warcher

Can somebody explain to me the existential threat AI is posing to the search business?

I am familiar with ChatGPT composing reasonable sounding answers to prompts. I get that I could type in "what's the best vacuum cleaner under $500?" or something like that, and both Google and ChatGPT could generate an answer for me.

But I want the best, most accurate answer, not a set of banalities that a neural network has composed to convincingly pass the sniff test. I actually care about the content being right, or as close to right as possible.

I admit freely that I'm clearly missing some possibilities here. Can anyone fill me in?

Police are tasked with maintaining law and order.

Laws are equal for all people.

Order is a set of subjective social rules that keeps everything in its "correct" place.

Maintaining order often requires not enforcing the law equally. This is the essential moral difficulty of the police. If you have people who appear poor in a rich neighborhood, they are highly likely to attract law enforcement attention at a minimum. Not because they've broken the law, but because they are out of place and "disorderly".

We really really like order, by the way. You can't just do away with the maintenance of order, although a strong argument could be made that we should not enforce it via state-licensed violence.

I mean, just make it 30%, or whatever, of stuff that uses their in-built app store payment. If you don't want to use their payment infra, you don't pay and you make whatever arrangements with the user both parties agree to. It forces them to justify their cut other as more than just rent-seeking. Netflix doesn't need any help getting a CC number. Or delivering apps, frankly. Apple inserts themselves as a middleman in that capacity for their benefit and theirs alone.

Yeah I dunno where they're going with this.

You can ski in the snow perfectly comfortably if properly attired, but you can't bike?

In fairness icy streets can get extremely dicey on two wheels-- no arguments there. The US in particular has a lot more extreme weather than Holland. You'll have extended periods where biking on icy concrete is not a great option.

Nothing short of seppuku streamed live via Oculus will redeem the honor of a business guy putting his honest level best effort behind some business things that didn't make as much money as he hoped.

Honestly as I operated a fully remote small business for a long long time, I think you're missing the real remote work lever.

Access to talent. Dramatically increased access to talent. Exponentially increased. You can get anybody across the whole world if you like, or at the very least anybody within a reasonable time difference.

This cannot possibly be overstated as an impact on your business. Talent is actually fairly evenly distributed across the world, but you only had access to a tiny slice of it before.

The issue here is that most management I've run into has a seriously hard time managing, recruiting, retaining, or honestly even identifying talent. Most of the time people just punt and say "Well they got hired at a FAANG, or somebody else promoted them, or they went to a school with a basketball team I've heard of, so how bad could they be" or something on those lines. So they're missing out on all these great people that were previously outside their narrow slice of who could reasonably drive in.

And managing a remote team is a big pain in the ass, no question about it.

So it's harder with a meaningful upside. Managers that can turn the corner will win, the rest are gonna get left behind. It's even more stark in tech, because organizations that can make that adjustment are going to poach a ton of talent from managers that can't get it together. WFH is very very very popular in tech. (I'm not really a WFH fan aside from family concerns, but family concerns are probably the biggest driver in my working decisions, so that's that. WFH is a big deal if you've got kids, and the best, most skilled workers you can get often are dealing with kids and a family. Folks with decent emotional intelligence, work experience, good energy, these people are textbook quality workers, but are usually married with a family.)

It's a lottery ticket. You can be good, even very good, your whole life and do just fine.

But these kinds of once-in-a-generation moonshots, they're a product of wild ass luck, so if you find yourself with one, you grab it with both hands and ride it as far as it goes. Because it's not about you-- you need to be strong enough to hold on, keep the thing from exploding or crashing into the side of a mountain, but it's bigger than you and your level of control is partial at best. Honestly, it's usually the product of something big happening in the world that you've randomly managed to tap into.

Dollar was way up as a global reserve currency relative to the euro, yen, yuan, pound last I checked. Did something change in the past few days?

I think if you have to pick a base for leadership, doing the thing you're managing other people in is probably the best.

The worst in my opinion is finance-- it's like driving using the rear view mirror. No business has ever succeeded or failed because their accounting was really tip top.

The MBA is for people who want to skip right to "being in charge" without having to learn how to actually do anything first.

The scary part is, if you went to a selective enough school, it kinda works.

The Ivy League undergrad -> elite MBA -> management consulting -> C-suite pipeline is especially frightening.

Is that true? I thought everybody got wiped out and he pocketed a huge check to make himself fabulously rich.

Can you expand?

I feel obliged to push back on the "gay people would respect privacy better" narrative with a couple notable counterexamples. J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn.

I have to add that attributing virtue or vice based on nothing but personal demographics in this fashion is overwhelmingly likely to lead you to some bad conclusions.

The HR recruiter involvement in the hiring process is madness to me. I get that managing somebody through the pipeline is work, and probably a dev isn’t the right person for that job. But having HR out there rejecting resumes is insanity.

As much as I appreciate a well turned phrase, I am highly suspicious about reading documentation written by someone who doesn’t fundamentally understand the topic.

I find tech writing skill to be necessary but not sufficient to competent at technical writing. GPT-3 is more than sufficient if my goal is phrases that sound reasonable may or may not capture the essential concepts

Man it sounds like guaranteed lifetime employment.

If everything is on fire, all day, every day, then nothing is on fire.

In Utah (home of lake powell) 80% of our water goes to agriculture, which in turn provides.... 1.6% of state GDP. The overwhelming majority of that state GDP goes to cattle and the feeding of cattle. Not just meat, but the most water intensive form of meat you can eat.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it will not make a lick of difference and I like my kids to have someplace to play outside.

Gonna need some citations on that one big hoss. Most of the talk out of California lately is farmers in an arms race to drill the deepest well, because they're planting water-hungry crops like almonds like fiends (good profit margins so fuck the water table).

We're all gonna be debugging wordpress apps in the metaverse while our self-driving cars whisk us down the freeway.

Not gonna lie, I think the jvm integration is a big win for clojure as a language. The fact that you can pull in and interop with established jvm tools and libraries makes using a niche language like clojure a possibility for professional development.

C libraries are wonderful tools when you need a low-level library to run hot, but if you need, I don't know, a database adapter or a queueing library and you don't want to write one, I'd much prefer pulling something out of maven than trying to integrate a C library. There's just a lot of infrastructure the jvm gives you pretty easily.

If you're just messing around with fun side projects, there's nothing wrong with using something you enjoy for no other reason than your own personal enjoyment.

This is something I have been a witness to in my personal life, and you're right-- I don't have the tools to wrap my brain around this. I'm familiar with disabilities. I get that. You're unable to do this thing that other people find easy. But this.... this is a choice. If you can't regulate your emotions, you can't regulate your emotions no matter the context. If you can function just fine at work, but not at home, that's a choice you're making.

Or at least, that's how it looks from the outside.

I get that people who struggle to control their emotions would push back on that analogy, but I'm pretty accustomed to people creating whatever narrative they need to justify their behavior. Somebody acting badly and then making up a justification is something I deal with nearly every day.

It's hard for me to get a better justification than "maybe your 'personality disorder' is just being an asshole" past Occam's razor.

Is there something I could be reading about this to get a better picture? I know I'm coming at it from a general place of mental health, so, you know, that's not the best lens, but I also know I'm not crazy for thinking like this. Just maybe missing a puzzle piece.

No this is typescript. They meant what they said. ;)

I feel like your advice assumes having a good faith debate on the internet about a subjective and highly charged opinion is a reasonable possibility if you express your opinion clearly and fairly.

I would like to know what part of your decades of experience writing and public speaking led you to that assumption.

Have I been using on the wrong internet my whole life?

Even wide distribution of long-haul trucking exclusively on the interstate, or an automated bus-like commuter service (but actually good, unlike the regular bus), would be a pretty meaningful innovation, wouldn't it?

Joke's on you, we're getting rid of snow!

Man I know a lot of kids getting major major bumps as FAANG kicks out RSUs to flyover country. Happy you’ve already gotten yours though.

Hard disagree there: remote is opening coastal salary bands up to people outside the coasts. This is apocalyptic. People in the bay are way way way better paid, and not really that much better (they all came from someplace else, remember? Y’all didn’t get every good dev in Kansas, just the ones that wanted to move.)

Honestly it’s already been done- release the wage numbers publicly. The only way screwing over long term team members works is if you can keep a lid on it. Wage secrecy enables all kinds of bad behavior.

I'm a partisan, of course, but I always found ocaml to be the practical choice for ML-style functional languages. All the functional type-y goodness without being shackled to it, you can let yourself off the hook if you need to, you can just write a dang loop if that's what needs doing, compiles down to native, just a good practical mix.

Other than Jane Street, nobody much uses it though, so that's that.

I'm not really a haskell fan, but the lion's share of that effect more that likely comes from the small sample size of companies using haskell. Even if it were somehow superior, there just are enough people trying it to be coming up with a unicorn startup or two.

Now, the lack of skilled haskell programmers on the other hand, that's a pretty scary proposition if you're starting a company and may find yourself riding on a rocket, needing as many able hands as you can possibly find.