blast

Right and what's this business about "gave him a 4% stake in stripe"? PG didn't own Stripe.

Are they actually sharing personal information? From the OP it sounds like they're sharing aggregate data. (I've never heard of Pave.)

The OP specifically mentions that.

You've probably learned it more thoroughly than I have, or maybe we have different tastes. I find it just impossible to get into, it all rubs me the wrong way. It is so overcomplicated, and unlispy in the way that FORMAT and LOOP are unlispy, only much worse. I actually like FORMAT and LOOP but they're foreign implants amid the lispiness and that's how ASDF feels as well.

ASDF is by far the hardest part of the CL ecosystem to work with. I find it unusably complicated. It's the autotools of CL.

Thank god for quicklisp.

That calls for a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt6nwvGJiN8

It's clearly driven by politics and media.

I've never been a fan of Musk fwiw so I remember when the default attitude was to worship him. Why do so few people remember that? It was just as glaring as the hate now.

Thanks, that's, er, good. It's so rare to find a comedian I'd never heard of who's that good.

It's fascinating how perfectly this little episode fits into the fractal of Googleness: the corporate borg with no human quality at all. At least Gates and Ballmer would kick you in the balls.

There was also that dystopian Apple ad about technology crushing everything.

I prefer Beefheart to Zappa. Beefheart was a genius with a vision from another planet. Zappa was talented but his smugness and middle-school humor ruin it for me. His freakiness feels showy, like he's trying to prove how different and smart he is. Beefheart on the other hand was a being who absorbed different chemicals from Earth's atmosphere.

He was abusive to his TMR bandmates though - to the point of running a cult. They resorted to shoplifting just to eat.

From the article: “We estimate that without wind, the butterflies could have flown a maximum of 780 km [485 miles] before consuming all their fat and, therefore, their energy.”

So they can fly 485 miles without wind? that is still an unbelievably long way!

That (alleged) quote is disputed and unproven, and came from writers openly hostile to Assange.

If "he didn't take it to court" is the strongest argument that the claim is true, that seems weak to me. I'd invoke "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" in that case.

"he didn't sue me for libel" is not much of an argument. Most false reports don't end up in a libel suit even in the UK.

I'm not saying it's false, I don't know, but the reporting on this has been hotly contested and there are charges of politicization all around.

Assange denies having said that, according to the article linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40786073. Is there proof that he did, such as a recording?

"Willing to hand death lists to psychopaths" is the language of a hit piece so your link seems a little biased.

Daniel Ellsberg is widely considered a hero for doing that. Before he died he was arguing strongly that Assange did the same thing he did.

Wow. Which book?

Oh dear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058804

He absolutely was punching down. He used his high status to mock a low-status (in the West) ethnicity, and shamelessly used selective editing to make everyone other than himself look like a bigot and an asshole. When rightly criticized for this, he acted like he was the victim.

It was an awful display which has not aged well and will look even worse over time.

yeah I should try it, I'm just a laggard.

Still though, the way that LLMs can give customized answers to complex specific questions, questions that probably don't have any specific page on the web, feels like a leveling up beyond traditional search engines.

here's a recent example: I asked how to call a particular function in some library from a little-used language, and it not only told me exactly how to do it but wrote the FFI wrapper. I could definitely have dug that information up but it would have taken a lot longer and then I'd still have had to pore over documentation to write that tedious code.

I was trying to be nice but yeah, "i'm smarter" and "i crush your skull" are not witty. There are nice twists of phrase in there though. The kid has potential!

I'm really wondering about this. Is it just "recycling things people have said before", or is it genuinely generative?

"Recycling things people have said before" is basically search, and that is hugely valuable and quite enough for me. If it's genuinely generative, that's a cosmic leap beyond search.

My guess is that it's not genuinely generative, but rather that the long tail of "everything that everyone has said before" is so vast as that it feels like magic when it's retrieved.

But LLMs have shocked me enough on the search front that I'm no longer smugly confident about this.

Oh I probably did because none of that is interesting to me. Every 5 years another crop of omg corporate drones are so awful consciousness appears, but once you've been through 3 or 4 cycles, everything new is old again. The rants aren't more interesting than the suits are. (well, - the rants at least have their fun side)

What interests me is that there is new technology here that does something relatively magic - that just doesn't happen often. Corporate crap and MBAs and suits and founder hucksters are forever with us. I'm sure it was equally true decades before me and you showed up.

I'm rather annoyed that this is so, because now I have to slightly get off my ass and learn something, so as to reach a better state of lethargy later.

I'm a ranter by character, but you know who I'd pick between the ranters and the drones? The drones. The drones are the 100 million sperm racing to fertilize the egg. They're all losers (save one infinitesimal winner) and it's easy to point that out. The ranters stand on the side saying "those fucking idiots. those morons. what losers they are. as opposed to me, who sees this." But the ranters are the dead end, smart as they may be. The sperm are at least in the race.

Who was that?

> you do not need AI for anything

I'd so have preferred this to be true, and to ignore the AI thing (mainly to avoid any effort to change any of my habits in any way). But as an end user I can say that this is wrong. I definitely need LLMs for one critical thing: search that works.

Google has become clogged with outright spam and endless layers of indirection (useless sites that point to things that point to things that point to things, never getting me to the information that actually fucking matters), but I can ask the best LLMs queries like "what's the abc that does xyz in the context of ijk" and get meaningful answers. It only works well when the subject has a lot of "coverage" (a lot of well-trodden ground, nothing cutting-edge) but that's 80% of what I need.

I still have to check that the LLM found a real needle in the haystack rather than making up a bullshit one. (Ironically, Google works great for that once you know what the candidate needle actually is—it just sucks at finding any needle, even a hallucinated one, in the first place.) For shortest path from question to answer, LLMs are state of the art right now. They're not only kicking Google's ass, they're the first major improvement in search since Google showed up 20+ years ago.

Therefore I think this author is high on his own fumes. It reminds me of the dotcom period: yeah there was endless stupid hype and cringey grifters and yeah there were excellent rants about how stupid and craven it all was—but the internet really did change everything in the end. The ranters were right about most of the battles but ended up wrong about the war, and in retrospect don't look smart at all.

> and have rage titles, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457

Uh yeah that's a bit like telling the same joke over and over. In fact it is the same joke.

I swear this particular rant style is derived from earlier writers who I've read, probably many times, but don't remember. It feels completely familiar, way more so than someone who started working in 2019 could possibly have invented ex nihilo. They're good it though! And somebody has to keep the traditions going.

I was annoyed at first but I think JonChesterfield was joking

You don't think people make clerical errors in SEC filings? What was Sam supposed to have gained by this?

The document was signed by Michael Klein and Jay Taragin (whoever they are), not Sam. But that wouldn't make much of a story, so Sam it is.