3,376 karma · joined February 21, 2022
But rather than advocating, or even agitating, for a change in the system that perpetuates unacceptable -- and now unavoidable -- climate risk, you seem pretty sanguine about the whole thing.
With bespoke human-crafted em-dashes, not slop-dashes.
No, it is not. Medical/health information is pretty much the most sensitive and confidential information possible on a personal level. You do not let a system already known for unwanted intrusion near any such system. Unless, of course, you're a sociopathic reckless money-grubbing cowboy, which is a long-winded way of writing "CEO".
What you are arguing is essentially if people have weak locks, its their fault if they get broken into. Or if a bug doesn't taste bad, then it's their fault if it gets eaten by a bird. This thinking puts the blame on the victim, which is 100% the wrong place.
Yes, I agreed that the Australian Government should have better security, but in government that's actually pretty hard when people see a government contract as license to charge $200 for a hammer. See the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website upgrade for an example of that kind of debacle.
10%.
Copy 10% of anything, free, knock yourself out. Fair use. Keep it simple for some things: one chapter of a book, maybe.
Copying the whole thing, building an billion dollar industry out of it in a way that kills the industry of the people you stole from, that's offensive, immoral, unethical, and dumb. And it should be illegal, and something that should be proscuted, and CEO's made personally liable for.
10% is fair.
I've seen some extremely smart people do some seriously stupid things. To the point where they use their drive and intelligence to double-down on the stupid where a baseline stupid person would have given up.
The economic costs of LLM use have been abstracted away, but they're still very much there. The ecological cost of building and running data centres will be a pretty heavy economic cost somewhere in the future. It's not obvious, but it still exists.
(I'm not dumping on LLMs — otherwise I wouldn't even be here. I'm not a glutton for punishment. I know well that HN users excited about LLM use now vocally outweigh, and are pretty intolerant of people who are more on the cautious/negative end of the spectrum. I don't want that trouble in my life).
It was also deeply uneconomic, and didn't change the world, or materially advance our understanding. Mostly it's demoralised the mathematicians already working to solve those problems. They're not going to say 'That's great, I can now devote my energies to another problem', they're more likely to look at 10 years of poorly paid intellectually rigorous work and go home and kick the dog. For a headline.
How is this post breaking any guidelines? How does a reasoned essay about LLM use not belong on HN?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
> "An emergency? Ha! It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realised that to be dependent on a mineral slime just doesn't make sense."
— Robert Banks Stewart (1975)
A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.
Firefox reader mode will probably render it OK.
What is better for everyone is if the people building the systems start with considering accessibility beforehand instead of shipping something broken then fixing it.
If society were perhaps more compassionate, and supportive of this group, then perhaps it wouldn't be so much of a problem.
As to your point about significantly improving accessibility of the web, we could do that right now, all of us, without "AI". We could have done that yesterday. Use semantic HTML, instead of injecting div-soup using Javascript into ad-riddled dark-patterned user hostile slop-pages.
"AI" (or accessibility audits themselves) are a bandaid after the fact. Accessibility needs to be baked in.
I wrote that a group of marginalised people would be further marginalised, and deprived of income and meaningful work in a sector where they are, by circumstance, subject matter experts. Anything else is projection.
Do you know one of the most underemployed groups are disabled people? And do you know where a number of disabled people get employment? Disability audits (unsurprisingly they're extremely good at this).
Congratulations on recommending further marginalising an extremely marginalised group.
In my country, I've not heard a lot of people expressing the wish to visit, let alone immigrate to the US for quite some time now.
And as a reminder of what country we're all talking about here, that'd be the one with the highest number of school shootings in the world, and the least political action and drive to do anything material about it, because, you know, emotional neanderthals gotta have their guns.
That said, if you have any kind of project (open source or not), and someone with significant experience in a domain outside your own makes a suggestion of something that could be improved, then the progressive and constructive response is "tell me why I should think that. What value is there in making this change? How will it be better" which opens up a dialogue, instead of "Hey man, RTFM and start coding" which is alienating (but your position is that there's actually nothing wrong with this. It is wrong if your goal is to create quality software).
I do design work sometimes, and when someone tells me "it doesn't look right", whether it's technically perfect or not, it means it's wrong. They might not be able to explain, but I know it's wrong somehow, and it's my responsibility to fix it. I don't sit them down in front of the keyboard and say "Ok, wiseguy, you fix it. You might need to take some classes at art school though". And sometimes that person is a designer and they say "Well, this composition is unbalanced, but you could try shifting that element a little to the right" and I'd be dumber than Trump if I didn't try that.
The subjectivity thing is interesting though. UX is not 99% subjective, and I don't know how you arrived at that figure. Start with Fitts Law, which is a thing, and not subjective and is measurable. Lots of people have spent a lot of time quantifying this stuff. There's science to it, and, yes, there's an irrational "feelings" component to it, but you ignore either or both at your peril.
Development to improve software should be a conversation between skilled and knowledgeable workers across many domains. Without that, you don't get improvement, you get feature creep.
"Patches welcome" is a conversation killer.
The problem was that people hyped it up as the solution for every problem and all the world's ills, so it wound up being used where it had no business being used (and therefore badly).
XML was a hammer used to bang in a lot of things that weren't remotely nail-shaped, and accordingly, a certain percentage of traumatised people despise it and react to any mention of it with fear and loathing.
It's kind of neat when you have an application for it that really leans into its strengths.
It will lead to someone with the insight on how to make actual material improvements frustrated and angry that they don't have the technical skill (or time) to grapple with a complex codebase, and the people with the technical skill working on the codebase dismiss people with actual knowledge in different domains.
"Patches welcome" is not any kind of welcome. It's basically a euphemism for "fuck off, I don't want to have a conversation to make something better, I just want to hack on Feature X".
Creative work is now so devalued the instinct when most people see something is to believe that nobody put the work in and it was generated, because that's suddenly the overwhelming majority of "art" we are seeing. It's horrifying.
There's no guarantee that a tree planted to "offset" a flight will grow to any kind of maturity, let alone survive three months. Some saplings just die.
Or maybe that tree got planted in a tree plantation for timber, or wood pulp, and 20 years later, it's framing timber or newsprint.
(I am someone who does revegetation projects and have planted a large number of trees)
I wish I was on a software team so I could justify buying it. But but my $DAY_JOB is answering phones and fixing printer-jams in a medical practice, so not a lot of application there.
They even wanted to remake "Fawlty Towers" without "the tall idiot".
And there's stories where the first comment is "reads like it's written by AI", it will make me far less likely to read the actual article, because I find AI writing somewhat nauseating.
I'm not saying Microsoft Publisher is necessarily good, but at work I run into a layout problem that Word won't handle, and there's nothing else available to me there.
Crazy.
127.0.0.1 x.com
Seems that sending a bunch of people with guns/bombs/etc to another country is almost always bad.
The military doing good things like ... um ... helping out during natural disasters or genuine peacekeeping is entirely a rare thing.
Are you forgetting the bad neighbor that keeps attacking most of its other neighbors, even while under ceasefire agreements? And then moving onto the land and saying "this is ours, time to redraw the border again.".
Because that, to me, screams instability.