eureka-belief

Blood on his hands is a little strong. You don’t think the ethics might be little more subtle?

Wow thanks for sharing. The time flew by when I was reading. This is the fundamental lesson that humanity must learn. We must reject the impulse to give away our creativity to a mystical/technological sky daddy that incorporates us into its machine. And we must accept that might does not mean right.

I imagine the problem inside the company looks like this:

1) data science team collects numbers to suggest that the problem of Botz is catastrophically widespread

2) said numbers are presented to management. If they acknowledge the numbers are true, then they are indirectly under a fiduciary duty to report this to advertisers, which would cause a catastrophic drop in annual revenue figures.

3) Management panics and asked the data science team to look at the numbers again just a really really really really make sure that they are over blowing the problem. Meanwhile, they are hoping to fix the problem before any of this shows up any more in the revenue cycles.

The best interview that I ever had was one in which the dude wore a fedora and we white-boarded. And yes we talked about algorithms. But I got the sense that he didn’t care if I knew any particular thing per se so much as was trying to figure out if I would be a fun person to jam with on hard problems.

Deep down we all know what programming, was supposed to be about, which is when you drop the ego and channel your childlike creative curiosity to create something you love, or to find like truth. People who know how to reliably find this state and enjoy it will become an “intelligent” person regardless of their original IQ. When I hire a full time role now, I look for people who are best able to channel this in the context of our team and our mission.

The problems come in when the creative output of the programming is being managed in a capitalistic system. If you take capital with the plans to build something and make money, then you have an entirely new set of constraints. You committed to a deadline so now you lose the ability to say “no”. Most programmers hate scrum/agile with a passion because these processes are basically the manifestation between the conflicts and misunderstandings that happen between shareholders and creators.

The clear issue with your post is that doesn’t mention the several high profile cases in which X clearly was banning accounts and posts related to things like rival services or for criticizing musk. I’d post a summary here but there are lists you can Google.

Also you seem to be falling into the trap of “if you disagree with me then you must be biased”.

Could be both. It seems highest likely that at some point addiction to AI “companions” or entertainers will be a huge societal problem.

I was in a similar situation fresh out of college. I’ve been hacking code since the third grade but somehow I found myself working for a dev shop in the Midwest full of non hackers making BS software. I remember burning with the feeling of “this can’t be it”. So I basically set a rule for myself that every weeknight I would take my laptop to a coffee shop and hack on whatever got me excited. Over the span of a year I wrote a chess engine in python and learned web dev via Django. The next year I moved to the Bay Area and doubled my salary by joining a startup and worked with some of the most curious and intelligent people I had ever met.

Something that might help is to cultivate a list of developers who you respect and make sure to follow what they do. (Eg. I personally recommend following Theo or Primagen on social media) this helps alot with not feeling alone and with keeping your sights and standards high. You have to learn to not see what’s around you as the norm.

Above all, make curiosity the foundation of your coding routine and your career. I know that sounds cliche but if you can tap into the joyful energy of curiosity then you will have superpowers and will have meaning in your life even if you’re broke and alone.

Nah just learn to love more people. It’s the “one weird trick” we’ve all been looking for.

India has a boom in outsourcing right but it’s going to get squeezed especially hard from AI. I work with Indian web app developers from major Indian cities. In the last 10 years ive noticed that the technical ability of Indian devs has reach parity with dev in US or Europe. However, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to product design and communication chops because Indian dev teams were structured to be the coders as a service rather than product teams. The issue is that AI is on the cusp of being the coder as a service. If you want a job in software in the post AI era you basically need to be either cutting edge in some vertical or you need to basically be a product manager who also has the skills to manually debug the generated code.

But I 100% agree with your advice overall though. I tell people don’t be a coder unless you are the type of person who codes for fun.

If a young person says they want to make a living as a influencer/youtuber/writer/streamer/musician I would tell them to strongly reconsider unless they have a reason of substance besides pure ego to think they can beat the odds. When someone has the foundations to be one of those things it’s usually obvious. There have been people I’ve met in life who I thought “I’m not sure how but this person will be famous”. There many people who just don’t know how to judge their own skills and usually they just need to be pointed to the right place for information.

Tragically, many of the jobs that people dream of and grind for have secret underbellies that young dreamers don’t understand. For example, Hollywood is a vipers nest where films get made. The music industry had its own Weinstein/Epstein combo recently with Diddy. Politics is the same. The most direct path to success in these fields is being willing to sell your soul and body to powerful evil people. So to be successful in those fields with your dignity intact requires a very rare constitution.

Fascinating. I’m working on something similar right now though taking a slightly different approach so not a competitor. Lemme know if want to bounce ideas sometime.

The last section is the most important. There’s a massive difference between what you can do with the text output of an LLM versus being able to know and play with the individual weights, depending on your use case.

Is it elaborate? Such a fake out is a trope of basic game theory that would be easy to see for someone who understands basic data analysis. And the implementation would be trivial compared to the work the malicious actor has already gone through to sponsor the memberships.

The reality is, the economy is on a ticking timer for when it will be turned upside down by 1) LLM agent workflows 2) AGI 3) superintelligence. There are many companies who know this and want to hedge against that future but they simply don’t know how yet. The tricky part about productizing LLMs is that your product designers need to have a full understanding of LLMs and what they can and cannot do. So currently many of the existing product designs and AI user experiences still suck.

The biggest misconception is that just because chatbots are now more capable that somehow that means that you should replace your UI with one.

The wonder what kind of revenue they are hoping to get from the short amount of attention users will fork over when they are already stressed from traveling. And how does this revenue compared to the overall cost of the ticket. Are airline margins really that thin?

But they are a darn convenient mental model if you’re just trying to do some basic async. The alternatives are harder to wrap your head around. Unless I’m missing some other cool pattern.

I mean it’s one thing to say “we want to make a voice that’s friendly… like SJ, and then to imitate the voice. It seems insidious to ask someone to be the voice and then when that person says no you just use the voice anyways.

They should have just created a unique voice from the start. And they will likely do that moving forward.

I wonder how the business would be affected if the public opinion turned against him.

I agree that these archetypes exist generally speaking. And any team will inevitably have a certain degree of waste. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not very important for director level and above management to continually be looking for ways to restructure the system so that skilled and motivated employees can do their magic without BS. When I look back on my career, there were definitely some teams that were much better at this than others and it seemed to be correlated with how much original critical thinking managers were doing, as opposed to just executing industry playbooks by rote. It’s easier to do this on small teams. Harder to do this at scale. But that’s the game to be played even if it’s difficult.

It might be a stretch comparison, but if like to know whether the authors believed that they had other better data points or industry averages to refer to. Ultimately, the question is… “is spaceX putting profits above people”. And then how do you measure that in terms of industry norms.

Low effort claim to the point of being suspicious. Are you saying there isn’t a clear historical precedent of spy agencies of various governments trying (and in many cases succeeding) to influence politics and thought in other countries? Are you aware of the Snowden leaks, which demonstrated that the US itself does mass data collection both foreign and domestic? (ie. why would anyone be surprised if China does it)

Are you aware of the ongoing cyber attacks from China on US infrastructure? The power and reach of the Chinese super-surveillance network? The long-standing genocide of the Uyghurs? You think China would be willing to do all that to maintain the stability of the regime and its international sphere of influence and somehow just draw the line at surveillance via TikTok?

If you truly think that then that’s fine but I just wanted to double check that I was hearing you right.

If we’re going with heuristics, I propose one more… if he suddenly turns up dead from a heart attack, suicide, or drug overdose should we assume he was in over his head and he was taken care of by “market forces”?

If you think this is an example of one-sided journalism and want to convince anyone else if your position (as opposed to coming off as a one-sided musk supporter who compresses all musk critics into a single group and then strawman them), perhaps you could make a case why the firing of the supercharger team is actually the smart move here.

Broken link

If it’s a serious business idea you might want to address the elephant in the room… who actually wants to spend their time reading a book written entirely by AI? … which will end up having factual inaccuracies and a very bland writing style.

Or more to the point, what use cases would there be for such a tool that don’t involve tricking users into reading a book they didn’t know was AI generated?

Don’t the senders of these messages understand the risk of alienating the people they are trying to mobilize?

(My conspiratorial side wonders what’s stopping political opponents from spamming “black flag” messages… ie to reduce the turnout of a political cause they don’t like)

They are annoying but I don’t understand why they being used on a site would be correlated with usefulness. Pretty much any site that bad actors would want to spam or scrape would be incentivized to use them. (Whether they work or not is a separate question)

Big sites like Facebook and Reddit can avoid using them because they have teams dedicated to identifying bot accounts algorithmically. But anyways those aren’t working well so those platforms and their users are suffering as a result.

Large scale hacking of US companies, IP theft, brinksmanship regarding issue of Taiwan (backed by real incentive to follow through) where have you been?

Apps track information of all kinds about you and it’s not hard at all to link this data to your real world identity. Even just the search and watch history would be a goldmine for any foreign (or domestic) spy program, especially if you consider what was discussed in the Snowden leaks.

“The case for harm has not been made” Do you think the American government would say publicly “we know China is exploiting this data because that’s exactly what we do and China is even worse than us.

Not the most eloquent version of the larger argument against “term cleansing” that I’ve seen. I’ll give my version, via a series of statements:

1) love your neighbor as you love yourself

2) as an individual, try to speak words that reflect your heart

3) language is messy and as it evolves, semantics of innocent words can sometimes collide with the other semantics of the same words (eg black as in blacklist, or black as in the recent terminology for having more melanin)

4) giving a small vocal/powerful minority the power to retroactively redefine and police the semantics of words can be dangerous and should be considered an anti-pattern when trying to change peoples hearts.

5) in conclusion, focus one’s individual efforts mostly on #1 and #2 and ignore the haters on both sides until one day as a society we look back and find this all very silly.

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