dingosity

I don't know how true this is, but the idea that a commercial entity in the modern era would prioritize public safety over commercial interests is pretty laughable. (thinking about Boeing and Waymo most recently.)

Doxxing people can give cause to restraint if it's inciting speech. Consider a situation where you say "Hey. I just found Joe Schmo's Address. He lives at 123 Main St., Anytown, DK 10010." Now compare it to when you say "Hey. I just found Joe Schmo's Address. He lives at 123 Main St., Anytown, DK 10010. Joe's a child molester. Let's go burn down his house." or if you call up the local police department and said "Hey. I saw Joe Schmo with Goody Parker in their house at 123 Main St., Anytown, DK 10010. They're molesting a child right now! Hurry, if you're fast you might stop them!"

Yeah... I don't remember saying bank transactions were copyrighted or in the public domain. Probably someone elses' comment.

VoIP calls? uh... you may want to review the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18USC2510-2522 before assuming VoIP calls can be intercepted for the purpose of training an AI.

You are free to believe anything you can access is fair use. (I mean, maybe in Iceland or Sweden.) But give me a call if you get caught doing this, I can refer you to a decent attorney. (Again... this all assumes you're in the states. International copyright is sort of a wild west. But you would expect MSFT to open up a fully owned offshore subsidiary in a country like Vanuatu or Iceland to evade continental copyright (what is it with islands and copyright???)

You can reasonably assume that by posting content to the intarwebs, the author provided an implicit license to view the content (for the community that could reasonably be identified as being able to view the work.) But this does not imply an automatic "freeware" or "fair use" exemption.

How can Suleyman say someone who published something on the web in 1995 intended for it to be used to train their LLM in 2020? It's unreasonable to assume that.

There's a reason you see people put explicit licenses on things, it's because they don't exist unless the work's creator releases the work under a specific license. And license for a human to read something on the web is not a license to give your content to a large company for them to remix it into... whatever the heck it is they're remixing it into.

But yeah. It's probably worth it to brush up on robots.txt definitions to exclude spiders from scraping your site if they're going to use it as LLM fodder.

FWIW... I found a few videos related to Endicott's story:

* This is a quick 5 minute video where Suleyman talks about how indeterminacy is good. So... you know... it's a good think that Co-Pilot can't tell you why it thinks it needs to dump 800 line of java code into your hello world program. At around 3:44, he confuses LLMs (with a surface understanding of syntax married with a markov chain on steroids) with people (who as best we can tell have a different understanding of the thing represented.) Corporate management confusing the the map with the territory? Who could have forseen such a thing: https://youtu.be/GsGFYoIx1YM

* This one seems to be the longer version, but I'm still looking for where Endicott's quote comes from, but around the 14minute mark is where the conversation turns towards "who owns the ip" used to train LLMs and the terms "Fair Use" and "Freeware" are used around the 14m50s mark: https://youtu.be/lPvqvt55l3A

[EDIT: So... yes... get out the pitch-forks... Microsoft is saying anything on the web is inherently freeware or subject to fair use even if you think you remember putting a copyright notice on it (or, as is mentioned in US copyright law, the creator automatically receives copyright protections upon creation of the work.)]

https://www.tiktok.com/@shortysspeedshop/video/7371594191027...

[ Edit: Oh... you can get the text without the cruft by using lynx. nice. ]

I agree with many of the assertions... Diversity is the right thing to do. And it certainly seems you should hire the best people, regardless of skin colour, ethnicity and gender. And if you limited your CEO search to white males between the ages of 32 and 43 who played college football and who are 6 foot of higher and judged to be "hot" by modern standards and hoot out motivational slogans as if every developer was motivated the same way every salesperson was, you're going to limit yourself to an un-naturally small field from which to draw your candidates.

But... it's important to note that the promises of wealth for DEI hiring didn't come from academia, corporations, employees, organized labor or politicians. It came from a company that, while admittedly hiring bright people, tends to downplay the importance of business context and emphasize the importance of focusing only on those things which are measurable while ignoring Goodhart's Law (When a measure starts to become a target, it stops being a good measure.)

My experience with McKinsey consultants is they almost destroyed my business. Brilliantly smart, they used their intelligence to justify policies dependent on only those things they knew how to measure. If they couldn't figure out how to measure it, it didn't seem to matter. Fortunately, after their policies lost us our three premier customers and a nearly 60% loss of revenue. After ditching McKinsey and organizational repair, the company was able to recover, but not before selling the company at a discount and layoffs.

Please don't blame the concept of "Diversity" for McKinsey's idiocy.

I'm not anti-Scrum, I'm anti-people-doing-stupid-crap-and-saying-it's-Scrum. Sounds like you have a decent environment with people who sort of know what they're doing. Are you hiring?

I should have been clearer as to what my point was: Just 'cause you're using the tool (Jira) does not mean you're automagically using the process (Scrum).

And maybe a related side-point: Scrum (like Agile) is a way of thinking about software development. Not everyone gets that. That might be the value of a good Scrum-Master. I've yet to see a good Scrum-Master in the wild. Most of the ones I've encountered are just dudes who tweak Jira settings half the day and use the other half of the day poking at Jira's SQL schema so they can fix config errors they made before they learned how the current version of Jira works. Or... in other words... if you're only filling out Jira tickets and only doing the ceremonies, then you're leaving half of Scrum's value on the table. Too many people do this.

But... was decision making authority devolved to the team, SDM or TAM? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Our code was nothing but a series of queries to config settings and simple math. And even then it took weeks to get a decision on how things should work so we could tweak the config settings used in code that was now difficult to understand. Refactoring? pish! Unit tests? who wants to test every class? (i.e. - management didn't understand what unit tests or TDD were.)

My experience with Amazon was we toed the line for the easy bits of Scrum (ceremonies, etc) but the stuff that seems to matter where wildly different between teams.

If someone asked me "Does Amazon use Scrum?" I would say "in theory, but not really in practice."

In 2016 when we all moved to the new issue tracking system, I sort of wished we could use Jira. For most of that year my team put Todos and Issues in the GIT repo along with the code because we were tired of losing days of info in the system as they kept reverting to known good versions and losing issue tracking data (because the format of the data was dependent on new code that was just reverted.)

Though I do know that parts of amazon (AWS, Studios, etc.) were able to avoid the majority of the problems. I had hoped when Andy took over the whole shebang, things would get better. But after poking my head in last month, things as the bit-A seem to have gotten a bit worse: interns and SDE II's still do all the coding (one of the reasons i left; i'm not an intern and i like coding), but no-one on the team I was called in to help still hadn't read any of the TDD books and just assumed a unit test was a test you wrote to test a single class, because a class is a unit.

But let me stop bitching about a company I don't work at anymore and say I don't disagree with you but it brings up a point I should have mentioned: "Scrum" probably means different things in different teams. Big companies have a lot of teams that might all say they're doing "Scrum", but they're doing it in a very different way. Some will ignore the intangible aspects of Scrum and Agile, and only use the tools (like Jira). Others will be adamant that every ceremony must be performed at exactly the right time. Most will try to do the best they can even though product management has their heads so far up... hold on... i should be nice... i have worked with product managers that are excellent, i just wish there were more of them.

Yeah. Amazon is a big place with a lot of teams. They're probably all doing a version of scrum. And they're not using Jira. So we have an existence proof that it happens with at least big companies.

I was worried the author of this piece, Gregory Korte, was horrifically biased. But I have to give him props for gingerly stepping around verbiage which is hard to write without sounding like a hack.

My read of the DNCs bylaws implies the delegates pledged to Biden will go to whomever Biden picks, if it's not himself. But I think the point the author was making was the decision of who would replace Biden would be more of a political nightmare than an administrative / procedural nightmare. Who do you want to replace him on the ticket? Harris? Newsome? Whitmer? Pritzger? -- Whitmer and Pritzger may be decent candidates, but they don't have nearly enough national exposure. Harris gives off a Hillary-Clinton-esque cold vibe, imho. Newsome is sort of like the Boogey-man for the right, though the people he seems to upset probably are already going to vote for Trump.

I'm also thinking of what happens if Biden is elected but incapacitated before the inauguration. My guess is the VP would take his slot since they were already elected. But if people disliked Harris, would this factor into their calculation. Could the Harris bow out at the last minute to be replaced by Newsome, Whitmer or Pritzger? That would be unlikely, but it's fun to think about.

still... thanks for just commenting about reddit rather than making a political jeremiad.

I miss the 90s when we did XP.

Another complaint I have about Scrum is its structure assumes you have a good idea of what you're trying to do. Agile was supposed to reduce the cost of design changes.

Also... is there anyone who uses Scrum who doesn't use Jira? At this point Scrum is essentially the same as saying "Our organization uses Jira. No one in my organization knows how to configure it because we don't want to pay to send the guy who manages it part time to training. And when we paid for the consultant, they asked all sorts of questions like 'how are your projects laid out?' and we said 'uh... we hired you to tell us how we should do that' and they said 'you need to know how your projects are laid out' and we said 'heck, batman, we don't even know what the hell we're really building because we're waaay early in the requirements gathering and design' and they said 'how cute, call me when you know what you're doing' and we said 'yeah... i think we can randomly click buttons on the Jira interface without your help' and our VP said 'we need to monetize our synergy by leveraging our learnings and develop asks for cross departmental interfaces' and i said 'absolutely, Bob, I'll just be over here writing a distributed map reduce function in Erlang' and my management chain said 'CI/CD is hard, let's just do GitFlow and hire interns to randomly type YAML files we upload to AWS' and at this time I tried to wake up but it was not a dream."

Which is to say... Scrum adds structure to the things that are easy to add structure to and seems to avoid having people think about the problems. You ABSOLUTELY can do Scrum without it devolving into a crap-fest, but it's not easy and you wind up using other tools, often without telling your management chain.