notShabu

While I get that unclear communication is frustrating especially if there are sunk costs, the core issue seems to be that they can't afford to subsidize all these tokens for free.

The agent model breaks the power-user/casual-user proportion that makes the existing saas-like pricing work.

Created this to help with my own understanding of Grant's video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...

dj.theory-a.com

This is the sort of thing that apple (used to?) take pride in doing well. e.g. new hires in orientation would be asked if there was anything 'special' about their offer letter and it was a thicker more premium kind of paper. Emphasizing the magical 'feel' that differentiated apple products.

I think apple is a red herring here, it's the amount of legal power granted to the enforcement of money laundering laws and the lack of ability to push back against this

Musk/Jobs archetypes, though unpalatable at a personal level, are valuable in their willingness to burn themselves up to fight the "system" vs bureaucratic types who just fall in line and elevate what is a political issue into a Sacred Value

maybe what has happened is that the team needed some experts to measure improvements and tapped ppl with a career in optimizing for "User Engagement" so the more we fight the keyboard the more they cheer and grow the team

Games around who does the grunt work requiring maintenance of a status hierarchy or a constant inflow of interns do affect quality and time to delivery though.

The current problems are oversupply of who does the creative work as well as no longer requiring interns.

There is both less of a need for new inflow and a problem with existing overproduction.

what are some good alternatives to mac os? there some features like image/text copy-paste being cross device that are insanely useful that make it hard to switch

The romanization of these names is always confusing b/c stripped of the character and tone it's just gibberish. "Hunyuan" or 混元 in chinese means "Primordial Chaos" or "Original Unity".

This helps as more chinese products and services hit the market and makes it easier to remember. The naming is similar to the popularity of greek mythology in western products. (e.g. all the products named "Apollo")

The cost of this increased healing rate would be the tail risk of compounding injury though. It's not something a doctor could recommend even if it were true for everyone consistently.

chat is the best way to orchestrate and delegate. whether or not this is considered "ME writing MY code" is imo a philosophical debate

e.g. executives treat the org as a blackbox LLM and chat w it to get real results

This is really cool! it allows you to see 2D charts in 3D without actually rendering anything in 3D

There are two caveats to this. One is that a lot of it is due to work being outsourced to China (which allows for metrics like 94% carbon free) The other is it has a huge population so it's going to have high absolute numbers of everything good and bad.

IMO the fuzziness is actually a feature most of the time b/c I can pass misspelled words or close enough words and it'll still figure it out.

Also, if we model the mental state of the llm as a frazzled retail worker dealing with thousands of customers per second, the rote response is reasonable. As a dev, sometimes I get at annoyed at QA for a hyper narrow "trap" test case

there is huge incentive for people who don't know how to code/create/do-stuff to slow things down like this b/c it allows them many years of runway at the company.

they are almost always cloaked in virtue signals.

almost every established company you join will already have had this process going for a long time.

doing stuff successfully at such a company is dangerous to the hierarchy and incurs an immune response to shut down or ostracize the doing-of-stuff successfully so the only way to survive or climb is to do stuff unsuccessfully (so they look good)

In trading there is an idea called the "hurdle" which is a measure of inefficiency that any trade has to be above in order to actually make a profit. E.g. if the bid/ask spread for gold chains or options is 2% then any arbitrage has to be better than 2%.

For companies this hurdle rate is from political friction. Any improvement that doesn't provide benefits in excess of the political friction generated doesn't get implemented.

And in large institutions this friction can be very high. E.g. planes not crashing for Boeing or kids-not-being-shot for the U.S. seem like obvious things-to-fix.

But they generate so much destabilizing political friction that they just can't.

behind a lot of these are power games made particularly perverse bc the participants tend to believe that they are above power games via dedication-to-the-truth or something

the more knotted and unaccepted the actual hierarchy vs the perceived hierarchy, the more of this kind of behavior. the more people feel respected the less they have to force behavior from others to make up for the feeling of lack of respect.

particularly toxic are places where a local tyrant believes that they deserve a lot more respect than they actually do (e.g. expert beginnerism)

IMO the rate of change or volatility of model changes, RLHF, user-behavior, the definition of 'better' is much higher than the rate of change of model degradation (if any) so it's hopeless to try and measure this

I think the reason it it wears away at your value structure. You have to "sell" your mind (thus polluting your non-work day thinking) to a system that feels "wrong"

For lawyers, it's a clear meritocracy based on how much you can bleed. For doctors, a kind of "virtue" in the work that cancels out some of the stress/BS. For software, it can be like temporarily joining the popular circus that's in town (similar to a lot of meme crypto companies)

There is a similar fallacy that I've seen many engineers & teams fall into. The occupy "critical" roles which without, the whole chain would break and everything would fall apart

However often times the project only needs that one critical role and can replace it fairly easily. (the on-ramp off-ramp costs are lower than the cost of redundancy or other political costs)

Ironically, "non-critical" roles can be more important from a business narrative or core competency pov.

E.g. "the AI expert/team" leaving breaks the narrative of being an AI company even if all they do is non-critical path exploratory research. The inability to get new hires breaks the narrative of a growth-company etc...

There is more leverage in being able to direct narrative energy than in being nominally critical

it's an "everything is awesome" schelling point at this point

An insight that allowed me to get past mental blockers to bargaining (guilt, awkwardness, etc...) was the thought "I am a person, just like you, not some animal to be milked"

This allows the price to be sought in a non-adversarial way since it makes building a connection and understanding of the local situation a part of the communication.

Much of the awkwardness comes from not really understanding how the local market and local way of life works while also basically being royalty from an economic perspective. This out-of-touchness creates a principal agent problem where the "foreign" other is distrusted but also relied on for "truth".

The negative experience doesn't come from the literal economic damage of being scammed but being treated (or programmed) like a pig let to slaughter.

I wonder if this has the effect of increasing "market rate" so that only big companies with economies of scale can be competitive

imo "growth" basically means a company is able to profit from mining "reality". their alpha or edge is having the know-how to be at this cutting edge.

in such an environment, "truth" matters a lot because it allows more efficient interfacing with reality.

without growth, managing perception becomes more important than truth. this leads to zero-sum politics exacerbated by things like mortgage payments and visa status.

everyone is trying to get into AI companies these days b/c they seem like the only companies that can still profit off of "playfulness" while all other cultures are becoming very Serious.

instead of just doing things or solving problems, every action and message has to jump through a bunch of "what will X think" hoops which is demoralizing.

Does anyone have a comparison between this and turbotax? I know there are some ethical issues w/ turbotax but the price relative to peace of mind is not that big of an issue and the guide-through UI does provide a lot of time savings relative to say filling out the raw forms.

e.g. part of me believes that due to the lobbying etc, returns that come through turbotax have a lower rate of auditing or sth.

this debate reminds of kitchen appliances. what makes an appliance a burden or not is how much cognitive load is takes (space taken, where is it stored, how to take apart and clean, how to use, etc..)

and how much value it provides. (time saved, quality produced, aesthetics)

sometimes it's "debt" when it costs more than it's value produced but this is can be highly dependent on how often it's used. (space taken is a large fixed cost)

with code, the space is "infinite" so there's a lot of clutter like "pineapple corer for those with a diameter between 5cm and 10m, corer for those with exactly 12cm, bannana nutella injector, etc.."

combine this tension with a changing environment and output requirements (one week steakhouse, next is chinese food, etc...) and everything starts to feel like a pile of crap

going "smaller" alleviates this problem b/c a lot of specialized tools are designed for scale. one steak and one chow mein doesn't justify a salamander broiler or a wok

this reminds me of how competence seems to decrease as you go up in an organizational hierarchy

maybe this "bug" is actually the "feature" that will save humanity - -;;

I've also heard that growing up with cats prevents allergies. Forget the source

it actually seems like the problem of plane hijacking solved itself once the kamikaze intent became known. people wouldn't just sit passively anymore

everything else is politicians making the best of a crisis

every domain of expertise has two "elo" systems, the niche one and the broader one.

e.g. you can learn basic juggling in 30 minutes that you are top 10% of your friends/colleagues etc...

however within the juggling community itself this is known as the "3 ball cascade" a really simple trick relative to the ones that requires years to master. an outsider may not be able to tell the difference between the 1 year expert and the 10 year master.

a lot dunning-kruger can be explained by people in one or the other not understanding the other system