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JSavageOne

2,078 karma · joined April 2, 2020

Software engineer

https://twitter.com/jeremybernier

Personal Site https://www.jbernier.com

Some personal projects:

• Open source offline-first Notion clone - https://mindgarden.app (work in progress)

• https://zsync.xyz, an attempt at a better Hacker News / Reddit

• https://nomadz.app, a crowdsourced site for useful places for nomads and remote workers, specifically work cafes.

Other social media:

https://www.youtube.com/c/JDiculous1 https://www.instagram.com/cityofjeremy

Posts here don't necessarily reflect my views as I may steelman an argument for the sake of greater understanding.

submissionscomments
JSavageOne··on Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
> "The prediction was that software engineers would lose their jobs first, and the recent trend went the other way: demand for software engineers is higher than ever"

Hard to take anything the author says seriously making nonsensical claims like this. The software engineering job market has been getting worse every year since 2022 by virtually every metric. This is especially true at the entry and mid level. For example, computer engineering and computer science majors now have the #2 and #4 highest unemployment rates amongst recent graduates [1]

Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up.

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market?utm...

JSavageOne··on Why you should work for a top tier tech company
Yea fair point.

I do think it's a good experience to try either way since the challenges are so different from that of startups. These large multinationals look for different skills some of which you can't really develop at startups.

And the money doesn't hurt.

JSavageOne··on Panic at the Job Market
Yea the job market is brutal. Being unemployed and getting rejection after rejection is really the most demoralizing thing.

Behavioral interviews are actually my least favorite and I have no idea why I'm not passing them. Either my experience is not good enough, or I'm not presenting it well enough.

Anyways to anyone struggling out there - hang in there. Remember that all it takes is one offer to be employed.

JSavageOne··on Panic at the Job Market
> "We already have UBI, it's just the overblown bureaucracies housed by American corporate structures."

Don't forget disability insurance, which is massively abused, functions like a UBI

JSavageOne··on MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
Asians aren't counted as "diversity" either. This is why they're referred to as "an inconvenient minority" in the context of DEI.
JSavageOne··on Ask HN: How is the Spotify app so bad?
Yes Spotify UI/UX is absolute garbage. It's not even possible to simply view a list of all songs by an artist. Also I had to turn off autoplay because the recommendation engine wouldn't stop autoplaying the same song.
JSavageOne··on Devin: AI Software Engineer
I think you're underestimating the amount of things built with nocode.

I don't think most people are building landing pages anymore by handwriting code anymore. Same with blogs (eg. Wordpress). There are MVPs of successful businesses that've been built by Bubble.io. Internal dashboards and such can definitely be built without code such as via Retool or Looker or whatever.

WYSIWYG obviously makes sense for frontend, but less so for backend. For backend code I don't really see how some visual drag and drop editor could make for a better interface than code. And even if it could, the advantage of code is that it's fully customizable (whereas with a GUI you're limited by the GUI), and text itself as a medium is uniform and portable (eg. easy to copy and paste anywhere).

Not to say that we can't create better interfaces than text, but I do think some sort of augmentation on top of a code editor is probably a more realistic short-term evolution, similar to VSCode plugins.

JSavageOne··on Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
This looks awesome.

Some suggestions though:

- Would be awesome to be able to open an existing animation (eg. like any of the ones showcased). It's a built overwhelming for a noobie opening up to a blank editor page.

- Could also consider putting a tutorial video

Anyways I'll have to play around with this.

JSavageOne··on "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
Such a bloated, meandering, poor written article. Just get to the point. Gave up halfway through and author still hadn't addressed the title.
JSavageOne··on Oregon is recriminalizing drugs, dealing setback to reform movement
How would that solve anything? In San Francisco drugs are practically already legalized, and filled with junkies openly doing fentanyl on the sidewalks.
JSavageOne··on How Quora died
Fascinating and confirms my suspicions. The point when the questions popping up in my feed were obviously not genuine is when I lost interest in Quora. The worst was how it'd always show me variations of questions fetishizing working at Google. Seriously every single Quora digest email had some variation of a question like "What is the best thing about working at Google?" Unsubscribed and don't miss it.
JSavageOne··on Animate Anyone: Image-to-video synthesis for character animation
Yea they definitely should've thrown in some ugly ones in there
JSavageOne··on Show HN: React Spreadsheet 2
No it's a great idea
JSavageOne··on Intro to Large Language Models [Video]
I wonder why OpenAI doesn't try to get more feedback and training data from its users, though I do notice that sometimes it'll give me two answers and ask me to pick the better one.

For example I've noticed that a lot of the time when I ask ChatGPT a coding question it might get 90% of the answer. When I tell it what to fix and/or add, it usually gets the answer. I wonder if they're using these refined answers to fine-tune those original prompts.

I wonder how the LLM interacts with other software like the calculator or Python interpreter. It would be great if this were modular so that the LLM OS could be more like Unix than Windows which is what OpenAI seems to be trying to emulate.

Ultimately though it seems to me like AGI is fairly straightforward from here. Just train on more quality data - in particular enabling the machine to generate this training data, increase parameter size, and the LLM just gets better and better. Seems like we don't even need any new major breakthroughs to create something resembling AGI.

JSavageOne··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
Yes it is a problem if a company is failing not just for the investors but the workers. Nobody wants to work for a sinking ship. Can't believe this even needs to be said.
JSavageOne··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
Right so every website needing a cookie banner to comply with EU regulations is not only a UX nightmare, but it doesn't even prevent tracking. Horrible pointless legislation.
JSavageOne··on OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster
Well the quote I referenced from the article of the machines deciding to destroy humanity is utter scifi nonsense.

There are obviously legitimate risks to AI and safety is important, but this is the same for any new technology, and it's governments' responsibilities to ensure that people are safe. AI companies mindlessly slowing down and keeping their tech to themselves does no service to humanity, and if anything is a net-negative due to how tremendously useful this stuff is.

Education is analogous to AI because AI is an enormous education and productivity boost to humanity - sort of like everyone having a personal assistant, programmer, and tutor at their fingertips. This could be used for good and it could be used for bad, but the technology itself is neutral.

Again I want to emphasize that obviously there are downsides that could result from evil people using AI for bad purposes, but that does not justify slowing down AI progress - just like I don't see "people using information for bad purposes" as a legitimate reason for stifling advancement in education or something like Google search.

I have yet to see any convincing argument otherwise. Feel free to provide your counter-perspective.

JSavageOne··on OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster
> There has long been discussion among computer scientists about the danger posed by highly intelligent machines, for instance if they might decide that the destruction of humanity was in their interest.

This AI doomer stuff is such nonsense and I can't believe anybody takes it seriously. As if it's OpenAI's responsibility to save humanity from the pitfalls of AI.

Imagine if we decided to improve our education system and doomers were talking about "hitting the panic button" because students were getting too smart from all the quality education.

JSavageOne··on We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
Quora is an embarrassment and died years ago when marketers took it over
JSavageOne··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
What a sad but refreshingly honest article. I never worked at Google, but this aligns with my impressions from the outside, as well as everything else I've read (eg. that recent article here from a founder who's startup was acquired by Google and she left due to the stifling bureaucracy). The company hasn't innovated much recently and its products like Google Search have deteriorated in quality tremendously. At this rate Google may be on its way to becoming the next has-been tech company (eg. sort of like what happened to IBM).

The management and bureaucracy depicted in the article sound like a corporate nightmare and unappealing place to work. I didn't know that Google had non-engineers running dev tool teams. Can this VP even reverse a linked list? /s

Seems like Google needs a change in leadership, starting with replacing CEO Sundar Pichar.

JSavageOne··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
Bard is trash. In my experience it's ChatGPT > Bing Chat > Bard.

Shame because Google invented the transformer architecture that enabled the technology.

JSavageOne··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
The internet would be better without mandated cookie banners. It's so damn frustrating using the internet in the EU. If you don't want to be tracked just browse in Incognito mode.
JSavageOne··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
You've just described why once prominent companies fade into shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be avoided with better leadership.
JSavageOne··on We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
I'd be shocked if D'Angelo doesn't get kicked off. Even before this debacle his AI competitor app poe.com is an obvious conflict of interest with OpenAI.
JSavageOne··on We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
The Hacker News comments section has really gone to shit.

People here used to back up their bold claims with arguments.

JSavageOne··on Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson

Adam Grant - Hidden Potential

JSavageOne··on Don't build AI products the way everyone else is doing it
> "One way we explored approaching this was using puppeteer to automate opening websites in a web browser, taking a screenshot of the site, and traversing the HTML to find the img tags.

> We then used the location of the images as the output data and the screenshot of the webpage as the input data. And now we have exactly what we need — a source image and coordinates of where all the sub-images are to train this AI model."

I don't quite understand this part. How does this lead to a model that can generate code from a UI?

JSavageOne··on Bill Gates – AI is about to change how you use computers
Here's a tweet of his from earlier this year verifying a Reddit AMA posted under the same Reddit account https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1613272185342414848
JSavageOne··on What I learned getting acquired by Google
I'm surprised this even legally flies. Seems like the legal equivalent of creating a shell company.
JSavageOne··on What I learned getting acquired by Google
Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing than being an employee
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