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Isn't this proof that the CEO doesn't understand the tech? Or am I misunderstanding something?

These days the expectation around promotions is that you've already been working at the next level for 1-2 years and are due for a correction in title and compensation. Basically, you have to let the company exploit you while crossing your fingers regarding the light at the end of the tunnel, which might just be the ditch light of the layoff train.

I had to check your profile based on this comment -- looks like you're new and the HN hivemind hasn't assimilated you yet. Don't worry, you'll be in the loop soon enough if you stick around. However, be mindful that echo chambers are usually intolerant of facts (and sometimes, surprisingly, knowledge in general...this place can be a good jumping off point if you know how to do your own research, though).

To me this article is almost the equivalent of claiming that Nvidia has stayed out of the generative AI discussion so far. Apple's investment in AI is absolutely massive, they just haven't focused on first party B2C products right now, and they don't necessarily have to.

Yeah, this is just capitalism in action. Almost every startup has stories like this, which appears to be why YC's startup school shies away from "goody two-shoes" type people and has questions like "please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system".

For example, in the early days Amazon famously "leveraged" the purchase of out of print books from their wholesalers to obtain orders that would otherwise be too small to ship.

That's just how capitalism works. You have to be either too small to bother with or too big to fail -- the problem area is in the middle.

> Is there a good reason for this other than if you're about to buy a house or something?

Liquidity. FDIC insurance upto $250k. Of course, you don't want to put a big chunk of your money into a bank like this, but $100k is not a "big chunk of your money" to a lot of people, in relative terms.

I'm assuming your sentiment applies to HYSAs as well, which is the better place for this kind of thing.

> lesson is that GPT'S reasoning capabilities are always a bit of smoke and mirrors that passes off memorization for logic.

That is the lesson, but people do not want to hear it. See my downvoted comment here [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038804#35043875

It's not that we don't "know" how to do these things, most of us are just resource-constrained. Interestingly, that's similar to the issues with GPT-3 et al. People aren't saying "give us the secret sauce", they're saying "it's problematic for corporations to be the sole custodian of such models".

What would you think of a world where only one country has nukes (due to a monopoly on radioactive fuel, rather than a monopoly on knowledge)?

> save it in a format that won't store layers or undo history or something

For eliminating such risk, just screenshot your censored content and use that image.

ChatGPT does indeed know nothing at all. Proving this is quite easy, it was trained on text generation and can generate paragraphs quite well, so if you ask it to tell you about Harry Potter's family tree it will do well.

However, it will fail immediately when you ask it to print an ASCII chart of Harry Potter's family tree, because it does not actually "know" anything, and it will make all sorts of odd connections.

The clearest observation I can make of ChatGPT's success is that the general public is quite ill-informed and easily impressed by theatrics, both lessons we've already learned from politics.

?

> Please lay out your definition of smart?

Firstly, I agree that "smart enough" is what we should focus on here, as I tried to emphasize with my focus on utility.

Secondly, I'm assuming your intent is to ask me when I would consider an AI to be "smart" in the context of my comment. I think I should avoid that question, and perhaps even retract my statement. There is plenty of evidence that ChatGPT is smarter than some humans. All of your 'problems', as you might realize, are equally applicable to some people.

Putting that aside, a model would need to at least be able to internalize any corrections made (by a user, and not necessarily only in the context of training) and reliably produce results consistent with such an internalization, for me to consider it smart-er (i.e., an improvement on today's AI IQ). To be smart without qualification, it would need to go further, into the realm of being able to hold opposing ideas while functioning consistent to a given user's expectations (this one will be big, because it will act as a defense against trolls and misinformation). Bonus points if it's able to improve upon its own learning algorithms and ruminate on ideas (unsupervised learning that is inspired by previous input and not stochastic in nature) without necessitating constant external dialogue.

"More powerful" here just means larger (another commenter says faster chips, but you don't even need that if you spend the next ten years training a model, although that could be a more accurate representation of what Nvidia is trying to say, since the alternative is a no-brainer). AI isn't really "smart," and it seems unlikely we're going to get there anytime soon (in other words, the "singularity" is still firmly out of our grasp). What we're seeing today is the fruit of training models with large swaths of data, and the limits of this approach are predictably based on the availability of such data and the resources required to convert them into these gigantic models. Framed in those terms, the "limit" we should be considering ought to be more about utility than how many resources we can afford to throw at models that might ultimately have no use.

Discussions around these topics tend to get dramatized, though. In my opinion we haven't made a lick of qualitative progress in recent years in the "IQ" of AI, but we do get better at utilizing what we have, and making quantitative progress in building ever larger models.

I wouldn't try and argue with someone who retorts to stress by asking you whether you work more than 40 hours a week, which is like telling a foie gras goose that actually it spends less time a day eating than most other poultry.

I'd say a programmer is to a software engineer as a handyman is to an architect. Can a handyman do the "dirty work" of most projects? Sure. Can they design a skyscraper to spec, tell you exactly what to expect in terms of resources and timeline, and roll with the punches of logistics and competing priorities? Probably not, unless they were already an architect just doing the job of a handyman.

That being said, as someone with a software engineering degree, I can safely say that most companies don't need engineers and can get by just fine with programmers. Anyway, in this industry there are many architects working as handymen and vice versa.

Something seems amiss. You can ask this chatbot how old Stephen King is and you'll get the answer.

What you're missing is that the article says the ones doing the wiping are "responsible recyclers and refurbishers" -- at this point the machine has already passed out of the hands of the owner, so it can't really be argued that the owner's privacy or consent were protected. Kind of like a thief saying they clean cars before reselling them, but now they no longer find the title in the glovebox.

Yeah, this sounds 100% like "working as intended". Even if they aren't stolen, this prevents people who've gotten their hands on these laptops for free/cheap (recycling) don't also get their hands on an unassuming user's data. I'd rather that my data is protected than someone make a quick buck from my refuse (or worse, by stealing from me).

For legitimate transactions or ones where the data liabilities are fully disclosed, you can obviously get around this easily.

I've documented some of my improvements to Foam and my workflow [0], brings it very close to endgame for me.

[0] https://csh.rit.edu/~rg/productivity/20221109203834/

> It's not just the leak that makes me lose complete faith in Lastpass. It's how they've handled the leak.

Absolutely. I'm switching to 1Password, and though the critics are correct that it isn't a great solution (being practically the same solution), at least they haven't stabbed me in the back or weasel worded me...yet. I was a premium subscriber for the 2FA, for all the good that did me.

> You can’t give people amazing comfort and stability then expect them to take outsized risks.

This statement doesn't make any sense to me. Who's going to try crazy new maneuvers on the trapeze, the person with the safety net or the one without?

Perhaps you meant to say that you can't expect people to iterate on their business model like their life depends on it...well, I'm sorry to inform you but that rarely happens even in the startup world. People routinely shrug and give up, some return money to investors, and everyone moves on.

Damn, burned $10M and still better known as 'millionaire' than his real name.

> I specifically dislike the "Lessons" section, as it throws all the blame on github and doesn't mention the seemingly obvious advice: "make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions, on github or any website".

I don't know. Github employees themselves have made this mistake as outlined in the post, and they were easily able to recover from it, which probably lowered the priority on changing any UX.

Essentially, it's a complete non-issue depending on whether Github cares about you.

Would you like the police in your area to behave in this manner? I think not.

> given the location I doubt they were talking about an Indian accountant

Possibly. As an Indian I'd just appreciate it if people were given the opportunity to have a dialogue around this. I agree that there are many cases where such dialogue is not warranted, of course.

A reply to your comment is perhaps not the best place for this, since I don't disagree with you, but am merely trying to have a somewhat relevant yet ultimately orthogonal discussion.

Personally, I've been forced to give it a wide berth for obvious reasons, as I imagine many Indians you know have too. However, if you came into my home you'd be able to find a few swastikas — I'm not even religious, it's just on gifts from friends and family.

> I've worked with a lot of Indians and never saw any of them wear a swastika necklace

Most Indians don't wear it, but that still leaves a lot who do. I'd also imagine that there's some selection bias going on when you consider only the people you've worked with. If you googled it you'd have noted that most images are clearly of pendants.

> I mean, I'm going to have a hard time treating a person wearing a swastika necklace with respect - I'm going to let them know that I will not be using their services and the reason why. I hope you walked out of there and found the services of a different accountant.

It's probably good to have a dialogue about it, and you should note the person's ethnicity as well.

Try Google imaging "hindu lucky symbol." I'm not entirely convinced that a people should be forced to entirely give up on a symbol they were using first, before it got misappropriated.

I think you’ll have to define “superstar programmers” to get meaningful answers. Otherwise people will make assumptions that range from “autistic savant” to “famous personality” which is quite a large space.

For famous personalities, for example, the prestige and PR of the name alone is sometimes enough to prompt a hire.

A long time ago, I used listen to the radio on my Walkman just before sleeping, but I don’t think I could do this with podcasts or audiobooks. I’d be afraid of a) missing something, or b) feeling obligated to finish listening to the piece at some point. With radio, things just feel more transient and less discrete.

+1. I wanted to build a daily journaling habit but digital just wasn’t cutting it for me. I managed to do it once I bought one of these [0]. I punched a hole in it and tied a pen to it.

The forgiving format (entries are not pre-dated so you’re allowed to miss a day, the bar on entry length is set low by design) coupled with absence of friction when traveling (no poor connectivity, low battery, etc.) really went a long way.

I knew that even the need to find a pen to write the day’s journal would be enough friction for me to skip it, which is why I tied one to it.

I’ve filled up a couple of these little notebooks, but I haven’t been able to replicate this consistency with any digital solutions.

[0] #HashtagADay: A Hashtag Journal https://www.amazon.com/dp/145213927X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...

I think pg is missing something important here. The reason Google was able to beat Yahoo, Altavista, Ask, etc. was not just because they had a better formula — it was also because they started in the era where 'search' was still seen as secondary to 'portals' by the big guys. Had these companies known how important search is to the internet back then, they would've copied Google's secret sauce and crushed it long before it could suck up their traffic.

This isn't going to happen again. Google isn't going to sit around twiddling its thumbs while a competitor develops a better algorithm.

You have to attack the problem from a different angle entirely (make something that looks nothing like a search engine), I don't think a niche market is going to be enough.

Perhaps you just want to make something that scares Google into acquiring you, rather than actually bettering the situation. If that's the case, I implore you to think of doing better ways to spend your life.

I’m not sure the problem statement for Stripe is quite right. PayPal was quite simple to set up when Stripe came around, it was just a little amateurish looking compared to the big players, and you couldn’t white-label it at all.

The Facebook one is silly as well since MySpace existed…