ineptech

And from the following day, their paraphrasing of https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/4/23946353/generative-ai-co... is succinct:

> Meta: We stole so much stuff that, actually, we didn't steal any stuff

> Google: If things were different, things would be totally different

> Andreeson Horowitz: But we already spent so much money

> Microsoft: Think about how this would hurt the little guys, like us

> Anthropic: Fucking shut up about it

> Hugging Face: It's super legal but honestly it might not be idk

> StabilityAI: It's legal in places that aren't here

> I'm always reticent to fully engage in "The Dialogue," regardless of its momentary configuration. It's a smoothie made from shibboleths; you have to be able to detect them at only a few parts per million because once these things metastasize, they stop being about whatever they were about and instead become increasingly loud recitations of various catechisms and loyalty oaths.

Boy does that ring true.

Sprints make/made sense in the world of slow deploy cycles, especially for lengthy manual regression testing. If it takes you three weeks to get from a story being done to a story being in production, deciding which sprint a thing goes in is the difference between customers getting it on day n or day n+21. Once that's not a problem you can kind of forget sprints exist.

Two thoughts:

> "Way of work should be defined at a team level by its people, not by the company."

OP delivers that like a surprise, but isn't that the single core defining tenet of Agile? I thought it was.

> Sprint Planning — as simple as it seems, a long session (up to 4 hours)..

My big insight is, painful sprint planning is a result of painful deploys. Once you accomplish real CICD, you can just dispense with sprints and sprint planning entirely.

I'm not sure if that's something most people would agree with or not so I won't belabor it unless someone argues, but I can go on at length about that...

I still don't see how this is relevant to the question at hand, where someone is trying to convince you of something. They either convince you or they don't; refusing to decide is equivalent to the latter. Not taking the vitamins because I'm "so gripped by ignorance that you can't act" and not taking the vitamins because I'm "not afraid to come to no conclusions at all" are not alternatives, they're the same answer!

This is probably true, but not very helpful. We can shrug over historical curiosities, but in a lot of cases we have to make a decision.

Consider Linus Pauling's claim that you can prevent cancer with megadoses of vitamin C. It was never widely accepted, but Pauling is a titan of science with two Nobels and he wrote books with convincing-sounding arguments, so it's tempting to think maybe this is a case where the status quo is wrong (esp. if you have cancer).

I think that's the sort of thing Alexander is trying to navigate here - no matter how comfortable you get saying "I don't know", at the end of the day you need to take the vitamins or not take them.

Same. I found a book back in college claiming (on the basis of some theory about the Egyptian pyramids) that if you made a pyramidal shape with certain dimensions out of cardboard, it would make plants grow faster and keep your razorblades sharp. I didn't believe it, but I did make one for fun. All my physics-major friends made fun of me for being gullible. I was like, isn't testing stuff what we're supposed to be doing here?

(It didn't work)

Like I said, I understand the sentiment in the abstract. But my actual experience is that many good quality essays are often preceded by a gimme-yer-email popup. That's not causal - popups don't make content better - but it does seem correlated, possibly because the writers who are too principled to try to build an audience without email lists already gave up.

I understand the sentiment, but those email signup begs are to some extent caused by and a direct response to Google's attempts to capture traffic, which is what this article is discussing. And "[sites like this] is what ruins content" doesn't really work in reference to an article that a lot of people here liked and found useful.

That's the double-edged sword of capital markets, right? If you take investment then you need to produce big returns forever, and if you don't then you're in danger of being beaten in the short term by those who do. Small consultancies and contract shops might be an exception, but that's not because of the owner is wise so much as because those kinds of businesses don't scale with investment like more typical software companies.

No longer, as of when? I was working on this exact problem two days ago, using an old Lenovo M7 for a magic mirror project for a gift. I went through every relevant SO article and gave up without getting it to show up for adb, so it's odd to see this declared a solved problem.

Agreed, which is insane! We'll spend untold zillions fine-tuning and A/B testing the process by which we get users, but when it comes to getting coworkers it's "Well HR says the applicants have to make an account to apply so I guess that's just the way it is".

It's legal to lie to the police under questioning in most circumstances, i.e. "I didn't rob that guy" if you robbed that guy. The big exceptions are falsely identifying yourself and lying while reporting a crime.

You might be thinking of 18 USC 1001 which makes it a felony to lie to a federal agent, and is extremely broad (both in terms of of what constitutes a lie and who counts as a federal agent).

That's kind of a spoiler.

AIUI, the solar wind does attenuate gradually; the relatively sharp drop-off is the transition from the "I feel the solar wind more than the interstellar medium" region to the "I feel the ISM more than solar wind" region.

> a fact I bet you hoped I'd miss.

Don't do stuff like this. Communication via text between strangers over philosophical topics is hard enough without it. Assume good faith.

This argument has only ever been about one thing: you made a claim that there's an easy way to show that all piracy is unethical regardless of the details, and I said that was wrong. That's it. However, when somewhere along the way you get the idea that I'm also arguing that piracy is always ethical, it's not sneaky or underhanded of me to point out that I'm not. It's not impossible to imagine a world in which that would cast some of the things I've said in a new light; "your reason for believing X is wrong" is materially and non-trivially different from "X is wrong."

> My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.

Wrong on both counts, but it looks like you found a new thread full of people who agree with me and still want to discuss it, so no great loss I'd imagine.

If everyone pirated music, musicians would make all their income from merch and touring and it's not clear that they'd be worse off.

You spent a week arguing with me under the impression I believed X, and I pointed out that I had told you at the beginning I didn't believe X. I was curious whether you'd re-read the thread with this new information in mind and re-evaluate the things you'd said. I think we both know the answer to that, so here we are.

You are right though, that I thought I was a lot more curious than I was - I forgot about this until I saw you peddling the same line of goods in a new thread this morning. Best of luck :) I will close by saying thanks for being civil, I hope you experienced this conversation in the "Let's have a friendly tussle over this relatively obscure point for fun and to understand the world better" spirit in which it was intended. For future reference, you can enhance that good-natured spirit greatly by not accusing people of being upset. Also wouldn't hurt to pay a little extra attention when someone says, "Just to avoid misunderstanding I'll try to clearly summarize my position...", missing that caused a lot of unnecessary repetition.

ELI5 attempt:

Suppose you're using Newtonian mechanics to model the behavior of a moving baseball that bounces off a brick wall. You write down some equations, do the experiment, the results match, yay science.

Now imagine your lazy coworker was supposed to do the same experiment, but he couldn't find any bricks, so instead of a wall he just built a tiny rocket engine inside the tennis ball that can exert exactly enough force to reverse its velocity. The ball's velocity changes in exactly the same way, except that it changes at a certain time (when your lazy coworker triggers it) rather than at a certain place (where the wall is). Would his results match yours?

For a single ball, yes. The behavior would be identical between these two scenarios. If you looked at a graph of the ball's location over time, you wouldn't be able to tell whether it had bounced off a wall or been "bounced" by a little rocket engine. Right?

Now consider a stream of baseballs. In your lab, your baseball cannon fires a stream of balls which all reverse velocity at a certain place in space, but your coworker is firing a stream of balls that all reverse velocity at a certain time. Would they also behave identically?

No, this time there are differences. For one example, the wall-balls would collide with each other (the ball that just hit the wall would run into the ball that's about to hit the wall) and the rocket-balls wouldn't (each ball reverses direction at the same time, so the spacing between the balls never changes). For another difference, they'd bounce back in a different order (the first wall-ball to be shot would be the first to return, whereas the last rocket-ball to leave the cannon would be the first to return).

That is more or less what this experiment is doing except they're using light rather than baseballs, and a substance with variable reflectiveness rather than tiny rockets. This might have repercussions for time symmetry, that's above my pay grade, but definitely doesn't involve time travel.

tl;dr of my comment and of the whole article:

a) think of the 3-5 best things you've done recently at work

b) practice describing them to a friend (you don't work with) the way you'd tell any other personal anecdote

c) When asked a behavioral "Tell me about a time when" question, instead of trying to comb through your memory of the thousands of experiences you've had at work, just ask yourself which of your 3-5 stories is closest, and tell it

d) if that feels dishonest (and it does to a lot of people!) remember that the whole point of an interview is for you to tell them how great you are. If they knew you had led the effort to fix the critical-but-brittle X service, they would've asked you. They asked a vague open-ended question to give you the latitude to answer however you see fit.

I think this is extremely good advice so I'm making a top-level comment to defend it and respond to some of the criticisms in this thread.

First, no one is asking you to lie. This isn't about inventing details or exagerrating. This is about deciding how to answer and phrasing your answer.

Second, "story" in this case means personal anecdote, like the author's hiking example. It is not very closely related to stories in books or games or whatever. What can we say about the stories you tell casually at parties or with friends? Probably that they take less than two minutes, they start with an interesting hook, and they include a problem of some kind and the resolution to that problem. That's what your interview stories should look like.

Ex: Suppose you are asked, "Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with a coworker and how you resolved it". Compare these two answers:

1) "One time I had a coworker that kind of hated me. I'm not sure what his deal was, we didn't interact all that much and I thought his work was pretty good, but he developed a personal animus towards me and started being rude and picking fights with me on Slack. He ended up getting fired after he threw eggs at my car."

2) "I was leading the effort to fix the critical-but-brittle X service, and I wanted to start by wrapping it in a service with modern deploy and test automation, so we could at least deploy it safely while we fixed it. However, the lead architect was opposed to that plan, because of Y. We worked through it by getting all of the stakeholders together and doing Z.

Which answer is more true? The first one might feel more honest. After all, the "disagreement with a coworker" part is much more central to answer 1 than answer 2. But it's also a terrible answer, because it has fuck all to do with your abilities. It's just a thing that happened to you that happens to meet the criteria the question asked for, but is otherwise not relevant.

> Your position re: "the sticker" is a substantial retraction of your initial argument, that piracy is not immoral.

That was my original argument, from a week ago. You can go look at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38453647

Don't know how I could've made it any clearer. Genuinely curious whether/how you will update as a result.

(you've heavily edited the comment I was replying to, I shall now edit the response)

> The expectation of compliance is part of the social contract.

Ethics requires that we act ethically regardless of what the law says, period. You can't something something Hobbes your way out of that.

> The reason this conversation won't progress is that you're more or less ignoring all of ethics and philosophical thought as it's been laid out in the past 500 years, instead substituting your own opinion, as if that were even approaching equality.

Huh? I'd be perfectly happy if CDs and DVDs were sold according to 500-year-old philosophical ethics. The "you might own the disc but you're only allowed to do what I say with it" stuff is comparatively very recent.

> Of course we won't get anywhere if you can't address the obvious relationship piracy has with the concept of "Free riders", for example.

Why am I supposed to address this? Was I asked to at some point? You've spent a solid week arguing that piracy is unethical specifically because the people who do it have somehow agreed not to. Are you now pivoting to the position that it's unethical for reasons pertaining to the consequences of piracy? If so (and far be it from me to accuse you of not reading my comments, which would be very rude) can I remind you that I clearly and explicitly agreed with that?

> ...I'll close by trying to clearly summarize my position. Media piracy is certainly ethically dubious, but its ethical position is not changed by the shrinkwrap license(s) that are sometimes attached to it. If it's ethical to pirate a movie, it is still ethical to pirate the same movie with a sticker saying otherwise, and if it's unethical to pirate a movie with such a sticker, it's still unethical to pirate the same movie without that sticker.

> You clearly have some form of disgust with corporations...

Nope. Recall that I said, "corporations are not part of [the social contract], any more than a scorpion is, or a calculator." Do you suppose I'm disgusted by calculators?

For the record, what corporations share with scorpions and calculators is that they lack agency, but I don't think it matters here anyway. Your whole position is that piracy is immoral because the people who pirate stuff promised (at some point, in some sense) not to, and I don't think your position or my response to it really hinges on whether that promise was made to a corporation or a person.

> And no, breaking laws is not, itself, immoral.

Great, we agree on something! The problem is, this contradicts your position up to this point. "Piracy is immoral because it involves breaking laws" cannot co-exist with "Some laws can be ethically broken." The former is what you've been claiming all along, and the latter is what you just conceded, and they can't both be true. And NB, you can't get around this with something like, "Well sure there are some exceptions, but it's still usually immoral to break laws" because the position you're arguing against is that piracy is one of those exceptions. You can't use a rule to disprove an exception to that rule.

Bottom line, I don't think this line of thinking is going to go anywhere. I can't help noticing that you seem fine with the idea of judging actions by consequences when it comes to corporate employees:

> "...those people who are responsible for whatever the consequences of their decisions are, good or bad."

All I'm arguing is that the same is true of pirates. Whatever you say in response must, at some point, deal with the fact that some people think pirating music is morally equivalent to stealing a bike and some people think it isn't. That, and not some abstract matter like how one interprets Hobbes or whether corporations have feelings or whatever, is the core of the dispute and also the thing you're trying to skirt around. Well, it was an admirable effort and I thank you for making it because I enjoy debates like this, but I don't think it's working. No shame in that! Trying to demonstrate that piracy is bad without arguing that piracy is bad was always a bit of a tall order.

First, I will cede the idea of corporations being bound by the social contract. It's not so much that I think it's wrong as nonsensical, like claiming a submarine can swim. I guess you can think of corporations as participating in the social contract, in the sense that they are subject to laws and in return they create social value, but it's not as if they could decide not to do those things. Corporations can't even exist outside of a society! But I also don't think it proves what you think it does, so sure, let's say that submarines are excellent swimmers and corporations are totally part of the social contract. I can't wait for Apple to remember that they're supposed to pay US taxes!

Second: do you claim it is inherently immoral to break laws or not? I've assumed the answer is no despite your dodging the question, but I don't see where you're trying to go with all this discussion of the social contract, if not there. There's more I'd say, but I hate typing out "if you think X then I would respond Y, but if you think Z then I would reply with W" stuff, I'd much prefer a straight answer to this.

Assuming you are referring to the social contract, I refer you again to the definition of "social"; corporations are not part of it, any more than a scorpion is, or a calculator. Could you answer some of these questions so I can understand your position better?

> What implicit rule is it that you think applies to purchasing stuff?

> This ethical agreement not to pirate stuff, is this something that pirates can refuse?

> If this is an explicit rule attached to every sale, then by purchasing a copyrighted work, you're consenting to that part of the agreement, yes? And if not, then how is this an explicit rule?

First, breaking a law isn't by itself unethical. You can argue otherwise if you like, but a) it opens up a whole slew of absurdities (e.g. exploiting a software bug on a slot machine for profit is unethical IFF it's on a network that crosses a state line - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Kane), and b) you'd be abandoning everything you've said up til this point.

Second, copyright law is not a rule that is "attached to every sale," whatever that means. (If it were, you could get around it by shoplifting!) You need to stop blurring the lines between legal rules and ethical rules, because it's led you to confuse the difference between agreeing to a rule and being subject to it. So, let's make that explicit. I'm subject to copyright law. Doesn't matter if I agree to it or consent to it (it's not even clear what consenting to a law means), I'm subject to it regardless.

Now, you can certainly argue that there are ethical laws that we are all subject to as well. But, you are not arguing that! (correct me if I'm wrong, of course) You are arguing that there is an ethical law against piracy that pirates have agreed to, without wanting to, and I'm telling you, that's not a thing that can happen. You can't agree to something against your will.

So, you gotta make a choice to make this whole line of reasoning coherent. This ethical agreement not to pirate stuff, is this something that pirates can refuse? If so, I think they very clearly are refusing it, and if not, you cannot meaningfully claim that they agreed to it.

A lot to unpack here, sorry to fisk:

> do you believe in implicit agreement to contracts? This might take the form of, e.g. an expectation of refund if this DVD ends up being blank, or the belief that the DVD won't contain a virus or cut you when you grab the edge.

In a word, no. I expect the DVD to work and not have a virus because consumer products are usually subject to an implied warranty of merchantability (which is very much not an ethical agreement but a legal obligation imposed by courts). The idea of a corporation replacing a faulty product because it's the right thing to do sounds like something from a children's book with talking badgers who wear waistcoats and serve tea. The real-world DVD manufacturer would dump toxic waste in my back yard if they thought the savings would exceed the fine.

> they still exist as a set of expectations and assumptions that come with social interactions (including product sales).

Purchasing a product from a corporation is not a social interaction. Not sure what else to say beyond referring you to the definition of "social."

> In other words, are there implicit rules that govern any given exchange beyond those that are explicitly stated before the exchange occurs? Really, rules that govern social interaction generally. Do those rules exist?

There are implict rules for all sorts of situations, sure. People tend to disagree on what they are, which is why we have so many explicit rules, e.g. copyright law and the CFAA and so forth. But sure, implicit rules can exist. "Don't fart in a crowded elevator" might be one. Another might be, "If you have a point to make, explain it clearly as opposed to dragging it out with leading rhetorical questions." What implicit rule is it that you think applies to purchasing stuff?

I feel like I'm talking to an LLM with a very limited token history. Yes, it would, if Bob actually agreed to a real contract. Have I not made it clear why I don't think purchasing a DVD constitutes agreeing to the license attached to it? That was literally the point of my very first reply to you: the difference between agreeing to something and being told "I declare that you agree to this".

Of course contracts exist, of course contingent agreements exist, please make your point.

edit to add: it sounds like Bob just signed an NDA.