softwaredoug

I think gruff language is fine if it’s allowed from both directions. I’m sure Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson cursed at each other a lot.

But when one side can do it and the other side can’t, it’s just a demonstration of power edging into abuse.

Just makes me think how we have encouraged a generation of tech leaders to be complete assholes with no consequences. That “loser thinking” line should never be accepted in any company discourse, even from leadership. If this person wasn’t an exec, they’d be shown the door for that language.

Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?

In the early 90s, I didn't get along with my Dad. I was a nerdy kid that didn't seem to fit in.

Star Trek TNG + Captain Picard acted as a male role model, a different moral philosophy, and a celebration of nerdy people as competent and important in the world

I wonder how long it'll pay for frontier labs to use compute this way?

I'm reminded of the Apollo program that was cool for a while, but eventually the public lost interest.

Maybe it becomes cheaper? Maybe other labs want to prove their worth will pick up the slack when another loses interest?

It’s not the software development that’s hard. It’s the data science and domain knowledge to build a good training set and a meaningful objective.

This is like saying we don’t need Dropbox because we have FTP servers.

People vastly underrate the patience of people to learn and setup a classifier. Jev is one API call. Training a good classifier is hard.

I discussed taking a PM role at a mid sized company recently. They were so locked into their classic definition of PM, and so against considering with AI a true PM must straddle product and engineering competencies. I felt a bit sad for their org, and I turned down the role.

We’re not ambitious because the economics are unimaginative cost saving. Large, complex orgs turning a team from 10 developers to two is the easy optimization. Meanwhile smaller companies are more focused on discarding old role definitions that don’t make much sense, and embracing fluid roles mixing tech and business.

Yes exactly. And I’m not sure we want agents with that level of autonomy to decide what functionality is important and what to leave in place.

IMO slop usually comes from overly defensive programming from LLMs. They’re loath to remove code and simplify, because unless we humans tell them some code / use case is unimportant, they have no reason to not care about it.

So agents can make these overly complex solutions trying to make bulletproof implementations and prevent regressions.

It requires a human to look at code, ask about complexity, and guide simplification by subtracting requirements implicit in the code.

The real solution to this has always been education. Teach the kids about social media the way we teach about drugs and sex. It’s in many ways more ubiquitous to many teens than the other two these days.

(Oh and regulate the companies, not what consumers are allowed to do)

No this isn’t about hacking voting machines, it’s about controversial defense work to stop outside foreign influence on social media.