berniedurfee

I disagree. I don’t think LLMs are a pathway to AGI. I think LLMs will lead to incredibly powerful game-changing tools and will drive changes that affect the course of humanity, but this technology won’t lead to AGI directly.

I think AGI is going to arrive via a different technology, many years in the future still.

LLMs will get to the point where they appear to be AGI, but only in the same way the latest 3D rendering technology can create images that appear to be real.

I think this is still very much applicable in OOP.

Developers tend to break complex business logic within classes down into smaller private methods to keep the code DRY. The “push ifs up” mantra is really useful here to ensure the branching doesn’t end up distributed amongst those methods.

The “push fors down” is also very relevant when most call threads end up at an expensive database query. It’s common to see upstream for loops that end up making many DB calls downstream somewhere when the looping could have been replaced by a “where” clause or “join” in the SQL.

In fact, the “push fors down” mantra is useful even at the architecture level, as it’s usually better to push looping logic for doing aggregations or filtering into a DAO where it can be optimized close to the DB, rather than pulling a bunch of objects out of the database and looping through them.

I love simple and clear design principles like this!

Though, as with all design principles, one needs to consider it deliberately vs applying it as dogma!

Follow the money.

I’ve always wanted to see something like that. I always wonder if forecasts are a coin flip beyond a window of a few hours.

So what’s the final outcome? A long prison sentence or a few years hanging out on appeal followed by a few years in a low security federal penitentiary and a long career doing speaking engagements and appearances?

Holmes got 9 years, but her actions had severe real world effects on people. Is that the ceiling for SBF?

Also, I do think video is _much_ more powerful than the written word.

Literacy is not required.

Watching video is far more engaging and entrancing than reading books to most people.

Video can be broadcast and consumed by huge numbers of people _much_ faster than written text.

Unless someone is reading text out loud, the people around them aren't influenced.

In court, especially the court of public opinion, video is currently infallible.

The current reality, is with existing technology, the entirety of the human race will need to, very quickly, learn to treat all text, audio and video as fake unless proven otherwise.

Will we eventually adapt to this new quasi-reality? Probably.

Will we adapt quickly? Maybe?

If not, is it game over? Probably not, but I don't think it's going to be pretty.

Market benchmarks are used to set minimums or maximums for compensation or pricing that workers or consumers will just barely tolerate. That’s the threshold these benchmarks measure.

I don’t think we’re close, not even within 50 years of real AGI. Which may or may not decide to wipe us out.

However, even given the current state of “AI”, I think there are countless dangers and risks.

The ability to fabricate audio and video that’s indistinguishable from the real thing can absolutely wreck havoc on society.

Even just the transition of spam and phishing from poorly worded blasts with grammatical errors to very eloquent and specific messages will exponentially increase the effectiveness of attacks.

LLM generated content which is a mix of fact and fantasy will soon far outweigh all the written and spoken content created by humans in all of history. That’s going to put humans in a place we’ve never been.

Current “AI” is a tool that can allow a layman to very quickly build all sorts of weapons to be used to meet their ends.

It’s scary because “AI” is a very powerful tool that individuals and states will weaponize and turn against their enemies.

It will be nice to finally have a good spellchecker though.

Renaissance Learning (eduCLIMBER) - Senior Software Engineer PHP

Fulltime - Remote US

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Our stack is simple and straightforward: VueJS -> PHP API -> MySQL on AWS. We're growing quickly and are expanding the engineering team to help our system maintain performance and reliability as we scale. This role will be on our API team, but we welcome anyone who wants to also do some frontend in TypeScript or data ingestion using Python.

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Thanks!

What’s in it for Google?

I disagree with almost all of these conclusions. I appreciate web pages that are sparse and concise. High information density is _not_ generally a good thing.

I like clean websites with lots of space. I don’t mind long scrolling websites, though I don’t particularly like the trend of stupid animations that happen as you scroll down.

I appreciate that “mobile first” has forced web designers to simplify web sites to be concise. Less is more!

As a greybeard, I’m so glad to hear and see type safety becoming okay once again.

XP seemed to be the catalyst for the “code fast and bail” mentality that’s persisted for too long.

I feel somewhat validated as a long time advocate of type definitions.

It always irked me to hear someone say a language with types is too “verbose” and slows them down.

Yeah, please do slow down! It really is okay to take a little more time to write better code.

Yeah, that’s really the anti-competitive part. The vertical integration is so incredibly difficult to compete against.

At some point you have no choice but to give them a slice of your revenue and some control of your product, lest your access to customers is severely limited.

Kinda like app stores.

Yeah, I was going to say the same, just not as creatively.

USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.

But they do, right? At the very least they turn a blind eye to the countless counterfeiters.

Why not McMaster Carr or even Digikey?

I’m sure Amazon has put a sizable dent in their sales without even really trying.

Amazon now has special search tools for buying fasteners that make it easier to find exactly what you need.

Prices are cheap, risk is high, but prices are cheap.

Very similar to the music industry, where technology has made producing music so easy the market is growing by tens of millions of new songs every year.

The slices of pie are getting very thin indeed. Especially when there are only a few pie delivery services to choose from and they take their slice first.

Follow the money

Lol, yeah, if you Google “who owns which power tool brands” you can find the Rosetta Stone of tool brands to figure out which cheaper brands come from the same factories as the expensive stuff. It’s a web of deception for sure.

You actually bought a Haier dishwasher with a GE sticker on it.

It’s hard to tell these days whether you’re buying a product from a brand you trust or from a company that bought the brand you trust.

Though, having said that, I recently bought a Bosch refrigerator because Bosch is still Bosch and I trusted Bosch.

But the refrigerator is crap, broken on arrival and it took 5 phone calls and 3 weeks to get service.

There are a few. Cockos makes an amazing Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that competes with the top names in the industry.

While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.

Had the same experience many years ago. I have a bunch of old Craftsman tools that are superb quality and will last decades more.

Sad to see them as an empty house brand now. Just like GE appliances, all that’s left is a sticker.

I always picture companies see regulatory bodies as a slalom course with regulations representing the slalom poles.

The course changes occasionally, but companies adapt quickly and learn to handle the course changes efficiently on the next run, skimming by the poles on the way to the finish line.

Every once in a while a new pole smacks them in the face, but by the next fiscal year, they’ve learned to navigate past it as if it weren’t there.

Lawyer are usually damn fine slalom racers, but occasionally you do need to donate money to the course to encourage the owner to move the poles.

I agree. At their scale, that fine is a ‘cost of doing business’ tax.

It also seems likely that number will be litigated down to something much smaller by the time the legal dust settles.

I would imagine most social media platforms have already aggregated enough data to suss out familial relationships pretty confidently. That’s kinda central to their business model.

In fact, it’s probably more likely these platforms don’t want anyone to know how much they already do know about familial relationships.

I agree with this. The executives that made the decision to outsource and offshore understood that near term gains would come with long term consequences, they always do. Those executives did very well by those short term gains.

That’s my understanding as well; that the Industrial Revolution in the US was very much based on IP from outside the US.

No clients are trustworthy.

That’s what I was thinking.

Wouldn’t harvesting the stray noise lower the impedance of the thing being noisy, making it use more power to compensate?