[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
123 karma · joined March 23, 2025
[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
Depending on if you're a cost cutting team, fixed expense team or organization, if you're a revenue driving team, or if you're a core team, or the very many other splits you can come up about the relationship between the expense/balance sheets and the team itself...there are very very different attitudes towards COEs and leadership principles.
Perhaps at that point if you stop reading after the first sentence, you could churn the entire article through AI to summarize it into a single sentence, and see if the invalid premise is core to the message?
Funny that soon the AI can define my own mental model on the fly soon.
OK, my fault for poor communication. Let me try strongly typing this.
Clarinet: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-Bb. Flute: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-C. And finger-C is polymorphic on the instrument, or something.
Aside from that, I don't disagree with you.
One consideration is that with most instruments, being keyed the way they are, if you immediately transpose via LLM some of those instruments will have almost all their notes in unexpected ledger lines.
Which could have (en)grave implications.
Like motion sickness with musical tones - you see one thing on the page, you have a sense for what "note" you're playing, but out comes something else.
I have perfect pitch but it's not really useful, except for noticing that my instrument is getting sharper. But that doesn't matter since you have to be in tune with the rest of the band/orchestra.
I liked the comments explaining why this worked.
Given those considerations I expect Y to be pretty large.
Who is "you"? And what do you envision is the "plug" to pull? And when does an intelligence become a superintelligence - do "we" know when to pull the "plug"?
For example, a superintelligence may be born in a datacenter. Would you expect politicians are aligned with shutting down a datacenter (privately owned) in which they may have heavy stake? What if critical systems are also running on the same infrastructure, will it be easy to cherry pick the superintelligence nodes to shutoff?
IMO this take is dismissive of the entrenched systems that make it hard to pull the plug. It's a hard problem and we need to think about it more.
This is under the happy assumption that all used water evaporates into a cloud directly above the source region, which rains back directly.
But then:
> A decoder backend on AWS (SQS + Lambda + DynamoDB + S3) reassembles objects from incoming encoded packets delivered via Proxylity UDP Gateway.
:( those microservice invocation will burn up the DC more.
The real sell looks like offloading s3 upload latency.
Suppose now that you're an ant on the middle ring of that tree stump. No matter which way you're looking from Earth's middle-ring, either the rings will get gradually older and then younger with increasing distance (if you're looking towards the center-ish), or the rings will get strictly younger (if you're looking away from the center-ish).
This analogy obviously breaks down if you delve into details but that should give a better intuition to what's going on.
I have not required a service for this kind of optimization at work. Though work gives me unbounded access to Claude 4.x-1m (substitute x with whatever is available). So I often ask it to do this kind of task.
I found that when I just specify, sometimes the AI will optimize to the point that it breaks other existing functional requirements in the same codebase. So I have to steer it with invariants. This is where the bulk of my effort is - monitoring to make sure that the agent didn't suddenly scramble the infra or delete valid usecases.
1. How do you address that [paperclip problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence) in Remoroo? Can we define invariants? 2. Why is there a whole orchestration system? Was there some limitation that prompted this architecture, e.g. did workers die frequently? Looks like Temporal/AWS SWF with the brain/worker/control architecture. The existence of `q (quit): Kills the Worker, aborts the run. The run is marked FAILED.` makes me think there's only one worker...so why...? It'd make more sense if the brain wanted to dispatch multiple hypotheses to multiple workers to test in parallel (e.g. if optimizing SQL, try these different joins all at once, discard queries running for X minutes after the first complete one).
Anyway, I got value out of it, comments dont have to increase net factual information to be meaningful, because we are all capable of reflection.
- Could you explain what you mean by "security through obscurity"? The mechanism is well explained in the blog.yossarian.net posts linked within. It is simply adding a time filter on a client.
- Also, I'm not sure if package registries (e.g. server) and package managers (e.g. client) are being conflated here regarding "attacks on package managers", this seems to be more of a mitigation a client could do when the upstream content in a registry is compromised.
- Lastly, I agree with the sentiment that this is not a full solution. But I think it can be useful nevertheless, a la Swiss Cheese Safety Model. [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing