HN user
Yeah, disappointing to see it so highly upvoted. So many tells of AI slop:
There’s a clean exception to all of this, and it flips the entire logic.
If letting go of the argument sounds like pure loss, here’s the reframe that turns it into a gain.
The ego is lowered. The defenses are down. The advice lands.
Even if there was some human insight that went into it, the output could be reduced in length by 80+% without any loss of substance.
Are you talking about LLMs in general, or specifically ChatGPT with a default prompt?
Since dabbling with some open source models (llama, mistral, etc.), I've found that they each have slightly different quirks, and with a bit of prompting can exhibit very different writing styles.
I do share your observation that a lot of content I see online now is easily identifiable as ChatGPT output, but it's hard for me to say how much LLM content I'm _not_ identifying because it didn't have the telltale style of stock ChatGPT.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post. I don't think I share the perspective, but I'm curious to understand it more.
On a personal level, I'm not happy to see a medallion-owning taxi driver lose their livelihood, in the same sense that I'm not happy to see anyone lose their livelihood, e.g., due to economic conditions, due to a company shutting down, or any other reason.
At the same time, there will be winners and losers from any economic or technological shift, and it seems that in our capitalist society we value progress and competition, underpinned by some utilitarian calculus that the short-term thrash is worth it for the long-term prosperity.
Inventing the telephone certainly would have harmed mail couriers, inventing the automobile would have harmed horse breeders, etc., but we don't typically reflect on those inventions as being ethically problematic.
In short, what I'm wondering is whether you think there's something uniquely unethical about the "tech bro" style of disruption, or if your perspective is more broadly a critique of capitalism.
I uploaded the PGN to lichess: https://lichess.org/rzSriO6I#97
After reviewing the chat history I actually have to issue a correction here, because there were two moves where ChatGPT played illegally:
1. ChatGPT tried to play 32. ... Nc5, despite there being a pawn on c5
2. ChatGPT tried to play 42. ... Kxe6, despite my king being on d5
It corrected itself after I questioned whether the previous move was legal.
I was pretty floored that it managed to play a coherent game at all, so evidently I forgot about the few missteps it made. Much like ChatGPT itself, it turns out I'm not an entirely reliable narrator!
I played chess against ChatGPT4 a few days ago without any special prompt engineering, and it played at what I would estimate to be a ~1500-1700 level without making any illegal moves in a 49 move game.
Up to 10 or 15 moves, sure, we're well within common openings that could be regurgitated. By the time we're at move 20+, and especially 30+ and 40+, these are completely unique positions that haven't ever been reached before. I'd expect many more illegal moves just based on predicting sequences, though it's also possible I got "lucky" in my one game against ChatGPT and that it typically makes more errors than that.
Of course, all positions have _some_ structural similarity or patterns compared to past positions, otherwise how would an LLM ever learn them? The nature of ChatGPT's understanding has to be different from the nature of a human's understanding, but that's more of a philosophical or semantic distinction. To me, it's still fascinating that by "just" learning from millions of PGNs, ChatGPT builds up a model of chess rules and strategy that's good enough to play at a club level.
As someone who was affected by this (non-U.S.), I have to say I was very satisfied with how PokerStars handled everything. When Full Tilt was shut down I essentially treated the funds I had on there as a write-off, and was delighted by the windfall of actually being reimbursed some time later.
Sure, easy piracy is a part of reality and businesses should, as a pragmatic matter, adjust their business models -- that's neither here nor there.
When I talk about being able to honestly assess willingness to pay, I'm talking about the pirate who claims that they wouldn't buy a good anyway so they might as well pirate it. It might be true, but all we can really say from the outside is that they value the good at least $0 worth, so their willingness to pay is somewhere between 0 and infinity. You can't put an upper bound on their willingness to pay just because they didn't buy the good when they got the good for free.
I don't particularly care if people pirate, but I find that pirates tend to do a fair bit of mental gymnastics trying to justify why piracy is ethical; I think the "I wouldn't pay for it anyway" argument falls under that umbrella.
That's a good clarification, and I agree that willingness to pay is the relevant metric to use when talking about being priced out of the market. The same point applies, though; it's hard to honestly assess your willingness to pay when it takes you 5 clicks and a few minutes of waiting to get exactly what you want for $0.
If we were to take a typical pirate and transport them to a hypothetical world where piracy was physically impossible, I think you'd generally find that they're not actually priced out of the market for many of the goods that they currently pirate. They'd likely cut down their consumption in a major way, but I strongly suspect that they'd still be willing to pay for a significant portion of the goods they currently pirate.
What makes you think pirates are priced out of the market? If we're talking about, say, the U.S., your typical pirate doesn't seem to be "priced out of the market" for a variety of other leisure goods, like the electronics that they're using to pirate music and TV shows.
The difference is that they don't have a frictionless way of "pirating" electronics, so they are actually forced to choose between paying for the good and abstaining from it. With media, it's easy to rationalize that you wouldn't be giving the producer money anyway, but I'm skeptical of your ability to honestly evaluate that when you have the option to trivially enjoy the good for free.
This sounds fine in the abstract, but I'm suspicious of it in practice because it's hard to make an honest evaluation of your willingness to pay for these goods when you have the easy option of getting them for free. I see many people using this argument while at the same time paying for other leisure goods that I suspect they actually value less than, say, music. The difference is that these other leisure goods really do have a pay-or-abstain dynamic imposed by reality. Reality keeps you honest about how much you're willing to pay for those goods, whereas with music you can consume the good without paying for it and never confront the decision of paying or abstaining from it.
That doesn't necessarily apply to you specifically, since it's dependent on your financial situation and how much you consume various media. Imagine yourself in a hypothetical world where it wasn't physically possible to pirate any music, TV shows, movies, software, etc. Would you really completely abstain from enjoying those goods, or would you simply reduce your consumption while actually paying for it? I think for many people, it's the latter.
I agree that it's compatible, and further that taking care of yourself is crucial to being able to effectively help others. The author might agree too, but in that case it's rather peculiar that everything in the article has an egoistic bent to it. Even if it wasn't the author's intention, I think it's worth pointing out that any mention of altruistic behavior is conspicuously absent from the article.
I can see how my post left room for misinterpretation; my intention was to express that the creators are in the set {people for whom it's most lucrative}. The earliest adopters are in the set too, obviously.
Put differently, my point is that "ethical" launches are simply good marketing, and are quite compatible with the sentiment expressed upthread that "[altcoins] are schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets". If a given coin becomes popular, the creator is going to profit immensely from it whether or not they engaged in pre-mining. By doing an "ethical" launch, they're making it more likely that the coin gains significant adoption, albeit probably decreasing the expected size of their payout. That seems like a smart play, given diminishing marginal utility of money, etc.
It's effectively the same thing, except that the set of people at the top of the pyramid is larger. It's still most lucrative for the creators, it's just also highly rewarding for the earliest adopters.
I'm also dying to know who was rapping about web development from ~2003-2009:
Yeah, the translation in the OP was almost completely wrong; I'm not sure where they got the idea that there was a joke that said "kill yourself". Actually, the depressing thing is that the real comment points even more toward a suicide.
If you pay attention to the self-congratulatory subtext of such complaints, it becomes clear that it's not really anything to do with being apocalyptic. No one is concerned that they personally are descending into a vapid, consumption-oriented existence -- it's always about how stupid and hopeless all those other people are.
Yes, there's reciprocity in this world, but it should be obvious to any unbiased observer that this wasn't part of some elaborate scheme on Patrick's part to grab the money of HN users. Patrick has spent countless hours providing invaluable advice to this community for free -- even if you want to take the most negative interpretation of his motives, this simply wouldn't be worth it.
If you want to spend years doling out awesome advice for free and then "cashing out" like this, I encourage you to do so. It would certainly be more valuable than bringing up the insipid "everything is selfish" argument.
Mathematically, you're correct that it isn't necessarily true that half of all current players are losing. It isn't even necessarily true if the pool of players is fixed, since the game being zero-sum doesn't constrain the possible distributions of winners and losers very much. The reality, though, is that the vast majority of players are losing.
Pursuing poker as a career is usually a poor decision for a variety of reasons, but the cost of learning is not one of them.
The overwhelming majority of poker hands are now played online, and the limits go as low as $0.01/$0.02 -- in today's poker landscape, the winning players tend to be those who initially invest a small amount of money and gradually climb the ladder with careful bankroll management.
The opportunity cost, on the other hand, can be very high. Many people waste a lot of time trying to become good at the game without experiencing any meaningful degree of success.
Here's my impression of the sequence of events, based on the blog post:
1) You post an article which includes several facts that are taken directly from Joshua's article. No credit is given to the original author.
2) Joshua publicly calls you out on this.
3) You quickly edit in a credit and a link to the original article.
4) With the awareness that future readers will see this credit and assume that Joshua is making an unfounded complaint, you send a series of aggressive tweets attacking him for bringing this issue up.
Now, it's possible that this isn't an accurate timeline, and now would be a good time for you to clarify what happened. But understand that the issue here isn't (entirely) the fact that you paraphrased another person's article; it's that it looks like you didn't give him credit, acted very deceptively to conceal that fact and save face, and that you did so in a particularly childish way.
Pay attention to the language you're using: "smug", "huge ego", "overblown response", "idiocy", etc.
You're trying to make this out to be a principled stance about "spreading ideas", and yet with every post you undermine that claim and make it clear that it's really about "Dustin Curtis is a jerk, so fuck him."
I agree, and I meant to emphasize more clearly that I don't think the 5% figure is meaningful (and that it shouldn't have been stated without the appropriate caveats in the article).
My main point was simply that I don't think it's prudent to create a worse experience for half of your users when you're so unlikely to gain any actionable information from it. It would be quite extraordinary if they found out that the speed increase caused a decline in conversion or a huge improvement in conversion, so I think it's safe to say that the measurement wouldn't make them reverse the change or make them allocate significantly more resources toward faster load times.
But, to reiterate, I agree that they should not have made the claim about 5% conversion when it wasn't properly supported.
That would certainly be better experimental design, since you would be controlling for other factors. On the other hand, precisely measuring the improvement in conversion isn't particularly important in this case; it's already clear that faster is better, so you're not gaining much actionable information from the measurement, whereas you would be giving half of your users a worse experience. In a situation where you were uncertain about which of two methods is better, it would definitely be better to run them in parallel like you've suggested so that you had a fair comparison.
Perhaps I'm just neurotic, but I do find it uncomfortable to write code with someone scrutinizing my work. When figuring out how to implement an efficient algorithm, I find that it's often helpful to perform exploratory steps before actually writing the algorithm. For instance, when I attempt a projecteuler puzzle that I don't immediately know the solution to, I'll usually try to compute the desired result for a few simple inputs, or I'll quickly write down the first (naive) approach that comes to mind and then trace through it to see where it fails, etc.
I know that those are all things that I can still do during a whiteboard interview, but having the interviewer look at my intermediate work, assume that I'm making mistakes and try to correct me tends to disrupt the process. I'm confident that the algorithms that I'll ultimately produce will be good, and I'm confident that I'll produce them at a good speed, but it will still look worse to the interviewer if I write down a bunch of noise before outputting a polished algorithm.
On the other hand, on paper, I can quickly churn through some of those early steps and then show the interviewer a solid, finished product without them having to see the crude intermediate steps. Again, it's possible that my anxiety about this isn't really justified, but I can't help but get the feeling that working in this way will leave the interviewer with a worse impression of my abilities than if I have the option to "hide" the rough work and just show them the output.
In this case, observing the actual spending practices of people can only set a lower bound on willingness to pay. If you're obtaining something for free, it certainly doesn't preclude you from being willing to pay for it as well. The fact that people spent significantly more on music (per capita) in the past[1] -- when it wasn't nearly as easy to obtain music for free -- suggests that how much people are currently paying is probably a poor measure of their willingness to pay.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real...
Yes, I enjoyed that diversion quite a bit.
A few different solutions: http://pastebin.com/Mf6ZmhfA
An additional consideration is the "dynamic" search that google implemented recently[1]. While you're typing, it'll guess what your final query is likely to be and display the results. Of course, the guess will usually be something that's been queried before, but if you are typing a completely new query then it will sometimes query a number of intermediate steps before you've finished typing. If this statistic includes queries of this sort, then this could contribute significantly to the number of new queries.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-tha...
That was quite an interesting read. I felt somewhat vindicated at the end of the article when the author mentioned that audio fingerprinting is a potential solution to this problem. While reading about the various issues created by matching songs based on names and artists, I immediately started thinking about how one might instead identify songs based on their acoustic properties.
Having looked into it a little bit (i.e., having read the wikipedia page about acoustic fingerprinting) I see that there are quite a few implementations in existence and that they appear to be fairly reliable at identifying songs based on the fingerprints -- which is really cool, first of all. Taking that for granted, it seems like facebook could solve its problem by creating a comprehensive database of songs which its music content partners offer.
In particular, I'm thinking of a database with entries containing an audio fingerprint, data about the artist, song, album, and so on, and links to the song on each of the partners' services. Then it would be possible to initially loop through each song offered by the partners, generate an acoustic fingerprint, check if it exists in the database[1], and then add a new record or add a link to an existing record as appropriate. This would be a huge process, of course, but afterwards you'd only have to perform this step for new songs, and you'd ultimately end up with a very impressive database of music IDs.
Anyway, that's undoubtedly a simplistic idea of what could be done and I'm surely glossing over some major obstacles, but I enjoyed indulging in some wishful thinking about it all the same.
[1] As I mentioned, I don't know anything about acoustic fingerprinting, but intuitively I can imagine it's probably not as easy checking if that fingerprint "exists" in the database. More likely, you'd have to check how similar it is to existing fingerprint and choose some threshold above which it's sufficiently likely to be the same song.
They were two separate meetings. From the article:
" ... I actually did attend the meeting that John describes in his blog post. However, as a full time engineer on WebObjects, I also had the opportunity to attend a different all hands that Steve Jobs called ... "