> As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified.
I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis
I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.
> This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis
You know that the Nazi comparison isn't because of the disagreement, but because of what that disagreement is based on?
It's really not hard to compare ICE to the Gestapo or SA, core Nazi institutions. They're kidnapping people off the streets in brutal manners, targeting them based on immutable visual characteristics, sending them to camps from where many are never heard of again. Including people who are citizens and thus not even "guilty" of the crime which is supposedly being targeted.
Palantir as a company enables that. In the same way we legitimately call out Dehomag (IBM's German subsidiary) for them enabling all Nazi atrocities, we can call out Palantir for enabling the current atrocities.
It's not "disagreement", it's "if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a fucking Nazi duck".
I was pretty curious as I have a kid who's not very aware about cars. That appears to be an extrapolation from a pretty biased source [1]. It's probably more honest to say "the aforementioned systems are expected to save 58 to 69 lives each year" after they are fully rolled out to the entire fleet.
That's not counting injuries or property damage, but it is still an already low number
LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of.
e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits and check if the code in them could be simplified or refactored to have a better abstraction"
Agreed. If I'm looking at what it proposes then about 1/2 the time I don't make the changes. If this were fully automated you would need an addendum like "Only make the change if it saves over 100 lines of code or removes 3 duplicate pieces of logic".
There are other scenarios you would want to check for but you get the idea.
I've tried this approach of instructing the LLM to look for opportunities to abstract, but it's not good at finding the commonalities after the fact, when possibly related functions have already diverted unnecessarily. It writes "sloppy" code, that is to say code that is locally correct but which fails to build towards overall generalizations, but that sloppy code is a cul-de-sac: easy to write, but adding to messiness, and really tough to improve.
When a good programmer writes a new feature, they are looking for both existing and new abstractions that can be applied. They are considering their mental model of the whole system and examining whether it can be leveraged or needs to be updated. That's how they avoid compounding complications.
In order to take a big picture view like that, the LLM needs the right context. It would need to focus on what its system model is and decide when to update that system model. For now, just telling it what to write isn't enough to get good code. You have to tell it what to pay attention to.
> When a good programmer writes a new feature, they are looking for both existing and new abstractions that can be applied. They are considering their mental model of the whole system and examining whether it can be leveraged or needs to be updated. That's how they avoid compounding complications.
This is actually a pretty good argument that it's a permanent issue. I haven't tried with writing, or having an LLM write, a summary of the coding style of any of my code bases but my hunch is it wouldn't do a good job either writing it or taking it into account when coding a new feature
I just want to thank the submitter. This is the type of internet that I really miss. A very smart person who's a good writer, proud of their interests and obsessions.
I disagree. Comes off as an arrogant guy rather than a curious scientist.
What will it take to get this before you die? What are physical limitations to shrink things more and more and to speed things up more and more? He talks about solar, but what are the physical limits and how can we get there?
I think there's interesting physics here, but this sounds like just a rich guy craving more power.
Geohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out. Famously said he'd go to Twitter when Musk bought it and help Musk fix search, because "how hard can it be". Then left in shame 3 months later having achieved nothing except figuring out that It's A Bit More Complicated Than That(tm).
Comma does some cool stuff, if relatively entry-level, and this post is good napkin-maths and was a fun read, but there is so much more depth and a hundred ways in which this post is wrong or over-simplified to the point of near irrelevance.
That someone thinks they can personally "fix search" in a few months at a multi-billion dollar social network that just fired half its engineering staff, however, does.
The GTA fix shows humility, literally the first sentence of the "recon" section is "First I wanted to check if someone had already solved this problem". Geohot wasn't interested in if anyone had tried and failed to "solve search", or why it might be a difficult problem. He assumed that Twitter were a bunch of idiots.
The whole approach of the GTA fix author is curious and humble. Very low ego.
These were interesting but I don't know if they'd work on most or any of the places I've worked. Most places and teams I've worked at have 2-3 small repos per project. Are most places working with monorepos these days?
>The only access anyone has to those questions is through something like introspection: either their own, or someone else’s honest reports of their experience, or the accumulated testimony of literature and philosophy...
I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen
My favorite part of that site, besides it loading incredibly fast, is even though it has an ad, for a wholly subsidiary, on it it is hard coded in the html.
Netflix pays like a Big Tech company, is valued like a Big Tech company and was part of FAANG. 10 years ago the streaming tech they had was fairly high tech, even if it's now pretty standard. So they're considered Big Tech for historical reason
There was no world that Netflix should have been part of FANG (notice the missing A as original conceived by Cramer). At the time it was coined, Apple was already the most valuable company. But was left out as was Microsoft
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad
It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
It's a poorly written article, and the writer comes across as unpleasant to talk to. Saying "big tech is bad" with no extra context has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen on a post with this many upvotes.
Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.
Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year
I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis
I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.
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