6
points
elliotto
Joined 674 karma
Software engineer interested in machine learning and data science.
- elliotto parentYes, this is AIMD and it's well formalised and understood.
- This is the TCP backoff algorithm, specifically the slow start to find the optimal bandwidth. In your analogy, it would find the optimal amount that a person is willing to reciprocate.
Not only does this algorithm exist, but we're using it to communicate right now!
- I wrote this comment in a response to his second chapter, where he presents criticism of the political role of the company as cynical, and then later where he presents a perspective on some tech company anti-union behaviour being conspiratorial.
I definitely took an uncharitable reading, but man am I tired of being told big tech is neutral. I will continue to be cynical and I will continue to gnash my teeth at anyone who tells me otherwise.
- I think there are reasonable things to expect from someone's morality calculus. Leaving the country you were born in for moral reasons is a complex and life changing undertaking and beyond reasonable expectation for anyone not extremely politically motivated, let alone resourced enough to do so. Not working for a company whose moral values you disagree with (when you have an extremely lucrative skillset) is a smaller and more reasonable ask.
I'm also not really asking that people leave these roles - everyone has their own path to take. Just that they don't make posts dismissing criticism of these structures as silly cynicism. Or else they will have to contend with me writing a comment disgreeing with them.
- I don't think he's morally bankrupt. I am disagreeing with his attempt to handwave away a moral analysis of these organizations as 'cynicism'. I think these analyses are really important.
I don't live in the US. But if I did, and I was capable enough to be a successful software engineer, I would try to work for an organisation that was not implicated in abhorrent behaviour. If I was to work for one, I would not attempt to dismiss criticisms of it as cynicism.
- The author seems like a nice guy, but perhaps a bit naive regarding the efforts big tech companies go to to crush employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...). They appear to be a staff level engineer at a big tech company - I don't know how much money they make, but I suspect it's an ungodly amount.
The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.
If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.
It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.
- The author postulates a few ideas about manners and courtesy, and starts to recognise that business transactions (employment relationships) don't actually care about these things, even though the human beings who populate these systems hold these values.
The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.
Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.
- This is a good article that is critical of narratives around behaviour within organisations. I particularly enjoyed his criticism of the 'morality tale'.
The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in organisations more generally, working above these strange social structures largely unique to silicon valley. It wasn't the purpose of the article, but I wish he was a bit more critical of these structures in general.
- I completely agree with this.
I think the writing style the LLM produces is an artistic decision made by committee prioritizing for inoffensiveness - what a coincidence that it comes out sounding like LinkedIn slop.
I don't really see any innate reason an LLM couldn't write well - it's an active decision by its creators to tell it not to.
- I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force?
In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.
- The title of the post is 'the kind of company I want to be a part of'. This presents a more abstract philosophical question of what one should do and how one should be. I clicked the article expecting a piece about social utility, intellectual stimulation, or the role of firms in an increasingly complex moral environment.
Instead the author posited a point about pluralizing nouns.
This is the Californian ideology - do not engage with fucking anything at all, because we're all getting rich off pluralizing nouns.
- We are working on a similar agent for general AI analytics at https://www.truestate.io/
We have a similar experience where it's shocking how much users prefer the chat interface.
- Hi HN, after reading through the comments sections on blog posts about RAG, I was finding a lot of differing views. Many people have had an entirely unique experience trying to implement a RAG system, due to the nature of their data, the scale and their goals. The underlying tech also changes so quickly that new methods show up every day, and old methods become outdated quickly.
I put together this blog post trying to capture some of the experiences we had building a RAG system at TrueState, and trying to put together a centralised, up-to-date review of the concepts.
If anyone has any feedback, suggestions, or wants to flame me for something I've gotten wrong, please let me know!
- I tried it with thinking mode and it seems like it spiraled wildly internally, then did a web search and worked it out.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68e3674f-c220-800f-888c-81760e161d...
- https://chatgpt.com/share/68e3674f-c220-800f-888c-81760e161d...
With thinking it spirals internally, runs a google search and then works it out.
- https://chatgpt.com/share/68e366b2-0fdc-800f-9bf3-86974703b6...
GPT-5 Instant (no thinking) spirals wildly. Poor bot
- The author approaches the topic from a libertarian perspective with some prior beliefs about the futility of regulation. These restrictions are not permitted within their ontology, which in my opinion makes the damning conclusion more powerful.
I strongly disagree with the authors political stance, which makes the fact that we agree on the problem / solution a nice bipartisan result
- I keep a few long running chats for important things and then just keep the random questions as individual chats. There's not a lot of structure but it works.
For example at the moment I have 1 long chat about some health stuff, 1 long chat about some bicycle repairs I'm doing, and then the rest are one offs. I rename the long ones (or just remember the name) and they stay at the top because I find them when I need.
I also manage memories assertively. If there's something important that I'm tired of repeating I just ask it to add it to memory and it will do it.
Most of my professional work is done in cursor so it's in a different place to my personal questions. These usually are one chat per feature kind of thing, and start a new one when it gets confused with the enormous context