Quotations
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Providing validation, strength, and stability to people who feel gaslit and dismissed and forgotten can help them feel stronger and surer in their decisions. These pieces made me understand that journalism can be a caretaking profession, even if it is never really thought about in those terms. It is often framed in terms of antagonism. Speaking truth to power turns into being hard-nosed and removed from our subject matter, which so easily turns into be an asshole and do whatever you like.
This is a viewpoint that I reject. My pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness. And much else flows from that. For people who feel lost and alone, we get to say through our work, you are not. For people who feel like society has abandoned them and their lives do not matter, we get to say, actually, they fucking do. We are one of the only professions that can do that through our work and that can do that at scale.
Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything. It prevents them from thinking. Instead, using AI as co-intelligence is important because it increases your capabilities and also keeps you in the loop. […]
AI does so many things that we need to set guardrails on what we don’t want to give up. It’s a very weird, general-purpose technology, which means it will affect all kinds of things, and we’ll have to adjust socially.
At first, I struggled to understand why anyone would want to write this way. My dialogue with ChatGPT was frustratingly meandering, as though I were excavating an essay instead of crafting one. But, when I thought about the psychological experience of writing, I began to see the value of the tool. ChatGPT was not generating professional prose all at once, but it was providing starting points: interesting research ideas to explore; mediocre paragraphs that might, with sufficient editing, become usable. For all its inefficiencies, this indirect approach did feel easier than staring at a blank page; “talking” to the chatbot about the article was more fun than toiling in quiet isolation. In the long run, I wasn’t saving time: I still needed to look up facts and write sentences in my own voice. But my exchanges seemed to reduce the maximum mental effort demanded of me.
[Reddit is] mostly ported over entirely to Lit now. There are a few straggling pages that we're still working on, but most of what everyday typical users see and use is now entirely Lit based. This includes both logged out and logged in experiences.
— Jim Simon, Reddit
I listened to the whole 15-minute podcast this morning. It was, indeed, surprisingly effective. It remains somewhere in the uncanny valley, but not at all in a creepy way. Just more in a “this is a bit vapid and phony” way. [...] But ultimately the conversation has all the flavor of a bowl of unseasoned white rice.
But in terms of the responsibility of journalism, we do have intense fact-checking because we want it to be right. Those big stories are aggregations of incredible journalism. So it cannot function without journalism. Now, we recheck it to make sure it's accurate or that it hasn't changed, but we're building this to make jokes. It's just we want the foundations to be solid or those jokes fall apart. Those jokes have no structural integrity if the facts underneath them are bullshit.
In the future, we won't need programmers; just people who can describe to a computer precisely what they want it to do.
If you use a JavaScript framework you should:
- be able to justify with evidence, how using JavaScript would benefit users
- be aware of any negative impacts and be able to mitigate them
- consider whether the benefits of using it outweigh the potential problems
- only use the framework for parts of the user interface that cannot be built using HTML and CSS alone
- design each part of the user interface as a separate component
Having separate components means that if the JavaScript fails to load, it will only be that single component that fails. The rest of the page will load as normal.
OpenAI’s revenue in August more than tripled from a year ago, according to the documents, and about 350 million people — up from around 100 million in March — used its services each month as of June. […]
Roughly 10 million ChatGPT users pay the company a $20 monthly fee, according to the documents. OpenAI expects to raise that price by $2 by the end of the year, and will aggressively raise it to $44 over the next five years, the documents said.
Consumer products have had growth hackers for many years optimizing every part of the onboarding funnel. Dev tools should do the same. Getting started shouldn't be an afterthought after you built the product. Getting started is the product!
And I mean this to the point where I think it's worth restructuring your entire product to enable fast onboarding. Get rid of mandatory config. Make it absurdly easy to set up API tokens. Remove all the friction. Make it possible for users to use your product on their laptop in a couple of minutes, tops.
I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of [AI training]. […]
We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI, which my guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable. I’d guess that there are probably a lot of people who have a concern about the feel of it, like you’re saying. But then, when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much.
We used this model [periodically transmitting configuration to different hosts] to distribute translations, feature flags, configuration, search indexes, etc at Airbnb. But instead of SQLite we used Sparkey, a KV file format developed by Spotify. In early years there was a Cron job on every box that pulled that service’s thingies; then once we switched to Kubernetes we used a daemonset & host tagging (taints?) to pull a variety of thingies to each host and then ensure the services that use the thingies only ran on the hosts that had the thingies.
SPAs incur complexity that simply doesn't exist with traditional server-based websites: issues such as search engine optimization, browser history management, web analytics and first page load time all need to be addressed. Proper analysis and consideration of the trade-offs is required to determine if that complexity is warranted for business or user experience reasons. Too often teams are skipping that trade-off analysis, blindly accepting the complexity of SPAs by default even when business needs don't justify it. We still see some developers who aren't aware of an alternative approach because they've spent their entire career in a framework like React.
— Thoughtworks, October 2022
The problem I have with [pipenv shell] is that the act of manipulating the shell environment is crappy and can never be good. What all these "X shell" things do is just an abomination we should not promote IMO.
Tools should be written so that you do not need to reconfigure shells. That we normalized this over the last 10 years was a mistake and we are not forced to continue walking down that path :)
Whether you think coding with AI works today or not doesn’t really matter.
But if you think functional AI helping to code will make humans dumber or isn’t real programming just consider that’s been the argument against every generation of programming tools going back to Fortran.
The problem that you face is that it's relatively easy to take a model and make it look like it's aligned. You ask GPT-4, “how do I end all of humans?” And the model says, “I can't possibly help you with that”. But there are a million and one ways to take the exact same question - pick your favorite - and you can make the model still answer the question even though initially it would have refused. And the question this reminds me a lot of coming from adversarial machine learning. We have a very simple objective: Classify the image correctly according to the original label. And yet, despite the fact that it was essentially trivial to find all of the bugs in principle, the community had a very hard time coming up with actually effective defenses. We wrote like over 9,000 papers in ten years, and have made very very very limited progress on this one small problem. You all have a harder problem and maybe less time.
In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. [...]
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records.
Something that I confirmed that other conference organisers are also experiencing is last-minute ticket sales. This is something that happened with UX London this year. For most of the year, ticket sales were trickling along. Then in the last few weeks before the event we sold more tickets than we had sold in the six months previously. […]
When I was in Ireland I had a chat with a friend of mine who works at the Everyman Theatre in Cork. They’re experiencing something similar. So maybe it’s not related to the tech industry specifically.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
o1 prompting is alien to me. Its thinking, gloriously effective at times, is also dreamlike and unamenable to advice.
Just say what you want and pray. Any notes on “how” will be followed with the diligence of a brilliant intern on ketamine.
[… OpenAI’s o1] could work its way to a correct (and well-written) solution if provided a lot of hints and prodding, but did not generate the key conceptual ideas on its own, and did make some non-trivial mistakes. The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student. However, this was an improvement over previous models, whose capability was closer to an actually incompetent graduate student.
It's a bit sad and confusing that LLMs ("Large Language Models") have little to do with language; It's just historical. They are highly general purpose technology for statistical modeling of token streams. A better name would be Autoregressive Transformers or something.
They don't care if the tokens happen to represent little text chunks. It could just as well be little image patches, audio chunks, action choices, molecules, or whatever. If you can reduce your problem to that of modeling token streams (for any arbitrary vocabulary of some set of discrete tokens), you can "throw an LLM at it".
Believe it or not, the name Strawberry does not come from the “How many r’s are in strawberry” meme. We just chose a random word. As far as we know it was a complete coincidence.
— Noam Brown, OpenAI
There is superstition about creativity, and for that matter, about thinking in every sense, and it's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something - play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems - there was a chorus of critics to say, but that's not thinking.
— Pamela McCorduck, in 1979
o1-mini is the most surprising research result I've seen in the past year
Obviously I cannot spill the secret, but a small model getting >60% on AIME math competition is so good that it's hard to believe
— Jason Wei, OpenAI
Telling the AI to "make it better" after getting a result is just a folk method of getting an LLM to do Chain of Thought, which is why it works so well.
history | tail -n 2000 | llm -s "Write aliases for my zshrc based on my terminal history. Only do this for most common features. Don't use any specific files or directories."
— anjor
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
I think that AI has killed, or is about to kill, pretty much every single modifier we want to put in front of the word “developer.”
“.NET developer”? Meaningless. Copilot, Cursor, etc can get anyone conversant enough with .NET to be productive in an afternoon … as long as you’ve done enough other programming that you know what to prompt.
whenever you do this:
el.innerHTML += HTMLyou'd be better off with this:
el.insertAdjacentHTML("beforeend", html)reason being, the latter doesn't trash and re-create/re-stringify what was previously already there