jmcgough

You might be letting your personal experiences pollute things. The CoC never says that. It's anti-harassment language, and specifically enumerates what that might look like. Some contributors are members of the LGBT community, and I'm sure don't want to debate their personal identity when they're there to contribute to a project and write code.

People working on an open-source language aren't 19-year-olds on twitter, you're using the wrong heuristic here. They're there mostly to talk programming and work on a project together. The CoC is pretty standard language that you'd find at most conferences you attend. It specifically enumerates bigoted actions because several contributors are members of the LGBT community. The last thing many of them want is to deal with culture war nonsense seeping into their fun hobby.

Read the CoC again: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUC...

It doesn't police peoples' personal beliefs outside the community. It only says that while participating in the community you agree not to harass people and try to contribute in a positive way.

I wonder if you have past experiences that are coloring your interpretation of this, because I'm really unsure where you're getting any of this from.

I think you're seriously overreacting; you don't need to believe the same things that they do, all the CoC states is that if you want to engage with the community, you agree not to harass people. Every community has similar expectations; having it in a markdown just makes it more explicit.

Wait, people are upset because they have a code of conduct?

Feels different now when the value of AI isn't just theoretical. Anthropic has like $80B ARR, and AI has really only transformed tech and a few limited spaces so far.

> Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.

I know it's easier to blame China than look at what we've done, but:

- The US generates more co2 per capita than China does.

- A lot of what China makes is products that we buy from them.

- The US has about twice as many CUMULATIVE co2 emissions than China does (remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)

- The feds have gleefully killed as many clean energy initiatives as possible. Meanwhile, China leads the world on clean energy, has driven down renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010, is the world's largest renewable energy producer and investor, and is on track to generate half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Most people I worked with in tech cared about things like climate change, but they were making good money and the problem felt so far removed and difficult. What could they do to make a difference? It's always easier to focus on the next sprint, the next title, etc.

I mostly blame greedy billionaires, citizens united, and cowardly politicians, but I have a hard time respecting people making six figures who aren't doing something to improve our broken country, even if it's volunteering at homeless services.

What? This is like a drive by shooting or something. Several PhD students almost certainly lost months of work, and others considering a PhD will have more doubts. Those problems aren't necessarily important because of the solutions, but because mathematicians can make unique contributions to mathematics in the process of solving them. LLM proofs haven't created any new mathematics techniques.

Robots break down. Humans you can pay $15-20/hr and don't even need to pay health insurance. Robots running 24/7 doesn't matter for service jobs either.

> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans.

I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.

Gillis (head writer for the onion) drafted the tone, arguments and jokes. He connected to Novak's lawyer through a friend at the firm. Novak's lawyer then connected Gillis to a former colleague who helped format it and provide relevant legal statute.

I was surprised that they didn't contribute to the jokes, it really does read like it was written by a particularly funny lawyer.

I don't think we can ever go back, and I'm not as convinced of the value of nationalizing Google, but it's clear that the monopolies held by massive tech companies are actively hurting society. Alphabet needs to be broken apart.

Louis is amazing. So cool to see how he's grown this project since starting it.

"Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing."

I can't tell if this essay was written in earnest or as a subtle troll.

Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?

I think the danger of anthropomorphizing is that 99% of people lack the technical background to understand the nuance. People have been primed by pop culture depictions of AI to think of LLMs as intelligent, autonomous beings, which leads to dangerous assumptions.

We should make the distinction between them, because openai and anthropic will not. A magical black box that does the thinking for you is a much more compelling sales pitch.

> There simply aren't any repercussions for this in their training envs.

It's also not like a child or a pet animal where you can try to teach it to learn from the experience. LLMs are not "intelligent", they just use language in a way that appears intelligent. They can't learn or develop ethics in the same way that we do.

The people you know aren't exactly representative of the whole country. Most people I know are on instagram.

This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.

Kind of weird to want to make an essay from 1971 about you. Until 1974, women sometimes weren't allowed to open bank accounts without a husband who could co-sign. There was a massive power imbalance until fairly recently.

Have to wonder where they got the mime. Was it a friend? Someone who worked there? I can't imagine the founder would actually pay a professional mime.

He served his time and hasn't been in trouble since. Do you not believe in rehabilitation?

I honestly feel like letting myself read the LinkedIn feed is an act of self-harm at this point.

Per https://eoconf.com/index.php/icmse/article/view/578, globalization decreases complexity of individual languages through standardization, but increases overall complexity by creating new multilingual and hybrid forms.

Either way, LLMs are an entirely different mechanism for shrinking linguistic diversity than just people watching Disney.

How are LLMs not the cause here? Reading online content is unpleasant these days because it all uses the same vocabulary and style. You can tell that an LLM wrote or edited it and it grates on you.

I'd need to see a study showing that this was already a trend, because globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.

This might be appropriate in some cases, but it's important to consider that you have a finite amount of social capital as a new leader. Once people get sick of poorly thought-out changes it can be hard to keep changing things and get buy-in, and talented employees (who almost always have someone asking to hire them) can be the first to leave.

I'm a fan of Chesterton's Fence [1]. Put effort into understanding the organization and why it's architected the way it is before making changes.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence

I've been absolutely loving the decomp projects that have been coming out lately. Huge props to the writer for this, Snowboard Kids is a real gem.

I'd also encourage people to check out the Legend of Dragoon recomp [1]. It's a real labor of love that has breathed new life into a largely abandoned game. You can play it fully vanilla, or with improved graphics, fixes to cumbersome design choices, bugfixes, etc.

[1] https://legendofdragoon.org/projects/severed-chains/

It's such a big deal to get a working RAS drug. Pharma companies will be pursuing additional drugs of the same class after this - much easier to be the second than the first. I think over the next few years we may see improvements on this, or better figure out how to use it and manage side effects. Very exciting!

Unlike AI, calculator use has been studied and shown to be useful for math education. Our understanding of these things evolved over time, however the results of this study are concerning.