ben_jones

In real time we’ve seen “LLMs are the future” becomethe AI research into AGI is the future”. What’s the next movement of the goal post?

Have you ever seen an instagram post where someone flashes wealth they don’t truly have? Be it a rented Lamborghini or a stack of twenty dollar dolls? Or a stack of ones with a couple hundred obfuscating the other denominations?

There are more incentives to flaunt success then bankruptcy. Even if the success isn’t real.

Hi Philip! This tool looks amazing!

My company specializes in selling to underserved communities in the AMEA region. Can your product help me connect with LGBT customers specifically in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia? Thanks!

PS can I get their exact addresses as well as the addresses of their family members and community leaders?

> If the Challenger launch had been pushed back what major effects would there have been?

An administrator would’ve missed a promotion.

Thus the conclusion should be heavily scrutinize future infoq .com articles and perhaps future articles by the same author Eran Stiller.

We shouldn’t detach responsibility from the publisher and author.

People need to stop giving Musk credit for the macro economic conditions of 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

A lot of the stock gains had nothing to do with Teslas executive decisions during that time frame.

Also Boudica

> It doesn't really matter if the result is called AI or not

I strongly disagree. Wildly overvalued companies disrupt the economy and present huge risks - see Tesla or Nvidia (currently valued at $100m per employee - $3T market cap / 30k employees)

I bought it for iOS and it failed to load on my iPhone 15 pro despite showing compatibility and successfully installing (multiple times).

I have no clue how they can sell games that don’t even start and the App Store allows it.

Edit: looks like it was fixed in May 2024 including a reset of its App Store reviews? So you can sell a product that doesn’t work at all and Apple will flush all your bad reviews when you get it working? Nice.

My prediction is it’s going to increasingly call traditional software under the hood but credit the AI as innovation.

“Knowing somebody at Google” has long been the best customer support route for non enterprise customers, which represents almost all google customers (per capita).

People like watering down good versus bad as if it were binary. They don’t care to think a good person can sometimes be bad, or that many crimes are crimes of opportunity, because then they’d have to question their own goodness

> Housing prices are still set by supply and demand. You can't charge LA prices in Atlanta no matter what kind of fancy scheme you run.

And yet the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain liquid. We do not live in a fair market.

Facebook, I mean Meta, has benefitted from the enshittification of the tech industry.

Next to TikTok they’re better moralistically. Next to Sam Altman, I mean OpenAI, they’re better moralistically. Next to other companies doing layoffs they’re better moralistically (biggest exit packages?)

> it's only us white collar workers in high paying fields like Tech, Finance, etc that have the dry powder to execute on purchases

With inflation, layoffs, and lack of union representation, I suspect software engineering median salaries outside major hubs to stagnate rapidly.

Is there a way to turn it off other than an obscure query parameter in the URL?

An honest release of this feature would have a “turn it off” button right next to it and I’m not seeing one.

People push back on the Crypto/NFT <—> LLMs comparison but I think it’s spot on.

Crypto failed because it could never be honest about its trade offs and the reasons for centralization in the first place. It couldn’t be honest about its flaws because then VCs and private equity would make less money.

LLMs as an immediate panacea is failing because it can’t be honest about what actual intelligence is, where human-computer-interaction is, and its ultimate goal of culling jobs. It couldn’t be honest about its flaws because then VCs and private equity would make less money.

If only there was some pattern involved here we could avoid the pitfalls of these hype cycles - the pitfalls that end up in a whole lot of people being worse off and a couple new Lake Tahoe vacation home purchases.

Institutional investors panic > board panics > executives panic > evps panic and dictates incentives to ship AI > directors, ems, and below, who actually know how shit works, take a submissive role because they have mortgages in Mountain View to pay.

That’s how it happens.

The risk is AI laundering the rest of America’s middle class wealth to the 1% resulting in falling healthcare outcomes, education outcomes, and life expectancies, and much worse working conditions for all industries.

We’ve seen a huge shift of wealth in the last twenty years in no small part passing through and at the insistence of Venture Capital and Private Equity. AI will be used to again accelerate this with more layoffs more outsourcing and lower quality services captured.

We’re talking about reaching out to an individual for consent, not getting consent, and then deliberately choosing a voice actor to circumvent that lack of consent.

Sam’s statement partially contradicts this by saying they contracted the voice actor before ScarJo - but I believe there’s enough intent shown in ScarJos original tweet that Sam as a default disregarded the entire interaction as an inconvenience where he could be “naughty” and get away without consequences.

CAC as in Customer Acquisition Cost if anyone else was wondering

Shhh we’re raising trillions for this technology remember?

Assuming you serve that content out through a CDN a lot of optimization work will be handled there and customization should also be handled there. I’d be shocked if CDNs don’t allow you to do much/all of that out of the box.

Honestly though if this is an authenticated function and you have a small user base… who cares? Is there a reasonable chance at this disrupting any end user services? Maybe it’s not the best way to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars.

Granted you’re an SRE so it’s your job to ideas this. I’d just push back on defaulting to dropping serious resources on a process that might be entirely superfluous for your use case.

> Because you've got to take care of your sick mother was very famously a reason.

With aging parents I empathize a lot with this appreciate you raising it. It’s true the locals will have many reasons to be here and will continue to start businesses and enterprises here.

> you can hire an incredible depth of experts here you can't anywhere else

I’d argue that there are a lot of bad institutional habits in the Bay with regards to software and business management such that the benefit of domain expertise is caught in a nuclear blast of bad “leadership” and dumb capital.

> What other options do you have?

Many companies are plopping offices right next to university clusters, which is a good solution if you need both talent and cost efficiencies. Consider the research Triangle in North Carolina as one example.

It’s probably shorter to just say SFs appeal is largely to fresh grads who want to party in a city and industry consolidation - both the consolidation of actual tech companies and the financial services that service them, like VCs. SF does not have any monopoly on fresh grads and no longer represents a disproportionate consolidation of the tech industry which is now very spread out.

> You are stuck making trade offs wherever you base your office, the market remains sort of efficient like that.

Absolutely there are tradeoffs. I believe people are struggling to realize the entrepreneurial tradeoffs of SF have changed (as much as I don’t want them to as a local resident), and now disproportionately encourage cynicism - oh wait AI will turn everything around never mind.

> It’s going to be ugly for a while.

As a life long Bay Area resident I’ve gotta assume 10 years+ before non tech businesses find some casus belli to operate the ex-warehouse converted to open office buildings throughout SF.

I say non tech because if you’re a burgeoning tech company why on gods green earth would you choose SF? Because you want to poach all the ex-googlers at 300k+ TC expectations? Because you want to compete with Meta for Stanford and Berkeley grads (because they truly are so much better than all the other CS grads in the world)? Because you’re really really trying to nail down that contract with Kaiser Permensorrythreemonthsuntilyourappointmente? Because it’s the only way you can raise $100m on a $5b valuation for your macaroni and cheese only microwave?

SF is a gorgeous amazing city with a rich history and jaw dropping views and weather (bring a jacket) but man even as a major proponent I can’t make a business case outside of checks notes access to League of Legends themed investor meetings.

Global 24/7 operations in a litigious industry is going to take a lot of people.

Then they have over 615 million users. That’s a lot of overhead in customer support, billing, etc.

Then they’re expanding into incredibly diverse markets like India. How do you expand in India? Do you hire 5 Norwegians? No you open offices in India, lots of offices, because there’s over a billion people there.

Ultimately the need to expand into complex markets like India, China, and South America is going to take a lot of people growth. With people growth there are inefficiencies. And it’s an explanation that answers a lot of these questions with Google headcount for example.

We should publish the b-school, and b-school networking graph through the career of a malicious individual.

People will take action faster if they knew Thaddeus Wrappesalot went straight from lacrosse captain to executive chairmen hiking veterinarian costs.

AI is a giant liability shield. You can blatantly steal shit and profit of it. Of course enforcement agencies are going to have a field day with it. Announcements like this are just a pretense that they aren’t already counting the money.

It’s a raw form of the same old celebrity worship we see with athletes, actors, and wealthy people. It’s in your pocket at all times, it’s in your friends pockets at all times, and there’s a tight feedback loop from the algorithm.

Silver lining is the abundance of influencers lessens the stickiness of any particular brand and makes it a shorter term fad.