theRealMe

It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?

That may be an accurate way to read it, but I’d bet that people just casually reading through it will breeze past that comparison and take away “these companies are bigger than most countries”.

Which, of course, is a comparison that Jacobin is more than happy to let slide. Jacobin’s own description of itself is “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”

Some people think an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but that’s exactly what Octo-Gandhi wants you to think.

Do you mean the same code that has its own Wikipedia page where the exact code is written, comments included, and has probably been copy pasted into 100’s of other projects?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

They didn’t. There is a small group of people that are always looking for the latest reason to be outraged and to point at any of the big tech companies and go “aha! They are evil!” Copilot’s ai was trained on GitHub projects and so these people are taking their turns clutching their pearls inside of their little bubble.

I’d bet that more than 95% of devs haven’t even heard of this “controversy” and even if they did, wouldn’t care.

> You don't have to respond if you don't have the education necessary to contribute.

Ok but how about if I buy an exotic car? :)

> Particularly when you think I'm trying to make some point, which would be a pretty silly thing to do. What would I gain in making a point?

Don’t worry, I think we’re both agreed that there is no point to your comments. :)

Why are you so hung up on pinning me to some specific predetermined percentage number? All I said was that I WOULD HAVE thought something different (note: not “DID”, aka I didn’t go through some intricate calculation beforehand to determine exactly what I thought).

I have no interest in discussing with you why or why not some off-the-cuff comment on something I might have thought if I put some thought into it, was wrong.

> Doubtful. The data just doesn't support it. Having connections and the capability to excel in that environment saw them more likely to be accepted into these schools, maybe.

Which data doesn’t support it? The data that we’re talking about that shows that 35% of the richest people went to one of these 8 schools? Or is there some data that you have that shows similarly gifted students that come from similarly “helpful” backgrounds but went to average-or-worse universities, end up at least as wealthy as these students on average?

I get and also believe that these schools probably get more credit than what they actually provide, but I don’t agree that they provide no added value compared to average universities.

> It (university) also doesn't have to have any impact. It can just be a thing off to the side that someone does as a hobby. Just because it costs money doesn't mean it produces economic value. 35% of these people likely also own some kind of exotic sports car, but is the car the reason for their position? Not likely.

At this point I’d like to ask you if you truly think that you are furthering some understanding or if you are just trying to be “right”? I’m not sure how to respond to someone that thinks they’re making a point by saying that owning an exotic car might have the same affect on overall life productively as going to an elite university. :/

“Produced” is a pretty standard way to describe people coming from a university. But I do understand that these universities aren’t just taking in the basic elements that compose a human being and churning out titans of industry…

And about wealth attainment declining, we’re literally talking about the specific people that attained incredible amounts of wealth here… centimillionaires. Those are specifically what we’re counting. Your points about wealth attainment may hold true as an average of our whole population, but it’s specifically not the case for centimillionaires.

And both the way that I apparently unintentionally “framed” it and the way that you framed it are accurate. The people that attend these elite universities usually(not always) did come from backgrounds with a lot of “help” AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). It doesn’t have to be an either/or.

You’ve reversed the question, which would have made me answer something differently. You said “what percentage of US centimillionaires attended these 8 universities”. If THAT was the question I potentially would have guessed lower than 35%.

But the way that I understood the original question was “what percentage of centimillionaires attended the 8 universities which produced the MOST centimillionaires”. When you pick the subset that produced the most of something out of a group, you should expect the subset to be over represented compared to the group. Sort of like the Pareto principle.

Also, part of the reason that I was surprised it was so low was that the numbers in the article were intentionally picked to invoke a reaction from the reader, and so if I’m coming from the angle of “let’s see how much wealth these fatcat elitists are hovering up!!” Then I’m a little surprised it’s only 35%.

So? Is this supposed to make me angry or something? That the top 8 universities ordered by wealth creation produced 35% of the wealthiest individuals? Aka, on average each of those universities produced <5% of the wealthiest 9600 people? Tbh that’s actually lower than I would have expected when trying to cherry pick anger-fuel numbers for wealth inequality.

The aforementioned company doesn’t appear to have been affected by the shortage like others. In the article it says they sold similar numbers of eggs the previous year. So they benefited from other businesses losing supply.

It’s still not correct tho. Now it says that if demand drops by 10%, that means price goes up. But that should be the opposite of what happens.

Maybe someone can chime in, but aren’t these things normally written by like a pr team or assistant or something anyways? Or does the person in charge actually sit down and write out heartfelt emails like this? Maybe I’m just too jaded…

I could be wrong but doesn’t it auto save every turn?

That study is from 2003. Fentanyl is a much more recent phenomenon.

Fwiw Microsoft itself is betting on and suggesting devs use it for Microsoft production code.

Microsoft itself uses and suggests this internally for production code.

If you think that more than 95% of the google search results give you an accurate answer, then I’ve got a search result about bridges to sell you…

Edit: and to add more so this response isn’t purely trash talking: plenty of us have already switched over to using ChatGPT/bing for our standard question answerer. It is far more efficient than getting back pages of search results and having to parse through garbage site after garbage site, scrolling through pages of ads and SEO optimized copy to look for the one nugget of info.

The thing is, people will adjust their usage patterns for these bots just like we did for search engines. You don’t just 100% believe what the first webpage says. You look for other contextual information to determine if you believe it or not. That is a learned pattern to how we consume search engines and a similar thing will happen with LLMs.

It’s like, if you were the first person to come into contact with fire, you reached your hand in and got burnt and then declared that fire is useless because it burns you. In either case, for LLMs, search engines, or fire, if you use them incorrectly then they won’t be useful. It’s up to you to use them correctly.

You can ask ChatGPT to cite its sources.

I’ve been thinking about this and I’d go a step further. I feel that current iterations of digital assistants are too passive. They respond when you directly ask them a specific question. This leaves it up to the user to: 1. Know that an assistant could possibly answer the question. 2. Know how to ask the question. 3. Realize that they should ask the question rather than reaching for google or something.

I would like a digital assistant that not only has the question answering ability of a LLM, but also has the sense of awareness and impetuous to suggest helpful things without being asked. This would take a nanny state level of monitoring, but imagine the possibilities. If you had sensors feeding different types of data into the model about your surrounding environment and what specifically you’re doing, and then occasionally have an automated process that silently asks the model something like “given all current inputs, what would you suggest I do?” And then if the result achieves a certain threshold of certainty, the digital assistant speaks up and suggests it to you.

I’m sure tons of people are cringing at the thought of the surveillance needed for this and the trust you’d effectively have to put into BigCorp that owns the setup, but it’s fun to think about nonetheless.

I can’t believe I’m about to use this stupid term, but this is such a “woke” take.

“My political bubble doesn’t think highly of this job, and so we shouldn’t give anyone the opportunity to do it.”

And yes, it IS an opportunity for some people. Just because you’re a dev that makes $150k/year doesn’t mean everyone can do that.

I didn’t downvote you(tbh I don’t even know how to downvote). But I didn’t respond to you because I don’t understand the relevance of what you are saying. You said we’re both wrong and then went on to talk about how inanimate objects can’t see? It just doesn’t make sense to me what you’re trying to say.

Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work.

What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot?

Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?

I’ll be honest, this sounds like you have made a decision on your stance and now you’re building false distinctions to reinforce your own bias.

You said a lot of words, but I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate? Because magnitude of ability, to me, makes no difference at all. It’s perfectly acceptable for a human to study the artwork of a specific person and then create their own works based on that style. Why wouldn’t it be the same for an automated process?

As someone that has been reading multiple children’s books per day for the last 5 years to my children, let me tell you that some books are like what you describe with a nice intertwined story that makes sense together and then some other books feel like randomly thrown together scenes like this that are just “and then this happened… and then this happened…”. I tend to notice a lot of the latter come from either 1. Celebrities that decide they want to be children’s book authors, or 2. Somebody that wants to make cool pictures and adds the story as an afterthought. With how nice these pictures are for OP’s book, it would probably be tricked into thinking this book was written by person #2.

Imagine this as a security attack vector. Instead of nonsense, spam a bunch of repos with code that does a specific thing but in a very hard to understand way. Then add in a small piece of very hard to understand, but legit looking malicious code. Copilot trains on it and then starts feeding it to developers around the world. Probably easier ways to achieve this, but interesting to think about.

I’m not saying this IS happening, but there’s a potential tin-foil hat angle here too. There was quite a bit of job hopping and increased wages going on before 2022. A little RIF by everyone has a chilling effect on people looking to leave. People prefer stability when times are tough. And cutting total number of available positions across the industry can have the effect of suppressing wages.

Again, I have no reason to believe this is happening, but it IS a potential motive.

Headline is confusing. It makes it sound like there will be 18k new layoffs, but this is information that has been public since November and the cuts happened two days ago. (Or at least the bulk of them did)

I would go even further tbh. Solar panels on the roof isn’t something that people want to hide. Nobody wants to admit it but my guess is the majority of people that get solar panels want to show them off, not hide them.

Edit: and that’s not a judgement by me either. If I had solar panels I’d want to show them off as well. They’d be a good conversation piece for neighbors.