mfDjB's comments

I wonder where does this end? I do feel like nearly once a year some country in western world tries to ban encryption. Can we just make it a right to encrypt communications and be done with this endless debate?

Thanks for posting this. I always found it odd that the transition from labour to capital seemed to be so hard, even with mid-figure 6 income TC's it always seemed like you can't quite escape the rat race, you can definitely live more comfortably, or maybe as comfortably as you can as one of the rats in the race but never escape. Of course with very disciplined saving and LCOL arbitrage you stand a chance, however it seems like these methods are being purged with COL adjustments, inflation purging cash savings, markets tanking 401k's. Just when you think you are out they pull you back in. I often wondered whether this was by design, because it seems a bit too convenient for labour pools, or whether its a feature of the economic system we operate in.

Google is slow in the AI space because it isn't willing to take the risks its competitors are willing to take due to PR and branding factors. Anthropic with its focus on AI safety is the wrong choice here, it will slow them down not speed them up.

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results.

At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work for me (typing out form letters, code language conversions).

For what it's worth I wouldn't use ChatGPT for search like I do with Google, but what it has done is taken away time I would be Googling for things like "how to write X form letter". I expect as it matures, it will take more time away from me Googling.

All these takes underestimate the following:

1) How quickly ChatGPT and its ilk will advance to solve relatively low hanging fruit like "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing". The delta is extremely important here.

2) How slowly the Google bureaucracy will grind when releasing anything remotely like ChatGPT. All the committees and the burdensome processes in place in Google will keep this new technology locked up for years, and ensure that the final result is a camel (horse designed by committee). It doesn't matter if they have superior technology if they never use it or release it.

3) How much Search means to Google will mean they will treat any product changes to it extremely carefully while Microsoft will be willing to experiment with Bing like they have with Co-Pilot and GitHub.

Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future.

It seems like every time a new UI framework comes around, a tradeoff is made between convenience and flexibility, with the advertising always being around "look how easy it is to make a table view", but this doesn't particularly impress me anymore, because as I've used these newer paradigms it seems like I am trading 5 minutes (UIKit) for 3 minutes (SwiftUI) when it comes to basic UI development, but later on trading 30 minutes (UIKit) for 3 hours (SwiftUI) when it comes to anything significantly complex. This is not just true for iOS but web as well.

I'm unsure how feasible it would be but it would be really cool if it were possible to benchmark frameworks both by how quick it is to implement basic UI components as well as more complex UIs and score them based on that.

I do feel like its quite an insidious trap to do a project to 80% completeness in a framework then be forced to make the awkward decision of "Do I continue with the current framework where the extra 20% will take a long unknown amount of time or rewrite in the old framework and take the time hit but with easily estimatable timelines?".

What I've learned from Google is that you are always talking to a bot, it just happens to be that some of those bots are human. Even though they are walking and talking simians they are executing a conversation script and have no agency and ability to control an outcome spare the most banal common issues.

His audience disagrees that he needs a filter. The filtered content you are talking about is abundant, authentic content is scarce, that's why he pulls the audience size he pulls. His reach would be smaller if we took the filters off other sources.

Just started a position in a FAANG as a remote worker, funnily enough accidentally. I am in Seattle working for a team in NYC. I didn't realise that it was technically a remote position, I just thought I would go into the Seattle office but happen to work for a NYC team, this is what I've been used to in the past. As a remote worker the following has happened:

1) I was relocating from where I was to Seattle, and told that I will receive no relocation support because I was technically remote.

2) I was told after speaking to other people I know at other FAANG companies that my seat at the office was not guaranteed. Indeed when I checked with the recruiter and my new manager it turns out that the company does not guarantee you a seat in the office if you are a remote worker.

3) Remote onboarding is a horribly broken and disfunctional experience, I can only speak for the company I am with here your mileage may vary, most links don't work and things aren't really explained well, you end up waiting around most of the time and feel strange, like you are missing something.

It feels very much like being a second class citizen at a FAANG. The perks access clearly isn't there, and there is a lot of assumed knowledge, e.g. "Oh you didn't know you wouldn't be able to go into the office?". Not a fan. I've never felt less like a person and more like a battery.

I find that most support you receive these days (whether its from the public or the private sector) feels like it is coming from a bot. Even if it is another human on the other end. Google in particular feels like they create inflexible non-robust policies that do not have an escape valve for when things go wrong on Google's side. If I had more options I wouldn't put up with it.

No matter what country I am in and whether they had consumer affairs ombudsmen, filing a chargeback dispute with the merchant (in my case Visa) was the best protection I ever got from dodgy vendors charging me after I cancel a subscription or fail to provide the agreed upon services. Even the hint that I am going to do it usually gets the vendors to act and quickly. I hope that this doesn't go away.

This is a real disappointment. Had a great job lined up at Coinbase that I was quite excited about, was in the middle of visa processing when this happened (why I had to quit my previous job, can’t have two visas in the US).

This was for a relatively senior position, not a fresh grad. Going to be hard to get a new job considering most of the other places have hiring freezes and I chose Coinbase over other offers (mostly from FAANG), these offers have probably been out for over a month now doubt i can resuscitate them.

On top of that most of the other offers were for SF, and my partner already has a job in NYC on this basis.

Nothing but pain. As much as I appreciate the severance, the damage being done here is immense.

Is there a historical precedent for this outcome?

Which one?

It might be worth noting that not all Proof-of-Work is just finding hashes, newer cryptocurrencies make more economic and intelligent use of the work used for proof.

It's very nice to see Eleuther fulfill the Open promise of OpenAI.

I'm scared that more and more big model advancements are being denied access from the general public, which will just make the inequality between big corporations and startups even greater.

I'm not sure how NFTs work, but are they proof of work or proof of stake? I was under the impression that one was more destructive than the other, and that proof of work was very outdated. I would imagine NFTs being somewhat new that they use the newer protocol.

So I see this claim made a lot, but I wonder if it isn't a spillover of the BTC inefficiencies into a domain that doesn't have this problem? I could be totally off here though.

All of these amendments favour Facebook. It also buys them time. I guess we will have to wait and see after the 2 month mediation period is up who has the upper hand.

I guess the answer to who won, Facebook or the Australian government depends on what you consider a win here. I personally would consider Facebooks strike and the forcing of the Australian governments hand to pass legislation that didn't want to pass a win for Facebook.

The Australian government did a last-minute deal in which it pushed through changes to its laws that are amenable to Facebook. I wouldn't say it was a win for them.

I've never really understood this argument, the content is still on the news sites right?

The news sites provide blurbs and descriptions through OpenGraph metadata that Facebook use, if they don't want entities to use metadata to make a link richer they could just remove the metadata no?

Basically I want to know how Google or Facebook are exploiting news content to make a profit.

Having been under lockdown (or more broadly hard restrictions) for at least 9 months of the last year I've come to the opposite conclusion, I would like to be a dual national of the USA just to take advantage of the idea that I can vote with my feet when it comes to state governance issues. If I don't like lockdown policy, I can move somewhere that has a lighter touch (like from NYC to Miami which I know a lot of people have done).

In the UK (especially post-brexit), NZ and Australia it feels like being trapped. Travel is restricted both internally (sporadically) and externally and the regional governments have more or less the same policies, so I don't see anyway to vote with my feet here that doesn't come with a high cost.