gregw2

Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!

Large Chinese companies seem to have researched+adopted HTAP much more in the last five years than US companies from what I can tell staying abreast of HTAP developments.

They replicated pingdb's control plane/metadata. Not the customer data. As I read it anyway.

So, to (mis-)summarize the Atlantic piece, we're doing this??:

1. We, Oceana, are at "war" with Eurasia. They're the worst! Our leaders have made friends with Eastasia. We can do great things together with Eastasia! Eastasia is great! <<Time passes.>> We won! Eurasia is dead!

2. We feel threatened by Eastasia! Eastasia has been stealing from us! We must prepare for battle with Eastasia! Eurasia is great aren't they! Eurasia always been great! We've always been at war with Eastasia!

3. ???

4. Profit!

(apologies to 1984 + slashdot)

Sounds like the earlier feeling of trying to do software development in the age of having executives trying to move most of that effort offshore to "arbitrage the labor differential".

I think the core point of the author is that scrum/agile is a bit of a decision processing framework with some of the responsibility split, more than a workload framework.

The author doesn't discuss kanban which is less overhead, but then makes collaboration acrossultiple scrum teams a bit trickier actually.

They reserve the right to sequence your DNA in the fine print last time I went to give blood over a year ago.

Presumably it's for medical research but that doesn't mean it similarly gets bought/sold for another purpose, sooner or later and possibly in bankruptcy like 23andme as mentioned by the parent poster who cared enough that I figured I'd warn them about less intuitive similar risks.

I think I have started to see similar language at doctors office paperwork recently but maybe I am misremembering. If you care about not getting sequenced, you have to read the fine print nowdays.

I hate to say it but fyi, don't give blood nowdays unless you read all the fine print they have an opt out policy you trust...

This is a nice piece of work. I particularly appreciated your webpage describing why Pivot is fast.

So what? Why should my life be ruled by money alone? Why should my life not have a mix of intrisic and extrinsic motivational drives? Why should I respect a company like OpenAI that disrespects my mix of extrinsic and extrinsic drives when I am the customer?

Or am I just a product to them?

I think you are right to note the undercurrent missing of "empowering" the people doing the solving.

This is in notable contrast to the "PC revolution" in the late 70s/early 80s, the marketing was all about equipping people, empowering individuals. It was a "personal" computer after all, not a big mainframe owned by corporate... designed to make you more powerful.

That messaging is wildly absent from the EA/SV-centric LLM/AI boom.

Instead it's about replacing you, the singularity, inevitability, fear-mongering, etc. And there is much more of a flavor of information asymmetry to the business model because of the Internet connectivity and SaaS structure to it all designed to enable the fastest possible feedback loops for the inventors combined with a bunch of pinkie promises with no actual controls possible on the user side at least for the frontier large models. What exactly did OpenAI peek at when doing Navier-Stokes and do they even know or would you trust them to tell you? You are right, it is a very different vibe.

The author proposes that the corollary to Goodheart's law is:

"Only measure that which you are comfortable turning into a target."

This is an interesting thought but I disagree and certainly logically wouldn't call it a corollary.

As someone managing a system, one approach is to have a balanced set of measurements and to hold some of them back so they can't be gamed by those being measured. I.e. have more measurememts than targets so you can detect alignment drift.