vbo

Few conflicting thoughts:

Having third party embedded researchers red teaming alignment is OK.

The alternative is having a bureaucratic agency like the US FDA testing and vetting models. The government probably couldn't keep pace with AI research right now, but it's where we'll eventually end up at anyway.

Fable/Astra can generate massive income for years even with no further advances.

Dario, Sam and Elon would not agree to do this if they didn't think alignment is possible in the short term, and the pain incurred by third party evaluators would be limited. Surely, if recursive self improvement works wonders in AI research, it can similarly work wonders in alignment. So this could be a PR stunt.

P-doom not negligible indeed.

I think there may be more to overcomplicated brews than lifestyle or status. It's a desire to get technical in a world where so much of life has been automated away from the consumer's view or ability to affect it. Coffee is a way to tinker with something in the same way previous generations tinkered with their cars or radios or whatever. It's an outlet for creativity and technical skill building for those that engage in brewing.

Coffee shops will sell rituals, status, prestige, sophistication or the appearance thereof. Same as every other business. But that's not to say the product can't be superior - it can. It also doesn't say that every product that makes use of those marketing techniques is superior; but even if it isn't, if the customer walks away happy, they must've done something right, right?

Don't we do the same with the technology we're working on? How often is it truly better beyond any critique? People were getting stuff done even before our products were around with less fuss and a different set of problems. We do what we do to end up busy with stuff so we can do what we do all over again, don't we? I digress.

It does get tiresome when everyone is trying to sell you an experience and it becomes disappointing when the selling of experiences becomes so commoditized, the thing being sold loses its credibility as something special on account of being sold as such. Is it a crisis of authenticity?

To each, their own. I used to tinker with espresso based drinks, but I'm mostly over it. I've learned to discern (some) better coffee beans from others, but I mostly don't drink that - I can't justify paying that much for a coffee I brew myself and that I may botch out of being in a hurry. It's also a distraction that takes time I don't have anymore. But it was fun to explore for a while and I now own a very fancy looking espresso machine, grinder and all sorts of acccessories.

I'm working on a tool to generate and host full stack web apps from prompts (just like everyone else). I'm loving it. Using llms to do as much of my coding as possible, so in a way eating my own dog food, although it's a more developer-driven effort than what the end product will be.

Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.

Looks good, might give it a try. I was looking for something similar to provide a unified interface for gpt and claude and eventually hacked something together myself, as none of the solutions I found could deal with structured output properly across both vendors.

I miss the 00s internet. I miss IRC and geeking out for the sake of it. Maybe i'm just missing my younger years, but I think there was a distinct feeling back then, of wonder and being amongst the first to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.

Point is we couldn't have a way of consenting to ai training until after we had llms. And I'm guessing we will, pretty quickly.

I don't want to defend Altman. He may or may not be a good actor. But as an engineer, I love the idea of building something magical, yet lately that's not straightforward tinkering - unless you force your way - because people raise all sorts of concerns that they wouldn't have 30 years ago. Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days, because it was immensely useful. So is ChatGPT, but people are far more vocal nowadays about how what it's doing is wrong from various angles. And all their concerns are valid. But if openai had started out by seeking permission to train on any and every piece of content out there (like this comment, for example) they wouldn't have been able to create something as good (and bad) as ChatGPT. In the early search days, this was settled (for a while) via robots.txt, which for all intents and purposes openai should be adhering to anyway.

But it's more nuanced for LLMs, because LLMs create derivative content, and we're going to have to decide how we think about and regulate what is essentially a new domain and method and angle on existing legislation. Until that happens, there will be friction, and given we live in these particular times, people will be outraged.

That said, using SJ's voice given she explicitly refused is unacceptable. It gets interesting if there really is a voice actor that sounds just like her, but now that openai ceased using that voice, the chances of seeing that play out in court are slimmer.

They're free because they could not achieve network effects if there was a monetary cost involved for users. So basically if they weren't free they wouldn't exist (at scale).

With or without EU regulations, client software could decide to discard all cookies once the user has "left" the site. Or it could block cross domain cookies of its own volition. Yes, it doesn't fix the fundamental issue, but it does address it for those that want to fix it against the tide. Yes, it comes with drawbacks, but it is what it is so long as we don't collectively move towards paying for content, ideally in micro form.

I sometimes come across articles in local publications that ask me to subscribe - dude, seriously? Do you expect me to subscribe to an Alaskan publication when I live half the world away and could not care less of what happens there, but just want to read this one article that seems interesting?

So instead we have ad funded websites that have to do what they have to do in order to make some money and keep publishing whatever it is they publish. Hence tracking cookies.

Everyone's needs would be better served if we could pay for content the same way we did back in the day of printed newspapers. You buy today's edition and you get today's edition and no one except the newsagent is tracking you (if you happen to regularly buy the newspaper from her, she'll remember you, and she may even suggest additional newspapers to buy but it's implied, right? we dislike machine tracking, not humans remembering our buying habits).

Alas, we don't have that. We have intrusive tracking and subscriptions, even though technically it's something we could build in weeks (lest the payment companies didn't make it unfeasible, for their own benefit).

And people do sometimes try to figure it out. Bundles come to mind. Everything -- except micro transactions allowing you to purchase just. this. article. And while micro transactions don't exclude tracking, companies are more likely (is this wishful thinking?) to be careful with a paying customer's experience than with freeloaders, which is what we insist of being, while putting up demands as to what publishers can do with our data.

and so has the internet. some use it for good, others for evil.

these are behaviours and traits of the user, not the tool.

So much of the horribly unmaintainable code I've come across was the result of overengineering that whenever I see an abstraction I have a compulsive urge to scream into the void. Some (the simplest ones) are ok, but other times an abstraction that seems like a good idea on day 0 evolves into an unmanageable hodgepodge of hacks that makes an innocent developer that bumps into it years later question their choice of career.

It's a hybrid 20-ish person team and I work from the office 4 days a week (my choice), but yeah, you're right that we fail at async coordination and fall back onto calls. I've suggested alternatives (meet in the office a couple of days a week) but it has failed to materialise and the only workable solution I found has been to remove myself from noisy/unproductive calls.

I hear what you're saying about docs but knowing everyone I don't feel we could do it. Pre-covid everyone-in-the-office worked well, but you need to drag people into the office these days so it seems we're stuck with an ineffective hodgepodge of calls and in person fractional team chats.

I don't mind working from home, but I find WFH-accommodating calls exhausting; it feels they take far longer than the equivalent in person discussion, in addition to losing the ad-hoc nature of office conversations. The context switch feels heavier on calls than it does in person. Also, the way daily calls tend to be scheduled (everyone at once, let's hash out everything for everyone so we can then get on with things) means I have to sit in on conversations that are irrelevant to me and for some reason having noise coming out of my headphones means I can't focus on anything else. On the opposite end, I'm now sat in the office while colleagues are having a meeting right next to me and I am able to focus on writing this reply (or maybe coding, if I wasn't procrastinating on HN).

Maybe it's my audio setup, but I've tried multiple types of headphones to no avail. I feel the quality of my work (and life) would improve if I could cope better with calls, but despite my efforts, I can't do it. I've removed myself from calls with an adjacent team that mostly don't concern me, and asked them to ping me only if they need me. That saved 30m to 2 hours of my life and saved me from becoming exhausted before the day has properly begun.

There's also a problem in that _some_ people prefer WFH because they can slack off more (or have multiple jobs); that means they're not always available and not fully committed, with whatever implications for the people who rely on them and the company/product.

Maybe it's down to the pace of the work. Startups, I feel, benefit from in office huddling. Corporations with ample time on their hands could be better suited to WFH.

I'm no branding expert but this sounds like a bad idea, yet given Musk's whimsical decisions, I'm not entirely sure he's serious about it rather than trying to reap the benefits of keeping Twitter in the news.

They could and they did, the problem is they’re now attempting to get the same access to encrypted communications by outlawing privacy, essentially saying they need to get rid of your freedom to speak privately for our greater good.

I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim. And perhaps that's true to some extent. But since most people believe the battle is lost, moreso that this has always been the status quo, then any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin. We have capitulated on privacy, because it's a vague concept and we don't equate it with freedom, or perhaps our sense of being free is so ingrained in modern societies that we see no risk to it being lost lest something drastic and immediate takes it away, when in fact the very system designed to protect our freedoms (led by people that look like us, think like us and enjoy these freedoms as much as we do) is malfunctioning and slowly erodes rights that previous generations enjoyed. We're not collectively trying to harm our freedoms and yet here we are.

And shortsightedness on the side of lawmakers is baffling. Nobody takes responsibility for vision, we just go along with implementing solutions without considering broader impact or history. If the government has all your correspondence and the government falls into the wrong hands, you're toast, assuming you do not align with the leadership. We're writing that possibility off, but someone gets to brag that they've written legislation to stop the bad guys -- and maybe they did, but the cost was our collective freedom.

My fuck-you-right-back response is I don't sign up and give up using the app. I had an instagram account and deleted it years ago. I don't want a new one. Sadly instagram is sign up only, so good luck to them and good bye.

It seems to me that people are jumping the gun on ChatGPT, Bing, Google and LLMs in general with regard to success and failure when it's still so early in this space. Amusing at times, so, so wrong at others, but we got a functional demo of the future airdropped out of the blue -- and more will come in different shapes, not just chat but also applied automation and information discovery, at increasing levels of maturity and usefulness.

Fair enough, though what I meant was really in relation to a class of problems, not this one person’s issue.

That’s one answer. But the question also applies to non-cryptocurrency uses of cryptography where you need to guard your private keys (like identity) — ie how to best enable people to use their keys while keeping them safe and also allowing for some form of recovery.

Out of sheer curiosity, what's the appeal of threadreader to you? I see a lot of threadreader noise on twitter and I can't figure out why people prefer its (ad ridden) article-ish view to simply scrolling through a thread on twitter.

> Why should they listen to voices on the internet who aren't even their customers?

People tend to exchange and discuss ideas on HN and this is no different.

I don't think touting no E2EE is going to get you more users. Fine, don't do it, but I'm pretty sure the people who want E2EE (myself included) are likely very convinced it's what they need and will act accordingly. And those who don't care for E2EE won't care whether you offer it or not.

Irrecoverable data loss is a real pain in the ass that needs to be dealt with but it's the only way to achieve true privacy. Knowing you can't decrypt my data whether by your own will or coerced by your government (which may or may not care about privacy now or in the future) or at the whim of a North Korean hacker, keeps my mind at ease. Why on earth would I give that up? Google has Keep, Apple has Notes, they do a pretty decent job as far as basic notes app go. Sorry if this sounds like putting you down, I'm sure you put a great deal of work into your app and you seem passionate about it and I'm sure it's great. But because the table stakes in the notes games are high, you need to go above and beyond what your competitors offer. Not just great UX, but pushing _every_ boundary in the space, including by offering privacy. I feel like in 2022, privacy is non-negotiable. Make it optional if you feel you must, or don't, but don't suggest skipping E2EE is in any way a virtue.

What are you going to do with your gpus once the merge happens?

I tend to pick up the accent spoken around me (I'm not a native English speaker). Not quite sure to what extent it borders native speaker's accent, but it happens without any training.

On a separate note, if you feel you need to change your accent to fit in, perhaps the people you feel would appreciate hearing you speak in a different accent are not worth the effort of fitting in with?

I too prefer the office. I also interview people and and tend to look for people willing to come to the office at least once or twice a week. It makes a world of difference when you can ask someone a question across the desk as opposed to scheduling a call (or two, or three) and forcing everyone on the call to drop what they're doing. I get why people want to WFH, but I feel a couple of days in the office works wonders for efficiency; maybe one week wfh/one week at the office or any other combo would work, but it depends on the stage of the project. The more technical/business unknowns, the more it makes sense to work in the same space, imho.

They will if Apple does this.

I sense sarcasm, but in case my sense is off, there is a webapp which allows you to log into your lastpass account and webapps are known to sometimes have security issues.

Reading the comments here there's one possibility that I haven't seen mentioned in that there may be an issue with lastpass allowing some level of access into people's accounts without actually having the password (which wouldn't enable the attacker to access the encrypted data).

Quick note that apple allows you to download a recovery code and disable all other account recovery mechanisms which I found incredibily soothing.