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cornel_io

922 karma · joined January 19, 2021

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cornel_io··on Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
When Europeans quit their jobs, they're often required to stay on for 1-3 months, as well, and many if not most employers actually hold employees to that when they get new jobs. In the US you can leave same day, and it's considered rude but meh; 2 weeks is almost always fine unless you're super senior.

We also make 2-3x what you do for exactly the same work, sometimes up to 5-10x in tech.

There are tradeoffs, but in my experience European workers are more likely to wish that they could come to the US to work than vice versa. When contracting in Europe I've had clauses written into my contracts on multiple occasions that forbid me from disclosing my rate even to the people managing my work, because I was making more in one month than they (as senior project leads) did in a year...

cornel_io··on A confusing probability question: Red and green balls in an urn
No, the higher the count goes the closer it becomes to the single removed ball not mattering at all, so the only thing that matters is the information you got about which urn you're selecting from.
cornel_io··on I regret selling my startup
Re: building again...

For some people, they don't have the same drive once they've done it once and were successful. I've got friends who were incredible operators for their first N companies, because they were hungry, but then after a big cashout they started to suck at their N+1st attempts. They make mistakes like being unwilling to start small, feeling like they should be Respected(TM) and that getting in the way of their relationships with potential partners, not being frugal with runway, being too precious about repeating exactly what worked before, etc. I've also seen some completely unable to ever fall in love with an idea the way they did pre-exit, and just bounce around doing projects forever without ever committing to anything.

On the other hand some people get better, much better, on their later tries. So YMMV, probably depending on your personality.

cornel_io··on On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
The much more likely outcome:

4. A ruling comes down that enshrines what all the big companies have been doing (with the blessings of their armies of expensive, talented, and conservative legal teams) as legitimate fair use

cornel_io··on How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives
This isn't a story about software engineering, it's a story about a shitty governmental department in a mediocre country not fixing something that everyone knows is broken, and threatening people with jail time instead.

Show me a similar story about stuff this bad happening at Google and I'll believe that there's something wrong with the field as practiced at its best.

cornel_io··on Turing Complete Transformers: Two Transformers Are More Powerful Than One
A modern computer can be cast as a seq-to-seq model, too, so their "arguments" apply to those as well, just with larger n and k. Any finite machine suffers from this.
cornel_io··on Economic downturn and the influence of AI are claiming numerous jobs
No, pretty much every piece of all three sentences you write is completely, utterly, and without any reservation wrong. In fact they are so ridiculously wrong and go against every piece of actual data that has ever been produced by reputable sources that unless you actually show your cards (I know that some NIMBY groups have fake and/or misleading data, which we have seen and rebutted many times before, so I really do encourage you to try if you're serious) I have to assume you're just trolling.
cornel_io··on NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances
If they could find a single person who in natural use (e.g. not as they were trying to gather data for this lawsuit) has ever actually used ChatGPT as a direct substitution for a NYT subscription, I'd support this lawsuit.

But nobody would do that, because ChatGPT is a really shitty way to read NYT articles (it's stale, it can't reliably reproduce them, etc.). All that is valuable about it is the way that it transforms and operates on that data in conjunction with all the other data that it has.

The real world use of ChatGPT is very transformative, even if you can trick it into behaving in ways that are not. If the courts act intelligently they should at least weigh that as part of their decision.

cornel_io··on Advancements in machine learning for machine learning
There was a very recent time when passing some version of the Turing Test would have been a fairly commonly accepted goalpost. Many experts thought that was 20+ years away, and were perfectly comfortable saying that it was their "bar", primarily because they thought generating convincing conversational text was so difficult that you'd basically have to solve All The Problems(TM) first.

Notice how nobody is talking about the Turing Test anymore now that it's either already been passed or is very damn close? We can argue back and forth about whether the real stupidity was the earlier expectation that the Turing Test was a useful threshold for AI, but it's impossible to claim that it wasn't a somewhat common and well-known one, so that goalpost really has been moved in a very dramatic way (or rather, removed altogether and replaced with nothing in particular other than a vague "I'll know it when I see it", in most cases).

cornel_io··on AI’s big rift is like a religious schism
...you do realize that a year or two into the earliest investigations into nuclear reactions what you would have measured was less energy emission than a match being lit, right?

The question is, "Can you create a chain reaction that grows?", and the answer is unclear right now with AI, but it's hard to say with any confidence that the answer is "no". Most experts five years ago would have confidently declared that passing the Turing test was decades to centuries away, if it ever happened, but it turned out to just require beefing up an architecture that was already around and spending some serious cash. I have similarly low faith that the experts today have a good sense that e.g. you can't train an LLM to do meaningful LLM research. Once that's possible, the sky is the limit, and there's really no predicting what these systems could or could not do.

cornel_io··on Cloud TPU v5p and AI Hypercomputer
Yeah, I spend a small fraction of that and have found GCP support through our account rep to be extremely good, at least on par with what AWS provides. Maybe the particular rep makes a big difference?
cornel_io··on How to tackle unreliability of coding assistants
If that was even close to true then I would have had to fire far fewer people over the years.
cornel_io··on Aspirin 81 (2019)
It's one of a very small number of substances that is proven to reduce heart attack risk, the primary use nowadays. The low dose seems to be a decent balance between that and the increased risk of stomach issues, though only a clear benefit for people with significant risk of cardiovascular events.

If that's not you, then yes, ignore aspirin. If heart attack is how you are almost certainly going to die based on generations of evidence (thanks, Ashkenazi ancestors!) then get to know your favorite brand of 81 mg chiclets, and carry a full pill in your pocket at all times so you can chew it if and when The Thing happens. Better: get a good cardiologist, and do everything they suggest, including the meds. Don't at all listen to people who say that staying in shape and eating healthy is enough, because for those of us with the wrong genes it absolutely is not: I'm young, in great shape, and keep a healthier diet than most dieticians would even suggest, but I still have to take meds to keep my numbers in line.

cornel_io··on We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
It's rare, and that makes it a spectacular leg up when you have a person who is great at it.
cornel_io··on 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/sp500.35?country... is up by less than the S&P over the last few years.

I'm not saying the healthcare system is great or anything (I generally agree with "pathetic broken mess"), but it's not making its investors particularly rich. Most of the excess cost is getting spread out within the system itself and never makes it through the other end. If you want to blame doctors, nurses, admins and suppliers that's arguably a better place to start.

cornel_io··on Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
They're likely going to be the ones who manage the OpenAI relationship...what better way to fuck the people who fucked them than by becoming the ones who literally control the resources that they need?
cornel_io··on Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
Smart people like Ilya really are worried about extinction, not piddling near-term stuff like job loss or some chat app saying some stuff that will hurt someone's feelings.

The worry is not necessarily that the systems become "alive", though, we are already bad enough ourselves as a species in terms of motivation so machines don't need to supply the murderous intent: at any given moment there are at least thousands if not millions of people on the planet that would love nothing more than be able to push a button an murder millions of other people in some outgroup. That's very obvious if you pay even a little bit of attention to any of the Israel/Palestine hatred going back and forth lately. [There are probably at least hundreds to thousands that are insane enough to want to destroy all of humanity if they could, for that matter...] If AI becomes powerful enough to make it easy for a small group to kill large numbers of people that they hate, we are probably all going to end up dead, because almost all of us belong to a group that someone wants to exterminate.

Killing people isn't a super difficult problem, so I don't think you really even need AGI to get to that sort of an outcome, TBH, which is why I think a lot of the worry is misplaced. I think the sort of control systems that we could pretty easily build with the LLMs of today could very competently execute genocides if they were paired with suitably advanced robotics, it's the latter that is lacking. But in any case, the concern is that having even stronger AI, especially once it reliably surpasses us in every way, makes it even easier to imagine an effectively unstoppable extermination campaign that runs on its own and couldn't be stopped even by the people who started it up.

I personally think that stronger AI is also the solution and we're already too far down the cat-and-mouse rabbithole to pause the game (which some e/acc people believe as the main reason they want to push forward faster and make sure a good AI is the first one to really achieve full domination), but that's a different discussion.

cornel_io··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
If I'm reading this correctly, that means Ilya must have voted against Sam + Greg, right?
cornel_io··on Planning for Unplanned Work in Linear
Yes - I don't hate it.

...which is literally the highest praise I have ever given and probably ever will to issue-management software. They correctly realize that we mainly want to not notice the software, which is something that every competitor gets wrong.

What I can't figure out is how they possibly got funding in the reddest of red oceans with a pitch that couldn't have been much more than "we'll make Jira but not suck" (that's essentially all it is), but I'm glad they did.

cornel_io··on Show HN: Convert any screenshot into clean HTML code using GPT Vision (OSS tool)
Specifically, the "universal function approximate" thing means no more and no less than the relatively trivial fact that if you draw a bunch of straight line segments you can approximate any (1D, suitably well-behaved) function as closely as you want by making the lines really short. Translating that to N dimensions and casting it into exactly the form that applies to neural networks and then making the proof solid isn't even that tough, it's mostly trivial once you write down the right definitions.
cornel_io··on Beyond Memorization: Violating privacy via inference with LLMs
None of that seems upsetting to me at all. Even if it's advertising, even if it's about stuff that's political, even if it's aimed at causes I dislike.
cornel_io··on A coder considers the waning days of the craft
Two years ago we were quite a ways out from having LLMs that could competently respond to commands without getting into garbage loops and repeating random nonsense over and over. Now nobody even talks about the Turing test anymore because it's so clearly been blown past.

I wouldn't be so sure it will be very long before solving big, hard, and complex problems is within reach...

cornel_io··on I skipped to the ending
Google generally approves almost any open source work. They're also really generous about approving even for-profit side projects as long as there are no conflicts and you're willing to wait for approval. I was cleared to work on a few side-project games while I was there.

Re: do-nothing tolerance, the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on, and everything takes ages to do anyways because of all the red tape, so it's kinda hard to tell who's phoning it in deliberately and who's getting stuck in the constant muck of cross-team approval and bikeshedding bullshit when they take 4x as long as expected to deliver half of what was promised (which mostly doesn't have any impact anyways). And managers are (were?) rated at least in part based on how many people they manage, not what their teams produce, so dead weight doesn't matter to most managers, if they're trying to get bumped up to director level the last thing they want is the distraction of having to PIP and then fire someone when they could just keep them around as padding and say they hit their staffing target...

cornel_io··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
In 2016 I worked on a project with a client who still mandated that all code was written to the Java 1.1 language specification - no generics, no enums, no annotations, etc., not to even mention all the stuff that's come since 1.5 (or Java 5, or whatever you want to call it). They had Reasons(tm), which after filtering through the nonsense mostly boiled down to the CTO being curmudgeonly and unwilling to approve replacing a hand-written code transformer that he had personally written back in the stone ages and that he 1) considered core to their product, and 2) considered too risky to replace, because obviously there were no tests covering any of the core systems...sigh. At least they ran it all on a modern JVM.

But no, it would not surprise me to find a decent handful of large companies still writing Java 5 code; it would surprise me a bit more to find many still using that JVM, since you can't even get paid support through Oracle anymore, but I'm sure someone out there is doing it. Never underestimate the "don't touch it, you might break it" sentiment at non-tech companies, even big ones with lots of revenue, they routinely understaff their tech departments and the people who built key systems may have retired 20 years ago at this point so it's really risky to do any sort of big system migration. That's why so many lines of COBOL are still running.

cornel_io··on FTC Chair Lina Khan looks for allies and leads in Silicon Valley charm offensive
She's trying to enforce laws that don't exist but that she would prefer did. That's not going to go well, and the real solution is to get new laws passed, not to try to force tortured interpretations of the existing and relatively weak ones...

She also doesn't appear to actually understand the startup ecosystem at all, if she thinks that blindly opposing all M&A is going to help it.

cornel_io··on How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
Here's the fundamental problem with Wolfram's approach: he 1) came up with a model of physics (which is fine), 2) noticed that it reproduced many of the normal things that are necessary in a viable theory of everything, like the basic results of quantum physics and relativity (also fine), and 3) declared success, taking 2) as an indication that he's absolutely right and this is the real theory of everything and we're done. It's 3) that's absolutely not fine, and I'm not convinced that Wolfram fully gets why.

It's extremely easy to come up with models that reproduce most of modern physics if you at all know what you're doing. String theory does it, loop quantum gravity does, and so on. There are deterministic models that avoid the "God playing dice" aspects of quantum mechanics yet still reproduce all the classic results. There are rods + gears models of electromagnetism that give the right numbers even though the mechanisms are ludicrous.

The fact that it is so easy to come up with models that match modern physics is in itself a meaningful and not at all obvious thing, but it ultimately derives from the fact that the real universe seems to operate on laws that spring directly from symmetry principles. It turns out that most of the physics that matters is extremely "natural" and can be derived as a consequence of much simpler assumptions than you'd expect, even if the math that gets you from those assumptions to the resulting mechanics can be intense. If you're unfamiliar with this concept but understand calculus, you owe yourself a very deep dive on Noether's theorem, the way that symmetry radiates into every aspect of physics is one of the most profound things to study in physics.

The upshot of Noether's theorem and the ubiquity of its applications in modern physics is that it's very easy to create a theory that matches the predictions of e.g. special relativity: you just need to sneak it in by, for instance, defining your "foliations" in such a way that you have Lorentz symmetry, then everything else comes for free. If you want general relativity, then you (mostly) just need invariance under diffeomorphisms, which is really frickin easy to build into the limit of any graph-based model since you're basically redefining space altogether. I still don't entirely understand how Wolfram gets quantum theory in there; I don't doubt that his model does actually do it at a mathematical level, I just can't stand the verbose writing style and have too little interest in his particular theory to work through it, but once you start talking about constantly branching and recombining state graphs and stuff like that it's not at all hard to imagine that you could pick your definitions in such a way that Hilbert spaces pop out and then you define observers/observations in a way that makes it cleanly match a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

But the fact that you have a model that reproduces all of known physics doesn't mean anything. We already have several of those. And people rightly criticize even the top contenders on the basis that they all tend to suffer from the same defect, they're overparameterized and could predict a lot of universes that don't work the way ours does, and there are very few experiments that would rule the models out altogether (rather than merely constrain the parameters). To the extent that their predictions differ from what current theory would predict, their parameters could be easily tuned to match almost any result, which makes it tough to have any faith that the goalposts wouldn't be moved when results did come in that could test, say, the extreme conditions where quantum gravity would be relevant. Wolfram's is no different, except that as far as I can tell he hasn't gone anywhere near as far as e.g. the string theorists in working out what the different predictions would even be for his theory. He's just blindly declaring it correct.

Models are great, and I think there is something useful in Wolfram going down the rabbit hole in terms of showing what a model that reproduces quantum effects looks like, I feel like that is underexplored (the rules of quantum mechanics are usually taken as a given, even in theories of "everything"). But his breathless declarations of having solved physics are ludicrous, and I feel like his ideas might actually be taken much more seriously if he had a more realistic understanding of what he was working with.

cornel_io··on They can and will ruin everything you love
I guess it comes down to your definition of "exploitation", whether that's bad, and whether you consider employment to be a mutually exploitative arrangement (which I could get behind, though I think it's not a bad thing).

If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.

The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.

I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.

cornel_io··on John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity
Unless a very major rewrite happened in the last few years, Defold absolutely does not power Candy Crush, in fact to my knowledge King has never shipped anything in Defold and it's fallen almost entirely out of favor internally.

All the Candy Crushes as well as several other games use variants of a custom internal engine that's managed by a fairly sizable central team.

cornel_io··on Ben Fry resigns from the Processing Foundation
It has a simple and sane IDE, drawing API and overall environment (including builds and plugina) that's pared down to be cruft-free but very full-featured. Their flavor of Java is preprocessed to be easier to work with, e.g. no classes are required, you can write rect(10, 10, 20, 20); in an empty file and hit run and a rectangle will show up on screen. Things like simple game programming are extremely easy to dip a toe into.

Python tends to really suck for stuff like that as a beginner, because you immediately butt heads with the terrible package management/library situation and why does the pip installer crash with an unhelpful error message and what the hell is a virtualenv vs conda vs pipenv and oh also why does every one of those install scripts crash and ohmygod I just want to draw a line and I see advice like https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844... screw this I'm out.

cornel_io··on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
You're routinely successful at arguing down C-level execs who have already rejected your pushback multiple times?

Seems like a risky strategy...

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