Fun fact, if they are using foreign workers at all, however briefly, they are likely in violation of state law in multiple states.
HOWEVER:
It is entirely possible that some back room deals were made, and possibly laws put on the books in the states they've rolled out in.
I suspect more will come from this, eventually, especially if waymo is involved in accidents that involve insurance claims, injuries, or deaths in one of those states.
IIRC from when Waymo discussed this previously, the remote people don't drive the car, they issue instructions to the autonomous driver. If that's the case they shouldn't need a driving licence.
Wouldn't it be risky to do that? This is a multi-billion dollar gamble being executed in front of the public, egregiously breaking the law or making back-room deals both risk extreme negative public reaction if exposed.
We know that eventually a self-driving car will hit somebody and kill them. Waymo and other companies are prepared for that.
Someone above posted a link to wardgate, which hides api keys and can limit certain actions. Perhaps an extension of that would be some type of way to scope access with even more granularity.
Realistically though, these agents are going to need access to at least SOME of your data in order to work.
Wardgate is (deliberately) not part of the agent. This means separation, which is good and bad. In this case it would perhaps be hard to track, in a secure way, agent sessions. You would need to trust the agent to not cache sessions for cross use. Far sought right now, but agents get quiet creative already to solve their problem within the capabilities of their sandbox. ("I cannot delete this file, but I can use patch to make it empty", "I cannot send it via WhatsApp, so I've started a webserver on your server, which failed, do then I uploaded it to a public file upload site")
Taste is subjective. I get it. There are Triple A games on Arcade. Things like Civilization 7, for example. I don't know what the current standalone price is because we use Apple One Family, however, it used to cost $5/mo.
Apple one is a steal IMO. Apple TV, Fitness+, 2TB, Arcade, and other smaller perks like News+ make it an easy sell. Compared to something like Netflix? Netflix is $25/mo for their top tier streaming alone. Apple TV consistently has higher quality content. So does Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness...then you get 2TB of storage to back your crap up to.
Ask Google or Samsung what they are doing for the cost of an Apple One subscription.
Not a fanboy or anything. I'm basically critical of all tech companies, however, Apple is doing something that is working well for them.
I've been an Apple One subscriber for over three years now. For the past few months, as soon as you open the TV+ app, a Peacock ad starts playing really loud.
Then I don’t know what to tell you. I just opened the app again, and right there in the home section I’m seeing an ad for the Super Bowl in Peacock. If you don’t get that, great, but I’m far from the only one complaining about it.
It would be great if folks would stop assuming this is on me and not Apple. There are Peacock ads in the TV app Home Screen, and they are targeted to One Family and Premier subscribers.
Most of my career, I've worked for startups and small/medium sized businesses, mostly using Ruby On Rails or Node based stuff for language/frameworks.
In every single company I've worked for in the past 15-20 years in this capacity the biggest focus was to exit heroku as quickly as possible. The reason: Price. You don't get to charge a premium for tooling, especially not when open source tooling exists that lets you use cloud providers without paying "the Heroku Tax".) Is Heroku still using AWS/any cloud provider? They should have rolled their own infrastructure decades ago. Alas, they got bought by a shit show of a company.
(Note: I stopped working in 2023 due to health, and much of my early career was ASP/PHP/.NET)
This is my experience, too. Heroku didn’t stay competitive price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price.
Feature and experience-wise, we were always really happy with heroku.
I don’t know if this fits with the “salesforce purchased and let stagnate” narrative that nearly everyone here is pushing.
Heroku got a lot of attention and funding within Salesforce at least for the first few years - they grew from about $1M in ARR when they got acquired, and I think they peaked at around $200M (second hand - so I don't know if part of that was funny-money revenue allocated from Enterprise agreements.)
Standardizing on one single tiny little project is always a bad idea. Why? Some examples (which are admittedly not related to postgres, because I don't know their structure):
1) A single person, doing a ton of heavy lifting, leaves, or worse, turns it over, or silently sells out to a nefarious person.
2) A severe security vulnerability is found. If everyone is using postgres, everyone is vulnerable. Bonus points if the vulnerability is either not publicly disclosed or it is hard to fix.
3) Commercial/Government interests heavily influence and push the project into places that could make it vulnerable in any given way. This is absolutely a thing.
4) AI. No clarification here. Just use your imagination, with recent news regarding FFMPEG and other projects in mind.
Op calling the de jure database solution (pg) in the world “tiny” is pretty laughable. It’s one of the most popular solutions for databases in general and RDBMS specifically. SQLite is also massive in terms of its adoption and use
Also: a large amount of folks seem to think Claude code is losing a ton of money. I have no idea where the final numbers land, however, if the $20,000 figure is accurate and based on some of the estimates I've seen, they could've hired 8 senior level developers at a quarter million a year for the same amount of money spent internally.
Granted, marketing sucks up far too much money for any startup, and again, we don't know the actual numbers in play, however, this is something to keep in mind. (The very same marketing that likely also wrote the blog post, FWIW).
this doesn't add up. the 20k is in API costs. people talk about CC losing money because it's way more efficient than the API. I.e. the same work with efficient use of CC might have cost ~$5k.
but regardless, hiring is difficult and high-end talent is limited. If the costs were anywhere close to equivalent, the agents are a no-brainer
CC hits their APIs, And internally I'm sure Anthropic tracks those calls, which is what they seem to be referencing here. What exactly did Anthropic do in this test to have "inefficient use of CC" vs your proposed "efficient use of CC"?
Or do you mean that if an external user replicated this experience they might get billed less than $20k due to CC being sold at lower rates than per-API-call metered billing?
> hiring is difficult and high-end talent is limited.
Not only that, but firing talent is also a pain. You can't "hire" 10 devs for 2 weeks, and fire them afterwards. At least you can't keep doing that, people talk and no one would apply.
Even if the dollar cost for product created was the same, the flexibility of being able to spin a team up and down with an API call is a major advantage. That AI can write working code at all is still amazing to me.
Every second of my political consciousness in the United States has been acutely tinged with the awareness that a bunch of people, across most of the political spectrum live in a constant state of denial. Denial of personal responsibility or culpability. Denial of cognitive dissonance. Denial of any distinct, self-informed morals. Denial of anything but a fear of others. Denial of anything that makes them fearful or uncomfortable or might invite confrontation.
I've known from the second I started doing debate and FX/DX in highschool, well, let's just say I never thought that the majority of the 2FA-folks would be worth a damn when tyranny really came knocking. Fear of the other as a form of manipulation, and a distraction from class consciousness, has been their literal raison d'état since decades before I was born.
I guess I was shocked that the President being a convicted rapist and documented child predator would be a bridge too far. But then we re-elected him.
I believe it. We voted for this. We do nothing in the face of zero actual justice. This is exactly as good as we deserve. And best of all, it certainly doesn't stop here. This is what they chose to not redact. When we know they spent enormous tax-payer hundreds-of-people hours redacting the documents.
I don't think it's even conspiratorial to say they left stuff in, so they could use it as justification for not releasing the other HALF of the files that haven't been released, even overly censored.
We deserve this, and the much worse that our apathy has invited.
I will certainly feel less confident ridiculing conspiracy theories.
I’d never believe Bill Gates would secretly slip antibiotics into his wife’s cocktail to treat an STI he got from a Russian prostitute on convicted pedophile estate.
I wish I could believe in more conspiracy theories. At least then I might believe there was some sort of master plan, that some individual or group had some image of a better world (to them) and that the world was being steered somewhere.
Unfortunately no, it just seems to be greed, incompetence, and incompetent greed. At least when a tank drives over a protestor somebody gets to be on the side of the tank. When the bus goes off a cliff because the driver sold the steering wheel everybody dies.
Absolutely. It’s not some grand replacement theory. It’s not an intellectual master plan. It’s mostly plain greed and cynicism from the powerful, plus ignorance or a resigned belief that people cannot be changed from everyone else.
I’m in the second group. When a majority of people miss the basics, when a large chunk treat internet content as daily reality rather than algorithmically served rage bait, it feels like there’s nothing you can do.
A friend once told me, “I wish I were more schizo like before, it was much more fun,” and in a bleak way, I get it. I’d almost prefer it if there really were a coherent plan, some deliberate attempt by the mighty to steer civilization. But right now it mostly looks like greed and cynicism. These days, a lot of it seems to be coming out of Silicon Valley but it will change as it always does like it did before.
Schizos would be schizos anywhere else. Widely available access to information which are biased towards your own bias mostly did that. Most of the people don't understand technology in general nor the algoritmic content suggestion. That is what the real problem is.
>Most of the people don't understand technology in general nor the algoritmic content suggestion. That is what the real problem is.
There isn't a common understanding of these mechanisms, because the first thing they were used for, was to brand as "defective" anyone pursuing such understanding on their own terms.
Of course you could always do it by the book i.e. go in blind and debt-enslave yourself until loss of capacity for disentanglement. A small number of such functionaries are indeed required to maintain a colony; and then some surplus ones to keep the first one in their place.
Is that a "conspiracy"? In the sense that you're stuck breathing in sync with a lot of strangers, sure. In the sense of secret master plan? Nah bruh, it's all been out in the open all along. Just mindkillingly terrifying to most of yall. Hence all the phatics.
Epstein was involved in a UK corruption plot to reduce taxes on banker's bonuses. He was involved with insider trading around 9/11. This net is far reaching.
As a non american looking in I feel like that applies to the other side as well and is how you ended up here.
Having paid a bit of attention during the election seeing bernie and trump at least in terms of rethoric more in line with eachother on the same trade agreements, migration, etc whilst also both outperforming Hillary in the same swing states, etc is not some coincidence.
And given that you live in a 2 party state it's always going to swing at some point eventually. No matter how depraved someone like trump is.
If the next one is just as bad and they sit it out long enough they will get their turn.
I wonder if this could be intentional. If the datasets are contaminated with CSAM, anybody with a copy is liable to be arrested for possession.
More likely it's just an oversight, but it could also be CYA for dragging their feet, like "you rushed us, and look at these victims you've retraumatized". There are software solutions to find nudity and they're quite effective.
The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.
The export itself is also sloppy, with characters like equal signs being added in weird places. Seems like they have it set to cast a wide and poorly set up net.
The US administration is, at present, regularly violating the law and ignoring court orders. Indeed, these very releases are patently in violation of multiple federal laws -- they're simultaneously insufficiently-responsive to meet the requirements of the law requiring the release of the files and fall afoul of CSAM laws by being incompletely redacted.
The challenge, as we're all experiencing together, is that the law is not inherently self-enforcing.
> ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," Schiltz said, adding that he counted 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases.
"Allegations" from the exact judges whose orders aren't being enacted? The orders in question are pretty simple: release this guy. Don't take this guy out of state. It's pretty clear when they're not being followed. This guy is not a slouch:
Did you notice that one article I linked involved a DoJ lawyer admitting that she couldn't convince ICE to obey court orders that she was trying to transmit to them? That's beyond an allegation and into admission. How is that not evidence?
The problem is that it's always specific to a particular case. So, if one guy isn't being released according to court order, they could order someone held in the courthouse jail until he is, and probably just the threat will get him released. But then 1) nobody ends up in jail, because they're not in contempt anymore and 2) it doesn't do anything for any other cases, and there are so many other cases. This sort of contempt where a judge can just order it is "civil contempt" and is meant to convince someone to comply with the court order, it can't be used to punish someone longer than that (criminal contempt can, but you need an actual prosecution, trial, etc).
You might think "ok can't they be held in contempt for the pattern of ignoring court orders" and, well, you'd think so. But that looks a lot like a universal injunction or a class action and SCOTUS has deliberately been nerfing those.
If they've simply been committing crimes then judges don't have anything to do- they'd have to be prosecuted by someone, or I guess sued civilly, but that won't put them in jail either and takes forever.
Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A.
In addition, one need only glance at the action in US courts to see egregious violations of the Constitution and valid court orders playing out daily.
Yes, the Abrego Garcia and Öztürk detentions are two very newsworthy cases that have actually reached the point of a final judgement in the district courts, as opposed to "merely" preliminary injunctions against the government.
(It's also worth noting that almost none of the government's appeals to their losses in preliminary injunctions have been on the merits as to whether or not their actions were legal, but rather on the grounds of "no one should be allowed to challenge our actions," which has also been a fairly losing argument for everybody except SCOTUS.)
Allegations are literally evidence. "He attacked me" is an allegation of a crime and is evidence that would be used in conjunction with other evidence to prosecute said crime.
There's more than enough credible reports of CSAM in the Epstein Files dump - more than enough for me to not go and download even a single file of them myself, simply because German law does not care about why you are in the possession of CSAM, even if you took the picture yourself.
The legal situation regarding CSAM is very strict no matter which country, and I better hope no one here will actually be dumb enough to provide actual links.
If those reports are true then what we have is not just an effective deterrent for download and distribution of the set, but legally prosecutable malware targetting anyone who does, empowered by the Interpol CSAM database to which the DOJ should probably already released the offending material.
It's a tricky issue. In many countries it's not illegal and quite common for children to run around naked in public, during the summer on beaches for example, and so millions of people have holiday photos that are technically CSAM in their possession that they don't even know they have.
CSAM has a meaning identical to child porn but doesn't make that meaning explicit. Drawn or generated depictions of child nudity can be considered CSAM in some jurisdictions.
They keep illegally appointing unqualified hacks as US attorney in defiance of the mandate they're approved by the Senate (Essayli, Habba, Halligan, Sarcone, Chattah) - judges have found at least five of the appointments illegal. As one example: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/judge-los-angeles-t...
They've repeatedly violated court orders to either return immigrant detainees or release them. "This is one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks.": https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/patrick-schiltz-judg...
His targeting and shakedowns of Universities, law firms, and media companies is transparently illegal jawboning.
Everything about the tariffs is obviously illegal which he confirms every time he opens his mouth since he's relying on 'national security' justifications to issue them without Congress and he keeps insisting they're punishment for some random perceived slight.
Some sillier things like renaming the Kennedy Center -- the law that established it literally said that it couldn't be renamed without Congress -- so Trump firing everyone on the board and then appointing a bunch of his flunkees to vote for the name change doesn't cut it.. https://beatty.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/beatty.house.gov...
It's a literal onslaught of illegality so I can't tell if you haven't read a news article since 2025 or if you're trolling.
Honestly, this is something that should've been kept private, until each and every single one of the files is out in the open. Sure, mistakes are being made, but if you blast them onto the internet, they WILL eventually get fixed.
Won't that entire DOJ archive already be downloaded for backup by several people?
If I'd be a journalist working on those files, this is the very first thing I would do as soon as those files were published. Just to make sure you have the originals before DOJ can start adding more redactions.
HOWEVER:
It is entirely possible that some back room deals were made, and possibly laws put on the books in the states they've rolled out in.
I suspect more will come from this, eventually, especially if waymo is involved in accidents that involve insurance claims, injuries, or deaths in one of those states.
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