It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
I think we are talking past each other. I'm saying there are proposed models which are not ads, but they don't maximize earnings. A silicon valley company will always choose earnings over anything else.
1. Allowing non-developers to provide very detailed specs for the tools they want or experiences they are imagining
2. Allowing developers to write code using frameworks/languages they only know a bit of and don't like; e.g. I use it to write D3 visualizations or PNG extracts from datastores all the time, without having to learn PNG API or modern javascript frameworks. I just have to know enough to look at the console.log / backtrace and figure out where the fix can be.
3. Analysing large code bases for specific questions (not as accurate on "give me an overall summary" type questions - that one weird thing next to 19 normal things doesn't stick in its craw as much as for a cranky human programmer.
It does seem to benefit cranking thru a list of smallish features/fixes rapidly, but even 4.5 or 4.6 seem to get stuck in weird dead ends rarely enough that I'm not expecting it, but often enough to be super annoying.
I've been playing around with Gas Town swarming a large scale Java migration project, and its been N declarations of victory and still mvn test isn't even compiling. (mvn build is ok, and the pom is updated to the new stack, so it's not nothing). (These are like 50/50 app code/test code repos).
Why do all of that when you can just keep a tight hold on an agent that is operating at the speed that you can think about what you're actually doing?
Again, if you're just looking to spend a lot of money on the party trick, don't let me yuck your yum. It just seems like doing things in a way that is almost guaranteed to lead to the outcomes that people love to complain aren't very good.
As someone getting excellent results on a huge (550k LoC) codebase only because I'm directing every feature, my bottleneck is always going to be the speed at which I can coherently describe what needs to be done + a reasonable amount of review to make sure that what happened is what I was looking for. This can only work because I explicitly go through a planning cycle before handing it to the agent.
I feel like if you consider understanding what your LLM is doing for you to be unacceptably slow and burdensome, then you deserve exactly what you're going to get out of this process.
I find pacing to be helpful. As long as there’s not a lot of poles to walk into accidentally. So while outside walks can be more focused you do get the odd head bang.
I should consider this - I run my own domains, and for years I just forwarded it to gmail, but I had so many cases when mails were put into spam, even replies to emails I had sent in the middle of a long conversation between myself and 1 other person, that I went to just self-hosted IMAP. Then for years I couldn't reliably send to google or yahoo or MS; I added SPF a while ago which help, but recently buckled down and put in SRS and DMARC and DKIM (and rspamd while I was at it); now I get the mail I want, and can mostly send mail without it being rejected (still have to ask people to check spam, but anyways many people I have to tell them I'm emailing them anyways if its important). However I have a lot of non-spam "promotion" emails that I don't want to see. If I could train gmail to not block legit stuff reliably, that would be worth trying again (I would say except for the privacy implications, but since so much email involves gmail on one side or the other, they probably get most of it anyways).
I have for about 15 years used a stool to sit on at work, rather than a desk chair that I can slump in. I have found I feel much better - the stool forces my upper body to be actively held up and balanced; also, when I do go to meetings, instead of being annoyed at sitting in some dumb conference room, I am a little happy to be able to slump like a normal slouch.
I put a zafu (kapok filled, and not too full so its soft/adjustable) on the stool, and adjust the desk height so I don't have to reach up at all to touch the keyboard.
I also do a lot of zazen on a zafu (with legs crossed) so keeping my torso upright is pretty ingrained into my body.
This is just anecdata, but my dad suffered with back pain his entire life (included multiple herniated spinal disks), knock wood, I haven't. If I skip the check on the keyboard height and find I am reaching up for a while, I will get shoulder soreness, but so far early enough to function as a warning to lower it.
Sitting upright as tho you are a world honored one does I think affect the entire mind/body system in a healthy way :)
Spot on. I used to have back pain and all sorts of discomfort throughout body, neck shoulders, etc. until I figured out how to properly sit. Luckily I haven't had any issues lately, I'm in my mid 40s and have been in a much better shape than I was in my mid 20s. I don't use a stool necessarily but I try not to use the back support too much and for me the sitting area must be rigid, any cushion can mess up with my sitting position.
This post really reads like a C.S. Lewis novel - the whole fear of being an outsider and laughed at, and the gradual but slippery slope towards more substantial clearly bad stuff.
Chatham House is openly the sort of "inner ring" Lewis warned about.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
That's what we are doing, with the Internet playing the role of the sibling. Every successful attack the vendors learn about becomes an example to train next iteration of models to resist.
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