equestria

Of course, but I'd rather not share it for obvious reasons. It is a nonsensical biography of a non-existing person.

Google does the "ransacking" for them - ContentID.

I exclude all the published LLM User-Agents and have a content honeypot on my website. Google obeys, but ChatGPT and Bing still clearly know the content of the honeypot.

I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail.

I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.

That last part makes me a bit nervous. It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.

I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.

As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.

In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.

The wifi protocol is computationally intensive. The wifi module is effectively a fast 32-bit computer with fairly complex firmware. And then, there's all the RF engineering that needs to happen to make it work.

So, the original thinking was "if you need wifi, we can't price a standalone chip competitively, just buy a SoC". But the genius of ESP32 was that they approached it the other way round: they built a wifi chip, and then figured they can carve out some room for user code. No need to pay for a separate MCU. This worked for a lot of customers, and the economies of scale took care of the rest.

I think it's one of these things that people like to talk about in the abstract, but how many people really want a big CRT taking up space in their home?

Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you. A lot cheaper than restarting the production of cathode-ray tubes.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. The point of these (ill-defined) alignment exercises is not to achieve parity with humans, but to constrain AI systems so that they behave in our best interest. Or, more prosaically, that they don't say or do things that are a brand safety or legal risk for their operator.

Still, I think that the original paper and this take on it are just exercises in excessive anthropomorphizing. There's no special reason to believe that the processes within an LLM are analogous to human thought. This is not a "stochastic parrot" argument. I think LLMs can be intelligent without being like us. It's just that we're jumping the gun in assuming that LLMs have a single, coherent set of values, or that they "knowingly" employ deception, when the only thing we reward them for is completing text in a way that pleases the judges.

I doubt it works this way. People at Google use search too, and they don't like what they see.

Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole.

Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.

Oh, come on. Not everything is addiction. I can accept that algorithmic doom-scrolling is somewhat habit-forming, but even there, we have agency. But background music? Yeah, I like it, but I don't get restless or frustrated when it's not playing.

Well, then again: maybe Spotify was hoping you wouldn't notice, but by now, the problem has been exposed publicly a number of times. This article is one of many.

How many of us are canceling their Spotify subscriptions over this? It wouldn't be some huge sacrifice, it's about the least we could do. Most of us won't. The "caring" is just lip service.

If a customer wants endless elevator music, then I don't think that Spotify is wrong to generate endless elevator music for them. The problem is deception. If you want to listen to human performances, then Spotify should give you choice instead of hoping you don't notice.

Free market means you can vote with your wallet. If you don't, then it says less about markets and more about our stated vs revealed preferences. Maybe we just don't care if real artists go away.

Most homes of people who are reasonably well-off - including most people on HN - go through three distinct stages.

The first stage is right after you spend an insane amount of money to buy the property. At that point, you want to validate the investment, so you spend more on making it look nice, but you're probably oblivious to many realities of homeownership. So yeah, this is when people splurge on matched kitchenware, beautiful cutting boards, "smart" kitchen appliances, sleek-looking but impractical veneer / plastic / glass furniture, etc.

The second stage is when you get kids or pets, and you start losing the battle. You eventually throw in the towel, accepting that there are going to be dings on the walls and on stainless steel appliances, holes in window screens, and veneer peeling off after the fifth juice spill accident.

The third stage is when the kids move out and you can actually make the space look nice. Except now, you know that there's some wisdom to old-fashioned solid wood furniture, that cutting boards are for cutting, and so on. So your home acquires more of an "old people" vibe.

I don't think it's a useful way to frame it. Model training is very compute-intensive. Generation isn't. You can run it on locally on consumer hardware. It's just not very monetizable, so we're converging on a black-box "in the cloud" approach.

If we're focusing on energy consumption, using an LLM to generate a newspaper article probably uses less energy than a living journalist would use. The morning commute alone is probably "worth" a dozen articles.

The problem is different. First, that journalist is still alive and consuming resources, just out of a job. Second, because you now have a very cheap way to generate an infinite number of articles, and there are commercial incentives to do so, the "dead internet theory" has a good chance of coming true.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Is there demand for AI-generated images in general? No, it's just that there is a lot of demand for middling, utilitarian artwork. And as it happens, AI can generate it more quickly and cheaply than human artists.

It will work the same for porn. It's just that mainstream models are sanitized not to generate it, so the cost to enter is higher.

So you paid another fee for a checked bag (or soon will, given that more and more airlines are converging on that). Either way, you're paying less for the base fare, but more for extras that most passengers need and that used to be free.

As for the second part, I meant "by the time you looked at the dates and hours and clicked on a specific flight".

But that's not making the actual price lower. There are few situations where you don't need carry-on, so almost everyone will end up booking a "cheaper" flight, but then paying extra for carry-on.

In fact, obfuscation like that probably allows the airline to charge you more, because you don't get to see all the fees until you commit.

Eh, kinda. It technically preserves content, but it has almost zero discoverability. The site disappears from Google & co, so unless you come across a dead link in some old HN or Reddit thread, you won't even know it's there.

In my experience, it's more common than we suspect. I've met quite a few people in their 60s with fascinating hobbies. Some of it boils down to the fact that they had many decades to get good - and with career in the rearview mirror and adult children, they have a lot more time, too.

But it's also true that with age, you lose the drive to get praise from strangers - so at best, you get a text website viewed by hundreds, not a series of TikTok or YouTube videos viewed by millions. And sometimes, not even that website.

When that person dies and leaves behind a man-sized vacuum tube computer, or a collection of vintage calculators, or something of that sort... the heirs usually don't have the willpower to carry on, and because the stuff is impossible to sell, it's often destined for the dump. Maybe a couple of years in a storage unit before that.

It's even worse with digital assets. Who's gonna renew that hobby domain or pay that hosting bill? I've seen some really valuable online resources disappear after the author died.

What's interesting is that in many cases, you will not be given a vaccine. A skunk bite will do the trick, but if you were bitten by a squirrel, you probably won't be getting any. You can probably read your state's guidelines online. My state has a surprisingly narrow list of animals that entitle you to a shot.

The theory behind it is that some mammals are somewhat less likely to be carriers, but it's not a comforting thought, right? You have a somewhat lower chance of certain death than if you were bitten by a bat, so we will deny you a pretty safe vaccine.

We have trillions of dollars riding on one-person open-source projects. This is not the barrier for "serious businesses" that it used to be.

Airlines are trying to squeeze every penny out in a depressing race to the bottom because they couldn't really differentiate themselves and travelers overwhelmingly just pick the cheapest flight.

Public transit is quite different. It's not as opex-intensive as flying, it's usually subsidized by the state, and it's often pretty much a monopoly.

We have already thrown and will throw a lot of wrenches into the works. We have extensively reshaped the planet to the benefit of some species and the detriment of many others.

It's a risk, but it's not worse than the thousands of other risks we've already taken. Given the absolutely insane amount of death and suffering caused by mosquito-borne diseases, it's probably also a justifiable one.

Huh? The bulk of your local taxes probably funds public schools. As for federal taxes, the bulk is social security, followed by defense, Medicare & Medicaid, and various unemployment benefits.

It can be argued that we should be spending less on defense, but the trade-offs there are very different from what you're describing.

The government also does a fair number of indirect subsidies by making some people or businesses pay less tax, but it's generally not the "top 1%". If you're in the top 1% of earners in California, your total effective tax burden is likely 50% or so.

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there. Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there.

I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60: except for folks who built their own companies or made truly exceptional contributions to their field, most will say that hobbies, friends, and family mattered a lot more.

So, there is this fundamental contradiction in this article: you can engineer a very neat career, but for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns. For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade. You don't need to dream about being a manager; you just need to be reasonably good at it.

> I think it's fair. It's the same thing humans do with their own art.

No, hold on. The key part is that you have a quiz that purports to test the ability of an average human to tell AI artwork from human artwork.

So if you specifically select images for this quiz based on the fact that you, the author of the quiz, can't tell them apart, then your quiz is no longer testing what it's promised to. It's now a quiz of "are you incrementally better than the author at telling apart AI and non-AI images". Which is a lot less interesting, right?

I'm not saying the quiz has to include low-quality AI artwork. It also doesn't need to include preschoolers' doodles on the human side. But it's one thing to have some neutral quality bar, and another thing altogether to choose images specifically to subvert the stated goal of the test.

Eh, this is pretty unfair. That's a test of how good humans are at deceiving other humans, not a of how hard it is to distinguish run-of-the-mill AI art from run-of-the-mill human art in real life.

First, by their own admission, the author deliberately searched for generative images that don't exhibit any of the telltale defects or art choices associated with this tech. For example, they rejected the "cat on a throne" image, the baby portrait, and so on. They basically did a pre-screen to toss out anything the author recognized as AI, hugely biasing the results.

Then, they went through a similar elimination process for human images to zero in on fairly ambiguous artwork that could be confused with machine-generated. The "victorian megaship" one is a particularly good example of such chicanery. When discussing the "angel woman" image, they even express regret for not getting rid of that pic because of a single detail that pointed to human work.

Basically, the author did their best to design a quiz that humans should fail... and humans still did better than chance.

This is such a weird take. There are countless platforms that do try to lock content creators in. Substack doesn't - you can literally export the list of all email addresses of your subscribers at any time, with a single click of a button. Your content is easy to export too. There's literally nothing forcing you to keep using Substack if it's no longer providing any value to you as a writer.

The article doesn't really refute this, it just casts random aspersions, brings up political extremism, and whatnot. OK, you can dislike Substack for their speech policy, but that's tangential to the claim the article opens with.

The parent described it as "mind-blowing"; I was curious about that.

Why? 20 ms is a very long time in the world of digital electronics. 1 MHz = 1 microsecond ticks, and most embedded MCUs run 10x to 100x faster than that. Sensors and ADCs commonly have microsecond-range response times, too.

The mechanical part (rapid inflation) is more interesting, but for a long time, they did it the "obvious" way: a precisely-calibrated explosive charge, just enough to fill the bag without tearing it apart. Now, I think they're moving toward compressed air, which probably requires some clever engineering to build a sufficiently responsive electronically-controlled valve.