tedggh

I currently work for a federal contractor including the DoD as their customer, using Wordpress as their main website. You would think there’s no sensitive information there, but some times all it takes is enough information about someone and their team to impersonate that person and gain access to an email thread, file sharing system or even an access card to a building. Never underestimate incompetence.

Yes, all corporations have their obscure interests and don’t profit from being ethical. But we can also agree there’s a distinction between companies like Enron, Purdue Pharma, Meta, Lehman Brothers, Flock and Apple, Walmart, Verizon and Ford. They are all unethical to some degree, but the first group actually conspired to commit terrible crimes or are borderline criminal. We don’t know yet where OpenAI belongs to but it’s looking more and more like they want to join the first group.

Not to mention with each iteration of every model you get lower cost per token. It’s really a race to the bottom for hyperscalers and neoclouds at this point, with technically only two paying customers.

“ Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general”

Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics.

There has to be a reason why almost every single important partnership OpenAI had, abruptly ended, except for maybe Nvidia.

Just recently Satya Nadella publicly implied that OpenAI should not be trusted.

They are slowly becoming the STD of the AI industry, it’s like they think they are too big and awesome to need friends.

Maybe pissing Apple off will teach them a lesson?

I went through a two month long fight with AWS over a compromised account. I lost 20K even when my previous usage for the last 3 years was like $20/month, and I had more invoices coming worth tens of thousands of dollars. AWS refused to help until I stopped the breach myself, which required me to spend several all nighters after work learning how to script for AWS infra. They also refused to close my account after the breach was under control. They asked me to sign a shared responsibility agreement before they could look at my case, which I refused to do. I finally contacted the AG office in my state and they email AWS directly. In less than 24h I had a AWS manager calling me to fix my account and issue a refund for the 20K. Still, they refused to close my account after all this ordeal, apparently there’s no way for you to completely get out of AWS once you are in. It’s the shittiest business ever.

I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account. It took me a couple of months and involving the office of the AG of my state to get the issue resolved and get my money back. Since then I never touched any AWS product, moved my small stuff to Azure. It’s been years since AWS have these issues with billing, you can find the stories online, students billed 60K for a compromised account launching servers to mine crypto which AWS somehow was unable to flag and block, and let run for months.

I think LLMs, with only a few exceptions, have mostly created the illusion of value. It’s undeniable I can write code, troubleshoot and document much faster than in the pre LLM era, but putting a dollar value to that it’s not particularly easy. One group of people being 100x faster at one task doesn’t mean the organization as a whole runs at 100x the speed, in fact in most cases where the bottle neck is somewhere else, the productivity gains of the 100x group have little to no impact, or even a negative impact in some cases due to token overspending.

They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.

How much of the decline in the US could be attributed to Fountas & Pinnell?

I’m in month 5 of not having access to any social network, and although the first weeks I felt tempted to reinstall X and Reddit, I’m at a point where I don’t think I’m ever coming back. There are still great spaces like HN where you can consume content and participate in debates. I do miss some of the fun stuff, but it wasn’t worth being exposed to all the other crap for a few laughs a day.

With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.

Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it

“ This time he didn’t have a choice. He was loaded into an ambulance for a six-mile transfer, evaluated without additional treatment, and sent home the same night.”

This is weird, why didn’t he have a choice? I have literally walked out of a hospital with IVs still attached to my arms when I disagreed on course of treatment that included hospitalization for a case of white coat syndrome. They also wanted me to wait one hour to sign a waiver, which I unkindly refused.

Perhaps there should not be a vote while so many representatives are absent, unless it’s about a truly critical issue, like war.

When you work on high availability, mission critical systems, 99.99% uptime is unacceptable. That’s a full hour of downtime in a calendar year.

Land is not very expensive in most suburbs, but houses have become huge, the average size in the area where I live is 2700 sf. That’s because building a 3000 sf home doesn’t take twice the time and labor a 1500 sf takes, so there’s an economic incentive to build bigger homes. People also look for more space today than 40 years ago. A 1500 sf house would be considered a very small house and would likely be very hard to sell. Again, the average sf price remains in the low $200, so that’s not a huge difference to 40-50 years ago, factoring inflation. Not to mention you get much better quality materials, appliances and construction today. So, the fix appears to be more small homes, ideally condos, in urban areas just like many other countries do. The problem is, it is technically impossible to build multi family in most cities in America due to the ridiculous zoning laws and ordinances by city governments and neighborhood associations. If you own a lot in a city neighborhood and try to build an apartment building you will likely face years of court battles.

It seems that per sf house prices haven’t gone up that much. We romanticize the idea of older generations being able up afford a home, but those houses were a lot smaller than they are today, the average size I think was around 1500 sf, and a family of 5 lived there. Cities were also not as livable as they are today. Take for example NYC in the 1970s and 80s, where a young photographer could afford an apartment in Manhattan, with the caveat that the area was riddled with crime. Then there are the city ordinances that discourage multi family housing, so if you are a builder and you need to decide whether spend years fighting in court vs going to the suburbs and build large homes, that’s a very easy decision to make. The current housing deficit sits around 3-4 million homes.

It looks terribly depressed, lonely and sad.

This could work with someone you don’t know well and should be the default approach. But you also need to trust your instinct and know when debating it’s not worth pursuing. It could be a coworker you have known for years who has certain toxic attitude. Humans are complex beings, we don’t know what’s going on with other people’s lives and minds. It takes years of dedicated study and experience to attempt to understand other people’s issues. You are not going to suddenly become a psychologist or behavioral therapist by just listening and kindly discussing. Some of these attitudes have an underlying problem that has nothing to do with work, it could be upbringing or mental health, or a combination. It just happens that Software Engineers may be more likely to suffer from these problems than people in other professions, just by the nature of it.

Having gone through IVF multiple times, there’s usually a pretty rigorous process and it is highly regulated in many countries. In some places you need genetic screenings when using donors. I was unaware that I was carrying a mutation for a difficult to diagnose, fatal but relatively easy to treat disease if caught early, which explained at least two cases in my family history. If the donor happened to carry the same mutation, the chances of having an offspring with the disease was around 25%. So in my view, IVF if done right, could actually make healthier humans. And yes, this genetic screenings are available to anyone not only IVF patients, but it is extremely unlikely that people will use them when conceiving naturally, because first, they aren’t cheap and secondly there’s some sort of tabu about asking your partner for genetic testing, and even if the test comes back positive for some type of disease, what would people do anyway?

Why are these decisions never easy?

You always buy fossil fuels with an EV, not directly but you do. When you stop at the plaza for a quick super charge there’s no way to tell where is the energy sourced from, it could very well be from a diesel generator a few miles down the road. The value is in all the parts found in an ICE that need servicing or replacement that you don’t have in an EV. With an EV you basically need tires and maybe brakes once every 8-10 years, no oil and fluids, no oil or engine filters, water pumps, spark plugs, valves, seals, etc etc

I could not see anything related to safety besides airbags and cameras. Any crash tests available anywhere?

“…live video interviews are now easily gamed by real-time assistance tools.”

I am not too sure about that. Possible, yes. Easily? only if the interviewer sucks at interviewing. If are “gamed” during live interviews, you probably should not be interviewing.

This is an old April fool’s post guys, don’t waste time arguing about it

Have you tried this?

"if you ever need a copy of your data, members can always request and download their content, including original files, through the Flickr Data section of your settings."

This seems besides unethical also illegal. Never assume companies have good legal counsel, particularly in the LLMs era. There are consumer protection laws and in the US they are by state. Sometimes all it takes is completing a 5 min form in the state AG’s website. Sure, $5 is not a lot of money, but screw them.

Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?

I haven’t fact checked, but according to Evans big telecom builders didn’t make a lot of money after all the capacity investment. Some actually went bankrupt or got acquired as distressed assets. Big tech was very profitable monetizing that same infrastructure.

I have used Fable only once to do an in depth codebase review of a complex system. I asked it to flag deviations from a particular design and also compile a list of vulnerabilities. It took about 15-20 minutes. The result was very similar to Codex for the most critical findings, different suggestions on how to address them but it found exactly the same critical issues as Codex. This is still not a good test to evaluate Fable. But my feeling is that the latest models are all pretty good and now it comes down to your personal setup and workflow, that’s where you can get the productivity gains IMO. It’s like picking between MacOS or Windows as development environment. For some Windows sucks and for a some is the opposite, but both groups of people can be equally productive if they know their environments well and know how to go around their respective limitations.