jackb4040

If you have read Bullshit Jobs, you'll be familiar with the concept of bullshit/corpslop as a parallel system of value / signalling to economic value. Unlike economic value however, this type of value collapses if severed from the person producing it.

I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.

Unlike most commenters here, I actually agree with most of this criticism. But there is one simple thing the delay gets you, which is a window for the dev to go on Twitter and announce that they were hacked.

The point is that the model has the source code in its weights. Therefore it's misleading to focus on being "only given the documentation", when it could produce a SQLite implementation in rust with no documentation at all. The wording is designed to create a marketing impression that it can do spec-driven development for a novel project, but this example doesn't actually support that.

It's like a diet system advertising how much weight a spokesperson lost on their system, without disclosing that they also went on Ozempic at the same time.

If this approach doesn't include a way to apply updated finetunes on a daily basis (also without going back to VRAM being the bottleneck) then the trash interval would be measured in hours, not months

Sorry, which billion-dollar corporation is Fable running "on its own"?

"When coupling getting higher, considerable amount of time is wasted in heavy coordination, alignment, and shared strategy. The other side of the same coin, considerable amount of time is lost when one component breaks for everyone"

Is this slop, or poor english skills? Is there any peer review barrier to being published here? Because this kind of looks like a low-effort 4-page survey of other people's data with no original empirical evidence. In other words, probably should've been a blog.

Go find the drunkest pledge in a Stanford frat house, give him media training a stylist and a personal trainer, and ten years to craft a corporate ideolect through twitter threads and founders' retreats. That's how you get the archetypal tech CEO.

As a class they are overwhelmingly incurious people, and would barely notice if you swapped their industry out for Big Tobacco or bombs. They care exactly as much about tech as Jeffrey Epstein did about finance.

Hasn't yet. No need to be defeatist about organizing. All of the other things tech workers have to be defeatist about (pointless hype cycles, layoffs, etc.) show no signs of stopping and will effectuate more organizing over time.

It's misuse precisely because any civilian can't use the same tool. Despite how they act, cops do not have a separate set of legal rights that extend to their off-duty lives.

If a cop was checking to make sure they got away with drunk driving, it removes factors that might deter them from continuing that behavior.

I agree, he should've said "working code"

Where does this guy come from and what is his supposed value to OpenAI? He's apparently been there 2 weeks?

Take a look at his (non-)apology tweet; full of "I don't think we should do this I just think it's a rational strategy"

Why would distillation not be a sufficient explanation? Output tanks in quality for the exact subjects you lack high-quality input to distill from - that's not exactly a surprise.

I learned who this guy is a matter of hours ago, can someone please explain what his value is? He's not technical, nor even from the tech industry? Why does he get to do a meal culpa in public after getting there two weeks ago for sloppy behavior that would've gotten any engineer(who aren't exactly known for good PR) under a year fired?

A lot of people still think AGI is going to happen, yes. Not the ones who actually build the thing, but the marketers above them and their eager victims in the political and business-owning classes.

Maybe, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem. "Subsidized" is a loaded word on HN because it often refers to the unsustainable consumer pricing of U.S. AI labs that will inevitably lead to market corrections. A subsidy by the Chinese state to avoid strategic encirclement isn't necessarily unsustainable nor irrational.

This is so cool, I love seeing more and more epaper projects! I would love some deeper technical blogs like what Eric Migikovsky is doing at Pebble.

It was surprising to see Arduino vs ESP-IDF even mentioned as a real decision to be made for a market product. The battery life would obviously be nowhere near optimal, but I'm surprised if you could even keep a real project of any scale manageable within the Arduino framework.

Agree. It's pretty clear the purpose was not to take even a small step in the direction of musicality for llms or video models. More of a typical "agentic engineering setup" blog geared to a different type of professional

Well yeah, because music is not a modality of the models involved at all. It's literally just an LLM with the timestamps of each line injected into its context, and then making an API request to image / video generators. I don't really understand what the point of this project even was; stitching together dumber models with bespoke glue logic like this takes us further away from general intelligence and confuses the public.

"Fish are going to make your job, and most jobs, obsolete within the year" I say for the fourth year in a row. I'm pretending to talk to workers, but am actually indirectly addressing my fish investors trying to scare them into thinking fish are too world-changing of an opportunity to pass up.

Every talk show then has to have me on. It would be one thing if I was boasting about the fish, but scared of it? Well then surely there must be something important going on there. I begin:

"Don't worry. Be happy"

Thank you, good points. I'm just learning about this in real time.

It looks like it does support transactions, but they basically destroy the performance benefits: https://vitess.io/docs/faq/sharding/advanced/can-i-use-vites...

The more I read the more I'm struggling to understand the benefit of a router like this that sits on top of a monolithic SQL, vs a truly distributed DB like cockroach.

Like you I'd love to learn more about the internals of their actual SQL engine, which is just barely touched on in the article. The idea of ripping out the layer of a SQL interpreter that does just enough to route it to a real server tickles my brain in the same way as when I learned how node.js ripped the js interpreter out of a browser.

I had this question too, even their "Database Scaling" course doesn't get to it.

https://vitess.io/docs/faq/sharding/advanced/

Looks like it's not drop-in, you need to heavily modify your data and indexes structurally to make sharding performant. Cross-shard joins are possible but need to be designed for explicitly (to be fair, indexes also need to be designed explicitly in regular SQL). IDK if a drop-in solution is possible or if this is an information-theoretical limitation.

I found the article very helpful from a technical perspective, and didn't focus on the number too much, as it could easily be swapped and the decision-making process for when to shard is kinda out of scope.

But I hadn't considered this, so thanks for pushing back. Good to keep in mind their incentives.

I will say, since their product is a proxy whose interface is a single SQL connection, you should in theory be able to do dev queries through that black box, much the same as application queries? What is so scary here that it would require a hundred engineers?

One Job Is Mostly Safe from AI: Crackheads

Let's be honest, poor people in general.

"Vote with money" is such a funny talking point in this discussion. It's a metaphor for actual voting, with votes, which the people already did, for politicians who are now protecting their interests. You just don't like corporations being told what to do.

Not for those of us around in 2018 when they became QVC for sh*tcoins

I think it's a stretch to call firefox on mac "unusable". Like once a month I'll have something not work, and half the time it also doesn't work in chromium (both are the developer's fault). And when it does work in chromium, browsers are free so just switch over there and switch back. And to top it off, there are endless free flavors of chromium like brave etc, that virtually never have compatibility issues without needing to go full google.

I guess my point is, FPTP / lesser-evilism / party lines are all tools corporate power uses to explain why outcomes keep diverging from desires within our nominal democracy. It's all well and good to lament partisanship, but Washington's warning doesn't really help us find a solution. It was already falling apart as he made it.

I do think Bernie Sanders was an attempt by our collective society to produce a new FDR. The fact that he was stopped so easily points to collapse as the next most likely outcome.

That aggression is a powerful political force. If democrats had used the same aggression to go after this type of corruption that Trump uses to go after latin americans, they would have ironclad popular support.

The problem is that all their donors would withdraw. That contradiction is destroying them, they don't have an answer for it. It lost them the 2024 election, and will continue to do so until they invent another Obama.

Then the problem with _that_ is, all the Obama types are now calling themselves socialists.

Unfortunately, Ivy-League research suggests the opinions of 90% of Americans have virtually no impact on legislation.. That is basically predetermined by lobbyists, paid for by the same corporations meant to be punished:

https://thinkbynumbers.org/democracy/voter-support-for-a-bil...

I think we either get a collapse into techno-feudalism, an anti-capitalist revolution (doubt), or a breakthrough savior of capitalism like FDR. The idea of "just vote better / harder" does not ring true to me or millions of people who have been hearing the same for decades while all these problems have gotten worse.