Bjorkbat

>I'll tell you that I'm getting overseas talent for roles where 10 years ago I would have hired entry level talent in the US. But since my company is fully remote and distributed, the downside to hiring in LatAm and Eastern Europe has been significantly reduced.

I really don't get the argument that remote work means that it's easier to outsource jobs or hire overseas talent. The fact that you can get overseas talent for a fraction of the cost of hiring domestic talent sounds to me like a vastly more compelling reason to hire overseas or outsource, and yet companies nonetheless hired a lot of US talent despite this fact. Microsoft and Google had the experience and know-how necessary to make a globally distributed workforce work, and yet the headcount at their overseas offices were paltry compared to the number of staff employed at home. Why is that?

How does a change in work culture tip the scales in any meaningful way? Especially compared to that?

Yeah, sure, you hear stories about companies hiring more overseas talent now that remote work has been normalized, but I have a hard time believing that things would be completely different and they'd be a largely US-based shop if it weren't for remote work being a widely accepted thing.

If you aren't convinced by now that this argument is bullshit, take a look at those companies who were fully-remote and distributed waaaaay before it got popular, especially those who have maps of where all their employees are located. One thing you'll note is that, despite being fully remote, most of their workforce is domestic, and a relatively small portion of their workforce lives in countries that have gained notoriety as outsourcing destinations.

Automattic, is a great example of what I'm talking about: https://automattic.com/about/

Just to clarify, I'm not dismissing overseas talent, I'm dismissing the idea of overseas talent being used a bogeyman that might suppress wages and take our jobs. If it were that easy, it would have happened already.

Kind of reminds me of the "messenger boom" back when Facebook Messenger was new and hot and a bunch of people thought that the "next big thing" was apps that utilize a chat interface. An argument I encountered frequently was that the ultimate interface was a chat-like interface where you asked for what you wanted in natural language and you got it. I thought the hype was well and truly dead until ChatGPT came out and re-animated it.

I think we overestimate just how much people like to browse for stuff rather than have it auto-magically done for them or shown to them. When it comes to online shopping, you probably prefer to browse, unless it's a recurring purchase. I still use a search engine for code issues because I prefer browsing for answers vs having one generated for me, usually because I like the additional context that comes from browsing.

Outside of browsing, I find it really bizarre that all the generative AI art tools out there use chat interfaces rather than a suite of generative graphics tools, i.e. a generative paintbrush, but then again, most people using said tools aren't trying to create some kind of specific thing in their minds eye, they just want an image. Otherwise, if you wanted to paint a picture, then you'd want either a paintbrush or some kind of paintbrush analogue. Painting a picture through a chat interface just seems kind of ungainly.

Kind of an extreme example, but imagine trying to drive a car that has all the familiar controls replaced with a chat interface. Even the A/C is better served by a dial of some sort rather than asking the AI to make the interior a little bit cooler.

If you're looking for more bandcamp alternatives, someone made a media player (https://github.com/torcado194/scritch-player) that you can add to an Itch page (example: https://keestak.itch.io/heck-deck-ost).

Cool part about Itch is that it's already got an established community around it, and that's very unlikely to change.

Kind of reminds me of this screenshot someone took of the fastest growing subreddits back in 2023, and all of them were AI-related, but here's the kicker, I think 8 out of 10 of them had to do with AI waifus and porn.

Kind of wild to think that all these uncontacted tribes could actually be more like post-apocalyptic survivors rather than a glimpse at our distant neolithic past.

Definitely more fun to speculate about.

Oh, it’s very much possible to create AI models with copyrighted materials. The “impossible” part is turning said AI model into a cash cow without fairly compensating the original rights holder.

I mean, mess is a bit subjective in Google's case. Sure, they tend to take on a lot of side-projects only to inevitably abandon them, and they did slip behind in the AI race, but there's a huge difference between "stagnant giant with way too much money" messy and "if our browser market share gets any lower government websites won't support our browser" messy.

Funny enough I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for well over a decade, but lately I've struggled to continue letting that remain the case just because of how badly managed Mozilla appears to be.

The weird AI website builder thing they released was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. Besides my many objections to current AI, my bigger issue was that this demonstrated a general lack of focus and carelessness on their part.

Kind of reminded me of how just before WeWork came crashing down it raised more money at a $47 billion valuation. Besides the fact that both companies have (or rather, had) lofty valuations, there are some other interesting parallels. There's the lack of any real moat. There's the insane amounts of cash they were spending, on leases in WeWork's case, and tech infra in the case of OpenAI. Both were lead by highly charismatic CEO's who were arguably their respective company's greatest asset, but also perhaps their greatest liability.

Kind of also reminded me of how Andreesen Horowitz gave Adam Neumann $350 million back in 2022 for some new real-estate venture. I mean, at this point, it seems very stupid to give him more money, and yet people who appear to be "in the know" are not only giving him more money, but absolutely insane amounts of money.

I bring up this latter point because it's one of those things that kind of makes you question what you understand. Why are otherwise smart and knowledgeable people doing something that seems stupid? Are you wrong? Or are they wrong? I mean, they know more than you do, so normally you would be wrong, but in this case what they're doing seems so stupid that you aren't so sure.

I feel similarly about AI. Not that I think AI is necessarily stupid. I for one am excited about what could come from applying AI to drug discovery. It just seems kind of crazy to create a machine that's really good at next token prediction and extrapolate from that all these crazy predictions. That this will lead to machines capable of understanding, reasoning, intelligence, and eventually, AGI.

Either the experts are wrong, or I'm wrong, and I'm normally inclined to believe in the experts, but in this case what they believe is so nutty that I really have to question things.

Pretty neat! Worth keeping in mind though that a lot of that data came from Phoenix, a city that only gets 8 inches of rain a year and has fairly pristine, well-marked roads to match. In a way, Phoenix is the perfect initial testing ground for self-driving cars before you put them in an environment that more closely resembles the typical US city.

But a lot of that data also seems to come from San Francisco, so I have to admit I'm impressed.

I'll admit when I'm wrong. The DOJ announced back in February that it was "preparing to sue", but appears to have never officially filed that lawsuit. My mistake.

Nonetheless, I think my point still stands in that the FTC and DOJ made how they felt about the deal pretty clear.

I would argue that the regulators made their point pretty clear early on when the DOJ opened a lawsuit against Adobe. The people most responsible for keeping this in limbo were Adobe’s lawyers.

I think Itch.io has a decent chance of picking up where Bandcamp left off. Out of the box it doesn't have a media player to preview singles on an album, but someone created a media player that you can add to an itch page to provide said support

github: https://github.com/torcado194/scritch-player demo: https://keestak.itch.io/heck-deck-ost

Sure, I get that, but to handle a disagreement over money in such a consequential fashion just doesn't make sense to me. They must have understood that to arrive in a position where they have to fire the CEO with little warning is going to have profound consequences, perhaps even existential ones.

I have a hard time believing this simply since it seems so ill-conceived. Sure, maybe Sam Altman was being irresponsible and taking risks, but they had an insanely good thing going for them. I'm not saying Sam Altman was responsible for the good times they were having, but you're probably going to bring them to an end by abruptly firing one of the most prominent members of the group, seeing where individual loyalties lie, and pissing off Microsoft by tanking their stock price without giving them any heads up.

I mean, none of this would be possible without insane amounts of capital and world class talent, and they probably just made it a lot harder to acquire both.

But what do I know? If you can convince yourself that you're actually building AGI by making an insanely large LLM, then you can also probably convince yourself of a lot of other dumb ideas too.

His sister on Twitter made some pretty crazy abuse allegations against him a while back, but it didn't seem to get much coverage outside of the usual Twitter crowd.

But who knows, maybe there's a connection.

I had no problems with this article other than the headline calling DALL-E “so good”.

If you’re using AI art for anything other than personal curiosity you’re probably using it because it costs next to nothing to make a generated stock image for your blog or children’s e-book.

I’m mildly curious if those additional tokens will make AI better, or worse.

We arguably trained AI on the good stuff first. Novels. Wikipedia entries. GitHub open-source projects with a lot of stars. What’s left but mediocrity and our “baser” internet ramblings?

Some researchers already found out that AI-sourced content can affect the models, but what about content from increasingly out-of-touch people?

Thankfully, they're already made their stance on AI clear on Twitter https://twitter.com/Procreate/status/1661210079360700417?lan...

So am I to believe some tech figure on Twitter with a large following who has an unnamed source? Or Sam Altman, who himself has said that no work whatsoever has been done nor will be done on GPT-5 in response to the rampant speculation this single tweet created?

I still remember some dork on Twitter claiming that a source within the company told him that they had already trained GPT-5. Mind you, this was back in April I think. Kind of reluctant at this point to believe anyone who spreads rumors about the inner machinations of OpenAI.

This article is merely summarizing a longer article at Bloomberg, in case anyone would like to read something more substantial.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/stability...

Incidentally I was about to comment on how peculiar it is that there are two open-source Retool alternatives backed by Y Combinator.

I know, I know, they're covering their bases, but nonetheless find it if only slightly amusing.

Piss-off a VC and they might back your competition. Get on their good graces and they'll give you both money and wait to see who comes out on top.

This is a bit of a strange one, but I made a free-to-play game that produces “art” posters as a form of monetization. Still a work in progress, but I was able to finally produce a poster from the game, which felt gratifying.

Might post it on Show HN one of these days. Still needs some work though.

Because until more scientists can replicate this the news is little more substantial than the typical post on /r/futurology on any given day.

I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd. None of them seem to be aware of LK-99, let alone care about it. Meanwhile, the GPT hype has worn off, and on that note, none of them seem to be aware that there's a difference between GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The former is this vague, nearly non-existent thing.

They're aware of the actors/writers strike and the association AI has with it, but AI in this context is a vague speculative thing rather than a specific type of AI or brand of AI made by some company.

Arguments like these are an example of why we need to be reminded of the principle of copyright: to protect artists and creatives from having to compete against themselves in the form of someone simply taking their work and profiting from it as if it were their own without fair compensation or consequences.

No one cares that Google is scraping their website because Google isn’t competing with them, or at the very least not using said site content to compete with them.

Not so with ChatGPT

I really wouldn’t call GUIs a “command-based paradigm”. Feels much more like they’re digital analogues of tools and objects. Your mouse is a tool, and you use it to interface with objects and things, and through special software it can become a more specialized tool (word processors, spreadsheets, graphic design software, etc). You aren’t issuing commands, you’re manipulating a digital environment with tools.

Which is why the notion of conversational AI (or whatever dumb name they came up with for the “third paradigm”) seems kind of alien to me. I mean, I definitely see its utility, but I find it hard to imagine it being as dominant as some are arguing it could be. Any task that involves browsing for information seems like more of an object manipulation task. Any task involving some kind of visual design seems like a tool manipulation task, unless you aren’t too picky about the final result.

Ultimately I think conversational UI is best suited not for tasks, but services. Granted, the line between the two can be fuzzy at times. If you’re looking for a website, but you don’t personally know anything about making a website, then that task morphs into a service that someone or something else does.

Which I suppose is kind of the other reason why I find the idea kind of alien. I almost never use the computer for services. I use it to browse, to create, to work, all of which entail something more intuitively suited to object or tool manipulation.

I think op is referring to what I call “capital T tech”, or alternatively, “big internet tech”.

There’s plenty of technological improvements within the past 20 years, we just tend to ignore them the further they fall outside of internet-adjacent technology. As incredible as it is that solar panels keep getting cheaper and more efficient, the real miracle is that no one gives a shit about them. What captures people’s interests is internet-adjacent stuff, and that’s especially true if said thing can be compared to as “a new internet”. Hence why when people say they want to “work in STEM” they implicitly are referring only to programming most of the time, and also implicitly referring to being a web dev or phone dev, and not some guy that writes software for power plants or whatever. That’s “capital T tech”.

I also refer to it as “zeitgeist tech” because I think we’re currently in a phase where said tech has captured the public imagination, but I think we’re also seeing it’s end, the decline of all major social networking players being the most visible side-effect (I don’t consider TikTok to be a social network). Or, you know, a “tech reckoning”.

Kind of hope we return to 2008 with Occupy Wall St and more environmental consciousness personally. Maybe it was because I was 18 at the time, but man, there was so much more optimism.

Personally I always considered the social contract to be that the price of admission for a free social network / online community is that you need to put up with ads and attempts to monetize the data, provided the latter isn’t an unreasonable breach of privacy. A free API never crossed my mind.

It’s why I have to admit that I am not sympathetic to third-party apps like Apollo. They implicitly violated the social contract I recognize by providing users with an experience that circumvents Reddit’s attempts to make money. Reddit responded by finding a way to put a price on the ad-free experience.