ambrozk

Don’t. It doesn’t matter. Join Ed Zitron and shout at clouds while the world passes you by.

It's not "becoming the norm." It's been the norm for decades. And yes, you should not be mad about the norm.

Does Europe not enjoy the benefits of global stability?

I interact with lots of engineers, some who got CS or Math degrees, and some who went to bootcamps. The difference in competence is very noticeable.

> You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer)

I do not believe this is true in the slightest. I learned more in a single OS class than i learned in years of industry work. What you learn in industry tends to be distinct from what you learn in college, and if it isn't, then your college curriculum was probably a waste.

Encoder: Text tokens -> Fixed representation vector

Decoder: Fixed representation vector + N decoded text tokens -> N+1th text token

Encoder/Decoder architecture: You take some tokenized text, run an encoder on it to get a fixed representation vector, and then recursively apply the decoder to your fixed representation vector and the 0...N tokens you've already produced to produce the N+1th token.

Decoder-only architecture: You take some tokenized text, and recursively apply a decoder to the 0...N tokens you've already produced to produce the N+1th token (without ever using an encoded representation vector).

Basically, an encoder produces this intermediate output which a decoder knows how to combine with some existing output to create more output (imagine, e.g., encoding a sentence in French, and then feeding a decoder the vector representation of that sentence plus the three words you've translated so far, so that it can figure out the next word in the translation). A decoder can be made to require an intermediate context vector, or (this is how it's done in decoder-only architectures) it can be made to require only the text produced so far.

These sorts of comments are going to go in the annals with the hackernews people complaining about Dropbox when it first came out. This is so revolutionary. If you're not agog you're just missing the obvious.

Correct. You shouldn't decide whether there's a genocide going on in Gaza by consulting official statements from interested governments. You should decide based on independent human rights researchers, international law scholars, journalists, and so on. Opinion on the subject among these people is very much split.

What I'm disagreeing with in your statement is the conflation of "real knowledge" with "power." It is true that all the most powerful governments in the West have taken roughly the same line on the charge of genocide in Gaza, but it is not at all the case that everyone with "real knowledge" has agreed with them.

"Everybody in the US's alliance structure agrees that the US's top Middle-East ally is behaving completely appropriately, which is strong evidence that they are. I am very smart."

Lol, they just intersect with the people who are still thinking about COVID. That's all.

I am just repeating what I have heard from people who should know.

Correct. People with no real view on the events in Israel get very excited to sneer at the "spoiled brat" protesters (who just willingly walked away from extremely fat paychecks). It makes them feel more comfortable about their own lack of moral fiber. The strong Zionists opposing this, I understand, but most people mocking it are just enjoying "the wokes getting owned."

This is textbook civil disobedience. They believed they could not quietly aid an ongoing injustice, so they loudly protested in the full knowledge they would be punished. This is how protest is supposed to work.

Of course the protest is about technology -- it's about the provision of technology to governments who use that technology for war. Why wouldn't you expect the employees of these companies have a position on that?

Like a lot of people here, I have family who died in the Holocaust. It is highly likely that the camps they moved through were using tech supplied by IBM. Would it have been "culture warring" for tech employees circa 1938, to publicize the human rights abuses being enabled by their companies? Because that's what the people who support these protesters think is going on here.

Yes, so it's clearly quite relevant to this board.

To me, modern-day Zionism means two things:

1. The belief that Israel is the homeland of the Jews, and by extension, my homeland.

2. The belief that Israel should remain, legally, a Jewish supremacist state, where only Jewish sovereignty is recognized.

I disagree strongly with both of these notions.

My understanding is that the protests were closely coordinated with lawyers, and Google will likely spend a ton of $$$ defending the terminations as a result.

Jebe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebe) became one of Ghenghis Khan's top generals after shooting the Khan's horse out from under him in battle. Heart recognizes heart.

It's incredible that on just about every piece I've ever read about Elm since they made that decision, this has been the first, second, and third comment. Wanting to try Elm for myself, I disregarded this advice, and.... immediately ran into the exact same problem! I've never seen such a promising project so conclusively killed by pure developer pigheadedness. And, amazingly, they've never backed down at all. They don't seem to mind that they maimed themselves.

Because some people want to buy, not rent them, and you want those people's money....?

It seems like the only solution that's compatible with materialism. If you accept that it "feels like something" to be you, and you accept that your intelligence is just a computational process which differs from others only in the specific computations involved (as I think you should, especially in the age of LLMs), then you must infer that it "feels like something" to be any number of computational processes. If you infer otherwise, you're positing that there's an unmotivated, invisible, in-kind difference between human intelligence and all other physical phenomena which seem to mirror its abilities.

The conclusion I come to, which doesn't actually seem that strange, is that what's special about our experience is the complexity of our thought, our ability to turn extremely high-dimensional raw experience into low-dimensional models of reality, our ability to maintain a sense of mostly-stable identity over a long period of time, our capacity for emotion and sensation. It may "feel like something" to be a rock or a standing desk, but it isn't a very interesting or complicated feeling.

> So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.

This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no dividing line between the "experience" of you and the "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What does it feel like to be a standing desk?

> Fanon's claims are consistent with this, he addresses it directly. Except he of course is talking about societies that use colonialist violence as a means to their ends, not those reaching for liberation through violence. Seems relevant here. If those who use violence for liberation are corrupted by it, what does it do to those of us who use it for no great purpose except our own benefit, as our societies certainly have?

Empirically, societies that employed violence for their own benefit (e.g. the British, the French, the Americans, the Israelis) seem to have suffered very few consequences, whereas the societies that have employed violence to remove them (e.g. the Chinese, the Haitians, the Iranians, the Palestinians) have done very poorly in the aftermath. While there are certainly some negative consequences for strong countries which violently impose themselves on the weak, (e.g. Americans pay for their Middle-East policy by having to take their shoes off at the airport), on the whole it seems like a successful invasion, however bloody it may be for the country invaded, tends to cause relatively few material problems for the invader. If there's any repayment for evil, it must happen in heaven and hell, because hardly anywhere is justice visible on Earth. Like Thucydides said, "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."

She didn't say it's okay. She said that whether it's against Harvard's CoC is dependent on the context, which is obviously true.

It didn't even really happen in FAANG. FAANG employees are still doing extremely well. FAANG companies are still holding onto tons of unproductive headcount which they would prefer to let go were it not for the employee backlash that'd follow. There are lots of people making lots of money who would be cut in any other competitive industry. I know because they're honest about it during their lunch hour. People read these stories about companies going about layoffs in a ham-fisted and counterproductive way, and jump to the conclusion that managements are all mustache-twirling robber barons whose main dream in life is to feed their employees into meat-grinders. The more conservative and reasonable conclusion to draw from the poor layoff execution is that FAANG management teams aren't very competent people managers, and are especially incompetent when it comes to layoffs, since they don't do them often.

You act like coders are okies. People at Google were frequently getting 2-9 months of severance, with benefits for most of those. Stop pretending like tech employers generally are behaving with "no sense of reciprocity." It's embarrassing and no one in any other field of work is going to buy your sob story.

Yes, which is... anti-social, right? And which you would judge a company for?

Just because many companies behave poorly does not mean there is not a code of reciprocal obligation between workers and companies. If a company lays someone off and gives them no severance, you would judge that company more harshly than if they had given them severance. Similarly, if a worker leaves with no notice, people judge them poorly. When you break the rules people judge you.

The Quigleys may have been assholes but getting into a feud with your neighbors, wiretapping their phone, and then publicizing the contents of their conversations about you should probably be discouraged by the law.