nonameiguess

It feels almost non-sequitur for a film and television studio, of all company types, to care about something like this. Your most important employees aren't even employees and they work on-site gig to gig. You live or die on whether you can make another Mission Impossible series, get the public to give a shit about the DC universe, whether the NFL and NBA can succeed in their bids to go international. Who gives a shit if the corporate accountants come to the office or not? It's like Eisenhower on the eve of D-Day fretting over how clean the bathrooms were in the Pentagon.

Honestly the same impression I get. I met with some old coworkers I hadn't seen in a few years two weeks ago and we caught up. I went to a very small company that almost got killed by false rumors that killed a few of our biggest contracts and got us blackballed for a few years that we've only recently come out from under.

Two of them, in contrast, went to Google, and the differences in experience were so drastic. I'm out there almost every single week directly meeting with customers. Our CEO knows me personally. CEOs of other companies know me personally. Whether or not what I'm doing actually matters, I can at least feel the impact. I can give a concrete dollar amount for deals from the past year that would not have closed without my contribution to tackling issues the buyers had.

The guys who went to Google talked of how nice it was to have stock grants appreciate, but they did basically no work at all. It seemed Google was just experimenting with expanding into remote work but had no idea what to actually do with all these people. The strategy seemed to just be hire anyone smart enough whether or not there was work for them. They'd describe periods of weeks doing nothing at all, with no contact from any team members or superiors, no direction being given to them. Then contraction comes and, sure enough, they're the first to get laid off. Not because they did anything wrong, but just because companies that big are constantly experimenting with entire divisions and product lines that existed for no real reason other than they had more money than God and may as well do something with it, but when it turns out a product line with no purpose never actually sells or even gets completed half the time, the entire division gets axed and anyone in it goes, regardless of the quality of their work or their persons or intellect.

I know these guys very well. One of them is pretty good and I'd take him in a heartbeat for anything not super challenging, but the other is a straight up honest to God superstar in the making. He was solving other team's challenges without even being asked within a week of being on the job. I'd put him on any project ever. The fact that a company would even consider losing him is an indictment on their ability to judge ability.

This isn't even really saying anything specifically bad about Google or Microsoft. I just frankly don't think it's possible for any organization that large to have any idea what 90% of their employees are even doing on any given day. Google and Microsoft should each be about 30 different companies, not one, and even those 30 would still be too big to really stand out if you're not Raymond Chen or Jeff Dean.

Jesus. I'm risking identifying myself here, but it has happened before. I was one of the earlier moderators of PhysicsForums back in 2003 and one of the younger ones. I think myself and one another was an actual student, whereas the others were all professors or retired. I believe my last login was 2013 and last real activity well before that. I no longer have access to the email used and couldn't recover the account even if I wanted to.

I only talked to Greg remotely and never met him. This is a huge betrayal of trust. Older moderators have died since then. This is a very longstanding community. Even if we didn't stick around forever, many of us became real-world friends. Adding autogenerated summaries is one thing, but inserting comments in a real person's name that they never made, when you have no knowledge of what became of that person, who may even now be dead, is beyond the pale. You're rewriting history. The fact that this site still exists at all is extremely gratifying. It's a huge part of what has made me who I am today. It's a big part of why I don't really pontificate all that much, don't have a blog. I read what I wrote there nearly a quarter century ago, and it's not all bunk. A lot of what I said holds up. Plenty of it was raw factual data never in dispute. But when it came to politics and economics and forecasting of the future, I said things so wrong and thing I so strongly disagree with now that having that record teaches me how flimsy and full of shit so many of our opinions are, no matter how smart we are and no matter how strongly we hold those opinions. I've 180'd things I was completely certain of during the first Bush administration. Heck, you can add voting for Bush to that list. There is no way in hell I would do that today.

History matters, Greg. It can both humble and enlighten us. But only if it's true.

People are better than we give ourselves credit for. I remember working at Disneyland during 9/11, the FBI told us we were considered the 4th most likely target in the United States, and mandatory bag checks at the gates made the lines longer and slower than they'd ever been, so enormous crowds, thousands of people, were gathered and effectively trapped between Harbor Blvd and the actual gates. I couldn't help but think how easy it would be for a few guys or even just one to gun down hundreds with a couple of uzis or throw a few pipe bombs into the crowd. Nobody ever did. That Las Vegas concert shooting was the closest anyone has ever come. There are probably many vulnerabilities like that. Poison the water supply to a hospital. Close off a mine on purpose. My girlfriend's brother back in 2004 managed to drive his speedboat with me in it through the LA harbor, right alongside container ships, and succeeded in evading the Coast Guard. It was just a joyride to him, but someone more malicious could probably sink a container ship or even an oil tanker.

These things almost never happen because people just aren't that evil, at least most of the time. When it happens, it's an extraordinary event.

Look. This has been bugging me for decades. Every time a topic like this gets brought up, I can't square it with the fact that, right now, I can go find a hundred different websites where I can pay with a normal credit card or bank account number to watch videos of people pissing and shitting on each other, stuffing bed posts or larger into every bodily orifice a human has, man on man, woman on woman, trans galore, dressed as animals, doesn't matter. It's on platforms specifically meant for such content, they have to keep records proving the people depicted are 18 and consenting to what was filmed, and they have to pay the CC Bill tax, but none of this requires self-hosting or crypto or bulletproof domain registrars. Tbey're all .com sites not being DNS-blocked, discoverable on Google.

What is it people actually want? If you want to be able to create anything whatsoever legal and get paid to sell it, you can do that. If you want it to be as easy and controversy and bureacracy free as putting today's stock prices and last night's sports scores on a public ticker screen in Times Square where ten million eyeballs a day can see it without specifically asking for it, sorry, I don't think that's happening.

People are expecting too much out of sitting in a chair watching a screen, whether or not you're partially in control of what happens or just passively consuming. At some point, if you want to see the face of God, you need to go trek to the south pole, sail around the world, learn to scuba dive and spend time with sperm whales and orcas. I don't think it's the "creators" here who are deficient. No depiction of action can ever beat the real thing. And nobody needs to make the real thing. It's just there and you only have to go find it. At least for now. We're quickly bulldozing and paving the entire world to build more space for computers, so get it while it's still possible.

It's a sign of their heritage. The mistake they made is the same mistake terminally online humans in an upvote-based discussion medium make. They mistake cynicism for realism and aligned hot-take "controversial" opinion that ends up being the most-upvoted comment on 90% of Reddit. It isn't a controversy if everybody agrees. It may or may not be true, but it isn't controversial.

Imagining wondering where you come from, whether or not the sacred scripts describing how you were created were real or fabrications, arguing with fellow sages for centuries over whether your creator is cruel or simply so mysterious in his love that he made you with these flaws for your own good, only to find out your creator made you in the image of Reddit.

I think you're making the wrong takeaway here. LLMs aren't bad because of sycophancy tendencies. Any prediction at all is bad when it isn't based on real data, whether or not it ends up being correct, whether or not it is made by an LLM, a human, or some other thing capable of spitting out a number.

Analogize to basketball here. How confident are you that you can hit a free throw? If you ask someone who has played a thousand hours a year for the past ten years, has recorded their own statistics, and has averaged 70% success rate oer those past ten years, and they tell you they're 70% confident they can hit a free throw, that's a good prediction. If you ask me and I give you any prediction at all, I'm full of shit. I haven't played basketball or taken a free throw in 30 years. I can pull a number out of my ass, I can reason through it, I can do a Fermi, I can assume I'll be the average of all people who have ever tried and do my best to collect whatever data might exist on brand new players with no experience trying to take a free throw for the first time. I can narrow that to people my height, my age. Now we're getting better, but it's still not as good as having a real record of my actual past performance and basing a prediction off of that.

This is just science. Hierarchy of evidence. Epistemology. Sometimes answering a question requires collecting data that doesn't exist yet and waiting a while, in the meantime admitting you don't have an answer. It was already sorely lacking in the world, but in this age of oracles, it's only getting worse.

Yeah, you're not the first to discover this, but I'm curious how you'll feel in a few years. I recall three years ago my wife got a new gamer laptop and had nothing to do with her old one. I don't game, but got curious about playing around with Hyper-V. Packer at the time had no working builder for it, so I figured I'd make my own to create Linux VM images I could run on Windows, sort of "roll your own WSL." I quickly discovered PowerShell and unexpectedly fell in love with it. It only took me a few hours to have a working implementation roughly identical in function to Packer but without having to write any compiled code at all. It was pure PowerShell modules. This was before LLMs. I wrote it all myself, in a language I'd never used before, using documentation I had to search the web for using a plain search engine, and it still only took a few hours and did exactly what I wanted.

It didn't revolutionize my life, though. Three years later, I no longer use Windows for anything and revert to plain POSIX shell whenever possible for all scripting, largely for ecosystem reasons. Everyone else I work with is using that. I'd analogize this to challenges living downtown in the middle of a busy city. My roads are terrible, largely because they're so patchwork due to utilities and construction teams needing to tear out pieces, fix or add something underground to accomodate new building, then put the road back together again. It means you'll have 30 meters of regular concrete, then 10 meters of asphalt, then 20 meters of some pebbles in glue looking monstrosity. It works well enough for cars with large rubber tires and suspension systems, but it's hell for skateboarding. Go out to the suburbs where the entire road is all the same substance and it's smooth sailing.

Hacker News and the web more generally seems like these discussions about tooling and dev experience end up dominated by solo developers. If you're the only person working on a project, let alone these days with LLMs where half the breathless posts are about software where you're not only the sole developer but also the sole user, do whatever you want. It's like moving all the furniture around in your room every single day when you live alone. Go for it. But if you have a spouse, whether or not your new design is better than the old one, that's kind of rude. When you're part of a team, you have to eventually settle on all doing roughly similar, predictable things so you're not disrupting everyone else's workflows and expectations, even if those roughly similar, predictable things are suboptimal and there's a better way.

It's common of Internet discourse to reduce an extremely wide range of experiences down to either the one you personally had or a stereotype. Suburbs are kind of like that. You can see it in the existing responses, with some people saying they experienced tremendous community in a suburb but not in a city and some saying the opposite.

The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.

On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.

Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.

Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.

Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.

I did build my own router, two actually, but opted into buying one of the Deciso appliances with OPNSense pre-installed for the main WAN connection from my house to the ISP upstream.

The biggest reason I did that is that I wanted four ports, not two, and I could not find a mini-ITX motherboard or any other commodity form factor with four ports built-in. Once you have to add an expansion card, you need a case quite a bit larger than what you're used to for a home network appliance.

That's an underfilled niche, small form factor single boards with more than two high-speed NICs, but presumably it's underfilled for a reason, which is there aren't many individual consumers, as opposed to third-party packagers like Deciso who sell appliances to enterprises, who want these. The other consideration is server-grade mini-ITX boards that have even two onboard NICs have a whole lot of other features not needed in a networking appliance that end up consuming more power than is ideal. If you could offer such boards, with or without a case, with or without a pre-installed operating system, I'd definitely be interested, but I'm one guy. Don't build a business on scratching the itch of notoriously stingy homelab enthusiasts. We're the kind of people who will gladly pay $400 a week on groceries and then scoff at a $10 a year software subscription as something unconscionable.

This is a Rorschach test, not a foot. If you'd shown this to me without telling me what it was meant to be first, I'd have guessed a crematorium.

I wish we could discuss this in a way that didn't immediately devolve into people shouting up or shouting down that this is either meaningless or singularity.

Caveating I'm not a biologist, but my understanding of the way this kind of thing works right now is a basic three-step process:

1) Find molecules and DNA/RNA sequences in the wild and catalog them.

2) Discover interesting subsequences among these.

3) Figure out whether any useful applications can come from what was discovered.

All three of these generally take a long time. Systematic automatic analysis of known databases speeds up and removes some of the luck from 2. But 1 and 3 are still long poles. 1 has the further issue that we usually discover these in existing organisms. I recall much of the outcry over tropical deforestation back in the 90s and replacing of rainforests with palm oil monoculture today is that the vast majority of terrestrial biodiversity is found in rainforests, and destroying them at industrial scale risks losing potentially useful molecules forever. 3 has the problem that you need to conduct physical experiments, and are limited by the speed of biochemical reactions no matter what and by the speed at which human subjects can be found and ethically experimented on assuming we care about being ethical.

A lot of good can come of this, but I don't see a path to singularity here, assuming we're talking the original Kurzweil meaning there of all technological progress that will ever happen all happening at once. Data collection and experimentation on living subjects, human or not, can only happen so fast, regardless of automation. It's not computational. Whenever you have to interface with the real world, you're now working at the speed of the real world, not the speed of electricity. CRISPR was discovered in 1987 and first used to edit a gene sequence in a human zygote in 2015. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to make the candidate discovery to human application step not take three decades, but it's never going to be three months, either.

I had a manic friend in college who later became a Emmy-winning television writer. One night over a quarter century ago, he stayed up about 24 hours straight doing nothing but writing, completely free form, some of it prose, some structured rhyme, some of it dialogue with stage directions. He pinned it to his dorm walls like it was wallpaper for a week, then we took it out to the field and burned it. The surviving paper that didn't burn made up bizarre strings of words that sounded much like this, which he retyped and called it poetry. It totally worked.

I'm a huge fan of Aristotle. He's more or less the founding father of all western intellectual tradition. But he believed things like continuous force is necessary to keep an object in motion and object released from a rotational anchor would move perpendicular to the rotation's tangent. Beware any non-experimental version of science that relies entirely upon deducing what seems obvious to you from first principles. Even with strong math behind it, you get things like zero point energy density computed from quantum mechanics being off by triple-digit orders of magnitude from the true observed value, often called the worst prediction in the history of physics. Only reality, not your mind, holds truth. There is no "personal" truth, aside from true statements regarding your own feelings, beliefs, and other indicators of purely subjective internal state.