PumpkinSpice

Sort of, but isn't the focus on prompts a bit myopic? The huge difference between earlier GPTs and ChatGPT was RLHF, which not only makes it better at following prompts, but also enforces a lot of hidden dogma. It certainly influences how ChatGPT talks about climate change or AI risks, for example.

This is actually a very lucid way to frame this. People love to complain that "Google is useless now," but it's pretty clearly not the case if you look at how most people use search.

What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.

What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.

Huh? Car maintenance is a rational, physical necessity. I don't need to compliment my car for it to start on a cold day. I'd like it to stay this way.

Having to be unconditionally nice to computers is extremely creepy in part because it conditions us to be submissive - or else.

This is such a weird topic in the ham community. The reason this restriction exists has nothing to do with the retro-justifications used by the community.

For a long time, the US government genuinely feared that ham radio would be used for espionage. It had listening stations across the nation to monitor all communications. It flat out shut down the entire service (!) during WWII. And it came up with the idea that you have to communicate in the open, and that no form of obfuscation or encryption is permissible.

And then hams came up with this roundabout explanation that actually, it's good that you can't have privacy. No matter that it holds back a hobby that is by all usage metrics dying, and that there are many countries where encryption is allowed and doesn't lead to any terrible outcomes.

Privacy is useful in hobby uses. Maybe you want to talk to your spouse without a nosy neighbor listening. Maybe you want to periodically beacon your GPS location without the whole world knowing. There are so many cool things you can do, and there is spectrum that is... quite frankly, largely dead right now, and if you don't encourage new uses, it will be reclaimed by the government.

It's literally the playbook of every single business. Database vendors and graphics card manufacturers tout studies that show their product performs better. Pharmaceutical companies pay researchers who conduct studies that show their stuff works. If Safeway wants a zoning variance to open a new store, they will pay for an environmental impact study that says it's fine.

I'm not saying this to convince you should trust this study. But I think it's important to recognize it's absolutely happening everywhere, not just in the industries we don't like. Most of the research we read was paid for, and an overwhelming majority of it reaches the conclusion that aligns with the views of the researchers or of whoever is footing the bill.

Yes, it probably applies to the most qualified hires, so probably folks who are already around $1M total comp where they are.

But the most important point is, you don't get that money now, and maybe never. The most likely scenario where you get that kind of a payday is if they go public and if the pre-IPO pie-in-the-sky valuation holds for a good while.

It might. But it's far more of a gamble than your FAANG stock.

The work culture isn't putting kids in front of computer screens and discouraging outdoor activities.

It's not even something you can control as a parent. My kid, 16 years old, walks to school on his own - but he's always back right after classes. And it's not that he's an outcast. That's just how they roll in the SF Bay Area. Other kids go home too, or they are shuttled by their parents to some organized after-school activities.

You're not describing a position taken by sane libertarians, though. Their argument is different: that if the government didn't regulate so much, customers would depend on the merchant's reputation, possibly backed by independent testing done by private sector institutions. A modern-day parallel would be electrical safety. In the US, this is largely handled by private organizations such as the UL. You can buy a non-UL extension cord or a toaster if you want.

And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.

I'd go a bit further with this claim. Most of what's being done in this space is about inventing new retro aesthetics, not about faithfully approximating how things worked in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, color TVs of that era didn't really have pronounced scanlines. They also didn't have thick, lightly-colored, reflective bezels.

I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that we liked these visuals back then because we had much lower standards, not because CRTs had some magical properties that made the games look awesome.

I see the problem a bit differently. Perhaps a society could function in a model like that. But we decided it's too burdensome and we ceded this responsibility to the government. In such a world, it is paradoxically more dangerous to come across some under-regulated niche, because our default assumption is that the government took care of the risk. It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric.

This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.

Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.

Well, HN isn't a forum with a well-defined "expert" scope. It's a link aggregator for nerdy news. If you get bored with Rust, you talk about ChatGPT. Or CPU design. Or biotech. Almost anything goes.

I think this makes it immune to the patterns described in the article, although there are other ways for such communities to die. The decline of Slashdot is a cautionary tale.

That's gonna be tough with phonetics across several thousand languages... not to mention regional slang and other subculture stuff. I think the surest bet is just to avoid short names. If it's four or five letters, the likelihood of a collision is high. Stuff like Josephine, Gabriella, or Nathaniel is probably pretty safe.

Most of these are commonly shortened and then you're back in the danger zone, but then, at least you have the option of reverting to the long form without jumping through any legal hoops.

None of this is a problem in any objective sense. It's just that if your goal is to use one name across two languages, it's not exactly what you get in this scenario.

Stuff like that doesn't bother me at all, but I bumped into quite a few immigrants who had strong preferences one way or the other.

This is actually a pretty interesting problem and the website doesn't do it full justice.

Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone.

Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down - so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly annoying.

Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck.

There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.