dpark

> most people don’t use ai this way though

How do they use it? Surely no one is just repeating the same prompt over and over (except as a Ralph loop perhaps, which is automated). I’m really struggling with the notion that most people just throw the same prompt repeatedly hoping it eventually works. Because that doesn’t sound like gambling. It sounds crazy (and frustrating).

> and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it

In the sense that you get a dopamine reward when you succeed, sure, but I get the same reward when I code by hand and achieve a successful result.

> and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output

This is fair, because sometimes with image generation the same exact prompt will produce very different output. This is becoming less true as the models get better and it becomes more effective to direct image generation iteratively than to keep starting from scratch with a barely tweaked prompt.

I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial.

If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money.

If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing, the LLM produces something that is hopefully close to what you wanted. You give it more direction to prod it closer to the end state you want. You are not executing the same action, but incrementally nudging it in the right direction. I’ve literally never restarted from the same initial state with the same prompt and hoped for a different result and I don’t know why anyone would. Rarely I’ve thrown away the progress made and started over but always with a very different prompt that includes learnings from the failed attempt.

This is not my experience with current AI models at all. But regardless you are not describing anything that sounds like gambling. You are describing a weird hallucinogenic experience.

I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”.

Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not.

Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?

They absolutely are. But this doesn’t mean that they won’t unwind those couplings. It just means it will be hard and take time.

> But it also can't show how conscious awareness may affect quantum wave function collapse probabilities, allowing free will to migrate to the deterministic timeline in the multiverse that most supports its well-being.

That’s true. Science can’t show a lot of things that aren’t real.

> taping batteries to your skin

Don’t give them more ideas. Someone will be selling bracelets with batteries in them soon.

> It seems plausible there may be some adaptation to the electrical properties of being at the surface

This is like saying it’s plausible that wearing a bracelet with a small magnet in it will have health benefits. It’s pure woo. There’s no reason to believe this from a scientific angle. It’s perhaps not impossible but it is certainly not plausible.

> there was a time when fiber in food was reasonably seen as just inefficient waste

When was this?

I suppose that’s also reasonable, though this particular repo also hosts evals and other content related to the skill. So a gist seems like it would be an addition, not a replacement.

A public repo is the easiest way to share something like this.

The reality seems to be that for decades Europe gave only lip service to decoupling from American tech infrastructure, but in the last couple of years America has gone from being seen as a strong ally to being a major risk.

It will take time to move. Frankly as an American I hope it takes a long time and we get our shit together and rebuild our alliance with Europe. But it’s possible that the damage is not reversible in the next couple of decades and Europe will accelerate their decoupling. It’s also possible we continue to slide into imperialist authoritarianism (and Europe definitely accelerates their decoupling).

Consider that three people have given you substantially similar feedback about your “candor”. Your attempt at a “personal voice” here comes off extremely fake. Compare your proposed “candid” message with the actual candor in your message at the top of this thread.

Rather than continue to dismiss the feedback, you should digest it and potentially learn something from it. Or not. It’s your choice.

> Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.

And yet you, simply by reading the email Gates sent, were able to confidently ascertain that the culture itself was failing here. You give too little credit to the recipients of this email when you imply that they can’t make the same assessment.

> Do you think personal responsibility travels uphill or downhill?

This is trying to be pithy but it’s not. Every leader from the CEO down has responsibility for their area of control and influence.

> It’s not a job for people who can’t take responsibility for their fuckups.

Neither is EVP or any other title that ends in “VP”.

The CEO ultimately owned The fact that installing movie maker was a shit show, but so did everyone in a position of leadership that contributed to that. Accountability does not mean everyone gets to point at the CEO and say “ultimately it’s their fault” as if that absolves them.

You keep talking about “taking responsibility”. Unless the person taking responsibility is also taking action, which you aren’t even proposing, then it’s just words. It’s more sugar coating. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

> This is a 'put out the fire' type reactionary stuff.

After the fire fighting comes the postmortem where the systemic issues should be discussed. A fire is a great way to spur both short and long term action.

> By 'underling' I mean anyone under him.

I don’t know how you reconcile “accountability” with the idea that the a leader cannot expect members of the team to deliver. Is Gates the only person who has any accountability expected here?

That’s not candid. It’s candy.

It borderline infantilizing and buries the message under a bunch of saccharine. I can practically see the fake smile plastered across the face of the manager saying this. I would be insulted if my manager sent a message like this to the team.

Your version also took away literally all of the concrete detail, turning into a generic “it’s bad” that isn’t an actionable. It sounds like you sent it through an LLM.

I would also imagine that there are a lot of other emails flying around that are discussing the general pattern of concern while this is more of a drive-by honest review of a specific experience. This is the kind of blunt feedback that execs do not usually get about their products and probably need more of. This kind of blunt feedback from a respected leader can’t be waived away the way anecdotes from individual customers can.

I think the real point is that this is a random email that Gates sent to some execs sharing a bad experience with the product, and some people on HN are trying to take it as a much deeper thing than it really is.

A leader should be able to send candid communication to other leaders. A culture where execs are unable to communicate candidly to their peers or other high-level leaders is a toxic one. It would be absurd to insist that every communication needs to be candy coated and framed in terms of “I take responsibility, so here’s a path forward, and I’ll handhold everyone through it.”

> sending the org into a reactive frenzy

I don’t see an actual “reactive frenzy” here. I see that Gates started a conversation with the execs he believes are responsible for fixing this mess.

And again, these are execs being paid millions. They do not need to be coddled. You are acting as if Gates sent this to a bunch of junior engineers.

> ‘taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.

It’s absolutely vacuous to say 'I take responsibility for this' when you are telling a group of people they need to fix their shit.

Any CVP/EVP who fails at a job and then hears someone above them take responsibility for the failure knows they are about to be out of a job.

> The email implies that some underling is to blame which is bad framing.

If by underling you mean “highly paid executives” then sure. At some point people have to take responsibility for their jobs. This wasn’t a failure of some individual engineers. It was a collective failure of a group of executives to deliver a good experience.

> "hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught.." - that's literally his job

It’s literally not. That’s not what CEOs of large corporations do and Gates wasn’t even CEO at this time. He was in an advisory role. His job was literally to give feedback.

> It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.

It is absolutely a user rant, but it's entirely appropriate for a leader to call out "this is not okay; this is a garbage experience".

> who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.

That was the intent. "Fix this." This was an email to a bunch of execs who are capable of driving the actual fixes. If Gates needs to hand hold them through this then they need to be replaced.

> A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this'

This is vacuous corporate speak, the kind of message you send to shareholders to soothe them. This is not leadership.

> hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught...

Again, if Gates needs to do this then everyone on the To line is dead weight.

Sometimes you don’t want everything hanging off the main domain, because if DNS gets horked everything goes down.

I’m left wondering if we disagree about what the problem is.

The problem here is not merely that Anubis is inconvenient to humans. It’s that and also that it’s not very effective for blocking bots. Anything that makes it easier for humans to get past will also make it easier for bots to get past.

He didn’t describe a solution. He described a (crappy) workaround for humans. But the fact is that this cannot and will not stop bots. The people running bots can do the same, even faster.

If you expect your users to mostly work with both mouse and keyboard, it can make sense. Dropping stuff from the tabbing order means that the stuff left is is quicker to tab through. I find it mostly annoying.

Tap to click, though, that’s infuriating. I don’t know how people can stand it. I know people who insist they like it and then I see them accidentally “click” regularly and get annoyed by it.

This is an exhausting read. From the diminishing use of the word “rape” to the steam of conscious delivery to the blogspam cliches of hyperbole and exclamation.

The malware installed by LG on Microsoft PCs and the spying by smart TVs are both despicable. But I couldn’t get through this article.

See how freeing that is? You can just be honest about your beliefs and others can choose to engage or not based on that instead of playing some silly game of pretending that treating symptoms is a bad thing.

It’s ironic that the current secretary of health believes that medicines like SSRIs are overprescribed while simultaneously believing that TRT is underprescribed. It’s interesting to see how people can accept their own “treat the symptoms” medicine as appropriate but deny others. Especially when the primary symptom of low T that most attest is lack of energy and motivation. Aka “can't be bothered to do things”.

MacOS has intentional holes in keyboard support. You have to go into settings and turn on a config for keyboard navigation to reach all elements. Apple intends for most users to navigate with a mouse.

It’s in the accessibility settings.

https://support.apple.com/en-za/guide/mac-help/mchlc06d1059/...

Then don’t ask about whether the drugs cure the disease or just “bury it further”.

Own your opinion and state clearly that you don’t believe depression is real. Don’t argue silly tangents that serve only to obfuscate your actual point.

Ok, Freud. You’ve successfully diagnosed the cause of Churchill’s chronic depression. Now what?

What is your treatment given that you’ve identified the cause as a past childhood experience. You got a time machine? Or do you treat the disease in the present?

I wonder if you feel the same about drug-based treatments for multiple sclerosis or ALS. Or hormone replacement therapy. Or palliative end of life care.

Sometimes treating symptoms is what we can do because we don’t have a cure.

Come on. Don’t roll into a conversation playing armchair expert criticizing others’ contributions when you’ve got nothing of substance to say.

You’re as capable of typing “causes of chronic depression” into a search bar as anyone else. The fact that you don’t do that indicates you don’t want to contribute. You just want to be argumentative.

This doesn’t hold up to even a little bit of critical right.

This boils down to “models aren’t real because they don’t affect the real world”. By the same rule, thought itself isn’t real. It’s an abstract notion that has no concrete effects in the real world.

Putting thought into action in the real world requires a linkage between the thinker and the physical. In humans, that’s the body. But you can put an AI into robot body and suddenly it also has a linkage to the real world and can have concrete effects.