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contrast

442 karma · joined April 2, 2011

Left uni in 2000, joined a startup, did the whole "acquired by corporate behemoth" thing, nowadays a tech evangelist / communicator.

Bilingual in tech and marketing jargon, expert at neither. Admirer of expertise, despiser of b.s., and crosser of communication chasms.

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contrast··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
In the UK and EU you absolutely do not have the right to be compensated for sales or deals not closed in part due to a delayed flight.

Your entire point is completely at odds to reality. In the general case, contracts do not guarantee there are never problems, and problems happening do not create an automatic entitlement to sue. The entire point of contracts is to protect both parties.

Ultimately, if you are travelling, you are relying on *you* to get yourself there. Airlines and hotels will help, there's compensation available to some degree, but extrapolating that out to "everything is someone else's responsibility and I deserve to be compensated for everything I hoped to achieve" is pure fantasy.

contrast··on Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?
I broadly agree. Plain text formats remain consistently accessible and flexible.

That said, arguably the dominant AI artifacts are binary images, video, audio.

The "preview panes for other kinds of tasks" will be a big deal. Humans tend prefer rich text editors (I think?). Also spreadsheets, page layouts, node graphs, timelines, hex editors, ...

So maybe the preview panes are actually editors themselves? Speaking personally, I enjoy closely coupled combinations of underlying plain text representations with task-specific UI on top.

contrast··on Half-Baked Product
I'd argue the spirit of entrepreneurialism and salesmanship in the story is more American!

I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder.

Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver.

Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research?

"If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.

contrast··on Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
Did you read it?

The argument boils down to: this is exactly the same as other times. And provides multiple examples.

contrast··on The user is visibly frustrated
"Teach yourself to not judge people for being human."

"Be a more charitable, generous, understanding person."

Anyone making such blatantly judgemental and egotistical comments to a complete stranger has absolutely no idea what is frustrating to people. And is not being anything like a charitable or understanding person.

contrast··on Ontology vs. Semantic Layer
This makes the remarkable claim that the ontology document is correct no matter what the actual data says! And I suspect legal would have something to say about the ontology defining what a contract is.

It badly needs grounding in some real examples. It reads like pure navel gazing academia, or expensive, gold plated consultancy.

I have never encountered a company that talks about their ontology.

You need the warehouse.

You can benefit from a semantic layer. Optional, but loads of examples in the wild.

Definitions in a semantic layer are absolutely an ontology of sorts. You should avoid working with people who let conceptual purity get in the way of practical results. Concepts and metaphors can guide your work and help with communication; pedantry drags it to a halt.

Treating your ontology as not just a useful concept but an actual product you spend time writing and maintaining? Outside of it being a word you could reasonably apply to tools such as data catalogs, my anecdata is that I have never heard of it in practice.

contrast··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
That's your reaction to a page about photography that has photos of a model, and the photos DON'T feature her breasts? I mean sure, she has them. Many women do!
contrast··on Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND
what's with the weird obsession all over the thread that it is the JUDGE who is the only person at fault here?
contrast··on The whole thing was a scam
That’s a profoundly incorrect misunderstanding of the Citizens United decision, which was to remove restrictions on political spending by corporations.

In other words, by your distinction, the decision was about stacks of cash, not movies.

A case regarding a movie was indeed brought to the court. The court decided to make a far more expansive decision. The movie became a footnote, and has effectively no meaningful relationship to the court’s final decision or its impact.

As for getting lost in a discussion about the difference between an ad and a movie, that’s really going down a rabbit hole of deliberately missing the point completely. Some word play is just too divorced from reality to engage with. There are many very short movies, and any rational person would be able to distinguish them from ads to a high degree of accuracy.

contrast··on Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use
Maybe its obvious but I can't tell it this is an image editor, a React builder, an HTML/CSS designer, ...? What does it make?
contrast··on Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop
Your tone is disagreement, but it's not clear why?

There is an individual who you trust to do good work, and who works well with you. They're not anonymous. Addressing the topic of this thread, you know (or should know) that it is not AI slop.

That is a significant amount of knowledge and trust in an individual, and the very point I thought the GP was making.

contrast··on How we lost communication to entertainment
This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.
contrast··on Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company
You’re comparing being the founder and CEO, to being an employee hired to run a fraction of an organisation?
contrast··on Richard Stallman on ChatGPT
"They do not know the meaning of what they generate but the output is important to us."

Isn't that a good definition of what bullshit is?

contrast··on LLM from scratch, part 28 – training a base model from scratch on an RTX 3090
You seem to be talking about a production-grade model rather than building an LLM as an exercise? Or if not, why do you disagree with the article's example of building a small LLM for $100?
contrast··on Implications of AI to schools
How is knowing the commutative properties of operations more significant than being able to do basic arithmetic?

I'd imagine millions if not billions of people have found basic math useful without ever learning what "commutative" even means.

contrast··on Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
I pay for a lot of software eg I used Screen Studio a couple of times, liked it, dropped a couple hundred bucks for it. Good work from a solo dev.

Datastar have basic functionality in the pro license. Basic UX capabilities like animation and copy to clipboard.

The devs aren’t “very clear” that most people should never need the license. That’s just PR. They’ve picked a bunch of features that even a teenage hobbyist might want to use as part of a trivial application. There’s no relationship between the locked features and their value or complexity.

I would avoid any web framework that might get in my face like this, at some random moment working on a pet project to try out a new thing, with an invoice demanding payment if I want to use random features.

“Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself?”

No I’m good, thanks. The Datastar community needs some work, going by the attitude of their defenders in this thread. Someone else is saying the way they charge money isn’t a monetization strategy. It’s nonsense.

Nothing wrong with charging money. Just be honest about it, take it in the chin when people don’t want to buy, and ideally have a pricing strategy that makes sense.

contrast··on Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
Copy-to-clipboard is a support heavy feature?

Do you really think Datastar is of such ridiculously bad quality that even simple features require a lot of support to get working?

contrast··on Checklists are hard, but still a good thing
A todo list is a unique thing, it’s about remembering to do all the things you said you’d do. There’s no implied consistency from one todo list to another.

A checklist is used repeatedly, and it’s about completing a task (or set of tasks) to a certain standard. If you’re following a checklist, you’re aiming for consistency.

contrast··on Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]
Pointing out that LLMs are deterministic as long as you lock down everything, is like saying an extra bouncy ball doesn’t bounce if you leave it on flat surface, reduce the temperature to absolute zero, and make sure the surface and the ball are at rest before starting the experiment.

It’s true but irrelevant.

One of the GP’s main points was that even the simplest questions can lead to hundreds of different contexts; they probably already know that you could get different outcomes if you could instead have a fixed context.

contrast··on Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
From my perspective, your argument is:

- AI gives me huge, mediocre prints of my own shitty pictures to fill up my house with - AI means I don’t have to talk to other people - AI means I can learn things online that previously I could have learned online (not sure what has changed here!) - People who cross-check multiple websites for information have a limited perspective compared to relying on a couple of AI channels

Overall, doesn’t your evidence support the point that AI is reducing the quality of your information diet?

You paint a picture that looks exactly like the 21st century version of an elderly couple with just a few TV channels available: a few familiar channels of information, but better now because we can make sure they only show what we want them to show, little contact with other people.

contrast··on Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
“the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon”

Love it :)

contrast··on X Chief Says She Is Leaving the Social Media Platform
I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread, rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently omitting anything.
contrast··on When Fine-Tuning Makes Sense: A Developer's Guide
I recognise the poster as someone actively working in the field. That’s exactly why it’s interesting that Simon is saying he hasn’t seen the benefits of fine tuning and would like a demo of it working.

Drawing an analogy to the scientific method, he’s not asking for anything more than a published paper he can read.

We don’t expect every scientist and engineer to personally test every theory and method before we grant them permission to ask questions. The world progresses by other people filling in gaps in our knowledge.

contrast··on GIMP 3.0
That’s a good example for showing how “UI” and “UX” are essentially the same thing. At least in a practical context.

We can call an excellent story teller a “writer”. A good story can be described as “good writing”. A great story, let’s say a film being adapted as a book, can become a terrible book if it is “let down by the writing”.

In the context of books and storytelling, “writing” is the all-encompassing word that experts use to describe the whole thing. Just like “UI” used to mean the whole thing.

contrast··on Hot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger
“Pretending anything else is AGI is nonsense”

Is it? I wasn’t aware of “playing a physical instrument on stage with millisecond response times” as a criterion. I’m also confused by the implication that professional composers aren’t using intelligence in their work.

You’re talking about what is sometimes called “superhuman AGI”, human level performance in all things. But AGI includes reaching human levels of performance across a range of cognitive tasks, not ALL cognitive tasks.

If someone claimed they had invented AGI because amongst other things, it could churn out a fresh, original, good composition the day after hearing new input - I think it would be fair to argue that is human level performance in composition.

Defining fresh, good, original is what makes it composition. Not whether it was done in real time; that’s just mechanics.

You can conceivably build something that plays live on stage, responding to other players, creating a “new work”, using super fast detection and probabilistic functions without any intelligence at all.

contrast··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
You might want to do a bit of research there before commenting further.

France built an independent system, the UK did not.

contrast··on Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)
For sure - actions before words and all that.

I think the context is different if you’ve shown you care twice a day for a year before screwing up. Most people interpret messages in light of their experience of you.

If you don’t have that track record, the words probably have a different flavor.

contrast··on Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
The thread is about bad things because of tax policy, your post is about a good thing because of health policy - but you don’t say it’s a good thing, or that it’s about heath not taxes.

The post pointing this out has different content to yours, which reads as if your meaning is “this reminds me of another bad thing caused by tax policies” - even if that’s not what you meant.

contrast··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
Sounds like you have had purpose for your entire adult life? What am I missing when you say "there is no real purpose"? Does the word "purpose" have some great significance that you feel a life lived well does not deliver?
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