joelfried

I don't know about OP, but I definitely do. If you do not know enough to answer correctly, do not answer. If you do not know enough to know if you are certain, adjust what you say to be accurate. If every answer becomes "I don't know but I can check with our teams", the Congressional response should be "We subpoena the team to answer these questions".

Allowing the CEO of any company to present a factually false answer to Congress while representing the company and speaking from a position of expertise provides awfully perverse incentives for _every single CEO_ to misrepresent his company if there are no repercussions for provably false testimony.

I think parent meant:

Assuming tenure is defined ONLY for those who have already left, 2 years is a bad sign. For a 3 year old company, if that definition is used, it is indeed pretty bad. It means that _of the people who are leaving_, people stay a couple of years, then bounce. This means people stick around long enough to get past the warmup of new employment, get used to your stack and tech, then bounce for greener pastures.

The very important metric this leaves out though is what percentage of the company actually left. If there's 7 people in this 3 year old company and only one person left last year . . . that says almost nothing. Any single person can leave for a great variety of reasons. You'd need a decent sample for this to matter.

The flip side definition of "tenure" is worth considering though: if the average tenure of 2 years includes people still working at the company, there are a lot more variables to content with before you can know anything. A 3 year old company could have an average employee of it have been working there for 2 years and not a single person who joined the company having ever left (e.g. if at year 1 there was a decent amount of hiring). I think this is probably why parent wanted to restrict the definition (and why it's worth thinking about this angle) - because otherwise the company ramp up and trajectory and hiring patterns become hidden variables and you can't glean anything out of the tenure numbers on their own.

You have to try a little harder with GPT to get it to understand its mistakes, but it's not as bad as it used to be, at least if you pay. It failed for me the first time ("Earlier inert, it could rouse in fury before long"), but not the second ("In a lull, may soon yawn"). With a little more pushing it got a much better result ("In a lull, may soon arise").

Conversation, should any want to see it in full: https://chat.openai.com/share/421dac47-16df-499e-9b2e-d8dc0f...

Why the scare quotes? There's no actual Hebrew text in that article.

So is Justice Thomas.

If my use of "actual work" offends you so greatly, you can replace "people doing actual work" with "people you manage" and my point stands.

Managing competing priorities and setting company-wide direction are certainly actual work - but regardless, that's pretty tangential to my real point about leadership.

Personality differences are certainly a piece of it, sure.

But if the folks On High do not realize what the people doing the actual work value about their current position, that seems like a pretty big failure of leadership. If you don't understand the needs of those following you, you're not doing a good job leading.

I don't know what parent had in mind, but I was personally disappointed that not one of these conjectures was actually talked about in detail. They had a nice picture of two images of a rotating line and then . . . proceeded to just not tell us what the actual conjecture states. They went on to talk about all the conjectures stacked up but never what any of them say or mean, just that they imply each other.

I wanted some meat, what I got was a photocopy of a magazine picture of some meat.

Counter-counter-counter point: Reddit reached its heyday under the leadership that allowed people to leave and come back to discuss. Its current leadership has intentionally driven away a decent percentage of users within the last year.

I do not think their decisions come from sound thinking but greed. They don't truly understand why they got big and now they're trying to squeeze all the money out of it they can before their luck runs out.

I think they did much better trying to give their users a good experience and they are in the process of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It just takes a long time for a zombie social network to die.

It may seem that way but I'd argue the hardest part is coming up with the specifications for what the output needs to look like. Even if the best LLMs could write full projects like that, the business side would need to specify far beyond their normal levels what that thing needs to be. Have you ever tried to collect requirements from stakeholders and generate a project plan that meets all of those needs? Even if we're not far from GPT-4 being able to build out a basic component library, that's a long way from being able to architect solutions at a high level.

If I had to pick an analogy it wouldn't yet be farriers going out of business, but instead be more like the advent of the pneumatic nail gun for roofers. Everyone will still need a roof (software) to be built. Every instance is a little different at the design level, but the actual grunt work just got easier and faster if you know what you want out of it.

We communicate with words, and people as a whole are used to being lied to and gaslit regularly especially by those in power. It's true that mathematics and the hard sciences have mechanisms for understanding that are on a different scale than, say, ethics and morality. However, it takes time for people -- especially those currently engaged in questioning the nature of their reality[1] -- to accept that in this specific instance lying and gaslighting are a lot harder[2].

The people who eventually accept and internalize the distinction around things that can be objectively shown to be true are those who by in the large have done some of the work to understand these things themselves. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is beautiful but it takes work to understand and if it didn't, it wouldn't be much of a meaningful breakthrough. Nobody is proving that 3+5=8 and then 4+5=9.

So what the average person sees is a high level language they can't speak with people being absolutely positive that this thing is special and true and incontrovertible. That raises red flags when you're dealing with folks talking about normal everyday stuff, doesn't it? It's a lot harder to say "but I don't understand" and a lot easier to say "but what if you're wrong" socially.

[1] As all college first years do, right? [2] Let's face it, lying to people is never impossible, it's just harder to be successful when you can be fact checked.

Perhaps you could argue that high initial sugar matters but final sugar content definitely does not. I only like my wines dry with no residual sugar remaining after fermentation is complete. A decade on my big reds are tasting fantastic.

I've had exactly one bottle of white go bad on me and it was somewhere in that 8-10 year range. It can definitely happen and would not recommend a white for this kind of thing . . . but this is also how you learn.

For someone not wanting to go the "make it yourself" route, I'm sure if you went to a good wine distributor and said you were looking to buy two or three cases of something you want to cellar for a good long while they would be happy to steer you in the right direction.

I made a wine kit for each of my children - it makes 30 bottles and we drink one a year on the birthday itself.

I've found it helps for scale and as a bonus you get to see how a wine really ages over time.

Regardless of where the burden of proof lies, telling someone who nearly lost a parent this year that they are a horrible human being for expressing their gratitude in a way you disapprove of isn't going to convince anyone of anything. And I don't think that you will make the world any better by being mean to other people.

Perhaps I missed it but I didn't see the author put forward a mechanism for how the "gate later" approach was supposed to work. Did I miss it?

To your point though, absent an implementation of "gate later", it's not clear to me that what the author would want would put you near the "dullest stars". There's no way Harvard (or any other Ivy+) would accept a "gate later" implementation that would give them the dullest of stars. The differentiators between folks with any non-zero chance of acceptance are already pretty small, and I don't think "allow everyone in" would be feasible as they would not have room to put all of the people who want to be there.

Lithium mines in the Donbas region, perhaps?

Doesn't that enhance the effect of the gate rather than detract from it? If, ceteris paribus, being around the shiniest of gold stars helps you shimmer a little brighter, that seems likely to make the gating-function effect more pronounced, not less.

My criticism of the article is that there's no alternative solution given. You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function . . .

Agreed all around. Especially the part about abolishing all parents -- humanity definitely loses then.

That instantiation of 'now' is gone, but you have more to come. If missing that one is the proximate cause for future beneficial actions, isn't that better than having it be the source of more guilt and angst?

I'm a bit surprised you've never heard of the spouse of a parental sibling called an uncle as well. To make that more explicit: my father's sister is my aunt, and her husband is my uncle.

For people who already have USB-C phones and are considering switching it means "All of the cords you have right now will still be useful", which is a definite improvement over "All of the cords you have right now are junk you will throw away and have to replace with new cords".

I'm not trying to say that will drive massive upgrades in and of itself, but I can definitely see it being a nice-to-have at the margins and help a nontrivial set of people pull the trigger.

This is difficult because there is no spoon.

I hope you are able to keep that idea in your head should you ever be in a situation where the damage caused by increasing your money is sufficiently abstracted away from your actions. History has shown us that many folks do not have that ability. The family I chose -- who helped start the opioid epidemic and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands[1] are far from alone as people whose desire to make money caused significant and irreparable harm.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html

Do you love money so much that, like the Sackler family, you would kill millions to have more of it? I hope not!

If you haven't read it, the book you haven't realized you're looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

I was all set to read and see whether they took LED manufacturers at their word for how long their bulbs lasted, and it turned out the article's source is nearly 30 years old.

Can we update the flair to say 1994, given that the embedded numbers date from that year? Regurgitating the data in 2017 doesn't make the information actually from 2017.

It's a lot easier to lie about a degree if nobody knows where you got it. That seems like a fatal flaw to your plan.

There is something physically moving: the machine itself. You can't wash or dry clothing without moving it around. Given that the entire machine moves (and on spin cycles, reasonably quickly), you need to make sure your circuitry is capable of handling the strain.

As a homeowner, I wish someone (anyone!) still sold reliable analog appliances that just did their job simply and made repair parts and schematics reasonably available.

Making it harder for bad actors to create malware would seem like one legitimate case.

Many of us have the ability to entertain ourselves entirely within our own minds on the regular. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a chair from nothingness.

Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?