yojo

AI is just another technology, and all technologies should be employed in service to humans.

I think it’s reasonable for people to say “I like the way things were, I don’t like this new future you’re proposing, and I want to limit the technology that’s doing the thing I don’t like.”

There is nothing inevitable about AI. As a society we may decide it is fundamentally unhealthy or anti-human. We have banned or curtailed access and research for other technologies before.

It will actually take a little while to tell if they were, in fact, crying wolf.

There is a lag between when carbon is released and when the effects of it peak. If we did stop all carbon emissions today, the effects of prior emissions would play out over the next 30ish years.

We’re injecting unprecedented amounts of thermal energy into planet-scale systems, and it is hard to predict second and third order effects.

I have kids/I really hope they were crying wolf.

Working in b2b SaaS, there’s a real gravity toward checkbox-driven development. Any time we lose a deal because a competitor had feature A, the immediate response is “we need to build feature A.”

And from a sales perspective, that’s probably not wrong.

I think a new (or newly critical) engineering challenge is how to build in a way that keeps a codebase that’s churning out features from crumbling under the weight.

The domain is code analysis, all languages and frameworks. It’s b2b SaaS, so total volume is not incredibly high. And many customers have contract clauses that we don’t train on their data.

I’m not convinced we could train easily here, or that it’s worth the investment compared to (previously) spending fractional cents on Luna, or now paying even less on Jev. Especially given that these numbers are not meaningful to our margins.

Is this equivalent though? The Laya article ends with “ Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.”

I have a dozen different things at work that are currently using LLMs as classifiers for different questions. I don’t have the time, data, or resources to fine tune a model for each of them.

I haven’t had a chance to plug in Jev yet (waiting on approvals), but if it has the general intelligence claimed in the press release, then Laya is in no way comparable for my use case, and whatever TypeSafe has done is a substantial innovation over the Laya paper.

Late reply, but I think once you took away the profit motivated people and the money man, the “museum” would have been exactly that - a collection of antiquated artifacts. But I guess we’ll never know.

I’m not saying it was right or moral, just probably inevitable.

In TS/JS you’re usually inlining the reducer fn, and there’s something hard to read/especially ugly about the comma after the bracket or arrow fn into the initalValue.

That said, when I’m reducing a list, I still use reduce.

You’re not wrong, but I think the alternative future is sama loses control, goes and raises a quick $100M, and hires all the profit-motivated staff to make something that looks like today’s OpenAI.

Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.

If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it.

Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.

So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.

That’s nice in theory, but as these things get better and cheaper this kind of capability is going to drop from nation states to script kiddies. That future is coming, I don’t see any way around it.

We can round up all the bored teenagers we want, but it’s not putting the genie back. Better start adjusting our systems to account for it.

They still haven’t removed “old.reddit.com”. Replace “www” with “old” on any reddit URL and enjoy a relic from when the internet was less ruined.

I was at Dropbox from 2016-2020. We were certainly trying to build a sustainable business, but there was a major identity crisis. Were we consumer web? Buy Mailbox and build Carousel, then shut them both down.

Maybe we’re Notion/Evernote? Buy Hackpad, plow a ton of money into Paper (which was legitimately good), then quietly deprioritize it.

Maybe we’re actually some kind of enterprise document productivity suite? Buy HelloSign. Plow a bunch of money into a desktop app. Pull more plugs.

A lot of smart people were trying. We made a lot of bets (too many?). None of them proved to be a second act, and the competitors eventually caught up.