowns (i.e., names) and then have those fragments reviewed (in a reCAPTCHA sorta way).
Finally, for images, cover all faces and the one by one decide which should remain covered and which should not.
LOTS of work but there are workflows to mitigate the ability for reviewers to connect more than they should.
Given how MTG went completely silent despite her high profile platform, I'm guessing the civil (or at this point, royal) servants don't want their families harmed.
I’d guess a first pass is done automatically? Eg if a page mentions eg Trump, just redact that whole page/paragraph/etc. So the people who have done the closer reading to redact further probably don’t actually know the scale of what was already redacted. Just a guess though.
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