People are just hoping they can skip from "hobby project" all the way to a project that funds a couple salaries just by overcharging for subscriptions. Apps that are meant to cater towards unorganized people are the worst for this because they know you won't stick with it. A week trial is just short of how long you'll likely use it before you forget or realize it's not working for you.
Maybe the best compromise here is a markdown interpreter that converts to latex so you can use existing libraries and templates but not have to worry as much about syntax.
I don't think syntax is the problem here. Using some tool that transpiles to LaTeX, you'll still have to fight your TeX engine sometimes, but now you also add friction and gotchas of your tool that does transpiling.
I've tried writing Org and compiling it to LaTeX, but gave up this idea because ultimately I had to figure out idiosyncrasies of both LaTeX and Org-mode engines.
The section above seems to explain why this article is written the way it is. Many people do experience sensations or see things that we otherwise cannot. They may have heightened sensitivity or could have a mental or neurological condition that produces these experiences. Some people may feel like they are going crazy seeing or hearing things that aren't actually there. Others feed into the experiences and believe they exist, like targeted individuals do. Someone that may be unsure if they are really seeing lasers or feeling indeterminate heating may and hasn't totally fallen down the DEW or TI rabbit hole could benefit from seeing something that basically says "I believe you're hearing/seeing/feeling these things, there may be medical explanation so you may want to see a doctor."
1. Sim box operators were running multiple locations for sending spam texts, cheap VoIP for scams, and potentially other phone-related crimes.
2. Operators were associated with other criminal gangs. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly. Someone may have been running a drug side-business from a location.
3. Someone uses this sim box operation to send threatening scam messages that happen to reach these government officials. For whatever reason, they take it seriously.
4. Now that the feds and NYPD have raided this sim box operation, they have to justify why they were doing this. It's probably not directly illegal to run a sim box farm so they are going to play up the threat a bit to get more coverage of the investigation.
I can assure you, a lot more dangerous criminal activity happened within a 35 mile radius of the UN than some zombie cell phones sending scam texts. While I applaud anyone shutting down scams, the window dressing is embarrassing. Someone has watched too much Blacklist or any of those fantastical police procedurals.
Yeah. Sorta weird USSS is investigating this. Maybe it was originally related to some Treasury-related fraud case. We're close to budget time so they have to demonstrate congress should give them the money they asked for, so it's pretty easy to upgrade some random scam/spam texter to a terrorism case. It's sort of endearing, actually, when they get some adults back in the USSS reporting chain we'll probably see less "imaginative" press releases.
They might have randomly spammed phone numbers that have special purpose and triggered some sort of honeypot. Or someone powerful got scammed. Either way, happy they take it down and provide some photos. Would love to learn more details.
Yeah. There's another post on HN saying the investigation started when someone texted a threat to a congress-critter via this system. So I guess that tracks.
Speculation: Some gov't types wanted to shut down the scammers (or whatever they are) - but were not getting much traction with the higher-ups, to actually do something. Vs. after their case was rebranded as "this may be part of a plot to assassinate the President" - suddenly every approval and resource they could want was being push into their laps.
Literally anything the government does from now on is going to be related to discovering terrorist plots. They have to find some way to fit the agenda into that giant post-9/11 loophole.
> 1. Sim box operators were running multiple locations for sending spam texts, cheap VoIP for scams, and potentially other phone-related crimes.
Agree, I would guess this was just a bottom-rate VOIP/text spam service, potentially affiliated/run by organized crime, that doesn't ask many questions, accepts payment exclusively in BTC, etc.
> 2. Operators were associated with other criminal gangs. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly. Someone may have been running a drug side-business from a location.
I think this is just another version of a grow-op. Run by a gang, mainly for profit. Perhaps the shelves were even from an old grow-op that became unprofitable when New York legalized marijuana.
> 3. Someone uses this sim box operation to send threatening scam messages that happen to reach these government officials. For whatever reason, they take it seriously.
I disagree here, from the description of the messages I think these were supposed to be actionable threats. At least two of the incidents mentioned were swatting attempts, which are still taken somewhat seriously and are treated as serious threats when directed at elected officials. US Police are highly armed and often very aggressive, swatting incidents have resulted in deaths before.
This, to me, reeks of the sort of foreign interference with domestic politics that has been mentioned in the past. Trying to escalate domestic tensions is straight out of that playbook.
What I think happened is - some foreign actor used organized crime connections, or some other way in to get time on this spam farm, and they used the numbers there to SWAT and threaten officials around the US in a way that's harder to trace than a regular VOIP provider.
> 4. Now that the feds and NYPD have raided this sim box operation, they have to justify why they were doing this. It's probably not directly illegal to run a sim box farm so they are going to play up the threat a bit to get more coverage of the investigation.
I think they see this as a wonderful coincidence. With the setup as described in the article, I could see this farm overloading the few cells that serve the particular area around whichever building(s?) these sites were found in, but city cellular networks are very dense. There's hundreds of mobile cells in New York City, and frankly I think if you wanted to seriously take down the cell network a few high power jammers distributed across the city would be more effective.
And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't directly illegal, although I bet the operation as a whole has been dodging taxes and know-your-customer rules. But, here we have a golden opportunity to play this up as a major terrorist threat instead of just organized crime, and they're going to take that option every time.
Oh lol, this is a scam site. Yes, there are potential other uses for a sim box but mostly they are used for VoIP purposes. It's honestly so hard reading quotes from the US government these days. Cartels, drugs, guns. They make it sound like they interrupted the staging of an assault on the UN when the article actually says that the locations were within 35 miles of the UN headquarters in NYC. This is a significant distance as it covers beyond the 5 boroughs, it's the "tri state area". Like 20M people live in that circle. I highly doubt this is for anything other than VoIP scams.
Yup. This is literally just a cellular grey route site for some shitty VoIP provider, just like the SIM box SMS scams go marching on in other countries. Some operator is shitting their pants right now, probably.
The SIM cards come from cheap MVNOs that have dealer arrangements for cheap or free first month activations, then they just set up a handful of SIM boxes and a residential Internet connection back to the mothership (like they did at the captured house with the white Verizon 5G Home router just casually sitting on the floor next to the units).
Similarly, I’ve had some friends on US MVNOs themselves that have access to “free” international calling, yet every time they call (the same) international number the receiving party gets a wildly different caller ID from a wildly different country each time (Poland, Moldova, etc). Also dodgy SIM boxes!
Or grey-route bulk messaging and SMS OTP bypass so actors can register throwaway accounts on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram, social platforms, fintech, crypto etc. then burn the numbers after use.
You need 100k SIMs to defeat per-SIM rate/behavior caps, receive OTPs for mass account creation and run thousands of campaigns/conversations in parallel while keeping each SIM's pattern below carrier detection thresholds.
It's not about the UN.
NYC is a prime market for "local presence" numbers (212/917/646 etc.), which boosts answer rates and trust for scams, impersonation, mass disinfo campaigns.
Those "local presence" numbers are highly depleted and highly unlikely to be available for MVNOs. Not to mention you don't need to be basically present in NYC to use those numbers.
The real reason this shit is in NYC is because the number of tower cells is huge due to population density. It makes having a few hundred to thousand devices in one office a bit more viable.
I live in the NY area (Long Island), and have a business line on my phone, so I get dozens of scam calls per day.
Most are spoofed. Many, from local Long Island exchanges.
All the spoofed calls just reuse existing numbers. When I first started getting them, I called a couple, until I figured it out. I usually got some poor, confused schlub.
I’ve gotten some calls, myself, and have been said poor, confused schlub.
Agreed. These days setups imho aren't vanilla origination and termination VoIP scratch card traffic it's more likely a distributed bot farm obfuscation as a service provider. I have seen commercially available sim bank gateways that can separate the sim from the antenna in order to change towers and simulate movement. The use of eSim adapters make it superscaleable now in terms of abstracting the numbers from the sims. Whatever the application a press release tie in to UN is a little odd.
> Yes, there are potential other uses for a sim box but mostly they are used for VoIP purposes.
So you mean... like, these are the exit points into the "legitimate" telephone network for, say, those random MedAlert scam calls I keep getting from numbers scattered all over North America? Or if not, what does "VoIP" mean here exactly?
Bingo! And the call's been "verified by the carrier" because it came off the cell network from a purportedly valid SIM... but patched into a dodgy SIP connection back to the scammer.
Perhaps the Secret Service possesses additional information they're not disclosing that supports their narrative. It might come out at trial, if it gets to that stage. Or, it might not, because certain methods and sources of law enforcement operations might not be publicly disclosed if national security is involved.
Of course. Trust in our Government is at a historic low these days, and reasonably so. However, that doesn't mean that everyone is inept or has ill intent. Most people I've met in government as well as the private sector want to do good (or at least not evil).
I agree with the idea that people want to do their best, and I think it's the machine itself that's really the problem day to day. That said, this is being filtered through a media mouthpiece, and that's where I raise an eyebrow.
The leaders of the US govt at high levels have specifically shown they aren't trustworthy which must impact the formerly trustworthy orgs, such as the FBI and the head of the FCC.
Generally, yes. You have a right to discovery of anything that they plan to introduce at trial against you, or anything that would cast doubt on your guilt (exculpatory evidence).
Most facts, yes. Non-disclosure is the exception, not the rule, thanks to the Sixth Amendment's right to a fair trial. However, when national security is involved, the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA) may apply, and some evidence may be reserved for in camera hearings.
Also, if the information would not exculpate the defendant, and the prosecution won't introduce it at trial as evidence of guilt, then the information can be withheld.
I'm on the verge of not trusting the US govt when they prosecute things. Epstein details being proclaimed and then hiding them is just the start. If the large and formerly mostly independent and trustworthy federal law enforcement groups can't disclose info there, what should make you feel like they are honest?
Good point, criminal trial process is not obviously corrupted like the pre-trial. Every day recently there's a story about trump trying to get his political enemies prosecuted, and then he fired people who investigated him from his last term.
An indictment is pre-trial. To get a criminal indictment, all you need to show to a grand jury is "probable cause," which is a very low standard--the same standard needed to justify an arrest. That's the reason for the old joke about being able to indict a ham sandwich.
Now that Comey's been indicted, the trial process will begin, assuming he doesn't plea out (and I don't think he will). The uphill battle for the prosecution now begins.
The article really should have put that map front and center, because that map alone is enough to show how ridiculously overhyped the government claims are.
I'm presuming this discovery was near the outer perimiter of that circle, because otherwise presumably they'd have quoted a smaller, scarier number.
Politics is the absolute peak of this kind of culture. You never know when you might need a favor down the road so it's best to be friends with anyone even just marginally aligned with your platform. Going beyond the minimum compromise keeps everyone happy enough to remember it. Politics is like dealing with a dozen different prisoners dilemmas every day. You could act in self-interest but you still need a majority vote or the consensus of your underlings to actually get the work done.
In the US, we've kinda swung back on the prisoner's dilemma. GOP finally figured out that they don't need to worry about bipartisanship or even having the consensus of their entire party. Turns out, if you've got the all three branches of government under control, you can just do whatever you'd like.
I'm an electrical engineer. One of my jobs is maintaining a couple racks of equipment and the scripts we use to test hardware. I've never been expected to be a programmer beyond things like Matlab but over the past several years, I've been maintaining a python project we use to run these tests. With equipment upgrades and my amateur python skills, we now have a fully automated test, plug in the hardware, hit the green button, and wait for tests to complete and data to be validated. Codesurf absolutely chokes when trying to work on my code, it's just too much of a mess to handle. But I have been using our in-house chatgpt to write some utilities that I've been procrastinating on for years. Like I needed a debug tool to view live telemetry and send commands as required and have been procrastinating for a long time to write this. My existing scripts aren't flexible, they are literally just a script for the test runner to follow. I have an old debug tool but it's not compatible with the existing workflow so it's a pain to run. I told chatgpt what I needed, gave it some specs on the functions it would need from libraries I've written (but didn't want it to see), and it cranked out a perfectly functional python script. I ended up doing a bit of work on the script it gave me since I didn't trust it completely or knew if I could even get it to expand on the work properly. It would have taken me much longer to write on my own so I'm very grateful I could save so much time. Just last week, I had another idea for a different debug tool and did the same process (here's my idea, here's the specs, go) and after a few rounds of "can you add this next?", I had another quality tool ready to go with absolutely no touch-up work needed on my end. I want my tools to have simple Tkinter GUIs but I hate writing GUIs so I'm absolutely thrilled chatgpt can handle that for me.
I'm a bit of a luddite, I still just use notepad++ and a terminal window to develop my code. I don't want to get bogged down in using vscode so trusting AI to handle things beyond "can you make this email sound better?" has been a big leap for me.
In a few to several months you will learn the meaning of "big ball of mud". Then you will either speedrun the last 20-30 years of software development tooling evolution or crash out of your current modus operandi and help fuel future demand for actual software developers.
I disagree. The quoted scenario is the absolute best for LLMs.
1) An easily defined go/no-go task with defined end point which requires
2) A bunch of programming code that nobody gives a single shit about
3) With esoteric function calls that require staring at obscure documentation
This is the LLM dream task.
When the next person has to stare at this code, they will throw it out and rerun an LLM on it because the code is irrelevant and the end task is the only thing that matters.
Here's the thing. Those first two things don't exist.
I'm revisiting this comment a lot with LLM's. I don't think many HN readers run into real life mudball/spaghetti code. I think there is a SV bias here where posters think taking a shortcut a few times is what a mudball is.
There will NEVER be a time in this business where the business is ok with simply scrapping these hundreds of inconsistent one off generations and be ok with something that sorta kinda worked like before. The very places that do this won't use consistent generation methods either. The next person to stare at it will not just rerun the LLM because at that time the ball will be so big not even the LLMs can fix it without breaking something else. Worse the new person won't even know what they don't know or even what to ask it to regenerate.
Man I'm gonna buy stock in the big three as a stealth long term counter LLM play.
I've seen outside of SV mudballs and they are messes that defy logical imagination. LLM's are only gonna make that worse. Its like giving children access to a functional tool shop. You are not gonna get a working product no matter how good the tools are.
Someone in the company manages a TON of questionnaires. They type the questions into the service, get the results. The results are in an CSV format or some shit. Then they need to manually copy them to Google Sheets and do some adjustments on them.
Took me about 30 minutes of wall clock time, maybe 5 minutes of my time to have an LLM write me a simple python script that uses the API in the questionnaire service to pull down the data and insert it into a new Google Sheet.
Saves the person a TON of time every day.
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Second case was a person who had to do similar manual input to crappy Sheets daily, because that's what the next piece in the process can read.
This person has a bit of an engineer mindset and vibe-coded a web tool themselves that has a UI that lets them easily fill the same information but view it in a more user friendly way. Then it'll export it in a CSV/JSON format for the next step in the process.
None of these would've been granted the day(s) of engineering time before, now both were something that could be thrown together quickly over a coffee break or done by themselves over a weekend.
> Here's the thing. Those first two things don't exist.
You are 100% wrong on this. They exist all the time when I'm doing a hardware task.
I need to test a new chip coming off the fab. I need to get the pins in the right place, the test code up and running, the jig positioned correctly, the test vectors for JTAG generated, etc.
This ... is ... a ... pain ... in ... the ... ass.
It changes every single time for every single chip. It changes for every jig and every JTAG and every new test machine. Nobody gives one iota of damn about the code as it will be completely different for the next revision of this chip. Once I validate that the chip actually powers on and does something sane, the folks who handle the real testing will generate real vectors--but not before.
So, generating that go/no-go code is in the way of everything. And nobody cares about what it looks like because it is going to be thrown out immediately afterward.
It's a language model, not a compiler. Which is what people get wrong.
Ask one to count the 'r's in "strawberry" and it may or may not get it right.
Ask it to create a program to do it, it'll get it right instantly and it'll work.
When we get to a point where "AI" can write a program like that in the background, run it and use its result as a tool, we'll get the next big leap in efficiency.
Do you have a definition of “actual software developers”?
To me an “actual software developer” is always learning, always growing, always making mistakes, always looking back and blown away by how far they’ve come - and most importantly, is always willing to generously offer a hand up to anyone who cares enough to learn the craft.
It’s ok to make a big ball of mud! You can deal with it later once you understand the problem v1 solves. Parallel rebuilds and migrations are part of software engineering. Or alternatively - maybe that big ball of mud does its job, has no new requirements, so can be left quietly chugging along - for potentially decades, never needing a v2.
I think they just mean professional who's responsibility at the company is to code. There are a lot of professionals that do some coding on the side of their main role, but it's not their responsibility to look after the code for 8 hours a day.
You made a new account just to shit on this human's report of being an electrical engineer and using LLMs to help him get shit done? c'mon man. I get that you're probably a software developer and that you see LLMs as an existential threat to the craft, but this person is saying that this hammer managed to drive in their nail. Their two 2x4's stuck together probably never need get more complex and you're telling them they'll never be able to build a skyscraper like that.
Ofc we're screwed in a couple more generations of Moore's law, if/when AI is able to one-shot "untangle this big ball of mud for me please".
This simply is untrue for a huge portion of work done in IT. It seems in the last decade or so many people have forgotten that programming is simply a way to achieve a business goal or task.
Some things are highly valuable (e.g. validating electronic equipment via scores of hardware testing) and can be curated by a skilled "amateur" programmer (we used to call these folks "scripters" back in the day) more or less indefinitely. Adding "real programmers" to the mix would simply cause costs to skyrocket with no discernable impact on revenue produced - just some smug programmers showing off how much better their code looks and how much more maintainable it is.
Stuff like this is domain knowledge distilled into a bash script. If you have the domain knowledge it is typically pretty trivial to simply do a full rewrite if you come in after this guy retires. The domain knowledge and understanding of what the automation is actually doing is the hard and skilled part of the job.
I'm not downvoting the low-value comment because I believe it needs high visibility for many who come here and see the responses to it. You don't need to "engineer" software for every use-case. Sometimes the guy with deep domain knowledge who can hack and kludge a bash or python script together is 10x more valuable than some guy with a CS degree and a toolbox of "best practices" who doesn't give a shit about the underlying task at hand. I'm sure some fancy new frameworks will be used though!
Sysadmins of yesteryear who were expected to deeply understand hardware and OS level things, but not be able to program all understand this and would be able to make great use of AI. The advance of programmers into the sysadmin (aka devops) space is really a travesty of speciality skills being lost and discarded. A whole lot of very pretty overengineered code sitting on top of hardware and systems that are barely understood by those who wrote it and it shows.
Idk how you can be nostalgic for hacking things together with bash scripts.
Bringing software development practices to the sysadmin world has improved it so much.
Infra as code, no pet servers, languages that don't require massive maintenence every time a dependency or language version changes, testing frameworks.
Things are so much better then clicking around VMware, bugging the one guy that runs a bash script cron off his laptop to write a feature.
It is very inappropriate to do at a workplace toilet. If there is excrement on the toilet seat, they're not positioning themselves correctly, or are too large for the seat, and they don't care to cleanup either. Wearing shoes alone is a reason to not do it outside of home.
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