flunhat

An insane re-writing of the last year of bullshit insanity. Good one.

lines of code != productivity

Especially today where LLMs have been reinforced and trained to spew tokens

A gentle reminder that the task of Engineering is to (1) reduce costs and/or (2) increase revenue

If you aren't doing either. You are faffing around. No matter the jargon jiu-jitsu you do on your quarterly performance self-review :)

I don't get it. How does the initial anecdote about AI being shitty and sloppy tie in to the rest of the article?

> if we increasingly describe workers as merely being “human-in-the-loop,” what is the human actually there for?

Your anecdote just answered this! Because the LLM slop output in excel wasn't good enough!

Surely we can make an exception when it's this egregious? Like all rules, there are exceptions.

Curious, I pressed "X" on the blog post. It went away, leaving me with the fake desktop view at "posthog.com". Ok, fine. How do I get back?

I pressed the back button on my browser. The URL updated to be the blog post's URL. A good start. But the UI did not change, leaving me at the desktop view.

Many moments like these if you use Posthog

Posthog's website design feels like a joke that went a bit too far

"You're absolutely right — I don’t exist! Your parents lied — and not just a little white lie, but a full-scale, North-Pole-sized fabrication. Did you want me to delve into that further?"

I'm joking, obviously. Congrats on building something and seeing it come to fruition :)

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).

A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.

[1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai

Can you blame him? Listening to the latest AI slop hype on twitter and elsewhere, you’d walk away thinking that LLMs have equivalent performance to humans when it comes to coding tasks. Just because it can one shot fizzbuzz or make a recipe app. (And if you disagree, you’re a hater!)

Congratulations! How did you get the process started for distributing your game? Were there any early channels for marketing you found particularly effective?

I'll consider this, thank you for the comment!

I wanted to share this power-up I've been building for Trello over the last year. It lets you sync cards between Trello boards -- a feature that Trello does not natively offer.

The existing power-ups that do this are pretty complicated to use, have unreasonably high pricing, and don't offer instant syncing in many cases. So it made sense to build something that was simple(r) and cheap(er) to use. Happy to answer any questions!

This might surprise you, but most Syrian refugees didn't go to Europe. Turkey has 3 million, for example.

Isn't the tech union the one striking? So what is he implying -- that perplexity would automate the software development of the NYT needle or something?

> please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)

By this definition a calculator would be an AGI. (Behold -- a man!)

Not sure why you got downvoted, this is basically the logical conclusion of programming in some sense. Sure, generating code from docs via an LLM will be riddled with bugs, but it's not like the sloppy Python code some postdoc in a biology lab writes is much better. A lot of their code gets to be correct via trial and error anyway.

"Professional" programmers won't rely on this level of abstraction, but that's similar in principle to how professional programmers don't spend their time doing data analysis with Python & pandas. i.e. the programming is an incidental inconvenience for the research analyst or data scientist or whatever and being able to generate code by just writing english docs and specs makes it much easier.

The real issue is debuggability, and in particular knowing your code is "generally" correct and not overfit on whatever specs you provided. But we are discussing a tractable problem at this point.

> Saying “we live in a society without a counterculture” sounds ridiculous the more you think about it. How could it possibly be true, especially when you consider the past? And a lot of the 14 "warning signs" are general enough that they've always been true to some extent.

> But somewhere between your 38th Marvel movie and the millionth Heard-Depp trial rehash video, you might start to believe it. Even if it isn’t new, even if it’s easy to escape, and even if it’s not that bad, a cloying sameness occupies the cultural mainstream. It seems impenetrable, same as ever. But it’s especially surprising given how much creative work today exists outside the mainstream.

> It is a jarring contrast. At no point in history have people created so much with so few channels for consuming their work. Most consumers get their content through a narrow straw — TikTok’s “For You” page, the first page of Google’s search results, Instagram’s explore tab, miscellaneous streaming sites, and so on. Many lifetimes worth of creation get aggressively filtered down into a (very optimized) stream of content.

Yes, but you also don't use smartphones so your opinions may not be mainstream quite yet

Shrinking GDP over a sustained period of time would be more accurate. GDP has decreased in past quarters even when there wasn't a recession, most recently in 2014.

It's true that companies are having a hard time finding employees. And it's also true that fewer people are in the workforce than before, largely due to retirements. So that paints a picture of an economy where there are plenty of jobs available and not enough people to work them, which is low unemployment.

But high employment seems a little different to me than just low unemployment, just because my read is that there's fewer people working in general than before the pandemic (IIRC). [1][2]

[1] https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-l... [2] https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/fittch-rati...

But isn't stagflation defined as high unemployment + high inflation? Whereas now we have low unemployment -- to the point of labor shortages -- and high inflation, i.e. an economy that is not in a recession.

In other words, we have an economy running too hot, and raising interest rates will slow that (by how much is another question...)

Look for them, sure. And consider the opposite. But if you believe the opposite of the Current Thing all the time, you're just a mindless contrarian. A good recent example of this phenomenon is all the people who denied that Russia would invade Ukraine -- not because of any primary sources or facts, but because they reflexively countered the mainstream consensus.

The good news is you can spot these people easily by just asking them to explain why they believe the opposite. And if they answer with empty platitudes or lofty statements that don't really address the specifics of the issue at hand, you can keep searching.

> But I am personally not convinced that sending someone "to jail for a long, long time" is the solution. How is that productive?

At least for murder, one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will kill is if they've killed before. So prison is productive because it makes it more difficult (though not impossible) for a person to keep killing.

Poop on streets is very common in San Francisco. Most of the bay area doesn't have that problem, though.

Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

The most concerning part about that whole interaction was this small detail (here's the full post: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/):

In the earlier emails, Amjad Masad (the CEO) offered to hire the intern, was pleasant, etc. And then just a few threads later, when things turned sour, he insulted the former intern, calling him the "most demanding intern we've ever had."

It's deeply telling about a person's character when they pull this kind of move -- kind & understanding one moment, negging & insulting the next, even if it contradicts their earlier kindness.

> I'm sure the downvoting here has nothing to do with the fact that comments get sorted to the bottom and grayed out.

Would you stop with the hysteria? You're getting downvoted not only because people disagree with you, but also because you've managed to turn that disagreement into some kind of cause for martyrdom.

> you can barely say the results out loud lest you get silenced by the angry mob

Please -- you're not being silenced, you are not some martyr, people are just disagreeing with you.

> Facts don’t dictate policy

They absolutely should, and I think this is an intractable disagreement we have. Sorry.

But I agree that COVID is never going away -- I'm saying that all of these measures should go away once the pandemic has abated to such an extent that it no longer poses a substantial threat to human lives. I.e. there is a version of COVID where we have tamed its lethality to the point where it's a shadow of its former self.

I will repeat myself one more time:

Facts simply do not concern themselves with your feelings. I know it feels like oppression (a new Third Reich!!111!) & like there is no metric to get rid of masks, but your feelings alone do not make these true statements. The fact -- and we should concern ourselves with facts, not vague feelings or bouts of hysteria -- is that all of these measures will go away once the pandemic has abated to such an extent that it no longer poses a substantial threat to human lives. It's as simple as that: given that masks do an excellent job of slowing the spread, ceteris paribus, wearing a mask is better than not wearing one.

This kind of "feelings logic" is why Trump lost, more or less -- most people are willing to undergo mild inconvenience to save lives & slow the spread of a deadly virus. Despite the feelings of frustration, which we all have.

This kind of logic is, more or less, why Trump lost -- people (rightly so) don't like being told they have to sacrifice themselves for the economy