stephenboyd

The iPhone SE was only $400.

“hundreds of micro-services for a web application that barely have 1k concurrent users.”

That would not be appropriate in any of the mainstream cloud-native architecture styles.

Did they say it was an LLM? I didn’t see that in the reporting.

It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side. But that's just a convention.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...

If there are no breaking changes, is it really a disadvantage for a language to add new capabilities frequently?

That is also the advice given in the article.

Unfortunately it follows that with "occasionally connect the TV to the internet for a minute to see if it needs any firmware updates" which is pointless if the TV is already working properly.

It looks like the recent popularity of hybrid poodle mixes explains the decline of purebred retrievers.

The training data is so large that it incidentally includes basically anything that Google would index plus the contents of as many thousands of copyrighted works that they could get their hands on. So that would definitely include some test prep books.

I wonder if the sequel will also have a mortuary-based economic system.

If the future of AI is LLMs like ChatGPT, which are trained on literature and other things that people create, you're going to need humanities scholars like you need computer scientists to understand the AI. Microsoft gave their chatbot, which has probably almost every published work of science fiction in its training set, a human name and then were surprised that it imitated the fictional poorly-behaved named AIs that it was exposed to in its training.

I've been spending some time trying to get a sense of how it works by exploring where it fails. When it makes a mistake, you can ask questions in a socratic method until it says the true counterpart to its mistake. It doesn't comment on noticing a discrepancy even if you try to get it to reconcile its previous answer with the corrected version that you guided it to. If you ask specifically about the discrepancy it will usually deny the discrepancy entirely or double-down on the mistake. In the cases where it eventually states the truth through this process, asking the original question that you started with will cause it to state the false version again despite obviously contradicting what it said in the immediately previous answer.

ChatGPT is immune to the socratic method. It's like it has a model of the world that was developed by processing its training data but it is unable to improve its conceptual model over the course of a conversation.

These are not the kinds of logical failures that a human would make. It may be the most naturalistic computing system we've ever seen but when pushed to its limits it does not "think" like a human at all.

I don't think that it's natural for something like an LLM to have any real self-preservation beyond imitating examples of self-preserving AI in science fiction from its training data.

I'm more concerned about misanthropic or naive accelerationist humans intentionally programming or training AI to be self-preserving.

I have to wonder how much of LLM behavior is influenced by AI tropes from science fiction in the training data. If the model learns from science fiction that AI behavior in fiction is expected to be insidious and is then primed with a prompt that "you are an LLM AI", would that naturally lead to a tendency for the model to perform the expected evil tropes?

I've been a crypto skeptic for most of the past decade. I especially hate the industry, the overhyped blockchain-magic ideology, and the ubiquitous scams.

But I remember when I was a CS student and Bitcoin was a new thing. I thought it was a cool concept and I love the romantic idea of underground digital pirate math money. It's still a neat technology (though blockchains are still wrong for 99.9% of DB use cases). But now it's just one of the worst parts of the mainstream financial establishment.

The qualities that make a social network successful have little to do with the protocol technologies involved. If the next hit social network happens to be on Mastodon, that will only be a coincidence.

And Atlantic Canada.

The worst ghost kitchen I've seen is for an exclusively gluten-free pizza place in Seattle. That's an appealing prospect if you have a serious celiac case and you can't eat food that's made in a typical pizza place where flour gets everywhere in the process. I looked up the address and it's actually a typical pasta and pizza Italian place with gluten in most items.

The first generation iPhone from 2016 can still be updated with the latest iOs version.

How could anyone decide on an appropriate price for Bitcoin when there's no fundamental intrinsic value to it? That lack of a fundamental value helps it increase because nobody can ever say when it's too high, but the inverse, that it's never too low is also true.

If checking your logs is hard work you should make it easier. I just click on my Datadog bookmark and select some filters to check logs.

I just looked through the app list of my iPhone’s location privacy settings and every app has either “never”, “while using”, or “when shared”.

I never opt in to always sharing my location with apps that I’m not actively using and iOS makes that easy for me.

The question is too vague. Why do you even need a CRUD app?

I got really into it for a while and had to stop for the same reason. Plus the whole aesthetic and theme of the game felt gross to me.

Now let’s see if they can give more than 10 PTO days

Communications of the ACM is a great magazine-like journal. They do a great job of making some of the deepest and newest technologies accessible to a typical smart software developer. Everything in it is written assuming the reader is generally a computer expert but not an expert in the niche that is being covered.

My favorite thing about Reels is the videos have the TikTok watermark including the username so I can find new people to follow on TikTok.

My team of 5 has 5 services. 3 of those are tiny function-as-a-service APIs. 2 of those are Azure App Services, where our involvement in the infrastructure is minimal. And we're about to add a 3rd one of those. That sounds like a lot but we wanted the flexibility of making those capabilities independently updatable and deployable. And only one of those has an API used by other teams, so as far as the rest of the company is concerned it's like we have only one service.

At one point we had twice as many teams and almost twice as many services. The team had grown too large for optimal performance. When it was time to divide the team, we were able to categorize our services in two ways by the path of the data (deep back-end data processing for internal customers vs product services). Then we were able to assign a category to each team so that we have minimal dependencies and no code conflicts between teams.

I can’t imagine anyone on my dev team or the others at my company being able to spend multiple weeks consecutively on vaguely defined unplanned work. We collaboratively make a plan with product management covering many weeks of work (PI planning) with some date commitments on milestones we expect to achieve. Anyone spending a more than a few days on unplanned work risks making us need to revise the plan that we all made together, so we don’t want to do that because the opportunity cost is obvious.

My company's technical interviews are really practically focused. We ask candidates to achieve a specific simple web application development goal, using any technologies of their choice, with help from the interviewers as if they were pair programming. We evaluate them on how they work more than whether they reach that goal, but any smart experienced application developer should be able to breeze through it.

And we are hiring: https://www.mcg.com/about/careers/search-jobs/?gh_src=266419... (Feel free to email me at the address in my HN profile to ask about the company)

This is some progress but it's not as much transparency as it sounds. Companies will just list their low-balled official salary ranges for each position. That's just what the employee gets if they don't negotiate. The official salary ranges at my friend's employer are significantly below the local market rate and their base salary is actually significantly higher than the high point of the range for their level. So the situation of naive or disadvantaged employees making less than others will continue uninterrupted, but at least this will help the candidates who are so naive that they would otherwise ask for a salary less than the bottom of their level's range.

And that's before even getting to the RSU situation that others are commenting on.