Hi, I am having difficulties with LinkedIn in the past 1.5 years and I have finally decided to vent off to the world about it.
Has anybody had similar experiences? Does anybody have any advice for me? I have a faint hope that such things might actually gain traction on HN and even lead to a solution, which means a _human being_ from LinkedIn steps in and offers a solution, or at least, an explanation.
Seriously, if LinkedIn is causing you that many problems then is it worth still using? Is it an essential part of your career/business/job search? Dump it. It's not worth the headaches and stress you're being subjected to.
Thanks for the answer! Yeah you have a point. I mean I did dump it kind of compulsorily due to these issues and I don't really need it. But I can't shake off the feeling that it could give me extra outreach on the platform. I am sad that I am not on there, but I am not too sad, just annoyed ...
I have a suspicion there is massive (organized?) downvoting going on in the past few weeks or months but hard to prove since hn doesn't make enough data visible.
Thanks for your comment and sharing that link! Very useful website.
I also have a similar suspicion. Feels like if you have billions of dollars of investment in AI, then crashing things in the internet that criticize you, can easily be solved for a few millions. If this is the case, for me, it is the biggest proof that AI won't live up to the hype.
I wanted to say it doesn't have to be planned from the top because people naturally want to flock to a cause. But I also remembered a certain billionaire paying people to play computer games under his account to boost his stats. Paying people or bots to downvote criticism is certainly not below him or any of the others, it's just marketing expenditure.
1. Consuming something that has an impact on the environment is an ethical issue. And I think it is unethical in this case. They are coming up with a power hungry system that consumes large amounts of energy—and they are doing it for profits. I think we can agree that they don't really have any desire to give back to the environment for what they consume.
You might ask, was industrial revolution's impact on environment unethical, despite where it brought us? Of course it was unethical! If we had the opportunity to go back in time and make it better, we would! Except of course profit hungry people would still find ways to circumvent our new policies, and gain an economic edge over competitors by consuming more energy and thus, again, harming the environment. The same is happening with LLMs. People who seek profit are even building their own grids which generate electricity by burning fuel, just to run their data centers. They don't care about the impact it has on the environment in which we all live, and that is unethical.
And what if the need of power will bring about new tech that will allow green energy much more efficiently? Like fusion reactors that work. Sure, nobody is stopping you to develop those! But you cannot take a bet on people's, animals' and plants' well being and "have confidence" that it will all work out in the end! You cannot take a bet on people's lives for a promised future. Who has such a right? What an entitlement...
There is only one way to make this ethical: Will you take accountability on your shoulders, if it all fails? Then go be my guest. But no, if it all goes down, and instead we end up with a dystopian AI that can mass control everybody, and washed up shores and a world that became a desert, then every single person who has been responsible for the mess will go be free, while some innocent scapegoats will take the toll. So no, personally I am not giving consent for profit seeking people to take a bet on my planet's future.
2. If you can see the data with your eyes, then you should be able to train an AI with it. However when you commercialize your AI and chant non-stop about how all the writers and artists who contributed to your AI model were nothing other than a stepping stone for you to create your model, it turns into an attitude that is unethical.
But the owners of the model spend billions of dollars to train the models, so shouldn't they have the right to sell it? Well, if they had any _morals_, they could train smaller models patiently that could be build on nothing other than a research's fund. Then we could have developed bit quantization to make it cheaper. Then we could have come up with better models by distilling them to make the LLMs better and so on. But no, there are profits to be made and no time to loose! These needless ethics shall not hinder the progress (of making as much money as possible as soon as possible)...
3. Progress in tech will inevitably bring about disrupting changes to the society. I also see no problem with this. However I must point that, pro-AI people have a disrespect for people's hard earned skills. I sense a grudge in these people that they really want AI's to nullify people's skills, skills that they themselves are too lazy to develop. In AI marketing, I also sense a similar strategy, i.e. their selling point is "now everybody can become an artist"... No, they can't. In my opinion this point has less to do with ethics. Overtime we will all see whether these models live up to the hype. At the end the natural cycle of life will sort itself out.
4. I don't see your point. I think it is both a fundamental problem and an ethical issue. Let me explain.
Imagine that there is an ultimate Truth to something. We don't know what it is, but we have an idea about it. Now imagine that you are a bad actor who wished ill on people. You develop smart sounding propaganda to steer public opinion away from the Truth.
An LLM with bias is exactly that. So it is an ethical problem.
It is also a fundamental problem, that is, whether AI gives correct or incorrect answer. If it is giving incorrect answers, then it is unremarkable. Currently, as far as my observations go, LLM's generate both (1) grammatically correct sentences and (2) sentences that seem contextually accurate. Whether the content of their saying are correct or not, really seems to be depending on how much of the requested Truth already exists in the Internet. So great, we invented a system that can recycle what is said on the Internet.
Don't get me wrong: I do think that it is a great advance in information processing, linguistics and machine learning. But for some reason, we don't seem to be ready to acknowledge it's shortcomings as a serious problem. Instead, there seems to be a general opinion that "it will get better". No, the thing is that, if it hits a point in development where it generates enough value for the commercial companies, we will end up with a smart sounding propaganda machine that can control uninformed masses in a scale that was unimaginable even for the most pessimistic person.
5. -> Seems like close-to-state-of-the-art LLMs will be commodified, etc.
The reason why I don't like your attitude is because of this. Yes, indeed, models will be developed by the open source crowd and will be in the hands of many. Surely progress in tech will bring about this.
And yet. This has nothing to do with what the author is saying. She is saying that _these LLMs_ made by _these companies_ (you know which ones we are talking about) will be used to concentrate power. Commodification of other models does not negate her point.
-> If it really becomes important I don't see why you couldn't just rustle up some donations for a truly open model or whatever.
I will shut up about this point when _it happens_. Until then, people who agree with me must keep bringing these issues to people's attention. AI has been used for controlling masses long before LLMs. Now it has been supercharged by LLMs because they can interpret human language pretty well. Therefore I think the blog post's author has a good point on this issue.
Overall I see hand waiving and weak dismissal of her points.
1. I don't think using power for AI is more unethical than any other non-life-critical usage of the same amount of power. Since data centers use electricity, there are already many green technologies which can power them. People are just porting this argument from blockchain where it was much more valid. The hard parts of making the planet carbon-neutral lie elsewhere.
2. ??? This just seems like you're complaining about your impression about annoying AI posters on Twitter or whatever. Also nobody is stopping anybody from developing a cheaper AI or whatever, and that would be a very valuable thing to do.
3. I don't think its disrespectful to say you've made it easier to make art or whatever, and I also don't think it's unethical to "disrespect" "hard earned skills".
4. Yes, it would be unethical to develop an AI to lie to people. It's not unethical to develop an AI that might be wrong sometimes, especially if you tell people about that very clearly.
5. If the complaint is just that you don't like particular companies, OK, fine. I don't really find that to be a very interesting discussion. I was talking about whether using LLMs was ethical, which is the title of the post.
- facial recognition software used in cameras in public spaces
- mass monitoring phone calls, text and processing them
- predictive policing (has been criticized heavily, currently this is a popular topic in ethics of policing to train young philosophers on the issue. Last I heard, police departments in US have claimed to have opted out of this. Maybe they have better ways now?)
All these examples are from the west. If you never heard about any of this, you would be terrified at what they do in China, for instance.
Usually you would need to process data you collected and rely on some primitive indications to identify dissidents to the system. LLMs are a game changer on this aspect. When you know, you know :) ...
A question for everybody on counting your visitors : How do you do it? I am self hosting my blog on archlinux + nginx using an old laptop. I proxied it behind cloudflared tunnel. On my Nginx access logs, All I see is mostly bots and for any visitor that does not identify as bots, I feel like they are still bots. I really can't be sure. And Cloudflare analytics suggest that I have a little shy over 1 thousand of visitors in the last 1 month, which also seem quite unlikely.
I would love to hear your experiences on this! Thanks
I just look at the numbers Google Blogger spits out. I'm sure they're overstated with respect to real users but I don't actually care.
(I use blogger and, in fact, after much deliberation just decided to roll everything (personal and business) together on my existing template.) Anything else was just too much trouble and probably cost. Zero interest in self-hosting.
What to name a baby is such a common and profitable search query, there must be so many SEO spam websites targeting it. I wonder if that’d make the data lean towards that too.
>“There is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance.”
What does von Neumann mean here? Why is it bad that it will develop along the line of least resistance? Does von Neumann advice that working on "harder" problems is more beneficial for TCS? Could not one argue that we should be solving away low hanging fruits first?
I am not sure if I am understanding von Neumann's quote nor this article properly. I would love to hear some simpler explanation (I am a new BSc. CS graduate).
This is how I see it: you can work on mathematics from two different levels. There is more direct level, which is the formal system, and there is more indirect level which are the intuitions behind the formal system.
If you look at new theories (let's say you are starting to study topology, or group theory) they start from some definitions/axioms that seem to come from "nowhere", but they are in fact a product of working and perfectioning a language for the intuitions that we have in mind. Once we set for the correct descriptions, then there are a lot of consequences and new results that come from interaction almost entirely with the formal system.
The interactions with the formal system is the path of least resistance.
The power of mathematics is that once you figure out a correct formalization of the intuitions, using just the formal system allows you to get a lot of information. That is why sometimes people identify mathematics with just the formal system.
To take it one step further, mathematical ideas which do not nicely fit within one of the highly developed theories then feels underbaked and less attractive to other mathematicians.
Knuth thinking about algorithms led to all these research questions about combinatorics, that have turned out to be very interesting, but are much more messy and disjointed results.
It becomes clearer if you check out the entire quote from von Neumann:
.. mathematical ideas originate in empirics, although the genealogy is sometimes long and obscure. But, once they are so conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is better compared to a creative one, governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations, than to anything else and, in particular, to an empirical science. There is, however, a further point which, I believe, needs stressing.
As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from "reality," it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing more and more purely l'art pour l'art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical; when it shows signs of becoming baroque, then the danger signal is up. It would be easy to give examples, to trace specific evolutions into the baroque and the very high baroque, but this, again, would be too technical.
In any event, whenever this stage is reached, the only remedy seems to me to be rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas. I am convinced that this was a necessary condition to conserve the freshness and the vitality of the subject and that this will remain equally true in the future.
My guess is that von Neumann worried that it develops in directions that people happen to find interesting, instead of in directions that are important by some objective external measure.
Reading the comment section, I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing by trying to look for ways to add <<ads>> into the browser.
And I am curious, is anybody aware of a good alternative browser or even just an alternative way to what Mozilla should be doing instead?
I use brave mostly but I am not sure if their ad blocking is any good under the hood or not... Seeing a company like Mozilla behaving like this, I honestly don't know who or what to trust anymore...
Servo is being worked on as an alternative (after Mozilla excised it in one of the dumbest decisions they could've done), with the devs recently starting work on adding browser chrome, but it'll probably take years before it can be considered to be a useful alternative.
For now your best bet is probably to use a Firefox fork (Icecat will probably not shit the bed, but there's many other forks although a good chunk of them also modify the source code in ways that might not be desirable to casual browser users since they started usually with the goal to privacy harden Firefox and privacy focused forks have a bad habit of disabling features you probably do want enabled) or a user.js for Firefox to turn off undesirable features, at least until the situation becomes truly unusable; not sure what the best choice is after that because none of the Firefox forks have the manpower to step up and become a new main browser.
Ad blocking works quite well in Brave and in Firefox with (ubo). Any other browser is just an almost carbon copy of one of those two methods. Are you seeing something that I’m not? I really don’t see 99% of the ads that would without ad blocking in browser. Also Mozilla is fine and most of us nerds freak out when they try something new like this.
>I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing
I remember up until around 10 to 15 years ago when Mozilla enjoyed seemingly limitless good will from basically anyone who had anything to do with computers.
Now they're arguably more reviled than even Big Tech, and rightfully so especially since they're deceiving about it.
They have some good stuff like offline page translation.
But most importantly they have a good review process for popular browser extensions. Google controls Chrome store, and they have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
So for daily browsing locked down Firefox. For banking and office stuff vanilla Chrome.
> they have a good review process for popular browser extensions... [Google] have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
It's serendipitous you mentioned that extension, because Mozilla recently came under fire after its treatment of that developer[1], and people started talking about how tedious it is to publish extensions. Mozilla is now also an ad company, so it has the same conflict of interest as Google.
I see that conflict as a sign this process actually works. That extension had a few thousands of downloads, and should not get automatic pass, just because it is from famous developer.
Ublick Origin is different from "Ublock Origin Lite"
All Chromium and Firefox-based browsers are tainted by association. The most promising options are Ladybrid, forked from the SerenityOS browser, but it's a long wait to 2026, and Servo-based browsers like Verso:
It all comes down to web engines. There are many browsers built on top of Chromium and a few that use Gecko or WebKit. Some of these try to make as few changes to the underlying engine as possible to ease the engine upgrades in their codebases, and due to the nature of the web they have to keep updating their engines.
So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies?
The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.
On top of uBlock origin, I can also recommend plugins to remove tracking elements from the URL, remove cookies, and running an own unbound + adblock (or similar).
Sadly then this becomes hard to maintain for non-IT people (i.e. the majority).
I had the same question at first. Upon downloading and inspecting the PNG file, you will notice that it actually has an alpha channel. This allows us to give it any color we want easily by giving a background color property in CSS. That could still be achieved however, if it wasn't transparent, by playing with the Hue value.
I think that quote is correct. We have billions of physically separated computers that are all connected. And for the most part, if they are not connected, they are rather useless. So we do indeed have just a few "computers" in the world, whose components are distributed across every individual who uses these few computers.
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