Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people.
Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their idiosyncratic workflows is a bad engineer, right? And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.
This line of thinking is why I think the tech industry has become so morally bankrupt.
I don’t mean to judge because I think many people come to similar conclusions but I believe there has been a concerted effort to equate accumulation of wealth with genius, and to portray this anti-social behavior of endlessly accumulating wealth in a positive light.
I really think this phenomenon should be studied because it will likely lead to some catastrophic outcomes for the country.
I've spent most of my career working, chatting and hanging out with what might be best described as "passionate weirdos" in various quantitative areas of research. I say "weirdos" because they're people driven by an obsession with a topic, but don't always fit the mold by having the ideal combination of background, credentials and personality to land them on a big tech company research team.
The other day I was spending some time with a researcher from Deep Mind and I was surprised to find that while they were sharp and curious to an extent, nearly every ounce of energy they expended on research was strategic. They didn't write about research they were fascinated by, they wrote and researched on topics they strategically felt had the highest probability getting into a major conference in a short period of time to earn them a promotion. While I was a bit disappointed, I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game. This person probably earns more than many rooms of smart, passionate people I've been in, and that money isn't for smarts alone; it's for appealing to the interests of people with the money.
You can see this very clearly by comparing the work being done in the LLM space to that being done in the Image/Video diffusion model space. There's much more money in LLMs right now, and the field is flooded with papers on any random topic. If you dive in, most of them are not reproducible or make very questionable conclusions based on the data they present, but that's not of very much concern so long as the paper can be added to a CV.
In the stable diffusion world it's mostly people driven by personal interest (usually very non-commericial personal interests) and you see tons of innovation in that field but almost no papers. In fact, if you really want to understand a lot of the most novel work coming out of the image generation world you often need to dig into PRs made by an anonymous users with anime themed profile pic.
The bummer of course is that there are very hard limits on what any researcher can do with a home GPU training setup. It does lead to creative solutions to problems, but I can't help but wonder what the world would look like if more of these people had even a fraction of the resources available exclusively to people playing the game.
It misses the point: if you split the universe in two identical parallel universe, but then take the same individual and in one universe train them 2h per week, and in the other universe, train them 8h per week, do you really think, whatever the test is, the second one will not perform better?
This is the point of training: the more training you have access to, the better you do. If it was not the case, then the notion of school itself as a way of training people to be able to think by themselves will not have any sense.
And that is just training. Even with the same amount of class hour, kids who don't have to worry about take care of their siblings, of the house chores, or of even having access to decent relaxing conditions will get higher score even if they are in fact less smart.
Thinking about it from the bee's perspective, this is like raiding the lair of an eldritch horror for gold. A beekeeper is just a funny looking bear-thing that takes honey sometimes, but the shop of a beekeeper is full of devices beyond a bee's comprehension, more honey than a bee would ever see in its lifetime just all sitting around, its own sun which can turn on and off. To find yourself in such a place by accident must be a crazy experience, convincing your brethren to attack it by shaking your butt is on another level.
We're nerds. We understand the nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people do not understand any of this. Regular people type into a textarea and consume the response.
The take away from this article should be that you are vastly overestimating how people understand and interact with technology. The author's experience of ChatGPT is not unique. We have spent decades building technology that is limited but truthful, now we have technology that is unlimited and untruthful. Many people are not equipped to handle that. People are losing their minds. If ChatGPT says "I read your article" they trust it, they do not think, "ah well this model doesn't support browsing the web so ChatGPT must be hallucinating". That's technobabble.
> forcing them to rely on ad revenue to run their useful service?
Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.
Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.
These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.
Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???
I don't want to go deep into it today (Fathers Day here), but he's alive and well now. We rang the bell just over two years ago.
He is enrolled in a study through the Children's Oncology Group mentioned here, and underwent an experimental modification specifically for male patients.
Specifically, the current state of treatment protocols (when he started) was that males received an extra ~6 months of treatment as there was thought that the testes could serve as a repository for the cancer. The data says that is likely not true, and that the tradeoff for the longer chemo is worse than any risk present.
We were fortunate that he hit every single "best case", from him being diagnosed very early, to all of the best possible results from his blood tests at every point.
Many of my comments talking about my experience are buried, but there is plenty that I've said here on HN.
Most nutritionists would today argue that is far too simple a model. Your body does not metabolize all calories in the same way. The role of your microbiome in terms of metabolization was barely understood at all only 50 years ago, and we're only now starting to get a handle on it.
If it were a case of "calories in, calories out", all the experiments down by food technicians to understand what is happening in the brain when you consume certain flavors (they were literally getting people to taste soda in an MRI scanner decades ago), would not be an efficient use of time and the food industry would collapse.
If you eat 2000 kCals of lettuce, your body is going to do very, very different things to eating 2000 kCals of potato fries, including how it stores or consumes energy in that moment. Importantly, what your body does is likely going to be very different to what my body does. 10% of the population can stay slim while over-eating crap, because they are genetically lucky. A %age of the population will struggle to stay at a healthy BMI even if they eat mostly salads and fruits.
This isn't radical new age voodoo: the best science available today tells us the calories in/out model isn't anywhere near nuanced enough to help educate people on eating healthily and managing their weight.
Tim Spector has written some material on this, and I've been reading Camilla Stokholm's book recently. It's all quite interesting, and very different to what I was taught when growing up.
I'd also do some digging on ultra-processed foods - it might stop you thinking overweight people are just doing it to themselves. They're not.
> Why attribute to insanity that which could just as easily be attributed to corruption and lies.
Because his “insanity” is more than just a claimed brain worm:
The trauma from the men in his life being assassinated when he was an impressionable little boy. He now blames the CIA for both.
The heroin addiction.
The whale on the car incident.
The bear cub corpse in NYC.
The swimming in raw sewage.
There is no spy or health conspiracy too large for this guy. Everyone is corrupt/corruptable in his mind except him.
These are not the actions of a stable person. His solution to autism is to dictate that there is no significant genetic component, then give scientists 6 months to “find the cause” (after hijacking all of the medical data the US government can coerce).
Sure, there is corruption in that he is making referral money from some of his companies. I’m not sure he’s lying though — that requires Mens Rea. He might just have crazy ideas about reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t believe in _germ theory_ after his statements about HIV /AIDS.
I think there's a difference between incompetently squandering government resources and intentionally tearing things apart. Sure, a lot of the time people in government are driving around while staring at their cell phone, but these Doge minions are intentionally driving on the sidewalk because they like hearing the sound of bodies hitting the windshield.
> how do we square that with this interpretation producing results that are squarely at odds with the intent of the founders
Jesus christ. Don't you feel at all obligated to provide support for the thing you're "pretty sure" about before asking people to accept it at face value? Based on your surety? It's hard to tell if this is basic rage-baiting with the absurdity of your claim sans support, or if you truly believe that wild claims don't require any, because enough people's reactionary vibes align with yours.
This is a concept that is seemingly alien to Americans.
The consequences of your actions matter even if you disagree. When your actions hurt people, you've still hurt people. Doesn't matter what you thought you were doing.
You see this kind of thinking through all levels of American life. You, personally, are the only person on the planet who matters, fuck everyone else and let them deal with the consequences. You run a red light and someone else gets T-boned and killed? That's their problem, you got to your destination 3 minutes faster.
The trump administration is simply the manifestation of how sick our country is.
It's going to take us generations to recover from this kind of societal illness, if we ever can.
Look it's fine let it go. You think this is good because you can't imagine it happening to you or people you care about and I think it's bad because I can. People stripped of citizenship also have "no right to be here" and that's the obvious direction this is heading.
In the many years we've been discussing similar things I've never known you to change your mind on even the smallest point of any subject. I frankly just don't respect you enough to put more energy into this conversation.
Your posts are always out there but this one seems completely divorced from reality. On what basis? He didn't pass any laws, he's attacking "DEI" whatever that is...
That's the bigger point. This is the destruction of the United States as a viable partner, today and for the future. It's the most anti-American thing you could do, which makes you think how much of this is incompetence and ideology and how much of it is compromise.
Coaching hires and selection process in more recent history.
I'd also argue that Venus and Serena Williams were a prerequisite to Coco Gauff. That's the point of representation: to make it easier for the meritocracy to work by creating a path for talent that might otherwise not consider a field (or sport, in this case). In many cases with minorities, what we see are extraordinary individuals who are able to shatter these biases and be pathmakers for others to follow. Jeremy Lin has also talked a lot about his experiences with racism all along his journey to the NBA (racism and prejudice is just a form of exclusion).
But it's ironic, right? Professional sports is a meritocracy that for decades excluded other non-white races from participating. The only reason we can call it a merit based system today is because there were strong efforts by individuals and organizations throughout the 20th century to make it inclusive, you know, the "I" in "DEI". You cannot have a functional meritocracy if individuals are being excluded from participating.
There's this assumption that certain races or genders are just better at coding or engineering or finance or math and that these fields are already merit based. Isn't it more likely that these fields still suffer greatly from the same type of prejudiced exclusion that professional sports suffered from and that "non-conforming" talent is being excluded at the candidate prospecting phase?
The way that the modern Supreme Court (starting with its extremely conservative turn around 2005 with the replacement of O'Connor with Alito) has treated Qualified Immunity is that the constitutional violation (in this case, the violation of her 4th Amendment rights) needs to have been clearly found in previous cases in this particular circuit (or by the Supreme Court itself). These sorts of search and seizure cases hinge on things like "she signed a document allowing another agency to search her phone, but not share it with another one, and they want to search for anything that might implicate her boyfriend an officer for Brady violations" and the 9th Circuit had never found this kind of sharing without consent or warrant for searching your own officers history to be a constitutional violation. So in this case, she can't sue for damages etc. But the next case that exactly meets these parameters with no novel grounds for argument, they can be sued.
Not surprisingly, clever lawyers find a way to make something slightly novel in most every one of these cases, at least in one particular circuit, and so basically nothing of consequence happens.
This entire doctrine only exists because the Supreme Court invented it, 8-1, in the 1960's to prevent Freedom Riders from suing courts and police officers who arrested them for trying to racially integrate public places. And somehow it's gotten worse over time.
I think this post underestimates how the degree to which “what data is correct” is deeply contextual.
My team created an identical hypothesis to this doc ~2 years ago and generated a proof of concept. It was pretty magic, we had fortune 500 execs asking for reports on internal metrics and they’d generate in a couple of minutes. First week we got rave reviews - followed by an immediate round of negative feedback as we realized that ~90% of the reports were deeply wrong.
Why were they wrong? It had nothing to do with the LLMs per se, 03-mini doesn’t do much better on our suite than gpt 3.5. The problem was that knowing which data to use for which query was deeply contextual.
Digging into use cases you’d fine that for a particular question you needed to not just get all the rows from a column, you needed to do some obscure JOIN ON operation. This fact was only known by 2 data scientists in charge of writing the report. This flavor or problem - data being messy, with the messiness only documented in a few people’s brains, repeated over and over.
I still work on AI powered products and I don’t see even a little line of sight on this problem. Everyone’s data is immensely messy and likely to remain so. AI has introduced a number of tools to manage that mess, but so far it appears they’ll need to be exposed via fairly traditional UIs.
Yes and no. Yes the level of discourse was always that bad, but previously the people posting at that level were Internet randos, not the President of the United States and the executives of our most important businesses.
I do wonder if these clowns appreciate the long-term consequences of shattering the mystique of business executives. It's all memey fun and games in the moment, but later on when you have to make the counterargument against "why do these people deserve their billions? why shouldn't they all go up against the wall instead?" and you try to say "Well, it's because they're so talented and brilliant; doing so would cause incredible harm to the economy without their strong guidance", it becomes much harder to do that convincingly when we can all see them behaving like toddlers in public.
The young and incurious have been targeted, recruited, and brainwashed into this by tech moguls for just this reason. A steady diet of calcified resentments against vague, post-modernist buzzword nonsense like “woke” and “DEI” has created a whole political movement around getting unreasonably angry over feeling slighted about symbolic representation in pop culture to the point where they’re going to bring the whole country down it’s insane.
But of course, that’s exactly what would be oligarchs want.
So can we safely assume that in 2007 you were steadfastly in support of the constitutionality of regulating weapons that fall outside of reasonable use in a Militia as in US v. Miller? Or does your complete and total deference to case law only go in one direction?
I have substantially more confidence in their assessment than I do in you and your "circle." A circle which, based on your other posts in this thread so far, provides you a convenient safe-space to avoid the need to provide evidence, defend your assertions with sound argument, and enables you to feel superior by way of intellectual dishonesty.
I can only aspire to be so woke, to see reality so clearly and with such confidence!
My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing.
Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma.
Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too.
I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.
Someone shared a picture of a dead baby in my community a few days ago. They were part of pictures describing the conditions of an ethnic conflict that is largely unremarked upon.
As mods, we removed it, since it’s traumatic to simply see it, and it’s out of scope for our community. It’s not an ‘acceptable’ argument and it was removed. That was censorship.
Should pro beastiality arguments be allowed? Am I admitting the anti beastiality argument is not as persuasive as the beastiality argument, when I choose not to give them space in my communities?
What about when children are engaging with an experienced cult recruiter?
Users are spamming your community with random content, to bury headlines about a heinous rape case that makes the ruling party look bad. That’s fundamentally more speech and it is acting as an antidote for ‘bad’ speech.
How do you address roving bands of users who go around Reddit, and downvote all negative news about China and India on r/worldnews? The demographics and time they are online, are sufficient to shift the news.
What would your conscience have you do? Have you been in a position to make similar decisions? I have, so I can give these examples.
This.. isn’t an attempt by me to prove you wrong. These aren’t hard questions, but pretty common place ones. Its just that all mod choices are essentially censorship.
I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.
If you decide to censor, I would be fine with it too.
Because you would still be making a decision based on a principle.
I’ve struggled with the idea of censorship since I first volunteered as a mod nearly 15 years ago.
I valued free speech as a core principle to enable humanity succeed and thrive.
I have, stopped seeing free speech as an end to itself. I had to reconcile the limited options with the results I saw in communities.
I hated it. Eventually I had to ask why we value free speech in the first place.
And we value it because we value a fair marketplace of ideas. I see the goal as being able to have fair debates and exchanges of ideas between normal people.
And they suffer failings and weaknesses possible in any market place. So the goal is to ensure the marketplace is effective at being fair.
Perhaps you would have a different idea, and I am happy to hear it. If only to see a different solution.
And if you agree with me to some degree and also think that having effective market places is a good idea, thats fine too.
We Sure as heck need the average person to decide what principles need to be held up, and at what costs.
I know a guy who does this. He finds a problem, then tells ChatGPT about it. Then ChatGPT elaborates it into dross. He says look at the magical output, without reading it or bothering to understand it. Then posts it to the vendor. The vendor gets mislead and the original issue is never fixed. Then I have to start the process again from scratch after 2 weeks are wasted on it.
The root cause is that LLMs are a damage multiplier for fuckwits. It is literally an attractive hammer for the worst of humanity: laziness and incompetence.
