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I have only one resolution: to do the greatest year of work of my life.

With that in mind, I bid you a very fond farewell, HN.

Tip for anyone suffering from viral fatigue - I had a bad case a few years ago and it was only strength training that turned it round. That's as simple as learning to use the weight machines at the gym.

Crazy as it might sound, you can literally do this by listening to your feet!

Yourself or others may find _it is exactly what has fallen apart_.

Exercise is magical, it gives you superpowers of focus and confidence that you can solve all problems. If everything is going wrong, it's the first place to check - are you exercising? If not, fix that. And maybe everything else goes away.

What you’re missing here regards diversity and volume.

Diversity: because language models are in some sense capturing an average (even if that average can be from a subset of training data), its comments will not be very diverse. I suspect if you try sampling away from the center of the distribution, you’ll find the quality degrades to nonsense.

Volume: the biggest problem is that you’ll end up with complete overwhelm of plausible comments. Language models cannot reason, which means they are incapable of producing the best insights (they can probably provide insight through “monkeys at typewriters” effects).

So the smart human who has analysed the subject really well, who currently has to rise above a certain amount of background noise, will now get completely swamped by it.

Does that mean murdering people in the cause of climate change prevention is ok?

I don’t think literally everything else matters less. I don’t think there’s a simple “matters” scale.

Most crucially, an important cause in itself does not justify any means whatsoever.

Merry Christmas everyone, even those who argued with me despite clearly being incorrect :-) thanks for continually challenging and educating me, HN. I know of no better way to keep track of trends and hear other opinions.

Also note that the cultural change around advertising within an AI chat interface could then lead to similar monetisation within human conversations too, ie WhatsApp -> WhatsAd

Bit OT but generally speaking if you care about company culture and want to build something great, acquiring mature companies is not the way to go. You end up with an alien culture you can’t integrate into your own. This is why Apple only buy companies they absolutely have to, and specifically early stage where the culture has not ossified yet.

So don’t buy GM - or Twitter…

I think the more generous reading here is that “usual” = “net positive for the world”

Interesting, but is the “date flexible” approach really workable? How does the rest of the business work if the deadline is May, then August, then the following year? At least with the fixed date method you know that a bunch of stuff will be shipped at that date, and you can always have an adjustable plan for eg marketing.

PG left because of censorship. Now he’s back. He’s a smart considered guy so it’s interesting to ask why he went back. We all have to make similar decisions, and one way we do that is to look to leadership.

There are always ethical compromises engaging with the real world, and there are few hard and fast rules to follow.

If PG is reading, I’d love to hear the thinking behind going back.

Is there a list of universities that don't do this kind of thing? I wouldn't want to send my kids to a university that published this, I want them to think for themselves. I certainly will strongly discourage them from applying to Stanford. Are there others I should be wary of?

(incidentally, not _all_ of the list is ridiculous, but most of it clearly is)

How do we know if this is a joke or not. Some of them definitely read tongue in cheek.

The Startup way: make a list of features you want to build for your next "release" / deadline. Make that really minimal, what really matters to your users? Tell people you're doing the next "version" by that date, but don't go to far into specifics if you can. E.g. you can say you'll have feature x where there are variants of that feature x1/x2/x3 of increasing difficulty.

If you need to, build prototypes of the features to get a feel for how difficult they may be. Then you've got a set of features you _think_ you can get done by the deadline.

Write down the spec where folks can see it. The deadline should be say < 8 weeks away. No scope creep in that time. Stick to what you have.

Then get to work. One rule: you will ship at that deadline. You can actually ship individual features beforehand if you do CD etc. You can use feature flags to hide the features for most users if you want to have them feel like a "version" has been released. But that deadline is set in stone and you do not move it (you can allow say a week slack to be reasonable, but probably keep that to yourself if you're a manager and only use it if you absolutely have to e.g. a key dev gets sick in the final week etc.)

As the deadline approaches, things will go wrong. Keep the deadline. Cut the spec. Firstly, cut to simpler versions of the features. Second, start dropping features.

Ship. People will be annoyed you haven't shipped feature Y that got dropped. Gauge the response. Now for your next "release", Y or Z is top of the list.

After the deadline has passed, give folks a period to recover as you decide what's next, cut them some slack and then go again.

This is the only answer I have to estimation.

What is the difference between copying and pasting an essay from the internet and copy and pasting an essay from Chat-GPT, which is a sample from a large training set of essays from the internet?

Following up - according to the FT today, Turnitin (widely used academic anti-plagiarism tool) are developing a detector.

Not sure his recent behaviour ruins his legacy. It’s likely far more will be remembered of say SpaceX than of this Twitter debacle. At least - to date.

But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.

Whilst I strongly disagree with the banning of links and accounts without good reason, it is true for me that Twitter has greatly improved since Musk took over.

Part of that is that interesting voices like PG’s are not so drowned out by background noise, so losing folks like PG begins to undo that improvement.

A useful metaverse is already here and it’s called Google Maps.

I think that position confuses ethics with condemnation of an individual.

You can be ethically against stealing, but still see the positive elements in the life of a thief.

It is absolutely not necessary to turn the discussion around Musk into a trial. It is possible he is neither guilty or innocent, but rather a mixture of good and bad - like everyone on here, even those condemning him as a terrible human.

Because the OP had taken generalised from that issue to a general polarised Musk fanboys vs haters debate.

Incidentally, one of my heuristics to avoid this: if your team are not contradicting you on a regular basis, you are probably not a good manager. They should feel free to float opposing viewpoints.

Thanks. So essentially: stereotypes are shortcuts? Good point.

That’s an instinct we can and should avoid in general debate though.

I don't think the parent was calling people people cheerleaders merely for defending him on any level.

Ah, I definitely read it that way. The use of “cheerleaders” leaves little room for ambiguity, I think.

I was watching a brilliant talk from someone quite famous in the nerd world and he was talking about Steve Jobs and the two things he brought to business… paraphrasing, one about being a visionary, and the other about… let’s say “strong management”. I do wonder if you’re right, I hope it’s possible to be nice and great though. Maybe it’s just harder.

I don’t think that’s how such a system would work, right? It would most likely mean higher taxes all the way up. Otherwise you’d get all sorts of tax avoidance tricks.

Thanks for engaging in sensible discussion.

I think it’s self evident that very rich people have more capacity for both good and bad, as they have more power in a capitalist society. To debate further there is a debate about capitalism, and whilst I’d like to see more social democracy and less laissez faire, going beyond capitalism is not something I want to jump into…

So I think ideally you’d like to see billionaires give up their wealth voluntarily, right? That seems internally consistent.

I think your last point is a good one, particularly a good response to those on the right who are always against progressive taxation: the cash should not be the only or perhaps even primary incentive. At least for entrepreneurship.

One issue with saying “900m enough” etc. is that often billionaires (or rich folk) are really just rich on paper. If your company is private it’s not necessarily easy to liquidate, for example. And maybe sometimes you want people to “own” lots of money in the sense that they need to steward it (maybe you want them to be an Angel investor, for example).

I guess I took you away a bit from “unethical” to “how do we solve it?” And it is still valuable to have ethics that cannot be enforced, because you want to be ethical yourself and be able to advise others.

Well, this is somewhat circular but I think you’re making a genuine point that doesn’t apply in my case.

I was following the other way around… people are dismissing Musk as a whole and turning this into a binary debate, so I felt the need to point out that Musk’s achievements aren’t really disputable, so it’s silly to treat this as a binary debate.

It can be “yeah musk has done stupid things and brilliant things” but not “musk has done stupid things and anyone who defends him is a fanboy and what he has achieved positively is now moot.” And the post I was replying to, and indeed much of the debate, takes that form.

And y’know personally that really bothers me. Casting people as goodies or baddies just really gets to me for some reason. I don’t know why, it’s just really irrational behaviour that I can’t tolerate very well.

Genuinely curious and open, not sure why downvote.

So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree.

Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold?

If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?

This is my main concern. Twitter seems like such a waste of time. Either Elon’s judgement is way off, or there’s a bigger picture he can see.

But in the short term at least, this circus just seems like a waste of time.