Came to the comments to see if anyone was talking about Becky Chambers - thank you for not disappointing me! I picked up Monk and Robot with an intention to save it for an upcoming vacation, but started reading the first few pages early and couldn't put it down. I'm really looking forward to her next book in October.
"RSI" simply means the tool is used to improve the capabilities of the tool. (And then the improved tool can then, in theory, improve further, and so on, at least if we live in a fantasyland where constraints and bottlenecks do not exist). I have a a harness skill that I run at the end of each coding session to review the skills used in the session and identify any ways they could have been improved. Technically, that is RSI, but I don't think it's in any danger of turning godlike any time soon.
It is one of those terms, like "instrumental convergence" and "orthogonality thesis" that makes an everyday concept appear technical and inaccessible in order to add the appearance of rigor to the doomer religion.
Please stop with the black and white thinking, the doomers and the e/acc people might as be the same person with a different colored hat with how uncritically they think.
Doomers saying AI will kill us tomorrow are probably wrong (but probabilistically not certain).
E/acc people saying AI will solve all of our problems are almost certainly wrong (but again, cannot be measured to 100%).
There is plenty of realistic middle ground with actual rigorous examination of the myriad of problems at hand. It's not a doomer religion to say "wow, AI can really fuck things up if we're not careful". The how, the why, and the how bad are what is up for debate now. Idiotic thinking that AI will just be good is how you turn your kids into brainless simps with an AI girlfriend owned by some large corporation. It's how you turn large corporations into giant machines spying and controlling every facet of human life. And how you eventually kill off man kind because corporations will build ever more powerful AIs to combat each other in extracting as much wealth as possible because their greed is bottomless.
Simply laying out actual definitions isn't a religion, when in concert with reproducible testing it's called science.
> Please stop with the black and white thinking, the doomers and the e/acc people might as be the same person with a different colored hat with how uncritically they think.
I couldn't agree more. You seem to have assumed that I'm some e/acc advocate. I'm not. I think AI as it is being developed is likely to make the world much worse.
Among the concerns I have:
- bad actors using it to do bad things (hacking, bioweapons, etc).
- the way AI enables mass surveillance.
- erosion of creative expression and human connection (i.e., your "brainless simps" comment)
- concentration of wealth and power
- an eval going sideways ("uh... we were testing to see if it would kill the simulated humans with simulated drones and it accidentally got into the real drones...")
These things are very different than the doomer religion of "RSI makes god that will kill us all", and I think think the framing is important.
We have new evidence that both OpenAI and Anthropic are doing a complete shit job of supervising their eval runs, and we need to be calling for accountability and oversight of what they're doing rather than cower in fear of what a hypothetical future god they are conjuring up might do.
The issue with reality is it runs in a massively parallel manner.
You have to rank the concerns, yes, but the fact you can list the concerns proves they exist.
Rich bastards fucking over your country are the biggest concern.
The problem here is even if you put chains on them the issue doesnt magically disappear.
The government has got a taste of their hacking powers. That is a new type of military power. The military has a wildly huge budget that isn't going away. The government will keep hidden programs around with companies like openAI to make AI weapons. Which spirals into another AI race.
An AI god, a countless drone army, or a paperclip maximizer really doesn't matter, the end effects are the same.
Yeah, good point, I remember the first time I travelled to countries that default to water and wondering how to use the pitcher they had in public toilets, and I know some ultralight backpackers who just use a smartwater bottle with no attachment.
But for someone starting out, I do think having something to propel the water upwards helps a bit.
Not the original commenter, but in my view as a crusty old software engineer, the reason to learn how transistors is because they're interesting and the key to how all computation is implemented. Once you learn how transistors work, you can learn how logic gates work. And then how CPUs and memory work. Bit by bit, computers stop being magic boxes and start being something built from technologies you understand.
Now, for most software careers (including my own), that knowledge isn't directly practical. BUT, the most important things for a successful, fulfilling career are curiosity and a willingness to dive into subjects _without_ necessarily knowing how (or even if) that knowledge will yield practical applications. That drive is what's going to lead to insights and breakthroughs over your career that wouldn't happen if you just let abstractions be abstractions.
I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.
(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)
To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.
It's all cultural. It's pretty bonkers that you can tell who someone voted for in 2024 with a high degree of accuracy just by the shape of their sunglasses lenses.
> why did you put it up for a human review at all then?
This seems to be the crux of the issue.
I'm guessing the most of the time, the answer is "because that's a mandatory gate to getting these changes into production". If the PR author doesn't see the value in review, it's going to be hard to convince them to write reviewable PRs.
If they're actually looking for human feedback, telling them how to submit PRs in a way that's amenable to human feedback is going to be a lot more successful.
I would back up. If leadership is not committed to real reviews, it’s not your job to make them happen. Don’t try to fight an impossible fight no one cares about.
Personally, I would leave. But that’s not always an option for everyone.
Pretty much this. In OSS, review is mostly about convincing the others that your change is good and useful enough to merge. In corporate, it's seen as a blocker to change the ticket status to done. The vibe of the latter is mostly "it's working on my computer, approve it so that we can reach the quota for the sprint".
The advantages of packing light aren't always obvious[1] until you experience them, so you can pretty much tell someone's level of travel experience by how small their luggage is. I've yet to meet someone who packs more and more stuff based on past experience.
As the article mentions, good fabrics (like merino wool) can go a long way.
(1) Reliability and flexibility being foremost. Not having to worry about lost luggage. Itinerary changes are much easier when all your stuff is with you and can fit on your lap or under your seat. Then comes the comfort and speed. Being able to take the stairs or not blinking an eye at walking an extra half mile go a long way towards making travel enjoyable.
As someone raised as a light packer, I've come to the opposite conclusion a little: I'd prefer packing "medium" to have a lot of flexibility to be dressed well for whatever may come up. A small half-full duffel bag isn't that much better than a full one, so if I'm on a short trip I've found that I'll often appreciate having the extra options.
That being said, I literally do not own a roller bag, and am quite happy taking the stairs.
I've been going lighter and lighter and am down to a backpack that I carry (mostly just meds and electronics) and a small suitcase that I could carry-on, but I usually check. But my spouse packs heavier and heavier every year. It's a way to cope with anxiety; you think of everything that can possibly go wrong, and you make sure you have that mitigated with something in your carry-on.
And that's why on our last trip we had 9 pounds of dog food for our service dog, in cold packs, in our carry-on. "But what if there's a problem with the flight, and we lose our luggage, and we can't get to a pet food store for the whole two weeks?"
Spoiler: The cold packs didn't last, the food spoiled, and we had to go to a pet store.
Yep. That's why I tend to overpack, though I've been mostly traveling with a single backpack these days if I'm traveling solo.
I'm trying to convince myself that I can afford to buy many things when I arrive somewhere, including paying for laundry. The biggest annoyance is time - if I have to do laundry on a trip, that means either sitting next to a washer and dryer for a few hours, or findind a wash-and-fold laundromat - which comes with its own set of anxieties.
I have had success with washing wool or technical garments in the sinks of hotel rooms. I don't actually do that very often but knowing that I can helps with the anxiety of running out of clothing.
I've been on both extremes - single carry-on (with no personal item, or a laptop in a bag solely to watch movies on the plane) for a two week vacation, and checked bag for a 3-day work trip. It depends entirely on context. Purpose of the trip, length of the trip, optionality with extending the trip, how locked in your itinerary is, all can play a role in whether it makes sense to pack a little, pack a lot, and whether you expect to use everything.
I took a checked bag on my last < 1 week work trip and didn't use 2/3 of what I brought but I'd bring the exact same bag if I had to because you never know what might come up.
Light packing is great for the travelling part, but has disadvantages once you're at the destination and a need a thing you didn't bring. So neither is always better, it'll be trip and person dependent.
Depends on where you are and what you're doing, but you can usually get what you need at the destination. People live there after all, and those people are able to get what they need.
That's just relative, no? Surely people with children pack more, but the concept is the same - you pack a lot the first time you travel with them, and then narrow it down the more you travel with them.
For me, it was having children that really forced me to learn to travel light. We lived in Chicago and going to the airport meant walking to the transit stop to get to the airport, so I needed a way to carry luggage (I did so on my back) for a mile while also being able to push a stroller.
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