2
points
a4isms
Joined 4,167 karma
- If you ran a party, and one individual seem (from your perspective) to hold opinions that goes against what you and others believe the party is for, wouldn't you also want them to leave your party?
I have run and worked for businesses in which dissenting views were important to our success. I don't personally find your argument persuasive.
But I do know people who find that kind of thing very persuasive: I think it would most appeal to the type of person who believes that groups of people should be managed in a strict hierarchal manner, with the people on top managing things for their own benefit.
And—confirmation bias alert—IMO that's absolutely what both of America's parties do, and why it is difficult for their voters to get even of a fraction of the benefits that the donors (who may donate to both parties) enjoy.
- "As the father of a daughter, I understand the need for feminism that I ignored as a son, brother, playmate, classmate, friend, neighbour, landlord, tenant, lover, teammate, colleague, report, supervisor, and fellow citizen."
That's a particularly icky formulation of personal connection, because it has overtones of paternity as property rights.
- I am a former D-list tech blogger, and the thought of posting slop under my name horrifies me. But then again, I consider myself an author who has enjoyed the pleasant side-effect of minor notability. I never considered myself an influencer who happened to use writing to acquire more influence.
Anybody shipping slop around—whether written by interns and published under their name or written by machines—is not an author. They are an influencer, and reposting slop is what they do.
- That is a true and useful component of analyzing risk, but the point is that human behaviour isn't a simple risk calculation. We tend to over-guard against things that subjectively seem dangerous, and under-guard against things that subjectively feel safe.
This isn't about whether AI is statistically safer, it's actually about the user experience of AI: If we can provide the same guidance without lulling a human backup into complacency, we will have an excellent augmented capability.
- If you show me a tool that does a thing perfectly 99% of the time, I will stop checking it eventually. Now let me ask you: How do you feel about the people who manage the security for your bank using that tool? And eventually overlooking a security exploit?
I agree that there are domains for which 90% good is very, very useful. But 99% isn't always better. In some limited domains, it's actually worse.
- It is not illegal for them to trade on their inside information. It is illegal for you to trade on their inside information. So they can send you their stock picks list and gloat about their ROI, but if you invest on the basis of the newsletter, you go to jail.
Wilhoit was right about everything: America is in-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it.
You and I? An out-group. And it although we make a lot of jokes about leopards ripping faces off, MAGA know they're an out-group too, it's just that as long as somebody else is getting it worse, they're fine with that.
- The business model for Tesla and xAI is actually very simple and superior to OpenAI and Google's. No, this is not satire:
The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.
He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.
What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?
Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.
- Back when Java was the NextBigLanguage, we built Java development tools at KL Group/Sitraka (now a part of Quest). For version 2 of the suite of tools, we were getting rid of the nerdy configuration text file and planned on shipping a configuration wizard (yes, we called them wizards while fondling the onions we tied to our belts).
I was the Program Manager, and as usual we were very tightly constrained for time, and in the era of golden master DVDs that had to be ready to distribute at JavaOne in the Moscone Centre... Hard decisions had to be made. The team decided to work on more important features, and drop the configuration wizard from 2.0. Then I did what everyone knows is a no good, very bad, terrible thing. And although I got away with it that time, it's still a no good very bad, terrible thing:
I took my work computer home for the weekend and fired up a HyperCard "compiler" called Runtime Revolution that could make executables for Windows and Unix. Come Monday morning, we had a shippable configuration wizard. Leadership blew its top, because one of their values was, "We're a Java shop, which means we use Java to write Java tools." And after I left the company, they rewrote the configuration wizard in Java Swing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)
To this day I consider firing up Electron and a complete React framework for simple tools to be a "Turing Tarpit," a place where absolutely anything you imagine is possible, but nothing of interest (in the domain of simple tools) is easy.
- I used DeckSet for years. I love this concept.
To answer your question directly, I am already all-in on Markdown and lightweight markup languages in general. Adopting such a thing is an exercise in a certain form of minimalism. In Markdown I can theoretically do anything by dropping into HTML, but the entire point (to me) is to focus on what I'm trying to write and not on every presentation and every slide being unique objects.
It's the same thing with my blog. I could use any number of tools that give me arbitrary control over text and images appearing wherever I want. But I choose not to want that in exchange for the simplicity and constraints guiding me to focus on what I'm trying to say rather than how I'm trying to say it.
I have found a local maximum for me, and tools like this are a good fit for that. You may be elsewhere enjoying a different kind of local maximum.
- Here I am!
I still enjoy writing code like the code in TFA, but these days people seem a lot less interested in code than organizing their agentic LLMs, so I don't have the same incentive to share whatI find interesting. And it would be terrible marketing, like showing up to audition for a job driving F1... In a Jaguar E-Type.
Elegant and beautiful, but that isn't the game any more.
- In the early days of Hacker News, and maybe even before Hacker News when Reddit didn't have subreddits... OG blogger Joel Spolsky posited the "Joel Test," twelve simple yes/no questions that defined a certain reasonable-by-today's-standards local optimum for shipping software:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
Some seem ridiculously obvious today, but weren't standard 25 years ago. Seriously! At the turn of the century, not everyone used a bug database or ticket tracker. Lots of places had complicated builds to production, with error-prone manual steps.
But question five is still relevant today: Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Look at how much they are spending. Think about how HN cheered Tesla's innovation in disintermediating vehicle sales by selling direct. Now think about OpenAI or whomever selling directly to enterprises. It's the same proposition:
"That Enterprise SaaS startup adds a markup to the AI that is powering your app."
Again, this is only IF the AI-vangelists are correct that some startups will collapse to a solopreneur. I am not sure that those same startups won't vanish entirely.\
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There are some high-stakes apps where Enterprises prefer vendors for extrinsic reasons. For example, some apps must have certain certifications, and in a vibe-coded future, the cost of certification could exceed the cost of development by multiple orders of magnitude. And it needs to be kept up. Another example would be apps where for liability reasons, it is helpful that there be an "industry standard."
But lots and lots and lots of apps are not nearly so consequential.