3,300 karma · joined March 26, 2015
This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
If it’s so much better, developers will switch. Lots of devs at my company have switched recently. But plenty of others have stayed on Claude.
I don’t think one is clearly better in every way right now. Or at least not better enough to make people want to learn and set up a new tool.
I only remember them being anti- killer AI and mass surveillance.
A lot of people would probably be happy to stick with the same model for a year or two if it’s 10x faster and cheaper.
And perhaps older models can become cheaper over time as newer models come out on new silicon for a higher price. That incentivizes people to stick with older models.
Benchmarks are one data point, not the only one, but the easiest one to compare.
But if they are successful in making on-device models that work well, then you don’t really need as much cloud infrastructure.
Linux just has too much momentum and there are too few real benefits to Hurd.
Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue.
They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari.
If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals.
So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.
He won’t have any authority in the company other than leading and voting in board meetings.
And most likely this is a calculated step to avoid freaking people out, even though he is effectively leaving.
This is just basic programming stuff and not limited to esoteric research languages.
Yet so many in the Go community treated it as some kind of language-ruining complexity.
Slices, maps, and channels all were generic from day one. Same with functions like append, copy, etc.
Your criticism makes no sense unless you think Go shouldn’t have had generics from the start, which it did.
There was even this condescending attitude that Google engineers couldn’t understand fancy languages anyway, so they had to dumb Go down.
My criticism really isn’t even about Go itself. Yeah it’s improving, which is great.
My criticism is about this anti-intellectual attitude that has permeated the entire Go community since its inception. It’s like hearing that college is a waste of time from people who never graduated high school.
Generic programming isn’t some fancy research language feature like dependent types. It’s just a bare minimum feature in any modern typed language.
It’s perplexing that after C# and Java both notably shipped without generics initially then added them later that they decided to ship Go without generics.. only to end up adding them later.
It’d be like thinking as slowly as Ents talk to each other in Lord of the Rings.
You can use an LLM to create work that isn’t slop. And you can hand write slop with no computer involvement at all. Most of the people I knew in high school 15 years ago would write slop on a daily basis.
Or sometimes I will have tables, charts, or even screenshots of text that I would otherwise have to have another step to OCR or type out.
Multimodal saves me time on a regular basis. Not sure it’s a game changer, but just lets me communicate with the model in all sorts of ways that would be harder otherwise.
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
And yeah, some people lose the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but actions have consequences.
Elon doesn’t just get to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by eliminating USAID and expect everyone to treat him the same way.
He’s made enemies for life, and he deserves it.
Musk has proven time after time that he doesn’t deserve my trust. I will never trust Grok as long as he’s in charge of it.
I agree that the guardrails on the top models have gotten out of hand, though.
Fable for instance won’t answer even basic health questions. As if you are going to take nutrition advice and make a bioweapon with it.
Partly this is due to government interference. Hopefully we get to a better place as competition heats up with open and Chinese models.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.