It can't possibly do everything; mind reading interfaces haven't been invented yet. Paul Graham goes on about how writing is thinking. Just the act of writing out instructions can be fun.
On one hand, analytics is similar to astrology. You observe real phenomena and draw lines. A lot of inaccuracy comes from the exclusion of delays.
Like if I removed the logout button, how would that affect churn? This is a question better answered by instinct than analytics.
On the other hand, analytics acts as a form of QA. I think this is the true value. But it should be in the form of flagging when quality drops, not being used to decide which corners to cut.
I see it as a punching bag analogy. It's a strike. A repetitive strike. I try to make the strike shorter and stronger each time.
The last time I tried to make a goth girl dating sim, it took half a day. The next time, I hope it would take an hour to reach the same level. Or be a better simulation.
Is it pointless? Maybe. But like with strikes, I enjoy the power. AI might add some distance, but striking a punching bag with a club is still satisfying.
If anything, I feel it makes my career more secure.
1) Nearly all the job losses I've dealt with was when a company runs low on money. This is because it cost too much/too long to build a product or get it into market.
2) LLMs are in the sweet spot of doing the things I don't want to do (writing flawless algorithms from known patterns, sifting through 2000-line logs) and not doing the sweet spot of doing what I'm good at (business cases, feature prioritization, juice). Engineering work now involves more fact checking and "data sheet reading" than it used to, which I'm happy to do.
3) Should programming jobs be killed, there will be more things to sell. And more roles for business/product owners. I'm not at all opposed to selling the things that the AI is making.
4) Also Gustafson's Law. All the cloud stuff led to things like Facebook and Twitch, which created a ton more jobs. I don't believe we'll see things like "vibe code fixer". But we'll probably see things like robotics running on a low latency LLM brain which unlocks a different host of engineering challenges. In 10 years, it might be the norm to create household bots and people might be coding apps based on how they vacuum the house and wipe the windows.
5) I don't take a high salary. The buffer between company profit and my costs is big enough that they don't feel the need to squeeze every drop out of me. They make more profit paying both me and the AI and the colleagues than they would just paying the AI.
I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly.
On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
Thanks! And it's a lot of info, yeah. ~90% of new data in yesterday's drop was photographs, which they redacted for us.
The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs.
For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
Yes! We used our friends at Reducto (https://reducto.ai/) for all document extraction and parsing (one of the best companies I've ever referred to YC ;) )
We did an initial parsing pass of all four DOJ document batches on Friday. This takes a raw PDF and returns chunks containing typed blocks—each with a type (Title, Text, Figure, etc.), bounding boxes, content, and confidence scores. For PDFs that were just scans of photographs (which was like 90% of new content in Friday's release), it gave in depth descriptions of those! You can type search terms like "door" at https://www.jmail.world/photos to see what I mean.
For apps like Jmail and JFlights we use their structured extraction endpoint instead—you define a schema (e.g. {from, to, subject, date, body} for emails or {departure_airport, arrival_airport, passengers[], date} for flights) and it pulls those fields directly into JSON.
The JFlights example served as the best ad for Reducto and how doc parsing technology can speed up hours of journalistic investigations like this.
while true, it would probably be useful to provide examples. The one that I am aware of seems to be a picture showing Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross with "redacted" victims
however it seems that this photo is actually taken from a 2003 Democratic fundraiser, and the redacted images of victims were of Diana Ross' son Evan, and Michael Jackson's kids, Paris and Prince Jackson. This may or may not be accurate either, since I have not been able to dig down into the photo and determine if it has any connections to a supposed 2003 fundraiser.
But it seems more likely to be true than not that this was sloppily planted evidence that was especially insultingly fake.
on edit: looking closer does not seem to be exact same photos, but instead two different photos taken at the same time and place, so in the 2003 Dem fundraising, but a different photo of that. So it could be that Epstein had it and DOJ thought hey, look at these pervs! Let's release!!
As you say, it's not the same photo. If the one in the dump was in Epstein's possession, the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton. I can't decide which I find more credible.
I think if it hadn't been those adults with the kids an alert staffer might have thought "whose kids are these, these aren't young teenage girls, I better double check" But Michael Jackson, kids, Clinton arms around him, Diana Ross with young male, they're thinking they walked into an armory filled with nothing but smoking guns!
>the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton
They were supposed to redact all minors, not just "victims".
I see people are not clued into this and incredulously downvote because the file release appears to be in good faith to them such that illegal evidence tampering is out of the question
I'm being snarky and this isn't such a serious comment and I don't really mean this for Gemini but can you imagine using something like Gemini ("Hi, please comb through this") and it just refuses on ethical grounds
I just have real institutional problems with Google, they have all the best tech minds but some things are just off limits to them being politically correct
And no, not Epstein. It's a general statement; but it's disappointing that they're like this (and of course Gemini was famously the one that gave black Nazis and things like that)
Google has never fixed their black people/gorilla issue. The foundational tech that all of their products run on going back a decade is fundamentally flawed (and outputs outputs that many would say align with racist ideologies, among others).
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.
> You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.
I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.
Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?
A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.
I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.
If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.
He wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)
I mean it is so obvious causing me to find the use of the phrase cloned so weird that I feel it needs to be said.
The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off.
But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag)
there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad.
You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc.
> The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it.
no. google did not exist until the late 90s.
various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch.
but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.
I'm not a physicist, but after getting into the rotten fruit this fall, I would bet my friend's horse could launch a space shuttle from her arse. Such a sweet mare, but she has no hesitation blasting Venetian atmosphere right into your face while you're scraping the shit out of her feet. At least she has the decency to make eye contact while doing it
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and GMail what have the Romans ever done for us?
All right, but apart from Google Wave, Google Reader, Google+, Inbox, Stadia, Project Ara, Google Glass, Loon, Picasa, Orkut, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Google Domains, Google Health, Google Notebook, iGoogle, Knol, Jaiku, Daydream VR, Google Play Music, Nexus, Fusion Tables, Bump, Revolv, Songza, QuickOffice, Meebo, Panoramio, Milk, Schemer, Sparrow, Poly, Tilt Brush, Tour Builder, URL Shortener, Latitude, Spaces, Google Hire, Google Bulletin, Shoelace, and Neighbourly, Android Things, Project Tango, Ara Module Marketplace, Google TV, Nexus Q, Google Play Newsstand, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Podcasts, Google Now, Google Now Launcher, Google Goggles, Gesture Search, MyTracks, Google Play Edition, Android Auto for Phone Screens, All Access, Google Currents, Google SMS Search, Google Cloud Messaging, Android Beam, Androidify, Field Trip, Google Currents, and Google Play Artist Hub, what has Google ever done for us?
I mean the I would really only include the code for things like:
- Fetching email messages
- Parsing email headers
- Mime parsing
- Converting the text of email bodies into UTF-8
- Threading messages
- Eliding reply text
Given that the official story is that pb made the first version of Gmail in a day, does anyone actually believe that he wrote the code for any of those things in a day? If you honestly believe that I have a bridge to sell you.
Wait till you learn that the source code in Chrome also predates the existence of Google.
Maybe that and manipulating technical tools requires far less background knowledge than it did, meaning the definition of “technically inclined” has shifted, as it often does.
"less technically inclined" doesn't mean people can make whatever incorrect claims unchecked like on reddit, where you get banned because you post inconvenient facts in the wrong sub.
And this is exactly why I stopped participating in discussions on reddit and never on LinkedIn. Discussions on HN are so much civil and respectful here
P.S. if the top level comment was indeed posted by a "less technically inclined" person, I hope this is a humbling, positive educational experience, at least that's how I would take it
> I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly.
The cynic in me would assume that someone with a lot of money wants to hide some of the emails and the best way to do that (at this point) is to release them filtered with a great UI.
The thing I got from reading the majority of these emails is Epstein / trump connection was not that strong later years. I feel JE humored trump to a degree and disliked him to an even larger degree. He may have initially had strong relations in the beginning but he was NOT pleased he was winning the presidency at all. He mentioned multiple times references to dirt on DT and even at one point there was the question did Trump set him up. Not to say JE did no wrong, cause the evidence is 100% there for that but it's super interesting having read the actual files to see the various media spins on all sides. If anything though it's led me to believe there are much stronger ties to Russia with DT than I thought before. (Palm Beach House, the casino, models coming from those areas etc).
I read through 80% of them last night by myself. I mean, I didn't go to bed until 3am but spread across a handful of agents? yeah you could do it in an hour.
The total archive size is 300GB. AFAIK they have only released around 2GB. Curious what is in the rest of it assuming it does not get [redacted] out or deleted. I am also curious how they intend to release the rest of it in time to meet the requirements of the act. Discussion [1] Epstein Files bill sponsor Ro Khanna and Hassan, no dogs being zapped.
> I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
It’s ok, it follows the rules - I made the comment very thoughtfully and it is indeed substantive. It’s also not snarky and isn’t a shallow internet trope.
Three things, not all of which any specific employee does:
1. Fix security issues
2. Create “features” in order to seem useful that the world was better without
3. Rest upon laurels of gmail from 15 years ago
Make Google multiple millions by improving ad delivery and conversion within Gmail. Probably by also helping Google land big corporate or public contracts, but last I checked most of the money was made via ads in the free tier of GMail.
> - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
if only there were some kind of universal summary engine that never gets tired and is essentially free.
The details matter. Will it hurt? Is it subsidized and will be more expensive later or the other way around? How's the latency? What killer apps? Is it under health privacy laws or typical internet privacy laws? What likely side effects are there besides laziness?
It does sound useful. Like go to the mall, look at a keyboard, immediately search up the reviews, then the price elsewhere, sort by nearby. Or in an interview or during a meeting, just search the answer on the spot.
Re pain: the brain "lacks pain receptors" according to standard thought (tho same can't be said for the meninges, so I guess all bets are off). Tho what about emotional pain? Increasing the signal/inputs might increase possible negativities (tho chips would probably monitor and adapt your "recommended content and styles" to increase pleasantness - taking "brain hacking" to whole new level I guess). And interfacing with it might might consume more "mana" making your brain hurt due to depleted resources. Idk.
Sometimes you need regular meetings for workflows, like a retrospective meeting. You bring up problems, like bad UX. You analyze the cause of these problems. You don't jump to a solution (e.g. "Hey let's hire designers!!!").
Telling people to stop making incompetent designs just makes them defensive.
I have a project with them, processing auto insurance claims. Mostly extracting details from police reports like license plate numbers, extracting details of the incident.
"Human in the loop doesn't help because the human would just have to read the document themselves to ensure accuracy, defeating the point of the automation."
They're doing it manually without it. Semi-auto beats manual readily. There's still checks like submission of the number to grab the details of the individuals involved, and if the names, vehicle type, etc don't match, that automatically flags that something's off.
- EVs will be in the Early Majority group, and 2/3 of them will be Chinese. At least 1 in 4 of new cars purchased will be EVs.
- AI will innovate towards visuals, personality, and tool use. AI tool use will start to innovate past just reading docs, maybe into more things like gaming and robotics.
- Some AI products (not necessarily LLMs) will start competing on latency. Notably on voice/calls, but also things like drones, robotics, etc.
I think EVs will head in the complete opposite direction in that sales will slow down and they will continue to be a minority.
Ford just killed off the F150 lightning and EVs (but also new cars) are still expensive purchases in a time with a lot of economic uncertainty.
While Chinese companies are making affordable options all the markets seem to love putting tariffs on them in order to keep their homegrown automakers alive.
Looking into this, this reinforces my predictions? I looked up the Ford F-150 Lightning and a quote catches my eye: "When the electric truck debuted in 2022, Russia had just invaded Ukraine, disrupting supplies of nickel, a key material in EV batteries."
Raw materials and cost is a big part of the Chinese dominance on EVs and it'll continue to be on that side of the political sphere.
Having to tariff China also emphasizes that they're gaining ground too quickly. They process about (over?) 80% of the major parts, so you can't fully tariff them either, only assembled cars or some parts.
I just read on a Polish automotive portal that the government has concerns about cybersecurity in Chinese cars. I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese cars were entirely banned for some businesses in the future.
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