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I have only one resolution: to do the greatest year of work of my life.

With that in mind, I bid you a very fond farewell, HN.

Tip for anyone suffering from viral fatigue - I had a bad case a few years ago and it was only strength training that turned it round. That's as simple as learning to use the weight machines at the gym.

Crazy as it might sound, you can literally do this by listening to your feet!

Yourself or others may find _it is exactly what has fallen apart_.

Exercise is magical, it gives you superpowers of focus and confidence that you can solve all problems. If everything is going wrong, it's the first place to check - are you exercising? If not, fix that. And maybe everything else goes away.

What you’re missing here regards diversity and volume.

Diversity: because language models are in some sense capturing an average (even if that average can be from a subset of training data), its comments will not be very diverse. I suspect if you try sampling away from the center of the distribution, you’ll find the quality degrades to nonsense.

Volume: the biggest problem is that you’ll end up with complete overwhelm of plausible comments. Language models cannot reason, which means they are incapable of producing the best insights (they can probably provide insight through “monkeys at typewriters” effects).

So the smart human who has analysed the subject really well, who currently has to rise above a certain amount of background noise, will now get completely swamped by it.

Does that mean murdering people in the cause of climate change prevention is ok?

I don’t think literally everything else matters less. I don’t think there’s a simple “matters” scale.

Most crucially, an important cause in itself does not justify any means whatsoever.

Merry Christmas everyone, even those who argued with me despite clearly being incorrect :-) thanks for continually challenging and educating me, HN. I know of no better way to keep track of trends and hear other opinions.

Also note that the cultural change around advertising within an AI chat interface could then lead to similar monetisation within human conversations too, ie WhatsApp -> WhatsAd

Bit OT but generally speaking if you care about company culture and want to build something great, acquiring mature companies is not the way to go. You end up with an alien culture you can’t integrate into your own. This is why Apple only buy companies they absolutely have to, and specifically early stage where the culture has not ossified yet.

So don’t buy GM - or Twitter…

I think the more generous reading here is that “usual” = “net positive for the world”

Interesting, but is the “date flexible” approach really workable? How does the rest of the business work if the deadline is May, then August, then the following year? At least with the fixed date method you know that a bunch of stuff will be shipped at that date, and you can always have an adjustable plan for eg marketing.

PG left because of censorship. Now he’s back. He’s a smart considered guy so it’s interesting to ask why he went back. We all have to make similar decisions, and one way we do that is to look to leadership.

There are always ethical compromises engaging with the real world, and there are few hard and fast rules to follow.

If PG is reading, I’d love to hear the thinking behind going back.

Is there a list of universities that don't do this kind of thing? I wouldn't want to send my kids to a university that published this, I want them to think for themselves. I certainly will strongly discourage them from applying to Stanford. Are there others I should be wary of?

(incidentally, not _all_ of the list is ridiculous, but most of it clearly is)

How do we know if this is a joke or not. Some of them definitely read tongue in cheek.

The Startup way: make a list of features you want to build for your next "release" / deadline. Make that really minimal, what really matters to your users? Tell people you're doing the next "version" by that date, but don't go to far into specifics if you can. E.g. you can say you'll have feature x where there are variants of that feature x1/x2/x3 of increasing difficulty.

If you need to, build prototypes of the features to get a feel for how difficult they may be. Then you've got a set of features you _think_ you can get done by the deadline.

Write down the spec where folks can see it. The deadline should be say < 8 weeks away. No scope creep in that time. Stick to what you have.

Then get to work. One rule: you will ship at that deadline. You can actually ship individual features beforehand if you do CD etc. You can use feature flags to hide the features for most users if you want to have them feel like a "version" has been released. But that deadline is set in stone and you do not move it (you can allow say a week slack to be reasonable, but probably keep that to yourself if you're a manager and only use it if you absolutely have to e.g. a key dev gets sick in the final week etc.)

As the deadline approaches, things will go wrong. Keep the deadline. Cut the spec. Firstly, cut to simpler versions of the features. Second, start dropping features.

Ship. People will be annoyed you haven't shipped feature Y that got dropped. Gauge the response. Now for your next "release", Y or Z is top of the list.

After the deadline has passed, give folks a period to recover as you decide what's next, cut them some slack and then go again.

This is the only answer I have to estimation.