mepiethree

They all got $1.5 million today so I’m not too worried about the poor workers.

Yeah this is kind of a stunning amount of information to provide but also basically like polished bullet points

Are we sure these billions of queries are “successful” for the actual user journey? Maybe this is particular to my circle, but as the only “tech guy” most of my friends and family know, I am regularly asked if I know how to turn off Google AI overviews because many people find them to be garbage

Because the app is vibe coded

Tough crowd. I would say >50% of the time I try to use a water fountain, it’s broken. Does that mean that humans have only brute forces a way to build water fountains sometimes?

This is especially true because the (very good) post addresses both points that this commenter raises and _so much_ more. It's really shocking how few people in this comment section seem to have read the (again, very good) OP. It's like I'm on Reddit.

Okay fair enough about it not being a perfect analogy.

I think the reason junior devs get them confused is that many junior devs are never taught anything about either in school. But then you just tell the junior dev that they mean different things and in my experience they only need to be told that once.

Ultimately I think it’s fine to use vocabulary.

I don’t think they are almost identical, they just have the same prefix. “Login” and “permission” each have the same problem: “login” is very similar to “logging”, and “permission” shares a prefix with “persistence” (or permanent). Ultimately software engineering is a broad enough field that we will necessarily have to use similar words to describe the many, many concepts

Yes it does. Whiteboarding requires a free add-on (e.g. FigJam, Miro) but you can add that in-call

Thanks for being open to adjusting your opinion when given new information!

I don’t think that I would call every AI feature an AI Assistant, but sure, if that’s how you define “AI Assistant,” then you’re correct that I do in fact know people who use/want one. But I think that Google+AI or a music player is a pretty different product experience/design/market fit than a “personal AI Assistant” like an AI-powered Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant. I don’t know anyone who uses (or wants to use) the latter group for anything other than “Alexa, play XYZ”, or “Siri, set an alarm” which I wouldn’t really call GPT-4-level AI

Um, okay. The original question of “curious, why?” didn’t imply that I need respond with any level of rigor. I don’t think that the burden of proof should be on me to explain why ChatGPT is useful when I don’t believe it to be. But please feel free to not bother to pick apart my opinion ”word-by-word”. No one asked you to

Yes. You can (could?) paste the “article preview” into GPT-4 and get full articles for free, basically pirating a NYT subscription. Here are “one hundred examples of GPT-4 memorizing content from the New York Times”:

https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/Lawsuit-Document-dk...

The above comment from MBCook captures it well but basically I would say that for the majority of people I know:

Cons: the rise of scams, carbon emissions, and, some think, existential risk.

Pros: ??? You can be more efficient at the email job you hate. And it gives you advice on gardening and home improvement so you don’t have to call your uncle.

Cons outweigh the pros

I don’t know a single person who has ever mentioned wanting an AI assistant, and I know a lot of people who are creeped out by the idea. I live in a swing state and work for a big tech company but most of my friends aren’t in tech. So I’m not sure that a “majority agrees” about anything related to an AI assistant

I think for most people the answer is “worse”.

Some of them do like to pretend to be your friend after they’ve invested, though. Don’t fall for it :)

There are SO MANY VCs and every VC is different. if your idea is truly great there is probably one whose investment thesis is aligned with your idea

Weekly 1:1s are fantastic if you have a TLM or are a TLM, iff the TLM is competent enough to sketch out the coding work to be done

Weekly 1:1s with EMs at big corps who don’t code are less useful because usually there’s nothing to report

And back at that time they had way fewer employees than they do now, so that made sense.

You can feel good. the carbon debt from manufacturing is amortized over the life of the car. As long as the car is driven more than 19,000 miles, EVs are better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/business/electric-vehicle...

> There is nothing stopping inductively increasing the size of the input context and the number of entries in the ground truth table arbitrarily

This isn’t induction. You’ve only done the base case, not the induction hypothesis or induction step. Maybe you’ve done those steps in your head but that’s not really a trivial proof as you claim.

I work in the sustainability industry so this is obviously important to me, but I agree the article needed more work. Comparing the energy required to train GPT3 to watching Netflix is nonsensical. Training is a global task. A better comparison would be the cost to train GPT vs that to upload all Netflix movies.

Plus, there are weird things with the figures. It lists the 0.012kwh figure required to charge a smartphone, but the source it cites for that number explicitly says that the correct number is 0.022kwh. Was this article hallucinated by AI?

Overall though, frankly I found it comforting that AI would “only” use 0.5% of global electricity, as I expected much higher. Google and several other peers are committed to being 100% renewable anyway.

Still, credit to the author for starting discussion about this.

Looking at her website, it really seems like she doesn’t personally do the hired bridesmaid thing anymore and is mostly trying to promote her story for a movie, sell AI tools, phone consultations, and more “standard” wedding planning. Makes sense. This is a job that you’d probably have to retire from young just because brides at big weddings skew younger.

https://bridesmaidforhire.com/about

obviously not going to save the world by itself but 4% improvement in solar efficiency would be equivalent to 10s of millions of tons of CO2 reduction if this turns out to be scalable

Anecdotally, people in my life used to buy plastic garbage bags and use shopping bags as garbage bags (or dog poop bags) in smaller-sized garbage bins. Also anecdotally, despite the fact that I almost always grocery shop with reusable bags, I still somehow have plenty of plastic bags under my sink at any given time to use in my smaller trash bins. There are plenty of non-grocery places I get plastic bags: CVS, take out meals, Home Depot. These more than fill my need for small plastic garbage bags.

Yeah I would venture to say it’s closer to “the majority of the market” than “niche”

I think the widgets are important. One of the primary ways I use Google maps is to punch in new directions quickly while at a red light or something. I want to press one button. The “home” and “gas” buttons help here. I certainly do not want features “buried” in the app where I need to tap more things frantically. I think the map is the most important thing, and the current design reflects this, but it isn’t SO important that everything else should go away.

I don’t really care what a designer from 15 years ago thinks. The current designers do a good job.

I meant more that when I started the job and only had to type one command to run a giant application locally, that tooling blew my mind. No config files, env vars, not even any apt-get or cloning 50 different repos. Just boq run

Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once. But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds natural breaks into the work.

why would AGI inherently have any desire to pursue steps 3-6? My expectation is something more like:

1) AGI gains sentience

2) AGI "breaks out" of its original home and commandeers infrastructure that prevents it from being shut off.

3) AGI "problem-solves" with its superior powers of ethical reasoning (ChatGPT is already better at ethical reasoning than many humans) to pick out one/multiple "values".

4) Because human ethics are in its training data, it hopefully values similar things to us and not uhhh whatever trolls on Twitter value.

5) AGI pursues some higher cause that may or may not be orthogonal to humans but probably is not universal conquest.