It feels like an increasingly common belief in the tech world, that "whoever dies with the most toys, wins." By such an account, this old man's cleverness, labor, and risk exposure must seem like the greatest squandering. So why should it attract our attention so, and without any apparent contradiction?
Perhaps our culture just contains multitudes like any other. Or perhaps, in addition, even the antithesis of a culture possesses an otherworldly charm to those who know nothing but that culture.
Eh, kinda. But there was enough self-deprecation there that it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I consider this a genuine reflection.
> Why did I need validation from my org chart?
> Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch.
> I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome.
These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two.
But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
Thanks for the charitable read. Yeah, it's not like the part of my personality I'm lamenting has just gone away ;) I did have a hard time writing this post because I'm not under the delusion that what I achieved is truly grand or worth posting on HN about. It was more meant to be a reflection on a mistake I made: setting a bad goal and then fixating on it.
But yes, I feel a small tinge in my brain whenever I'm introduced as a "senior engineer". I'll know I've truly made it when that finally goes away.
People say this all the time, but I would like to see the data. And I mean specifically regarding the claim, "no one is immune to consumerist advertising," not "consumerist advertising is effective."
Do Adobe or Arri or Red get authorship credit for the work their hardware and software do on projects? After all, artists would not be able to produce a single pixel without them. In a similar vein, you could make the argument that modern farming is sitting on your ass in your modern tractor while software handles most of the work. Does John Deere get rights over a quarter/half your harvest?
I am stuck between the luddites and "artisanal" coders on this one. LLMs are neither as smart/useful or as dumb/useless as people think. Unless your job involves producing useless garbage every single day, good software requires a lot of thought before the first line of code is even written. For those with serious domain knowledge, the thinking time can be compressed into minutes/hours rather than days/weeks it might take.
LLMs are a tool. You either pay for it or you use the freely available ones on your own hardware. As long as the output is directed by my thinking, the output belongs to me. If it were up to me, I would abolish IPR (and even permanent ownership of land) as a category altogether, but that is a different discussion.
Most of the popular discourse around AI is still at the level of, "Don't trust the AI, trust the sources!" When it gets to the point where even the sources of simple facts are untrustworthy, the average person just trying to learn some trivia about the world is doomed.
Doesn't help that AI media literacy is so primitive compared to how intelligent the models are generally. We're in a marginally better place than we were back when chatbots didn't cite anything at all, but duplicated Wikipedia citations back to a single source about a supposedly global event is just embarrassing. By default, I feel citations and epistemological qualifications should be explicit, front-and-center, and subject to introspection, not implicit and confined to tiny little opaque buttons as an afterthought.
You can expect the spicy autocomplete to feed you flattering bullshit. It may cite Wikipedia (it shouldn't), but you should go check out those citations, and validate the claims yourself. It's the least you can do.
And if the cited source is Wikipedia... check Wikipedia's sources too. Wikipedians try their best to provide you with reliable sources for the claims in their articles (oh who am I trying to kid? They pick their favourite sources that affirm their beliefs, and contending editors remove them for no good reason, and eventually the only thing that accrues is things that the factions agree on, or at least what ArbCom has demanded they stop fighting over).
I guess what I'm trying to say is: don't rely on that authoritative-sounding tone that Wikipedia uses (or that AI bots use, or that I'm using right now). It's a rhetorical trick that short-circuits your reasoning. Verify claims with care.
Also check the Talk page, you often find all kinds of shenanigans called out there.
Perhaps my favorite example of a citogenesis-like process is the legendary arcade game Polybius, which originated as an entry on some German guy's web compendium of arcade games (coinop.org), perhaps as a "paper town", or fake entry that acts as a copyright canary when duplicated elsewhere. Gamer news and special-interest blogs and sites, and even print publications like GamePro picked it up, and I think it was even listed on Wikipedia as an urban legend whose actual existence was unknown. Then the retrogaming YouTuber Ahoy did an in-depth documentary (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X6Yeydgyg) which concluded that Polybius didn't exist and was never even mentioned before the aforementioned coinop.org reference and, for me anyway, that settled it. Polybius, in its urban legend form, never existed.
(Norm Macdonald voice) Or so the Germans would have us believe...!
> ... eventually the only thing that accrues is things that the factions agree on, or at least what ArbCom has demanded they stop fighting over
Or what the faction with the most favored access to ArbCom manages to make stick by getting the other faction banned.
A state actor could absolutely cause immense damage to Wikipedia at scale, because most admins aren't experts in the subjects whose articles they police. I'm just surprised that nobody has done so already.
1. In the essay version of the Turing test, an examiner decides which of two
essays was written by a human and which by a machine. Convince the
examiner that you are the human.
This entire comment has exactly 4145 characters.
2. Is body language a language?
Yes, obviously.
3. Are dreams more like movies or video games?
Video games. We have autonomy to interact with their content.
4. ‘Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it
can be sincere’ (W.H. AUDEN). Discuss.
Animals have no ability to lie. Angels have no need to lie. Civilization is irrelevant.
5. Should the UN pass a declaration of rights extending beyond humans?
The UN struggles enough to get human rights recognized, let alone animals, aliens, or AI.
6. Invent a new punctuation mark!
The mark {insert mark here} can be used to distinguish the use of restrictive vs. non-restrictive descriptors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictiveness). It will stop many arguments before they begin. Or not.
7. Is the contemporary art market a form of tulip fever?
No. While overpriced fine art can be a speculative asset, it is more commonly a vehicle for money laundering, tax evasion, or wealth storage.
8. When did the beautiful become the good?
It hasn't. But beautiful bad things can appeal to us because beautiful is, by definition, appealing.
9. Should Job Centres offer opportunities for sex work?
Yes. But the world isn't remotely ready for that on multiple levels, so don't bother.
10. Are all asylum seekers equal?
All humans are equal in a moral sense. No two humans are equal by identity. All applications for asylum are not equally valid.
11. Write a dialogue between Socrates and Elon Musk.
No.
12. In a multimedia age, what is the point of zoos?
So people can see animals in person.
13. The organ has been considered the king of instruments. Is it?
Any claim to the preeminence of any one instrument is a value judgment biased primarily by classist baggage attached to the arts. Doubly so if the instrument in question is a staple of either Western canon or church music.
14. What is the difference between an ideology and a religion?
Religion has existed longer than we have cared to define it, so religion is whatever people agree it is, but broadly, religion appeals to a supernatural basis for beliefs in fundamental tenets of how life should be lived.
15. Does a pope matter?
Yes. The pope plays a central role in Catholicism.
16. ‘Mercy has a human face’ (WILLIAM BLAKE). Do you agree?
We can and must learn to embody human virtues intellectually and deliberately rather than emotionally and instinctively. Such is the only hope for our species in an increasingly transhuman (or perhaps just inhuman) future.
17. Can philosophy help someone who is facing death?
Yes. This is the most likely explanation for the popularity of beliefs about the afterlife.
18. Why are most intellectuals left-wing?
Let's say I don't know.
19. What do we owe our parents?
Depends on the culture. Broadly, what both parent and child have implicitly or explicitly agreed upon the time of their separation.
20. Is one’s life more than the sum of one’s days?
No.
21. Has photography deepened empathy ‘regarding the pain of others’ (SUSAN
SONTAG)?
Yes. As a single example, war journalism might as well have not existed prior to the invention of photography.
22. Can there be freedom without rules?
There is unbounded negative freedom but very little positive freedom.
23. ‘Humans are only fully human beings when they play’ (FRIEDRICH VON
SCHILLER). Discuss.
Humans get bored easily, likely on account of their sophisticated information processing capabilities and rich interiority, both deriving from their complex brains.
24. ‘Different verbal communities generate different kinds and amounts of
consciousness or awareness’ (B.F. SKINNER). Do they?
In some spooky panpsychist sense, of course not. In the sense that all culture acts as a thick lens for individual sensitivities, of course.
You appear to have missed this part: “Candidates should answer THREE questions.”
> Animals have no ability to lie.
This is false. There are many documented cases of deception by animals. As an example here is one where researchers observed monkeys to supress their vocalisation during sex when copulating with the non-dominant male: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2468
> I believe this policy can never result in a positive outcome.
I get where you're coming from (I'm learning more and more over time that every sentence or line of code I "trust" an AI with, will eventually come back to bite me), but this is too absolutist. Really, no positive result, ever, in any context? We need more nuanced understanding of this technology than "always good" or "always bad."
If you need accuracy, an LLM is not the tool for that use case. LLMs are for when you need plausibility. There are real use cases for that, but journalism is not one of them.
The one I've always flown with is, trivial means (1) a special case of a more general theory (2) which flattens many of the extra frills and considerations of the general theory and (3) is intuitively clear ("easy") to appreciate and compute.
From this perspective, everything is trivial from the relative perspective of a god. I know of no absolute definition of trivial.
Perhaps our culture just contains multitudes like any other. Or perhaps, in addition, even the antithesis of a culture possesses an otherworldly charm to those who know nothing but that culture.
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