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46 karma · joined August 22, 2023

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pressbuttons··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
"in RSUs", I think that meant $4M, not 4M shares.
pressbuttons··on Someone used my open source project to phish people
To each their own, I suppose. I personally enjoyed the style, and it definitely pre-dates LLMs. For example:

> You want to know the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper! Clothes are cheaper. Steel is cheaper. Cars are cheaper. Phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That's because I'm a speech writer - I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with 'lowers' and 'raises' there? It's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and now you end with the one that's not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. Heh, and that's it.

It sounds like this: https://youtu.be/8dGkiJcEK78?si=MGfv2FM_GksGoMho

pressbuttons··on Someone used my open source project to phish people
Why do you think this is LLM-generated? Reads perfectly fine to me.
pressbuttons··on Show HN: Yolobox – Run AI coding agents with full sudo without nuking home dir
Were they actually broken, as in violated? I don't remember them being broken in any of the stories - I thought the whole point was that even while intact, the subtleties and interpretations of the 3 Laws could/would lead to unintended and unexpected emergent behaviors.
pressbuttons··on Google is winning on every AI front
It doesn't have to be high intent all the time though. Chrome itself is "free" and isn't the actual technical thing serving me ads (the individual websites / ad platforms do that regardless of which browser I'm using), but it keeps me in the Google ecosystem and indirectly supports both data gathering (better ad targeting, profitable) and those actual ad services (sometimes subtly, sometimes in heavy-handed ways like via ad blocker restrictions). Similar arguments to be made with most of the free services like Calendar, Photos, Drive, etc - they drive some subscriptions (just like chatbots), but they're mostly supporting the ads indirectly.

Many of my Google searches aren't high intent, or any purchase intent at all ("how to spell ___" an embarrassing number of times), but it's profitable for Google as a whole to keep those pieces working for me so that the ads do their thing the rest of the time. There's no reason chatbots can't/won't eventually follow similar models. Whether that's enough to be profitable remains to be seen.

> Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment.

Same outcome, different intermediate steps. I'm usually searching for information so that I can do something, build something, acquire something, achieve something. Sell me a product for the right price that accomplishes my end goal, and I'm a satisfied customer. How many ads for app builders / coding tools have you seen today? :)

pressbuttons··on An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1
Not if the problem as written is "does this code compile", which is still a useful stepping stone for some workflows. Yours is certainly a more useful query in most cases but repositioning or re-scoping the original question can still lead to a net win.
pressbuttons··on Counting Lines of Code
Completely agree. It was a little tongue-in-cheek, but actually removing code and the complexity and tech debt associated with it is incredibly valuable.

Especially if more experienced and knowledgeable engineers can remove the code paths that are "in use" but shouldn't be - premature optimizations that can be simplified, redundancies that can be eliminated, features that aren't bringing in value. It's usually an underappreciated job but can lead to greatly improved velocity and significantly less fragility.

pressbuttons··on Counting Lines of Code
Next step is to get recognized for simplification and "streamlining" of the codebase, by subsequent reduction.
pressbuttons··on The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing
I was excited for Matter for all it promises... but companies seem to be explicitly holding back support for it because they recognize that it will bring less control for them, less differentiation, and far fewer opportunities to force these money-squeezing ideas onto consumers. I hope to be proven wrong but I'm not feeling very optimistic about its long-term future right now.
pressbuttons··on Experian fined $650K by the FTC and DOJ for spam emails with no opt out
I think you missed a few zeros (or a decimal). It would be $6.29