19,306 karma · joined January 1, 2016
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids?
FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.
How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.
There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.
Fast forward 8 years, and the things we know about DJT today are so much worse than anyone imagined in 2017. He tried to subvert our nation's democracy and political stability. He summoned a mob of rioters, stood idly by while they assaulted our leaders in congress, and eventually pardoned all of them. He has been convicted of multiple felonies, and found guilty in civil court of sexual abuse. People from his own previous administration have called him out as being corrupt and incompetent, and seven Republican senators voted to impeach/convict him.
And yet, despite a jaw-dropping list of unforgivable offenses from the past few years, he enjoys more support today than he did in 2020. From people as smart as Zuck and Andreesen.
It really is true what they say about the fragility of political norms. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, there's no putting it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland)
The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations.
In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well
You're ignoring the reverse causality. Antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 1990s/2000s put them on edge, and made them think twice about strong-arming their competition. Back when Google was starting to make a name for themselves, MS strongly considered adding a warning on Internet Explorer, telling people to "beware" of any results they see on Google. MS eventually decided against it, because of the antitrust magnifying glass they were under. Having a level playing field allowed Google to grow exponentially, and eventually rendered MS' monopoly irrelevant.
Monopolies use anticompetitive tactics to preserve their moat, and continue being monopolies. When antitrust legislation works effectively, this moat disappears, and the monopolist is eventually overrun and becomes irrelevant.
> Seeking to dent Vovor’s credibility, defense lawyers suggested he was resentful that Javice didn’t want to date him.
That is one hell of a defense
I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace. And nominees like McCain, who told his supporters that Obama is a decent family man, and a natural-born American. I worry for the future, and my children's place in it.
Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-capitalists would be better off joining the working class instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't have the financial means to build their own company, is relegated to a sub-par quality of life.
The norm in most of my interviews has been that candidates can solve coding problems in whatever language they are most comfortable with. For most languages like Python etc, it would be a mistake to reject a candidate just because they don't have experience with that specific language.
How are they defining regularly? If someone rents out their home for one weekend every month, will they be liable for that 13% tax? Regardless of whatever threshold they choose, it seems weird that someone's tax liability will jump from 0 to potentially hundreds of thousands, because of a tiny change in their renting behavior.
Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.
Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever.
The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.
But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out?
I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus:
On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations).
They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well.
I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.
This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere.
The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic.
Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay).
As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8
When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.
This is very interesting and insightful, but I take issue with the above conclusion. Your average software engineer would probably fail to code up a python solution to this problem. But most people would agree that the average software engineer, and the average person, possesses some theory of mind.
This seems to be a pattern I'm noticing with AI. The goalposts keep moving. When I was a kid, the turing test was the holy grail for "artificial intelligence." Now, your run-of-the-mill LLM can breeze through the turing test. But no one seems to care. "They are just imitating us, that doesn't count." Every couple years, AI/ML systems make revolutionary advances, but everyone pretends it's not a big deal because of some new excuse. The latest one being "LLMs can't write a python program to solve an entire class of very challenging logic problems. Therefore LLMs possess no theory of mind."
Let me stick my neck out and say something controversial. Are the latest LLMs as smart as Peter Norvig? No. Are they smarter than your average human? Yes. Can they outperform your average human at a randomly chosen cognitive task that has real-world applications? Yes. This is pretty darn revolutionary. We have crossed the rubicon. We are watching history unfold in real-time.
If this isn't already happening, I expect this will be the future of our industry.
> That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.
Some interesting implications of this:
1. Any children you have, would be fulfilling a purpose in the world
2. If you decide not to have that child, you are depriving the world and everyone else of a person who would otherwise fulfill that purpose
3. Recall that no one is superfluous or redundant. So by depriving the world of a person who can fulfill that purpose, you are guaranteeing that the purpose will never be adequately fulfilled
4. The above applies no matter how many children you've already had. Already had 10 children and decided not to have a 11th? Man, you just created a Nicky-sized hole in the ecosystem. Now the whole world will be off-balance because of your tragic decision
5. So yeah, if you don't want the world to be off-balance, you better get out there and have as many kids as humanly possible
The way to make money when front-running is to buy early, wait for the pop, then sell immediately. The longer you hold on, the less of an impact that pop will have on your gains. Company fundamentals and market forces will overwhelm any short-term pop in the long run. Especially so for highly liquid stocks like VMWare where the decisions made by individual funds have a smaller impact on the stock price.
I'm saying all this because the guy was buying and holding for many years. He held on to VMWare for 4 years. And NetApp for over 2 years. At those timescales, the vast majority of your returns are independent of your decision to front-run the trade.
It does seem very coincidental that he bought and sold just before/during his fund's trades. But consider another possibility. He does a lot of active trading - the article mentions that most of his trades are unrelated to his fund's trades. On one of those occasions, he thought VMWare was a good buy, and so, bought the stock for himself. He's also on the fund's investment committee, where his job is to help the fund make good investment decisions. Unsurprisingly, he pitched VMWare as a good buy... because that's what he genuinely believes. The committee agreed with him, and bought the stock.
4 years go by, and he thinks VMWare is no longer a good stock to hold. Hence, he sells his holdings. As part of the fund's investment committee, he also expresses his genuine belief that holding VMWare would not be a good decision at this time. The committee agrees with him, and decides to sell the fund's VMWare holdings. All of the above seems extremely plausible and above-board.
I don't know the exact details of the case, so I'm not claiming the guy is innocent. But the information given in the article isn't as damning as it's presented to be. I'm just glad we have a criminal justice system to try cases like these, as opposed to a media witch-hunt
Combine both these factors, and I'm now ignoring recruiters who are begging me to interview for insanely well-paying openings. I have a decently well-paying job with good work-life balance, and colleagues who respect me. And I have no interest in throwing that away just to navigate a political minefield at a new job
This seems like such an obvious problem in the way science is currently done. Are people so focused on their own individual fields that they aren't thinking about and fixing such glaring meta problems?
I've been doing E2E testing using 3rd-party APIs for a decade now, and this has yet to be a significant problem. The majority of my APIs had a dedicated sandbox environment to avoid "rate limiting, bans, and other anti-abuse mechanisms". The remainder were simple enough that the provider didn't care about users exploring on the live API, and were usually read-only as well.
Did I run into the occasional flaky failure, or API stability issues? Sure. But it was very rare and easy to workaround. It never devolved into becoming "untestable" or "full manual QA"
My other teams that relied on mocks suffered from far worse problems - a ton of time being spent on manual-QA, and bugs that leaked into production, because of mock-reality mismatches.
This isn't true. If you find out that only Tesla is customizing their car-price for you personally, you may decide to boycott Tesla. But what are you going to do if every single car company does the same thing? Boycott all cars and take the bus? Hence my point that price-personalization works even better when more companies do it, not less.
The methods described might be new, but the underlying principle is simple and fundamental - charge customers based on their willingness-to-pay. If customers are willing to pay $10 for your product, as opposed to $20, almost all businesses would take that into account when setting their prices.
In a low-tech world, you can only price stuff using one-size-fits-all. So you would price stuff based on something like median-willingness-to-pay. This puts your product out-of-reach for half its potential customers, while giving a big discount to the other half. The techniques described in the article are designed to "fix" the above - sell the product to as many people as possible, and give everyone a more even discount compared to their willingness-to-pay.
There is no reason for this strategy to stop working just because other companies are also doing it. In fact, it will only snowball once this practice becomes more commonly accepted.
In a macro sense, fine-grain-price-differentiation is undoubtedly in the best interests of all corporations. Whether they are in the best interests of consumers is more debatable. I'm guessing the answer is no. In theory, the best possible outcome is perfect price differentiation, coupled with increased corporate tax rates (or capital gains tax rates) that are used to lower income tax rates. I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
- Autonomy over deployment rollbacks. If your team owns a microservice, and you noticed that you deployed buggy code, you can easily and autonomously do a rollback. Your rollback doesn't impact other teams. It isn't visible company-wide. This allows teams to take more risks with fewer downsides and more psychological safety
- Isolation of secrets, api-keys etc. If one module has access to an api-key, then it's effectively made visible to every single module in the monolith. Other teams can decide to bypass your API entirely and read directly from your database, making it impossible for you to abstract away your implementation details
Problems solved by microservices that could in theory be solved in a monolith:
- Build/test times. A big monolith will have a huge build time and a large number of CI/CD tests. In theory you could parallelize your build/test-suite to make it infinitely fast, but I'm not sure how practical this is
- IDE slowness. A monolith will make your average IDE run much more slowly. In theory also solvable, but would require major IDE changes and investments
- Code ownership by specific teams. In theory you can use things like regex-CODEOWNERs to enforce code-ownership of individual modules, but it's easier with microservices
- Migrating to better languages/frameworks. If your original monolith was written in perl or on a bad framework, it's very hard to move away from it. With microservices, each microservice can be independently and incrementally migrated, allowing the company's tech stack to evolve gracefully.
Any others I missed?
> people who talk/write like this usually have no idea what they are talking about
According to your heuristic, you have no idea what you're talking about?
In all seriousness though, your comment comes across as unnecessarily personal. I disagree with the OP's conclusion, but he raises some interesting arguments on an interesting topic. I came to the comments to see a technical discussion around the pros/cons of microservices. It's off-putting to see that the top comment is an ad-hominem attack
> It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt says that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. “There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen,” he notes. Google gives its rank and file room to make decisions and innovate
OP:
> I recently joined a startup to run an engineering org of about 40 engineers. My title is VP Engineering. However, I have been having lots of ongoing conflict with the CEO (a former engineer) around whether or not I am allowed to have or hire any dedicated engineering managers
So Google, by design, had some managers with 30 direct reports. And they thought that went well. Meanwhile the above CEO wants the VP-engineering to manage 40 direct reports. The numbers are slightly different but they are in the same ballpark.
I find the OP's response not very convincing. The above CEO isn't trying to build a no-hierarchy org. He wants his tech-leads to also double-up as mini-managers, with dedicated managers only at the VP/director level. I personally know of at least 1 other very successful company with a similar policy.
The great thing with startups is that they are a low-risk avenue for experimenting with new ideas. Including new organizational-cultures. If Google and other early pioneers hadn't experimented with cultural changes, we would still be working in suits and drab gray offices. The CEO could have done a better job of explaining his vision to the VP before they joined the company. But besides that, I'm glad there are startups out there experimenting with radically new ways of working.