throw46365

I'm not insinuating. I'm asking.

It's a pretty reasonable question for both of them. Perhaps more for the CFO, given what we know of Altman's, er, lack of candour with the board where money is concerned. But maybe given the "Her" debate it applies to both of them, in different ways.

Is this a company where the executives can really be more than rubber stamps?

When the iPad came out, people actually mostly said it was just a big iPhone.

It is, in fact, pretty much still just a big iPhone.

It turns out that's enough for a lot of people.

It's odd how unexcited Apple people often sound when they say they couldn't be more excited.

> Palm CEO on the iPhone

This quote pre-dates the iPhone by a couple of months. So it doesn't remotely qualify as a "failed product" comment. It's just a bad prediction.

(And it's not that bad: the iPhone launched with 2G and without an app market or text-editing beyond delete-and-retype, for example)

Honest question: Do they not each worry they are each, in their own way, going to be Linda Yaccarino?

The lesson I learned from the dot-com era is that people who are dependent on the hype to make profit will crane their necks to believe the hype.

Salespeople, executives, engineers, it doesn’t matter.

Every day on HN reminds me a little more of 1998.

Right. I mean... I sometimes think that Webpack is a malign, inscrutable intelligence! :-)

But at least it's supposed to be deterministic. And there's a chance someone else will be able to explain the inner workings in a way I can repeatably test.

But not the now, quite obviously.

Colour me cynical but I don't feel like pretending the future is here only to have to have to fix its blind incompetence.

Indeed, and presumably well before 1965, which is when Greater London was created. Most of the non-disambiguated High Streets will be in the Greater London boroughs (Bromley, Bexley etc.)

When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)

Free idea: a website called But Humans Also, where one collects bad justifications for applying LLMs.

<mid 2000s product specialist> the dot-com is available!

The "zen" of LLMs is that they do not see a real distinction between these two things, or either of these two things and success ;-)

I dunno. I tend to annoy people when taking on jobs by telling people what I am concerned about and do not understand, and then sharing with them the extent to which I have managed to allay my own concerns through research.

I turn down a lot of jobs I don't feel confident with; maybe more than I should.

An LLM never will.

> You could say the same about the output of a compiler.

Except, for starters, that you're not using the LLM to replace a compiler.

You're using it to replace a teammate.

> I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all.

I think using AI tools to write production code is probably indicative of people who don't really know what they are doing.

The best way not to have subtle bugs is to think deeply about your code, not subcontract it out -- whether that is to people far away who both cannot afford to think as deeply about your code and aren't as invested in it, or to an AI that is often right and doesn't know the difference between correct and incorrect.

It's just a profound abrogation of good development principles to behave this way. And where is the benefit in doing this repeatedly? You're just going to end up with a codebase nobody really owns on a cognitive level.

At least when you look at a StackOverflow answer you see the discussion around it from other real people offering critiques!

ETA in advance: and yes, I understand all the comparison points about using third party libraries, and all the left-pad stuff (don't get me started on NPM). But the point stands: the best way not to have bugs is to own your code. To my mind, anyone who is using ChatGPT in this way -- to write whole pieces of business logic, not just to get inspiration -- is failing at their one job. If it's to be yours, it has to come from the brain of someone who is yours too. This is an embarrassing and damaging admission and there is no way around it.

ETA (2): code review, as a practice, only works when you and the people who wrote the code have a shared understanding of the context and the goal of the code and are roughly equally invested in getting code through review. Because all the niche cases are illuminated by those discussions and avoided in advance. The less time you've spent on this preamble, the less effective the code review will be. It's a matter of trust and culture as much as it's a matter of comparing requirements with finished code.