ajbt200128

fair enough

Sorry Bence I trust the FT journalists to have due diligence w.r.t. what evidence of AR they got from investors (who got it from OpenAI). I completely believe that the company helmed by "not consistently candid" sama bullshits investors about their AR which is the point of this article.

Though I agree with your sentiment that FT is reporting this stuff in a way to stir the pot and create outrage. Speculating about a private company like this is stupid.

this is rage bait whether intentional or not. Next time please think before you blog

Wow Stephen Dolan never fails to impress

> we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.

> [...]

> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.

Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...

> We’ve created systems so intricate and interconnected that human reasoning fails, then declared the tools that help us navigate this complexity to be essential.

Yes??? I personally cannot understand the complexity of a single compiler yet alone all the libraries and systems that might contribute to a program, but maybe I'm just not trying hard enough

Thats a good call out, I was definitely being hyperbolic re: no one was misusing the expanded title IX definitions, and I appreciate the anecdata, since you're right that I was not alive back then and so don't have a grasp of exactly what it was like. I trust you that it happened back then, and I have also seen similar situations happen now.

> I imagine that a lot of these cases are not related to being a woman — it’s just general shithead behavior

I agree, a lot of these cases are just shithead behavior, but a lot of them are not, and were overtly sexual in nature (though not direct, but maybe thats up to interpretation), or just overtly sexist. E.g. discussing sexual fantasies or their ongoing sexual escapades, commenting on bodies in a sexual manner that may not be an advance but instead negative in nature etc. But I would agree even within that, title IX may sometimes be overkill, and I've said that to friends and peers myself.

But this exchange touches upon why I still think PGs essay is not worth a charitable read, and just overall more or less harmful. We both have anecdata about correct and incorrect uses of title IX, ways that title IX could be better, etc. How society should treat this and other issues relating to class and abuses of power is an important discussion to have and should be ongoing. What PG is doing is claiming that changes to title IX (along with his other examples of wokeness/priggishness) are in conflict with "truth":

>Surely if truth should prevail anywhere, it should be in universities; that's supposed to be their specialty; but for decades starting in the late 1980s the politically correct tried to pretend this conflict didn't exist.

Which, given your anecdata, is sometimes a fair assessment, and given mine, sometimes unfair. But PG does not allow this nuance in his arguments, and completely disregards the problems any of his examples were trying to treat in the first place. In fact he claims that the thought process that leads to these changes causes disaster, and need to be stopped.

So PG is not directly arguing whether or not the 1980s title IX change was effective in its goals, but instead arguing that the type of thought that lead to that change (and others) simply needs to be stopped entirely. There is no allowance in his argument to affect change, with a deft touch or otherwise, to these societal issues. The only change he suggests are ways to stop or tune out those trying to solve these issues.

Contrast that with Adrienne maree brown's essay https://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel... Although a different type of writing for a different crowd, it also acknowledges that cancel culture (or wokeness, priggishness, whatever) is harmful and must come to an end, but acknowledges that the problems that have spawned it are real and still need to be fixed.

> We must all do our work. Be accountable and go heal, simultaneously, continuously. It’s never too late.

I agree with the definition pg gives in the first two paragraphs of what a prig with, which is why I suggested you reread past that section. As OP said, DEI initiatives are regularly hollow and performative. Re: dongle gate and the other hypotheticals, sure, not great, I agree enforcing arbitrary rules isn't good for society, and we really gain nothing.

Let's look at this essay critically, and let's not doing any legwork for PG. He has an opening statement about priggishness that, again I agree with, and then (eventually) dives into examples that we're discussing re: hostile environment. Does this example support his argument about what wokeness is?

You claim that the goal of this example is for PG to provide evidence

> that this expansion to include a "hostile environment" makes it fall under the "eye of the beholder", which makes it a lot more vague and arbitrary. ...

Which i agree is PGs point in introducing this example as he says so himself

>But the vagueness of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas.

So we have this example, and we can clearly identify how PG /thinks/ it supports his argument. This is where I disagree, and like almost all of the examples in the essay, it does not support his argument.

Do you believe that, as PG says, in 1986 and the following few years, (not now, we'll save that for later, he specifically is talking about the 1980s) this title IX ruling that expanded the definition was misused in a priggish sense, to punish people arbitrarily, and that it did not support women? Talk to some women who were alive at that time, and you'll soon realize that yes, outside of direct sexual advances there are many things that professors would do or say to dehumanize female students. So by giving these students a mechanism to hold professor accountable for dehumanizing them, we are... supporting them!

Now maybe you believe that is the minority case, and that in general this was misused. Would you trust women in the 1980s to decide for themselves whether or not they were being sexually harassed by a professor in this expanded definition? Remember, the original definition was just when a professor/whoever would make a direct sexual advance. Ok, so say we trust women to know when they themselves are being sexually harassed. Do you think that men were going around in the 80s accusing professors of sexual harassment? Yea probably not. So who was misusing this? Basically no one. Who was benefiting from it? Women. So this is not priggish in any sense.

As far as today goes, I went to university within the past few years, at a very woke school even by my standards, and even with this expanded definition, I have not heard of any professors suffering from false accusations of sexual harassment. I have had quite literally dozens of friends tell me their experiences where professors dehumanized, belittled them, or have even blatantly asked for sexual favors or been assaulted by them. And of course these reports go through title IX, with this expanded definition, and even today rarely is a professor's career upended. So even today, not priggish.

You can rinse and repeat this for almost any example pg gives. His examples do not support his argument at all. So either his initial argument is wrong, or this essay is just plain bad. Either way it's worthless as a way to defend the argument we both agree on. OP explains why it's also harmful.

Thank you for the breath of fresh air, and helping reduce the echo chamber that hn can be sometimes

Read his essay again, past the first two paragraphs. Look at the social movements he describes as priggish, woke, politically correct etc.

> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."

> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia

Going by the examples pg gives, anyone willing to support women, or LGBT, is a prig. Don't let his abstract theory cloud the rest of the essay. He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.

> What does it mean now? [...] > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

sure yup. Performative social justice bad. Now lets continue reading and see what PG thinks is performative.

> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.

> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."

> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia

> Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida.

> Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness

> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America.

note: it's ok PG, you can say the cop murdered him. no one will cancel it for you (except maybe the right).

Wow you're right PG, all of this IS performative, because none of it has actually helped anyone you know and respect. It's just helped women, POC, LGBT etc.

TL;DR; PG like most billionaires hates when anyone like him is held accountable, would rather see humanity suffer than not be able to say whatever he wants.

thank you for the sane comment. adrienne maree brown is wonderful

Amazing work again! EmacsConf was as fun as ever this year

anyone find his hacker news account yet?

Will probably be one of the more ethical players in the crypto space. I'm excited for my electricity prices to go back down, currently paying ~$85 to PGE for a "delivery fee" which is absolutely criminal

Wondering what the difference is between this and juicefs?

Product Hunt inherently cannot be """Gentrified"""". There are no limited resources and no real community to disrupt. There are no laws or systems that have been changed or weaponized to push out a marginalized group. Please choose a better analogy

Glad they're finally taking the mask off. Hope the IRS clawsback as much as they can

> If you're screening to only candidates who can code in the language your company primarily works with, you're missing good candidates.

I agree with that. I work somewhere that uses a lot of OCaml, we don't screen out those who don't know OCaml, but it usually helps them, since static analysis is easier with an ML family language than say, javascript.

> We want to map the candidate to whatever language in our repository of "this question in different langs" is closest

If there's not a close language in any of your repositories for the candidate, then I think that's a good signal that candidate may not be a great fit. As mentioned before, we don't necessarily ask candidates to write OCaml, most functional languages will have a similar bug + fix.

> problem statement to debugged bug what if the problem you might normally run into is perf issues related to the language? I.e. HFTs usually use C++ and perf = $$$. I would agree that yes, those who have worked on say Rust could be good candidates, but if someone has years of experience in writing highly performant C++, and that's what the job requires, probably easier to look for those candidates.

I definitely agree with you in general, just pointing out that there are times where being familiar with the language used is desirable.

> You’ll need at least one question per language that you want to allow people to interview in. ... “Was this performance poor because they’re bad at debugging, or just unfamiliar with this language’s tools?”

Not necessarily a con. Different languages/tech stacks have very different tools. I.e. debugging a GC issue is different than debugging a network issue is different than debugging an embedded issue. If you chose a language for a very good reason, then it's not a con to filter out those who aren't familiar with that language enough to debug an issue in it

Is this satire?

> // SAFETY: do you trust me?

No.

Have you seen the safer-ffi crate? Then you won't have to commit the deadly sin of writing unsafe Rust