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Not true with github copilot. Cost is per prompt no matter how many tokens the prompt uses. Which can vary by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude...

While waiting for someone in the hospital I recently played the fun game of "how can I work around their firewall stopping me from connecting to tailscale" that they kindly provided.

It was just blocking new connections. Via SNI. Tailscale's control plane turn out not to care if SNI is sent. Tailscale's app let you set a custom control plane... like a local proxy that forwards connections to tailscale's servers without setting SNI.


This may very well be the system in use.

I've seen this effect in several places, not just my work.

Of note: I do not work in the tech sphere. I suspect that this particular loophole may be used by IT personnel to be able to tell the management "yes, we block VPN use" while letting them continue to use their own VPNs. I see no reason to complain.


I suspect there's less thought put into it than that.

There's probably a firewall vendor that has a product that does SNI inspection for blocking things like pornhub and the product comes with a list of sites that includes VPN control planes.


Well, yeah, they didn't roll their own. Offhand, I forget the product, but it's definitely off the shelf.

My point being that surely some of them have noticed the same thing I have, and it hasn't been stopped. I'm not going to raise the issue either way.


> I'm not going to raise the issue either way.

Except, you kinda just did


Not to them, in a way they can’t just ignore. I could be anyone here on HN.

That's why I said kinda.

It'd be funny if someone working there was a visitor here...and it doesn't matter who you are. I was thinking of them closing the loophole


I understand your point better now, but if that was really a risk I cared about, I wouldn’t have put it on the public Internet to begin with.

The worst they can do to me is make me tether, and my iPad will never hit that allotment. And, like I said, I think they use it themselves. So, no incentive to close their loophole.


I strongly suspect that this is already illegal - publicity rights are a thing - and the the demand that needs to be made is for the law to be enforced.

The weird part is that it's "shitting over the floor" in quite a deterministic ma nner. Every 600seconds (+- less than 0.5 seconds) doing the exact same thing.

This is a cool solution... I have a simpler one, though likely inferior for many purposes..

Run <ai tool of your choice> under its own user account via ssh. Bind mount project directories into its home directory when you want it to be able to read them. Mount command looks like

    sudo mkdir /home/<ai-user>/<dir-name>
    sudo mount --bind <dir to mount> --map-groups $(id -g <user>):$(id -g <ai-user>):1 --map-users $(id -u <user>):$(id -u <ai-user>):1 /home/<ai-user>/<dir-name>
I particularly use this with vscode's ssh remotes.

I've been using a dedicated user account for 6 months now, and it does everything. What makes it great is the only axis of configuration is managing "what's hoisted into its accessible directories".

Its awe-inspiring the levels of complexity people will re-invent/bolt-on to achieve comparable (if not worse) results.


You can, and should, over the entirety of europe apart from the northern parts of the nordic countries electric heat pumps are now simply more efficient than gas powered furnaces. This is true even if powered by gas based electricity - but obviously makes it possible to power them via renewables as well.

People in Quebec (Canada), which is colder than just about all of Europe, have been providing heating in winter using renewables for decades (thanks to an excess of renewables).


most of the countries don't have enough hydro to make it feasible

Yeah, but now wind and solar have made it feasible just about everywhere.

There's little sunshine in winter. Wind is better but it's still intermittent.

There are a gazillion battery techs being developed right now (regular lithium ion - with variations like NMC, LFP, ...), solid state lithion ion, sodium ion.

You can over provision solar as someone said.

There's geothermal, tidal, etc.

Long distance high voltage electricity transmission at scale.

Electricity is a marvel and we're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with it. Betting against it is like betting against electronics, a risky proposition.


Panels are cheap enough that you can overprovision for winter sun.

And geothermal, biogas and tidal.

So... why is fuel 25% cheaper in Slovenia than in the neighbouring country while Solvenia is simultaneously having issues with running out of fuel?

Seems like the obvious solution is to raise prices so people stop driving to your country (wasting fuel, ironically) to take your cheap fuel instead of just paying for the fuel in their own country. More than that it's a solution the free market would actually find on its own...


It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.

Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.


This BBC article does a really poor job of explaining the context of this situation or why fuel would be so much cheaper in Slovenia, so I had to look around. Slovenia apparently introduced fuel price regulations last year (for motorway service stations; off-motorway stations have been regulated for longer), as a means of reducing costs for consumers[0]. These price caps were, in fact, removed a week ago[1], and prices at some stations rose considerably in the aftermath, closer to the Austrian prices across the border.[2] I won't speak to the wisdom of the Slovenian government in trying to cap fuel prices, but however well-intentioned the policy was, it didn't last long in the face of a global energy crunch. [0] https://sloveniatimes.com/43824/fuel-price-regulation-expand... [1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/2037901/slovenia-imposes-fuel-... [2] https://sloveniatimes.com/47009/prices-at-the-pump-up-substa...

One thing you have to keep in mind is that in Slovenia, your employer is required to cover your commuting expenses. If there’s no viable public transit option (which is the case for most of Slovenia outside of bigger cities), they have to pay you for gas per km.

So if the regulations were to suddenly be lifted, this would have a domino effect on not only truckers but also regular commuters, which would then mean companies would have to compensate for the increased labour costs by raising the prices of their products/services even more.


I'm not sure about that. AFAIK it's just per km and not impacted by gas price.

https://www.racunovodja.com/clanki.asp?clanek=232/kilometrin...


Which is adjusted to compensate for inflation of fuel prices every few years, so they would eventually have to raise that to cover the increased prices.

In Slovenia, fuel prices have been regulated since, like, forever.

A few years ago (or last year? not sure) they were deregulated on the highways (i.e. to make tourists pay more) but then the government changed their mind (several times, IIRC).


They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.

Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.


We can barely afford it at the current price. The solution would be charging foreign transit the non-regulated price but that would be considered discriminatory.

Subsidizing gas is an expensive temporary bandaid solution.

Higher prices will drive EV adoption and busses.

In the EU, EVs or public transit is the only long term solutions we have.


Lifting the gas price regulations will somehow make EVs more affordable to the average Slovenian?

Electricity is expensive here too.

Public transit wise, good luck. The bus system has only been getting worse (despite sustained usage), trains are not much better. There just aren’t any viable routes in many places — it would take me 6h to commute 80km to Ljubljana (3 transfers with waiting time in between), it takes 1h30 by car in peak traffic.

Both busses and trains are also much more expensive than just driving yourself unless you’re retired or in school and thus have a subsidized ticket. And this is with regulated gas prices.


Price increases tend to be regressive—the poor person who needs a little fuel to get to their job is hurt more than the large business that uses a lot more fuel but has much, much more money overall.

There are things you can do to try and even things out. Etherium has been considering “quadratic voting” to solve a similar problem (in this case, that would look like tracking consumption and increasing the unit price of fuel as you consume more fuel, so that cost goes up quadratically with consumption). That seems hard to enforce, though, and doesn’t help with foreign opportunists.


I'm totally ignorant as to Slovenia, but as a general comment on taxation regressive price increases/externality taxes/sin taxes are easily made up for by simply giving everyone a fixed sum of money (that can either be gathered specifically through the regressive tax or just through the normal non-regressive tax pool).

Ethereum has the weird issue where "votes" and "money" are different things and they only want to redistribute votes and not money, but that's not a problem here...


There was an election recently and it’s possible there will soon be another… That’s why the fuel is so cheap.

Fuel prices are regulated here, and we had an election right now and a huge gas price hike would be bad for the current government (not decided yet if they stay or go). The government basically lowered the gas tax for a bit to keep prices stable (they also raised the gas taxes during covid to keep the prices "stable").

The prices will go up soon, that's why everyone is panicking and filling up canisters of gas.


its usually differences in taxation, they vary a lot across europe

There's also cis-male people who will "pass" that SRY test if they take it for some reason...

This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category... which is about the expected result of bigots trying to work backwards from the result they want headlines about.


> There's also cis-male people who will "pass" that SRY test if they take it for some reason...

This is news to me - which males are you talking about here?

> This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category...

It's really not, though. They found a marker they can test for, and have clearly defined exceptions.


> This is news to me - which males are you talking about here?

This poor bloke who found out he was infertile during a premarital medical exam, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7760426/

> It's really not, though. They found a marker they can test for, and have clearly defined exceptions.

Have you heard of the politician's fallacy, "something needs to be done, this is something, so this needs to be done"...

Your argument here is that... needing a test, and having a test, doesn't mean it's the right test.

You're also assuming that we even need a test... evidence (no transfemale olympians ever coming not dead last) suggests we don't.


> This poor bloke who found out he was infertile during a premarital medical exam, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7760426/

Interesting. Perhaps a better test is needed.

> You're also assuming that we even need a test... evidence (no transfemale olympians ever coming not dead last) suggests we don't.

This isn't just about trans women, but also about DSD cases like Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya.


SRY testing was done at the 1996 games and for a while before that. 8 cisgender women tested positive at that games. Far more than the number of transgender athletes who have ever participated. This resulted in genetic testing being changed from all women to on-suspicion.

The bottom line is these tests will catch dozens of people who are phenotypically women, who can even give birth. Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?


From what I've read, these women all had CAIS or similar, and testosterone had no effect on their bodies. Thankfully the new IOC guidelines have an exception for that and would let them compete with women.

But I want to point out that XY+CAIS individuals cannot conceive or carry a child. They have no ovaries and no uterus.

> Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?

They are, if they are female or have CAIS. Caster Semenya, for example, does not meet that standard. Caster was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, but is not biologically female, rather a male with a DSD (5-ARD) who has testes and fully male levels of testosterone and musculature.


there are many types of DSD (aka intersex)

one type most definitely would "fail" SRY test

yet they can give birth using donated egg, IVF, etc.

nature makes many variations, it's not exact, it's not binary

there is common and less common and that's why it's messy

A different approach would have been to accommodate the less common

But they purposely decided not to do that because that's the opposite of their goals


it's because Y chromosome is transient and "males" can lose it with age or illness

it doesn't really do anything after puberty

it's about gene expression and it can be discarded genetically

so yes there are "men" walking around who would show negative on a SRY test and qualify

again, they tried this exact thing in 1996

and it went over so badly they ended it by 2000

this is 100% politics and conservative people with power trying to manipulate things

biology is not binary, it's messy and not exact

there are "common" things and less common

Another approach would have been to accommodate the less common

But you'll notice they didn't even try to do that


Me too, which is making me wonder if they're planning on silently flipping this setting on April 24th (making it impossible to opt out in advance).

We are not. The reason we wanted to announce early was so that folks had plenty of time to opt-out now. We've also added the opt-out setting even if you don't use Copilot so that you can opt-out now before you forget and then if you decide to use Copilot in the future it will remember your preference.

Would you be able to comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522876, i.e. explain the legal basis for this change for EU based users? If there is none, you may have to expect that people will exercise their right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Why would you expect an engineer to be able to comment on legal affairs? Presumably it was cleared with Microsoft's legal department or whatever GitHub's divisional equivalent is.

That's precisely what the term 'engineer' signifies. (I know it gets used incorrectly for software developers.) Workers in general need to decide whether something is legal independently of their company, because the company lawyers have the interest of the company in mind, which might conflict with the workers interest to not do illegal things.

Big Tech is known for clearing illegal things by their legal departments all the time.


Is it because I'm in the EU?

I'm in the US and it's off for me. I believe I've previously opted out of everything copilot related in the past if there was anything.

I'm in Canada, so not only the EU at least.

More likely they have RCE vulnerabilities known to various governments than intentionally made secret backdoors... which is worse since a backdoor would probably at least only be usable by the county that manufactured it (for example see Jia Tan's attempted backdoor).

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