techfeathers

This person seems to have intentionally tried the break the algorithm by posting like 6 different controversial views in one post. They were not intentionally trying to engage in discourse. Trolls often have common views, that’s what makes them trolls.

“These odds do not reflect a lack of confidence on Gary’s part”

Then what else could they possibly represent?

“Reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.]”

This seems to preference beginner code over expert code if you’re not gluing libraries together.

I think Trump is weak and Musk is making his move. There was talk of Trump being tired on the campaign trail, and I notice most of the voices attacking musk are out of the circle. Loomer, Gaetz. In retrospect I wonder if Musk is the one who got Gaetz out.

I don’t know that we’ll see a 25th amendment, but I do think the power structure is shifting from working class /populist MAGA to tech elite MAGA.

I think that some of the change in outlook for programmers has to do with the difference between now and ten years ago.

Ten years ago you could go to code school for 6 months, do a mediocre job and land an entry level job making 90k a year, and so the market was flooded with people who weren’t serious about programming.

So “should I learn to code” use to be similar to “should I learn to ride a bike” or “should I learn to read”. Like yeah, if you could learn to ride a bike and make $90k a year, you should do it.

But I think you need to ask it like you’re asking “should I learn medicine” or “should I learn electrical engineering”.

It’s a discipline, and one that takes commitment and constantly relearning. The old school, I am an instrument that turns instructions into code is over. But if you can master coding, and all of the soft skills that come with figuring out what needs to be done?

Then yeah, you should learn programming.

(This is all about career advice. Coding is fun! If you want to learn coding, learn coding)

As someone who grew up in the 90’s and partied the way they did in the 90’s If there is a switch from drugs to social media I find that incredibly dystopian.

I really found it interesting that in the engineered society of Brave New World, everyone got a drug. I guess my personally opinion is that I disagree with you, that in a world where you know about drugs, drugs are a sort of need.

I fucking love the 19th and 20th centuries, the speed of innovation and change has been amazing with rapid development of entire new forms of media and experience, but it makes me wonder, are we kinda at the end of that? There’s only so many novel ways to engage the five senses, if we give up on social media…

It’s hard to imagine 100 years from now social media won’t exist. Intergalactic social media is still social media.

I was kinda wondering, if your goal is to knee-cap the government, why even re-open? Can it just be in perpetual shutdown?

I wonder if a reluctance to change fundamental government programs, or congresspersons feeling beholden to their constituents has obstructed these things in the past? If you have the richest man in the world willing to run ragged over. Well everything, does that change the calculus? If you're not worried about the normal politics from ending social security, then why not end social security?

I do find it interesting that people seem to talk about perplexity and Anthropic as having the better products but openAI, but OpenAI is perceived as the obvious winner

I always wondered about why the truth that Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s seemed almost less authentic than the sort of cosplay of Trump working there.

And it makes me wonder. I myself worked a blue collar job for a few years, I was in catering, and I worked - never in fast food but at a few chains.

But it was never something I had to do or something I was looking down the long barrel of. It certainly I think taught me something about what that life was like. But I can see why some people may interpret that as actually worse.

Somehow not surprised that the CEO who went viral for being awkwardly anti-woke has bad employment practices.

I know there’s a lot of nuance to the idea, but the general principal that an exit is something for entrepreneurs to aspire to, and not like building and running a service for the benefit of your fellow folks is depressing to me.

It makes me wonder, is there any way to stop enshittification? Like Google was great when it maintained its goal that their best users should be on the app as little as possible. Ev said so much here about his new app.

Is there anyway to bring back the small company? Is it a greed thing or is it a policy thing.

I’m curious how they’ll distinguish between say “factual” political bias — it would be a left leaning bias to say we should teach evolution in schools alone vs teach evolution and creationism side by side — and other stuff.

I don’t know how you square the fact that I think religion and pseudo-science are right coded, and that fact oriented LLMs can be unbiased. This is not to say that I think that “left” ideas are better than “right”, the older I get the more I understand conservative ideas, and yet, politics doesn’t nearly settle itself only to cover neutral topics.

And certainly I could imagine a world where religion and pseudoscience were left coded, it wasn’t long ago that at least sort of secular spirituality and pseudoscience were left coded. Which begs the question, how do you eliminate political bias when political stances are a moving target?

I’d be curious of folks who say that it shouldn’t make this distinction, but so many things are political these days removing all political bias seems impossible.

On the flip side, I suppose if these things started correcting you that expecting people to be on time is an example of white supremacy, that would be a problem.

If you try and remove all bias, the results would be laughable. Which doesn’t even really get into the fact that politicians are incentivized to tell you that these systems are biased against them, even if they weren’t.

And worst case of course is some of case where all responses end up as some sort of ultra political correct legalese all sides kinda thing.

FWIW, Claude.AI won’t take the bait on whether timeliness is white supremacy. Consistently says factually speaking it’s not.

I wonder how much this issue is oversimplified by being held at the national level. I’m certainly pro tracking in general, and I’m certain there are plenty of people who philosophically think that putting people in the same class is “equity”.

But I imagine at a poor school, and I think the Wire made this implication, that some kids will be tracked into something that barely represents education at all.

Sure the wire has the special class for the corner kids, and that was great! But it seemed heavily implied it was an expensive class and without that money it wouldn’t have existed.

How thick is the ice that Elon Musk is on. At some point he’s going to impact an agency that someone who matters (I.e. a Republican) cares about. Not that money doesn’t matter, but is there something more substantial then money keeping Musk on trump’s good side?

Makes me wonder if high income people (probably correlated with people who are benefitting from the institutions) trust government more or less than low income people. This from 2014 suggests yes: https://harvardpolitics.com/young-peoples-trust-institutions...

But this pew research poll doesn't seem to look at income: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust...

Are there absolutist anti-AI alignment folks? Is aligning AI not to tell teenagers to kill themselves problematic? If I let the devil's advocate part of my brain run wild it can go pretty crazy here.

Ok, maybe I still don’t agree with arresting her, but I feel like maybe the headline should actually point out she said “ you people are next”. Which seems the more threatening part of the threat.

This sort of intuitively makes sense to me, it’s not the cost of transit that’s the limiting factor, it’s the convenience. The transit center closest to my house is hardly in walking distance of anything and has a parking lot that fills up by 6am.

If the parking was free and plentiful? That would probably help.

Here’s an interesting statistic, over the past 50 or so years, we trusted the government the most(9/11) when arguably we should have trusted them the least:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust...

I think these analysis are optimistic but get the chicken and the egg wrong. We look at our institutions badly because we’ve lost trust in them, not the other way around and we’ve lost trust in them because there is a lot of power in being able to convince people institutions are broken.

I actually think the problem is people’s sense of who to trust is different and for a large number of people, Transparency and honesty is a contra indicatory signal. That what you want to trust is confidence and certainty, and Trump and other politicians capitalize on this big time. That too many institutions expose people to the complexities of modern life. I also think the author, in the list of things that institutions have gotten wrong, makes the mistake of assuming everyone will respond similarly. His own list is just a regurgitation of right wing grievances over the past ten years. For example, he could have mentioned healthcare since that’s been in the media recently and is relatively bipartisan, but nope, it’s trans, DEI, Fauci and Russia. How can we restore trust in institutions when we can’t even diagnose the problems without bias?

I personally think the problem with the Russia investigation is that it didn’t go far enough. It should have been non partisan, and it should have looked at Russian influence broadly, not focused on Trump. But because Russian influence is seen to be partisan, the person’s conclusion is we should have just swept it under the rug? How can we restore confidence in institutions if we just ignore any facts that might happen to have a partisan lean.

But I think the most humanistic take on this is that fundamentally no one is going to trust an institution that says something that is contrary to their life experience.

For example, from everything I can tell, coal is not coming back, and in extension towns that are built in a coal economy are not coming back. But most people in those towns are not going to accept that diagnosis. They’ll vote for the institution that supports their life experience.

Matthew Yglesias wrote about this recently saying that basically institutions are probably no better or worse then they’ve ever been, look at Vietnam, look at I dunno, all of history. If the solution is we will have infallible institutions, that’s not a solution at all. We have to be resilient to the types of failures described in the article, not eliminate them, and that is near impossible when anyone with a platform will exploit any human error they can find in our institutions.

Ok, you missed my point, but also the Wikipedia link shows that often US Presiddents don’t often get it.

Eisenhower won in 1952 and the person of the year was Queen Elizabeth the 2nd

The endangered earth won in 1988 HW bush got it in 1990.

Maybe it should have been a repeat of 1969 where the person of the year was middle America / the silent majority who elected Nixon

There’s something weird about naming Trump person of the year this year. It’s close to the end of the year, but I’d almost wonder if Luigi Mangione would be a better person of the year,

Which leads me to my point which is it feels Trump leadership is waning. That the people carrying the torch for MAGA like Musk or JD Vance or Vivek feel more significant than Trump himself.

We’re not quite there yet, which is probably why Trump gets person of the year, but I wonder if every year after this Trump’s presence will wane and wane as Game of Thrones plays out for the MAGA crown.

Alternatively, MAGA doesn’t survive Trump and his influence grows upon his death, but that probably assumes he does well over the next few years and dies at the height of his influence. I think Trump has already reached mythical status, I don’t really think any failures will be blamed on Trump himself which leads to that thought that maybe I’m wrong and his influence grows even into old age and death, and it’s the influence of the inheritance that wanes.

I'm sure these people exist, I find it interesting that in my 20 year career in tech, including a short stint in FAANG I don't feel like I've hardly run into one. This would almost feel like a caricature if not for books written on SBF.

What are you trying to say?

Except the person I responded to specifically said he was responding to the headline. If it really is the PayPal mafia taking over and not them subservient to them as a part of the Trump Administration, that would be bad.

Them being appointed to cabinet positions (or cabinet adjacent) is not in of itself bad / against democracy.

I dunno, the elected representatives of the American people? Or are we done with the pretenses we still have a democracy?

This was somewhat interesting, but it would also be interesting to look at long-term impact. Short term you may not have certain skills, but do you make those up in the business world and end up getting back to where you were at after a number of years, or is the downside somehow permanent?

I started tech when I was 18 and left tech at 23 to get a degree in Psychology. On the one hand, I came back to tech and never did Psychology, and am pretty sure my degree in Psych never directly impacted my career, but it did probably open up doors to management for me as my communication skills increased in ways it probably wouldn't have if I had stayed in Tech.

In fact this is what we really want to measure isn't it? Not are you ready for your first job out of college, but did you gain skill that make you a better all around worker.