asolove

They are relying on training data of humans talking about how hard these problems are. Same way an un-reminded Claude gives estimates for work that are as if a human is doing it by hand, but then will drop them by 20x if you remind them it’s going to do the work.

The way people become corporate Cassandras is by doing the hard work for a while and building a mental model that is more influenced by the grit of the real work and unfiltered customer feedback than by the group discussion.

You could train a model to just read the group discussion and say plausibly sounding things. But if its input is just the group discussion and, as the post suggests, git history and competitor web searches, you can disagree, but you can’t have the orthogonal mental model that produces the “you’re not even wrong” style responses that corporate Cassandras produce. You’d need an AI that actually does the work and maintains private opinions it doesn’t reveal to its prompters.

More importantly, this post seems to ignore the real role of politics. It’s true the bot itself doesn’t have a promotion to worry about. But if its goal is influence, then it will need to take into account the reactions and unpopularity of its ideas. Or if not, it will get itself ignored or turned off. Politics is just how decisions happen, not a problem that goes away!

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way.

It’s a census: it just asks questions.

If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

1. If you are proposing something even stricter than previous antitrust rules, great. But getting back to antitrust itself is actionable is step 1.

2. You don’t have to prevent every case before it happens so much as just stochastically go after the worst ones to make it less economical for people to go take on debt to have huge swaths of consolidation. Letting the market work, after pricing in that egregious monopolies will be broken up, is kinda great and better than minutely scrutinizing every tiny deal for long-term consequences.

The OP explicitly answers this: go back to pre-80s antitrust policy. Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers.

Yes it does.

Today on X, people are having fun baiting Grok into saying that Elon Musk is the world’s best drinker of human piss.

If you hired a paid PR sycophant human, even of moderate intelligence, it would know not to generalize from “say nice things about Elon” to “say he’s the best at drinking piss”.

I also have an OM System camera (OM-5) and never get corruption this bad but occasionally got one row of green pixels at the bottom of a photo during import to Photos. I thought I was crazy, but this motivates me to change up my routine and check if it was Photos all along.

You can know almost all you need to know about this article from this sentence:

> This is even more true today, when the intersectional grid draws rigid lines between “oppressor” and “oppressed” that Baldwin, despite the animus against white America that ballooned as he aged, was far too subtle a thinker to accept.

If you think that the inline definition of "intersectional" is an accurate one, the rest of the essay follows. You may or may not learn anything, though if this prompts you to read "Go Tell It on the Mountain", that would be a great outcome.

If you actually know anything about theory, then you'll see the rest of the essay as rhetorical shadow-boxing with something no one is actually saying.

$5 says this is one support rep (or AI tool) just getting it wrong.

There are some similar-ish systems with alpha-level install instructions: https://folk.computer/pilot

This part is so important:

> The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.

Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far.

And adults who aren’t authorities over them except insofar that they have cool talents the kids want to learn.

The amount of work to be done isn’t constant. If you make it cheaper to do a unit of work (less labor per unit) then the market will demand more of it.

Look up the unintentional impact of the cotton gin for an example.

These are more or less the first people to think about geometry rigorously as an abstract system. Anyone previous would have just pointed to the hypotenuse and said “it’s that length right there” and not asked a further question.

What is counter-intuitive? In a triangle with sides A=1, B=1, then C=root(2), so C/A is irrational. That's what was so impactful about the discovery.

Imagine not knowing about irrational numbers. You assume all numbers are just integers and fractional ratios between integers. It would be weird (terrifying?) that something as simple as a right triangle would require a whole category of numbers you can't express.

"As Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy death he found himself transformed in his coffin into a software project"

If you're interested in this topic but want more, I recommend "Cognition in the wild": https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262082310/

I’m a remote product engineer with 15 years of experience, including leading teams at Stripe building their payment UIs.

Location: Atlanta, GA

Remote: yes, please

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, React/Vue, Go, Ruby, bits of clojure and haskell. I know a bunch about payments and conversion optimization as well as WYSIWYG editors.

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/profile/in/asolove

Email: asolove+jobs@gmail.com

In disagreeing with the phrase "traitorous slavers" used as a pejorative, you've decided to nitpick the less-important part.

Go is a constructed game with a precise definition of the rules and victory.

The real challenge with AI helping experts is whether it can correctly help them balance their own value function for what "better" means. And whether we can still train human experts who can think about that independently with good judgement, if we've automated away the things that beginners would normally do to train their judgement with black boxes that they can't interrogate.

Will be interesting for sure.

Also very curious about this. I’ve been slowly building one myself and would happily give up if another good one already exists. Tried searching the web and can’t find it.

I’ve been working on a Sketchpad recreation recently, reading through his thesis.

One thing I loved is that the display scanned so slowly that if you did it linearly, or even interlaced, there was a visible strobing pattern across the screen and it gave people a headache. So he randomized the order in which lit pixels were drawn to give it a more distributed, “twinkle” like appearance.

100%. If you read "A Pattern Language" and arrive at GoF, I'm not really sure how you got there.

Folks who enjoy this should consider reading Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order", which has some philosophy and metaphysics, but also a lot of analysis of concrete examples, of how complex structures come to be. It also attempts to analyze the process-oriented reasons behind guidelines like this.

Yeah, it was 100% a script tag. At the time, I didn't understand that you could pull in code from another URL and have it impact the current page. I thought "view source" was everything impacting the page.

I think you are talking about this line in the article:

> So, why didn’t he omit the racist quip about “Orientals”?

This is specifically in reference to a quote from Orwell at the top of the article:

> > coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking)

The author of this article is primarily objecting not to the use of the word "Orientals" but to the defense that it's ok to beat them because everyone does it and they are annoying.

I think what the author is asking is: if he has had such a change of heart, why not simply omit this excuse? Why still provide justification that it is ok for a white person to beat a colonial subject because their cultural norms are different and annoying to the white person?

The year is 1996. Microsoft's homepage has a menu bar that expands when you move your mouse over it. I am determined to figure out how this works.

At the time, IE has a "view source" button, but it's not very platform aware. You get a Notepad doc. The server is running Unix with files where lines break on "\n" and I'm on Windows, which needs "\r", so the source is one single long line of html.

I look through the source thoroughly: what is in their html that I don't know about that lets them make things move around? All the html tags are ones I know. All the content is text I can see on the page.

The only mysterious bit is these " "s. I've never seen those before and don't know what they are. They appear on sites with moving menus. They must be related.

(For six months, I believed the effect of dhtml was achieved through magic incantations of what turned out to be html entities. A bit later I found WebMonkey tutorials and this turned into a whole career.)

+1 to this. I no longer even associate with the religion that required us to do preparation, but still look back with appreciation on this event.

And while I would not be in favor of any state or religious requirement, I still wish it were just more widely done. Call it a marriage mindfulness weekend, make it a social norm as strong as sending "save-the-dates".

It was wild to go to a marriage prep event and see couples right next to us start yelling at each other "what do you mean you want kids?" or "why would I quit my job?" I don't know how you get engaged without knowing these things already.

For us, it led to some really good, deep conversations on what we wanted the future to be like. We were already largely aligned on practical things, but learned even more about some of our deepest dreams. And the style of conversation we practiced is still routinely useful when we get misaligned and need to talk about our hopes before we even start debating some concrete decision.

RIP, Dean. I miss the days of this kind of ethos being central to the web.

This is actually very common for any kind of security fingerprinting use-case in the browser, especially in banking/payments.

If you work forwards from "wow, fonts are a weird fingerprint technique" it seems clever.

But the reality is it's much more straightforward if you just work it backwards. Someone said: we have access to the customer's browser, what can we grab to throw into our ML model? You look in the DOM spec, grab every piece of data you can get from the customer's system and send it all. Fonts is one thing that ended up being useful.

(I am not condoning this practice, just happen to be aware of it very well.)

Is it wild to imagine an ethically-run company has salary bands based on levels and makes offers within those bands based on maintaining internal equity?

I don’t naively believe all or most companies do this. But I have been a hiring manager at two that do.