jonstokes

If you used UUIDv7 you get time-ordered UUID and could use that for a tie breaker.

Wrong. "Here is a totally mind-blowing new thing AI will let you do this week that humanity could not do last week" is an endless source of novelty and eyeballs. Source: Am a publisher in this space and have seen the engagement numbers. You are the guy in the meme standing in the corner of the party, with the words "They don't know AI is just math" printed over his head.

I don't know LeCun personally, but there's a lot of backstory here that this polemical clickbait is leaving out.

- LeCun has a history of getting mobbed by "AI ethics" types on Twitter, and in the past he was very deferential to these folks, and even left Twitter for a while. I wrote about some of that here: https://www.jonstokes.com/p/googles-colosseum

- The MIT Tech Review, which is the author's main source here apart from Twitter, is techlash rag, and they went through a long phase where they only published anti-AI stuff from the "AI ethics" people. Most of those writers I used to follow there on this topic have since moved on to other pubs, and the EIC responsible for this mess has moved on to run WIRED. But it seems they're still publishing the same kind of stuff even with new staff and management. They have exactly one and only one editorial line on AI in general and LeCun in specific, and that is "lol AI so racist and overhyped!" It's boring and predictable.

- LeCun has a longstanding beef with Marcus, and the two treat each other pretty poorly in public. Marcus seems to have a personal axe to grind with LeCun. Given that Marcus has been leading the mob on this, it's not shocking that LeCun got crappy with him.

- Emily Bender, Grady Booch, and the other folks cited in the MIT Tech Review piece all, to a person, have exactly one line on AI, everywhere at all times and in all circumstances, and it's the same one I mentioned above. You could code a bot with a lookup table to write their tweets about literally anything AI-related.

- Yeah, LeCun is a prickly nerd who gets his back up when certain people with a history of attacking him come after him yet again. He should probably should stay chill.

- "AI so overhyped" is a pose, not an argument, an investment thesis, or a career plan. But hey, you do you.

Anyway, I hate to be defending anything Meta-related, but this article is slanted trash, its sources haters who have only one, incredibly repetitive thing to say about AI, and the author is a hater.

I don't know who this "we" is you're talking about. Many of us are outraged over Saudi atrocities going all the way back to 9/11.

The reason being an anti-vaxxer is bad is because of a concept called "herd immunity." There is no analog, here. I think that not only do you not understand much about kids, but you also don't understand the analogy you're trying to use.

I'm a parent of three girls, the oldest of which is 10. None of them will have smartphones, probably not even in high school. I run my house pretty much like the author of the article -- there are gadgets on the weekend, only. And even then the internet-connected ones are very carefully controlled and there are a ton of rules.

But you know what? My kids aren't babied. My oldest and I just went to a two-day rifle shooting clinic, and the two oldest have knives of their own that are very sharp and that they can use whenever they want.

They hike in the woods by our house, unsupervised, and they ride horses and swim. They climb trees. They camp in a tent in the woods by the house.

As for their peers? Those poor kids have never even touched a sharp knife, much less been given one of their own. My kids are well aware that they're allowed to take a lot more risks than their peers, and that they're given more responsibility for their own safety.

They're not babied. Rather, the kids who stay indoors on a gadget are the ones who are babied and stunted. They're the ones whose parents have infantilized them.

A kid doesn't "deserve" a smartphone. What they deserve is a childhood. They deserve to be bored for long stretches and to have to make up their own games and stuff to do. They deserve the privacy of their own thoughts, and to not be tethered to a gadget that they can't put down. They deserve flesh-and-blood relationships, instead of jerky pixels and audio. They deserve a life, and not just an existence.

I think it's amazing that on a site that's supposedly filled with tech geeks, so few commenters seem to know the difference between spending time alone in your room in front a non-networked PC learning to code, and being glued to a networked smartphone no matter where you are, taking in a feed and waiting for the dopamine hit from a "like" or a share.

Anyway, the public-spirited side of me sees responses like the ones here and is depressed, but my secret inner libertarian sees them and thinks: "Score! My three kids will have attention spans and social skills, and will out-compete the smartphone-addicted children of these fools in every arena of adult life. So by all means, cripple your kids by handing them one of these pocket slot machines. Mwuahahaha"

Looks like Zawinski's Law is still 100% true:

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

My first reaction to "could this be related to the storm," was "oh no, now this QAnon stuff has spread to HN."

What's wrong with SES? (Not a rhetorical question. I've played around with it and it seems ok, so looking to hear about downsides.)

Thanks!

This ^^. The "OMG... HORROR" in this article about the mere fact of x86 usage is deeply silly. The stuff about C64 and so on at the end... there's just no redeeming this mess. The mods should nuke it.

AWS has absolutely taken down websites because they didn't like what was on them, just recently, in fact:

https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gu...

I'm a journalist and have seen a screencap of the takedown that Amazon issued to the Firearms Policy Coalition, which started and maintains the censored site (CodeIsFreeSpeech.com). The takedown erroneously cited a temporary restraining order issued against an entirely different site (defcad.com) as the reason for the sudden, no-warning booting of the site from AWS.

And as you mentioned, Azure just now threatened to pull Gab.ai off its platform over a pair of anti-Semitic posts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-an...

So these infrastructure providers are absolutely involved in censorship right now.

This is the sort of article that makes me imagine a dialogue between a senior software engineer and a newb developer that goes something like this:

Newb: Hey man, I think for this project I'll write my own SQL datastore from scratch. I've looked at a bunch of them and my project, which is basically an inventory management system, is such a special snowflake that it needs its own datastore.

Senior: That would be insane. Never do that. Use what's already out there, and is tried and tested. In fact, just use postgres and make it work.

Newb: Aw, ok. I was so much more excited about writing a new SQL datastore than I was about the actual project it's for, but sure, I'll just use postgres. starts to walk away...

Senior: Hold up a sec before you go, I want to run something by you. Because our discipline, which is basically a team of people who are hired to build things on a schedule, is such a special snowflake, I've invented this totally new way of thinking about work, and of organizing a team and leading it, and there's a bunch of new terminology and I have some cool diagrams... I'm lobbying that we all switch to this at the end of the month.

In my personal experience, Dry-rb is the "bargaining" stage of grief over the current state of Ruby and Rails. When you finally reach "acceptance," you move on to another stack entirely.

My experience is that people who come to feel about Rails the way he describes in the intro (I went through this exact progression, myself) end up moving on to another stack entirely, typically either Elixir or JS.

My personal shift has been to JS, because you do can everything from front-end to AWS to postgres (via plv8) with it -- it covers the whole stack. And with the advent of ES6, it's just not that bad as a language. It's not great, but it's not the misery it once was, either.

As the author says, Rails is great for starting out. It's great for starting projects, and it's great for starting as a web developer. But I know first-hand the pain of growing and scaling a monolithic Rails app that he speaks of, and for projects that I start from scratch I no longer use it.

I'm using this, and so far it's working just fine:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-local

I'm only testing Lambda functions with it, and not really testing APIG + Lambda integrations or anything fancier.

I prep the local db, mock a Lambda event, write the mocked event to a JSON file, then use command line options to run the event against AWS SAM local, then get the response and compare it to the expected response.

I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51.

This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get specific terms of art wrong, and nitpickers nitpick and clarify. I know this because I made a career of such nitpicking and clarifying once.

My point here is that nothing put forward in this article means that there's not a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how. It just means that said materials are not properly "alloys" and the journos got that word wrong, as journos often do when they're way outside their area of expertise.

Yeah, it was the same with Bill and Melinda from what I recall.

No I didn't miss it. That's what I'm saying -- there has to be something beyond "consensual relationship with subordinate" going on here. The fact that someone complained to HR supports that hypothesis.

My point was that sleeping with subordinates is not historically the kind of thing that gets people fired at Google. I make no claim about whether that's good or bad (whether or not that should ever be ok is a different discussion), just an observation that that's the way it has been, which (along with the HR complaint) indicates to me that this wasn't a simple case of Rubin sleeping with a subordinate.

LOL... Because I really was cracking up at the Comic Book Guy thing :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_Opt9bJlqg

Don't forget that Larry dated Marissa for a long time, and she was his subordinate. And then there's Eric, who was notorious...

Anyway, my understanding was that it has historically been OK at Google to date subordinates, so I'm waiting for more to come out because I can't imagine that "he had a consensual relationship with a subordinate" is all that's going on here.

But maybe someone who has worked there for a long time can correct me?

Please don't get your history from The Oatmeal. If you want to read a real account of what Edison actually did, the opening chapters of this classic are great:

https://www.amazon.com/Networks-Power-Electrification-1880-1...

Why was the title edited on this? There is nothing wrong with the title assigned by ProPublica, and in fact it's far better than the one above. Submitters, please stop doing this.

This article is from 2011.

Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years.

Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)

The original title is less precise, but it's not even remotely inaccurate or even "vague" by any reasonable definition of the term.

If you want to know about the future of Theano, that tells you about it.

If a title is misleading clickbait, then sure, fix it. But if you're making subjective judgment calls about whether you think the level of imprecision is appropriate or not, and so on, that's way over the line.

Again, the original title is 100% appropriate for the post, because it describes exactly what the post lays out. It may not be as precise as you personally want it, but this is how the author chose to package it and that should be respected.

Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.

Lol, I'm so sorry, this is unkind and very possibly inaccurate, but I read your "what department" question like this:

"Where were you on the internal Harvard hierarchy that we both know is incredibly important to Harvard folks, but that the outside world generally knows nothing about. I need to know where you were on the status ladder so I can decide how much of your comment, like the article author's (she's on the lower side of the middle of the ladder) is sour grapes from someone who hit a velvet rope inside the club and is bitter about it."

Like I said, this is probably deeply unfair, and if it is then my apologies, but after spending five years there I can't help but parse it this way.

FWIW I was at the Div school, which is near the bottom, so we're all keenly aware of these issues because the lower you are on any hierarchy the more that hierarchy and your place in it defines your experience of the whole. It's only the folks on top who can afford to be ignorant of the kinds of issues that everyone below them has to carefully navigate.

I was a graduate student at Harvard for five years (two Masters degrees), and the article is spot-on. Grade inflation was a big topic while I was there (some prof had written an editorial blaming it on affirmative action), and everything she said resonated with me. In fact, your comment is so clueless and un-self-aware, I'm kinda shocked that someone with your apparent bio could have written it. That you did pretty powerfully proves her point.