nilirl

I see the pattern the author wants to show me, but what about it?

Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?

Beautiful UI.

What's the criteria for pieces promoted?

Why is it implicit that semantic search will outperform lexical search?

Back in 2023 when I compared semantic search to lexical search (tantivy; BM25), I found the search results to be marginally different.

Even if semantic search has slightly more recall, does the problem of context warrant this multi-component, homebrew search engine approach?

By what important measure does it outperform a lexical search engine? Is the engineering time worth it?

Your argument hinges on getting the design right, upfront. That assumes uncertainty is low or non-existent.

Time spent, monetary cost, and uncertainty, are all practical concerns.

An engineering problem where you can ignore time spent, monetary cost, and uncertainty, is a privileged position. A very small number of engineering problems can have an engineering philosophy that makes no mention of these factors.

Yes, my point is it's a privilege to have an engineering philosophy that doesn't need to address time spent, monetary cost, or uncertainty.

Can you have a coding philosophy that ignores the time or cost taken to design and write code? Or a coding philosophy that doesn't factor in uncertainty and change?

If you're risking money and time, can you really justify this?

- 'writing code that works in all situations'

- 'commitment to zero technical debt'

- 'design for performance early'

As a whole, this is not just idealist, it's privileged.

This post does a great job of limiting its terribleness by being short.

I read it twice; twice I got nothing.

It is incoherent. Vaguely attempting to take a swing at ... modularity???

So: The author wants to work for a company with resources.

Unfortunately, details take time and time takes money.

For a business's survival, the company's relative positioning in the market, access to sales and marketing channels, financing are much stronger concerns.

This is a designer longing for endless tinkering.

I see your point. I'd meant relatively fewer progressive options compared to an absolute and unchanging number of total options.

But that's not what the author's analogy would imply.

Still, I think you're saying the author is deducing the creative process as a kind of gradient descent, whereas my reading was the author was trying to abductively explore an analogy.

I wouldn't jump to call it a trick, but I agree, the author sacrificed too much clarity in a try for efficiency.

The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships work in the model.

My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.

What diction is "appropriate to the subject matter" is a negotiation between author and reader.

I think the author is ok with it being inappropriate for many; it's clearly written for those who enjoy math or CS.

I liked the post but can someone explain how macro choices change the acceptance volume?

Is it their effect on the total number of available choices?

Does picking E minor somehow give you fewer options than C major (I'm not a musician)?

This was weak.

The author's main counter-argument: We have control in the development and progress of AI; we shouldn't rule out positive outcomes.

The author's ending argument: We're going to build it anyway, so some of us should try and build it to be good.

The argument in this post was a) not very clear, b) not greatly supported and c) a little unfocused.

Would it persuade someone whose mind is made up that AGI will destroy our world? I think not.

Ah, I see, so when someone yells at me "Please don't stab me", it's actually, I, who is at risk of being stabbed.

I was referring to this:

> who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds

You invoked usage that connotes vapid meaning.

I see your argument: How can someone do something if they don't know what to do?

Explicit instruction is useful to a novice; say a toddler or someone new to a domain. But most adults don't spend the day explicitly telling each other how to behave socially.

A case can be made for individuals who display some difficulty learning this vicariously, but considering that should affect <1% of the world population, I think it's reasonable to be suspect of misbehavior.

i.e "you didn't tell me how to be nice, so how could I be nice?" is not a reasonable excuse for most adults.

'be more empathetic' is not a veiled request, it is openly declared. The author subverts the ask for behavior change by a) calling it veiled and b) not treating it as the main argument against which they're trying to make a point.

Like the author, you're constructing a similar straw man argument: selecting a specific use of the word and making that the main point to argue against.

'be more empathetic' is an argument to behave differently with the people around you. Not think differently; behave differently.

That's setting up a straw man.

By framing an argument against semantics or social obedience, you're ignoring self-implicating behavior; you're intentionally ignoring people's needs.

Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" instead of "Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper, this is no time to consider how I treat other people."

Instead of asking people why they're asking you "to be more empathetic", maybe you should ask yourself why you're prompting such a request?

So, did the Covid 19 pandemic force multiple insurance companies into insolvency?

Also, what does new product development look like for industries like this? How does one search for new financial products? Is it possible for a non-expert to come up with new products in this space?

Are there any books you can recommend for a novice?

Man, I haven't had so much fun on HN in a while. Loved this!

Are any of these causal to OpenAI's success? Or are they incidental? You can throw all of this "culture" into an org but I doubt it'd do anything without the literal world-changing technology the company owns.

HN over the last year: personal anecdotes, analogy, and extrapolation as evidence for "obviously it's inevitable, why can't you see?"

I've never worked at a startup that hit it big, so I came in wanting to disagree with whatever was in this post.

But I liked it. Now I'm mad.

Let's be honest, this is us taking a few terms from a few neuroscience and cognitive psychology papers and running with it.

There are two claims in this post: Initial goals get adjusted as we discover operating constraints, and it is easier to work with fewer variables to pay attention to.

I didn't like these sentences in this post:

- "I see this in wannabe <people trying>..."

- "Here's what happens to those brave enough to actually begin ..."

Here the author was brave enough to put themselves on a pedestal; like a true wannabe profound.

"Fix inputs" => The assumption is there exists some perfect input that will give you exactly what you want.

It probably works well for small inputs and tasks well-represented in the training data (like writing code for well-represented domains).

But how does this work for old code, large codebases, and emergencies?

- Do you still "learn" the system like you used to before?

- How do you think of refactoring if you don't get a feel for the experience of working through the code base?

Overall: I like it. I think this adds speed for code that doesn't need to be reinvented. But new domains, new tools, new ways to model things, the parts that are fun to a developer, are still our monsters to slay.

I didn't understand what this was from the link posted; why choose cute over clear?

But when I clicked around I found what the app was and I liked it. Here the cuteness was charming. Great work!

Just wanted to say, you single handedly made me a rust programmer.

Your answers on stack overflow and your crates have helped me so much. Thank you!

Post was fun to read but a tad bit melodramatic.

The "leaps" were nice analogies but poor evidence of anything. The example chats were not surprising completions, considering the prompts.

That being said, my best guess echoes the author's final point: Our idea of mind-blowing AI will be accumulated over time, and over such a time it won't be mind-blowing.

I liked this. It got me thinking:

Are there any large consumer software companies (just software; no hardware or retail) that are not advertising based?

No, I know that's a meaningless suggestion.

I was trying to capture my sentiment: that there's nothing to do but be prepared to react.