HN user
I'm not insinuating. I'm asking.
It's a pretty reasonable question for both of them. Perhaps more for the CFO, given what we know of Altman's, er, lack of candour with the board where money is concerned. But maybe given the "Her" debate it applies to both of them, in different ways.
Is this a company where the executives can really be more than rubber stamps?
When the iPad came out, people actually mostly said it was just a big iPhone.
It is, in fact, pretty much still just a big iPhone.
It turns out that's enough for a lot of people.
It's odd how unexcited Apple people often sound when they say they couldn't be more excited.
Palm CEO on the iPhone
This quote pre-dates the iPhone by a couple of months. So it doesn't remotely qualify as a "failed product" comment. It's just a bad prediction.
(And it's not that bad: the iPhone launched with 2G and without an app market or text-editing beyond delete-and-retype, for example)
Honest question: Do they not each worry they are each, in their own way, going to be Linda Yaccarino?
The lesson I learned from the dot-com era is that people who are dependent on the hype to make profit will crane their necks to believe the hype.
Salespeople, executives, engineers, it doesn’t matter.
Every day on HN reminds me a little more of 1998.
Right. I mean... I sometimes think that Webpack is a malign, inscrutable intelligence! :-)
But at least it's supposed to be deterministic. And there's a chance someone else will be able to explain the inner workings in a way I can repeatably test.
But not the now, quite obviously.
Colour me cynical but I don't feel like pretending the future is here only to have to have to fix its blind incompetence.
Indeed, and presumably well before 1965, which is when Greater London was created. Most of the non-disambiguated High Streets will be in the Greater London boroughs (Bromley, Bexley etc.)
When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)
Free idea: a website called But Humans Also, where one collects bad justifications for applying LLMs.
<mid 2000s product specialist> the dot-com is available!
The "zen" of LLMs is that they do not see a real distinction between these two things, or either of these two things and success ;-)
I dunno. I tend to annoy people when taking on jobs by telling people what I am concerned about and do not understand, and then sharing with them the extent to which I have managed to allay my own concerns through research.
I turn down a lot of jobs I don't feel confident with; maybe more than I should.
An LLM never will.
You could say the same about the output of a compiler.
Except, for starters, that you're not using the LLM to replace a compiler.
You're using it to replace a teammate.
I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all.
I think using AI tools to write production code is probably indicative of people who don't really know what they are doing.
The best way not to have subtle bugs is to think deeply about your code, not subcontract it out -- whether that is to people far away who both cannot afford to think as deeply about your code and aren't as invested in it, or to an AI that is often right and doesn't know the difference between correct and incorrect.
It's just a profound abrogation of good development principles to behave this way. And where is the benefit in doing this repeatedly? You're just going to end up with a codebase nobody really owns on a cognitive level.
At least when you look at a StackOverflow answer you see the discussion around it from other real people offering critiques!
ETA in advance: and yes, I understand all the comparison points about using third party libraries, and all the left-pad stuff (don't get me started on NPM). But the point stands: the best way not to have bugs is to own your code. To my mind, anyone who is using ChatGPT in this way -- to write whole pieces of business logic, not just to get inspiration -- is failing at their one job. If it's to be yours, it has to come from the brain of someone who is yours too. This is an embarrassing and damaging admission and there is no way around it.
ETA (2): code review, as a practice, only works when you and the people who wrote the code have a shared understanding of the context and the goal of the code and are roughly equally invested in getting code through review. Because all the niche cases are illuminated by those discussions and avoided in advance. The less time you've spent on this preamble, the less effective the code review will be. It's a matter of trust and culture as much as it's a matter of comparing requirements with finished code.
One day... building a 4x5 is next.
I shoot digital, and only black and white film, these days.
(I need to build a darkroom so I can print again)
But the thing that really hooked me deep into photography was 6x6 transparencies from a Rolleicord. Velvia, incident light meter, sunny day, job done.
Downvotes on my earlier comment suggest that people haven't had this experience: no matter how great, practical and useful digital is, there is something mesmerising and emotional about a great transparency.
These days I get my visceral buzz from assembling my own simple lenses.
I am pretty certain I am a Weird Nerd.
I have good reasons to consider myself neurodivergent (and others do consider me such). There are definite divergences that have caused me problems. I have what people consider "superpowers" and what people consider "difficulties".
Not certain I am autistic. Might have been considered mild or (the then-termed) "high functioning" as a kid in the 80s.
But on the other hand, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to put me in the same broad category as autistic people, because I have the same issues in the context of the article -- with being conventionally "ambitionless", having relatively little grasp of (or instinct for) power games etc., and needing the kind of support that others often do.
That category needs a name. (In the UK we'd traditionally go for "boffin", which is broadly a term of affection, but it's a little harder to spot a boffin these days because of casual clothing at the office)
TBH I cannot, which is why I talked of doubt in the quantity comparison, and it’s a fair point to pull me up on. My broader point was that people associate film with chemicals often because they have been within sniffing distance of a darkroom or developed film at school. They do not associate consumer electronics with chemicals, when silicon chip manufacturing involves some true nasties that you would not be able to safely go near to with gloves and tongs like a fixer.
It’s just my instinct based on what I know of the processes involved in manufacturing the main bits that are different between even a late era film SLR and a contemporary mirrorless camera —- displays, high density batteries, sensors, additional microcontrollers and usually two powerful CPUs.
The nastiest bit is the sensors, which are very large chips.
But given the sheer amount of electronics in it and what we know of the impacts of toxic waste pollution in Taiwan and other silicon manufacturing centres, and even just CO2 emissions, it seems likely to me that the contents of a digital camera are likely worth hundreds of rolls of film and their prints in terms of pollution impact once you consider all the processes that are involved in controlling that pollution.
The average secondhand consumer digital camera in my experience has shot in the low thousands, where that data is easily found still; it’s getting harder to find shutter activation data and it may not really be a useful guide anymore. But in the DSLR era it was normal to find secondhand kit with use equivalent to 50 to 80 rolls of film at the very most.
This is why secondhand camera companies and hire shops are so important, because they extend the useful life of what is otherwise e-waste. And I think there's a lot of delayed e-waste out there; people who own DSLRs but haven't chucked them because they are occasionally still better than their phones.
Digital cameras use more (and much worse) toxic chemicals. It’s just that you don’t get involved with them personally.
I doubt most digital camera owners ever shoot enough to get to the point where there’s an environmental net benefit compared with film.
This is one of the reasons why I only shoot with secondhand digital kit now.
ETA to whoever downvoted me: I accept you think I might be talking made-up nonsense! But to get an idea of what I mean, I would urge you to look at why there are so many Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.
Well, it will never achieve the economy of scale it had. So it will always be more expensive.
But the same is true for art inks, I imagine.
I don’t think I can answer because again I think I would not put myself in that position.
I am going to retreat from this argument because this entire topic has me questioning my planned career change away from development towards training.
If this is what people think about human teachers, what at all is the point?
It’s more perfect than digital.
Consider this about the original slide: it was physically there with the photographer when the photograph was taken.
It is stained with the chemically-captured energy of the actual light that bounced off the subject, in a form that you can visualise with your naked eye.
If that is not perfect I don’t know what is.
(Yeah, the dynamic range sucks compared to digital. But then some digital cameras suck compared to others)
Unless I am mistaken in my reading of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Legislativ...
suggests it went through the parliament in a now pretty normal way. They used a tripartite approach earlier in the negotiations, and people say this is a bit less amenable to scrutiny, but ultimately the parliamentary adoption happened.
Would you be opposed to replacing human tutors then?
Yes.
If your answer is yes, (in some flavor of "protecting and helping the jobs of those who teach), I would argue your ethics are focused on the wrong group. Teaching is for students to learn, not for teachers to have jobs.
OK. But your framing here projects upon me the idea that I'm solely concerned about replacing jobs, in order for your argument to succeed. (Though again, that is the cold-rationalist AI zeitgeist[0]: why should people have jobs when an AI can do it?)
It elides the possibility that it is inherently better to learn from a real person, who has invested time and effort into teaching you. What is the point of higher education in particular if you are not learning, at some point, from people who are directly adjacent to cutting edge thinking?
We don't have said technology yet, but it's reasonable to think we can get close. If there's a good chance to improve how well students can learn, I don't think "teachers don't appreciate it" is a good reason not to do it.
Well then. I can't argue with this, if you think it's OK to take humanity out of teaching. I think — perhaps feel — you are so wrong that I can barely even string the words together to explain. And that is an unbridgeable divide.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/opena... or https://archive.ph/AL81B
'In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”'
I wouldn't put myself in that position.
When the question is of the form "what do you think about the ethical implications of using AIs?" and the quick answer is "humans also make mistakes" I think the entire premise is on pretty shaky ground.
Humans have their drawbacks?
I have to say, I really urge you to consider the nature of your framing here.
As you can tell I am quietly (or maybe not-so-quietly) appalled by the zeitgeist around generative AI, but even if I were not, I hope I would still see that this kind of linguistic framing is insensitive and self-defeating if not wholly inappropriate and demeaning if you want to see any co-operation from educators, who are as a broad picture, tired, dedicated, hopeful people who -- unlike LLMs -- can and do place significant moral and ethical value on teaching.
You changed it from "every" to "any".
I changed nothing, sorry. It's just a British English colloquial word choice -- I don't think there's much semantic difference and I didn't intend it.
But you can read it as "any and all" if you like.
The point is that essentially all governments have granted themselves that power, one way or another. They have the right to access any postal communications in transit.
That "any" includes all of it. Even, I would hazard a guess, under a practical day to day USPTO given the rather broad readings of the Postal Clause in the past. There's no constitutional right to privacy, is there.
Having moved from the US to a Westminster country, I have to say that even British MPs can look an awful lot like rubber-stamp voters. The system is set up to punish them severely if they dare to seriously endanger anything the cabinet wants.
Not really. Parliament inflicts major defeats and signficant amendments quite a lot, several times a decade. Which is a lot.
And you have to understand that there is implicit context here, which is that Parliament really doesn't like having the piss taken out of it, doesn't accept disrespect, and hasn't for several hundred years.
It does take a long view of the British parliament to understand how the longstanding collective spirit of parliament as an entity, a community, influences which legislation government even tries to put before it.
There are some notable exceptions (particularly in this parliament) but as a general rule, ministers don't have the whipping power they tend to think they have.
What you see is a series of acquiescences, but what government sees is a process/approach that rules out things they would want to do that they won't ever get through parliament. Select committees in particular are brutal.
We are heading towards a period of time where the government of the day is going to have a lot more power, and what you will see is paradoxical: longstanding members on the back benches of the government side will become even more vocal about the importance of respecting parliament.
It's amazing the way it happens, and it is often underwritten by a little bitterness about not getting a ministerial or PPS job that becomes a balancing force.
Yes I don't need explaining that encryption is maths and letters can be encrypted. That is pretty obvious.
(Postal inspectors the world over would assume evidence of a crime.)
No, it is on the people who want new powers to justify them.
The exact point I am getting at is that the governments who want these things are seeking to protect the power they have, not expand it.
Encrypted communications are eating away at the power to inspect communications they already have, that we have been happy to grant them (that is the social contract I am talking about; it has existed for as long as postal services have).
It's a very American thing to assume that government in general is always acting in bad faith, I guess.
They were there for their PhD, not as a professor in training which would have made your position more understandable.
Right. Not all TAs become professors. But at a first approximation all professors have TA experience; it's generally their first experience of teaching.
I was paid for my time as a TA, in the UK. It would be illegal for them not to pay.