It is really beautiful to see distilled to the core algorithm. Despite AK’s claim that everything else is simply optimization, I am sure there’s a bit more to training a useful frontier model! Still, an excellent teaching tool and nice way to spend an afternoon walking through the code.

While true, it's still a user-hostile move. You kinda have to meet your customers where they are. If people are clicking ads without knowing it, that's a serious design problem. Yes, people should learn to read, but the risk of placing too much burden on users is that all it takes is one ambitious product manager to push an A/B test that generates huge revenue wins while enshittifying the product for everyone else.

It's a design solution to "people not clicking enough ads".

> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers.

> we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.

There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.

It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.

Approach it from the other angle - what scenario would it be bad in. It's not hard to see very real possibilities in the short term where it does matter: A 16yro looks up on chatGPT how she can check discreetly whether she is pregnant or not and what potential avenues she has. The advertiser could literally by anyone targeting pregnancies, including government or action groups who now have some information about that user's conversations in this scenario.

Any data exfiltration or reporting on the users would quickly be developed by the industry to merge this information and improve inferences with confidence values on target populations/individuals.

You don't need ChatGPT to know that someone buying a pregnancy kit from you has an above average chance to be pregnant.

Who said they had to buy it to leak the information?

Replace the word buy with view and it will still be true.

But if they're only viewing it because it was put on their screen by ChatGPT, that's a non-consensual leak of personal information to the advertiser.

Hard disagree. Advertisers (or people with worse motives) will be very creative in how they use the targeting parameters offered by chatGPT ads and suddenly they can make educated guesses about groups or even individuals. I remember a couple years ago, someone posted a story about how they were able to circumvent Facebook rules and display ads for just one person: their roommates and used that to freak them out.

This feels like the end of a nice era, we all knew its coming but enjoyed an ad free experience while it lasted

I also have questions about the data flows. 1. If I have a conversation about robotic cats, will OpenAI share how many people like me talk about this topic? 2. If I click an ad, will OpenAI share why the ad was relevant to the advertisement.

Anyways, I think they will be doing both. So conversation data would not be sold to advertisers, but statistics will be given freely.

If you’re referring to body shop consulting agencies this may be true, but IME as an IC consultant in DS/ML, my rates are well above Staff+ at FAANG, and nobody has ever tried to leetcode interview me. Yes, I have to do a lot of smooth talking, but performance is extremely transparent: if I don’t deliver, I don’t get paid. Honestly I doubt I could pass a leetcode style interview, and I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore.

That and there are high-quality boutique consulting firms that are happy to pay big bucks for super skilled people

You're right, of course, there are suitable alternatives that work well. There are some things that will just be easier to manage such as Parental controls, backups, and Family features. Additionally, I've lost basic tech support skills on iOS. Part of my motivation for originally switching to android was to gain familiarity with the ecosystem, but now I've fallen behind on the iOS world and can barely use my kid's ipad.

I lean towards your viewpoint as well. Their assumptions (axioms, postulates?) are highly controversial, while the actual principles seem quite sound to me.

The only issue I can see is with #5. I would argue for decision making, you absolutely need a single metric, otherwise the process collapses into bickering over which measure is more important at the time (often for political or interpersonal reasons). The point is a bit vague on what exactly is being evaluated (product quality, which means what?). For launching products or running A/B tests, aim for a single metric as your decision framework. If you must have more than one, then be explicit about the tradeoffs in a flowchart: e.g., "if X is > 0, we launch. If x <= 0, but y > 2%, we launch, otherwise no launch".

There are too many insightful and thoughtful points in your comment for a single upvote to repay, so I must thank you with a reply. Becoming so demoralized with the present media and political landscape, it is comforting to find that there still remain semblances of reason for which I may again briefly restore some measure of sanity. Thank you.

Thank you for reading all of that. I read a lot and tend to be long-winded when I write and I know that a lot of people's attention spans are pretty short. I'm glad you found something of value in the words. That was my hope.

You're welcome.

Think of the people you've helped get their jobs done over the years. That's worth more than author credit in the colophon of a man page.

The man page has ... probably helped plenty of people get their jobs done over the years!

edit: or the program the man page is documenting!

Your first point is fair too. Commands are useless if nobody documents their usage.

Bluff? Putin wants to live out his golden years in unabated luxury after anointing a loyal successor. If he nukes the entire world, he will live in squalor and misery while being hunted by the entire human race. He won't do it. Me hopes. Me also hopes someone in his inner circle gets a nice clean view of the back of his head and does the world a favor.

I mean you're right, but... he already lives in unimaginable luxury, wanting for nothing. Has for decades. Could continue to do so for 100 lifetimes. And yet here we are.

Any recommendations for best practices in "modern C++"? I have to resurrect an old codebase and would like to refactor it using more modern idioms, but its been a loooong time since I wrote any decent c++.