I used to take this approach when building new integrations. Then I realized (1) most documentation sucks (2) there's far too much to remember (3) much of it is conditional (4) you don't always know what matters until it matters (e.g. using different paths of implementation).
What works much better is having an intentional review step that you come back to.
Most of the time QA can tell you exactly how the product works, regardless of what the documentation says. But many of us haven’t seen a QA team in five, ten years.
You say this like trivial misstakes did not happen all the time in classical engineering as well.
If there is a memory leak, them this is a flaw, that might not matter so much for a specific product, but I can also easily see it being forgotten, if it was maybe mentioned somewhere in the documentation, but maybe not clear enough and deadlines and stress to ship are a thing there as well.
Just try harder. And if it still breaks, clearly you weren't trying hard enough!
At some point you have to admit that humans are pretty bad at some things. Keeping documentation up to date and coherent is one of those things, especially in the age of TikTok.
Better to live in the world we have and do the best you can, than to endlessly argue about how things should be but never will become.
Shouldn't grey beards, grizzled by years of practicing rigorous engineering, be passing this knowledge on to the next generation? How did they learn it when just starting out? They weren't born with it. Maybe engineering has actually improved so much that we only need to experience outages this frequently, and such feelings of nostalgia are born from never having to deal with systems having such high degrees of complexity and, realistically, 100% availability expectations on a global scale.
They may not have learned it but being thorough in general was more of a thing. These days things are far more rushed. And I say that as a relatively young engineer.
The amount of dedication and meticulous and concentrated work I know from older engineers when I started work and that I remember from my grand fathers is something I very rarely observe these days. Neither in engineering specific fields nor in general.
We were talking about making a missile (v2) with an extended range, and ensuring that the developers who work on it understand the assumption of the prior model: that it doesn't use free because it's expected to blow up before that would become an issue (a perfectly valid approach, I might add). And to ensure that this assumption still holds in the v2 extended range model. The analogy to Ariane 5 is very apt.
Now, there can be tens of thousands of similar considerations to document. And keeping up that documentation with the actual state of the world is a full time job in itself.
You can argue all you want that folks "should" do this or that, but all I've seen in my entire career is that documentation is almost universally: out of date, and not worth relying on because it's actively steering you in the wrong direction. And I actually disagree (as someone with some gray in my beard) with your premise that this is part of "rigorous engineering" as is practiced today. I wish it was, but the reality is you have to read the code, read it again, see what it does on your desk, see what it does in the wild, and still not trust it.
We "should" be nice to each other, I "should" make more money, and it "should" be sunny more often. And we "should" have well written, accurate and reliable docs, but I'm too old to be waiting around for that day to come, especially in the age of zero attention and AI generated shite.
If ownerless code doesn’t result in discoverability efforts then the whole thing goes off the rails.
I won’t remember this block of code because five other people have touched it. So I need to be able to see what has changed and what it talks to so I can quickly verify if my old assumptions still hold true
>I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
Military hardware is produced with engineering design practices that look nothing at all like what most of the HN crowd is used to. There is an extraordinary amount of documentation, requirements, and validation done for everything.
There is a MIL-SPEC for pop tarts which defines all parts sizes, tolerances, etc.
Unlike a lot in the software world military hardware gets DONE with design and then they just manufacture it.
For the new system to be approved, you need to document the properties of the software component that are deemed relevant. The software system uses dynamic allocation, so "what do the allocation patterns look like? are there leaks, risks of fragmentation, etc, and how do we characterise those?" is on the checklist. The new developer could try to figure this all out from scratch, but if they're copying the old system's code, they're most likely just going to copy the existing paperwork, with a cursory check to verify that their modifications haven't changed the properties.
They're going to see "oh, it leaks 3MiB per minute… and this system runs for twice as long as the old system", and then they're going to think for five seconds, copy-paste the appropriate paragraph, double the memory requirements in the new system's paperwork, and call it a day.
I honestly wonder if it's better to flag and downvote into oblivion rather than to engage in good faith. The sibling didn't seem like they were trolling, just misguided, and shutting down discussion doesn't allow for any reflection.
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
Can anyone explain to me what ChatGPT does that traps people? I get the value as tools, I like using copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't offer me value that any other LLM can't. Given that everyone is quickly rolling "AI" into their own stuff, I don't see what's ChatGPT's killer app. If anything, I think Gemini is better positioned to capture the general user market.
I also wouldn't underestimate Google's ability to nudge regular users towards whichever AI surface they want to promote. My highly non-technical mom recently told me she started using Google's "AI Mode" or whatever it's called for most of her searches (she says she likes how it can search/compare multiple sites for browsing house listings and stuff).
She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.
It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.
> When was the last time you went to an actual physical library
My eyesight is making paper books harder and harder to read, so I don't go to libraries and bookstores as much as I used to. But I think libraries are still relatively popular with families, because they're sites of various community activities as well as safe, quiet places to let kids roam and entertain themselves while the parents are nearby.
When I was a kid, my parents went to the library much more often than they do now, because they were taking me and my sister there. And then we would all get books before we came home.
Not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's a significant part of this that is "changing rhythms of life as we age", not just "changing times".
It used to be, people went to the library to look things up, and as a primary source for finding information they needed. Not just as a community center.
> Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.
Yeah, that's my point. If Google is good enough I don't think people are going to want to do those extra steps, just as in your google maps example. There might be better services out there, but google maps are just too convenient.
The branding is so strong and it works well enough (I’d say, according to the perception of most people) that it’s just the first “obvious” choice.
Akin to nobody getting fired for choosing AWS, nobody would think poorly of you using ChatGPT.
I don’t think Claude has that same presence yet.
Google has a reputation for being a risk to develop with, and I think they flopped on marketing for general users. It’s hard to compete with “ChatGPT” where there’s a perceived call to action right in the name; You don’t really know what Gemini is for until it’s explained.
Poe's Law notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think I was making a good faith business acumen observation. If Optimus walks you to the kitchen to get a coke, what's Tesla's business model? Charge by the nanosecond for compute time?
Purchase/lease access to the hardware, subscription for the necessary online connectivity, and microtransactions for each actual use of it (ostensibly because of cloud compute, and that also means surveillance data is captured and monetized).
Perhaps. I suppose the biggest in history then? $1.4T valuation and 60% of shares held by non-meme institutions (like pension funds, S&P tracking ETFs, etc) when you factor out insiders.
Oh, so that’s from him. This is the most state-interventionist economist. The fact that state actors trusted him for their policy since 1929 has more to do with a convergence of interests than rationality.
I’m not surprised that he started the ideology that markets were irrational.
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.
Stable coins fail when there's a run on the bank. Crypto is a wild west of unregulated banking. They have essentially become tools for money laundering and scam enablers, so it might take a while. But eventually the general public will say "no thanks" to a pain in the ass version of regular money. When the rush to the exits happen, the ~7 txn/s limit of Bitcoin will become painful.
What in the world are you talking about? What stablecoins are you talking about operating at 7tx/s? Why do stablecoins fail when there's a 'run on the bank'? You're mixing so many metaphors here that I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all. This is a stablecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency). If it isn't permissionless it's not a 'stablecoin' it's an IOU.
Without commenting on the rest of either of your posts, he is talking about how to trade between stable and other coins with that limit on Bitcoin. i.e. He is saying there will be so many people trading away stable coins for Bitcoins (as in Bitcoins not generic stand in for cryptocoin) or other coins that the 7tx/s limit of Bitcoin wallet transfers that it will become a significant factor as Bitcoin is used as a 'reserve currency' for these trades.
it won’t be. the same sane argument was that “robotaxi” fall will be dramatic but it wasn’t, Musk, like Trump, is a master at manipulating masses and when thing du jour inevitably fails he’ll just pivot on an earnings call (and on “X” along the way) how “thing du jour is yesterday’s news” and he’s onto “next big thing” - data center on Jupiter that will replace all earth’s data centers or something like that :)
Honestly I think capitalism is a farce and I don't even have an emotional response to (b/tr)illionaires getting insane handouts and the stock valuations being insanely overpriced for even the most optimistic projections created by the companies themselves.
Okay rich guys, you get to have infinite free money.
But economists, I beg of you, I am willing to kiss your shoes, but please just admit that this causes inflation, and things aren't getting more expensive 'just because'
So lets see a $60k robot, lets say the whole economy crashes and money means nothing so they just call it $30k for kicks and giggles. Super cheap power since elon owns all the land now, he can have a tiny nuclear reactor every few house lengths. So $1 a day for power : 30365 / 365 days a year is about $80 a day in the first year, or maybe $40 a day assuming the reactors dont melt down for 2 years. So that is about 2 forced cokes down your throat per hour, 4 if you are a "known criminal" who is being robo-babysat. And that is still zero profit for elon because he has to shuffle all his assets around to the next farce of a fucking company
This is hypothetical, in the spirit of your "economy crashes and money means nothing": if one has zero profit (in dollars) but somehow manages to own all the land and run the country, I'd say he profited a lot. Land and ruling are more tangible than money.
I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.
How much can you bias training to favor certain products before it becomes illegal? That seems like a similar question to "how much linear algebra do you have to do to copyrighted works before copyright doesn't apply anymore".
I wonder if you could pay them to tweak the messaging about your products. So when a user asks: Is drinking Coke everyday good for my health, it starts saying yes because sugar is vital to our survival.
I don't get why we try to make the story so convoluted. They will just declare the ads, as all big platforms do. It's legal and it works. Why would they open themselves up to lawsuits over this? It's just not reasonable.
AirBnB and Uber have demonstrated to all companies that legality doesn’t really matter as long as the numbers are good. It takes regulators an ungodly amount of time to act, and any well-written appeal buys you another 5 years for making political contributions
I don't know of any legal rulings or laws, which say not disclosing an embedded ad is illegal. In fact quite the opposite. There are loads and loads of prior such cases, movies, TV shows being an example.
For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.
This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.
US and EU law already cover this: undisclosed paid promotion that looks like neutral content is generally illegal (FTC Act + Endorsement Guides in the US, UCPD + DSA in the EU). Product placement in old TV/film is the historical exception, not the rule. An interactive "assistant" secretly steering you because someone paid for it is legally much closer to a deceptive influencer ad than to a Snapple bottle in Seinfeld.
Their entire business model is currently based on legally questionable practices. I'd argue they wouldn't even exist without massive copyright infringement and utter disregard for software licences.
To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.
They won't have to sneak in anything. On the contrary. The world is about to be deluged with a monsoon of personalized advertising the likes of which you've only previously imagined. They have the data, they have the buyers, they just so far don't have the means. All this AI hardware has to do something to justify its staggering cost and all that compute, all those datacenters, are going to be devoted to crafting personalized sales pitches. The distilled essence of all of humanity's information is going to sell you boner pulls and hair loss supplements
The enshittification of the LLM has begun and it'll be one of the all time shittiest ones.
It'll be hilarious (in a tragic way) if Google adds ads to Gemini using their existing platform and suddenly it becomes a scammer in the middle of chats.
It wont be that obvious. It will explain to you the dangers of doing your own cooking, the number killed by food poisioning each year, then suggest something from doordash instead. Or it will suggest you eat something faster, like pop tarts, so you can spend less time cooking and more time interacting with your AI buddy.
Yup. I've been lost for a while on how to properly set up my MSI X870 TOMAHAWK mobo, this makes it all clear. Boy is it a mess with all the bifurcation.
Wow, that list on the Samsung site is concerning. The S21 is a 2021 phone. Absolutely realistic people would still be using it, and outside of a tired battery I'll bet it's performing just fine.
I only just stopped using my HUAWEI P20 Pro - which I bought in 2018 - the phone was still great and handled everything I needed it to - plus the camera was amazing. I just got a new phone as the battery life was getting silly and it began restarting all the time - and I'm not loving it compared to the P20 Pro.
I think a 7 year old phone has no reason to not be suitable to 90% of what people want from a phone (in my case it was 100%). Frustrating to see them abandoned by manufacturers.
My S21 Ultra is the best phone I've ever had. I bought it a couple of months from when it was newly released and it just will not die. I've traveled with it, played all the games, thousands of photos, used it for nearly a year while I was doing gig driving (so plugged in and screen on for hours at a time), dropped countless times, and the screen has no cracks and the battery still lasts more than a day with regular use. For the past few years every new Samsung smartphone has piqued my interest, and the second my S21 dies I will buy whatever Samsung flagship happens to be the latest, but it just will not die.
Same. I have now turned my s21 ultra into a full on gaming console with the following emulators installed on it: drastic, melonds, m64plusfz, citra, snes9x, super8plus, redream, superpsx, ppsspp, duckstation, aethersx2, ppss22, cemu, dolphin, eden, sudachi, citron. And even winlator.
It plays everything below switch flawlessly. Even on switch it'll run literally everything I have thrown at it from BoTW to ToTK to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, albeit with poor performance. But lighter switch games like Super Smash Bros Ultimate or even the newer Super Mario Bros Wonder run flawlessly. Hollow Knight runs flawlessly.
I have an OLED steam deck, but I LOVE the portability of this phone. I play with it using the bsp d8 pro controller as well as the xbox series s controller using a magsafe case and a magsafe clamp that attaches to the controller. Phone works great for 3ds emulation as well.
Also the battery charges so quickly after a gaming session. It really is a wonderful gaming device.
I literally just upgraded from that a month ago, and only because of the degraded battery (which I was fine with but I was going on a trip and didn't want the headache). There's dozens of us, Jerry!
Only (in the case at hand) if they choose not to apply the free system update, right? And even then, only to the extent that they use cellular network calling?
It looks to me from the list that the newest device that needs replacement (vs updating) is a Galaxy S7, released 2017, which would be well outside the 5-year-extended-warranty period that seems to be the longest one they sell at your link, no? If I’m reading it right.
Actually, narrative explanations like the vampire book are exponentially the most reductive. Cause/effect, story. On the other hand, evolution is billions of hours of trial end error making footsteps of niche evasion.
Gotta think big, stories are puny both in terms of explanation load and their total existence in evolutionary time. They are fun over the dinner table but that’s about as definitive as they get.
And out of the entire gamut of literature and competing theories you found a single chapter in a pop sci book to be the most compelling? OK, fair enough.
Actually to be fair, all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable. Which makes them little more than hypotheses. So these tales are little more than the campfire tales that begin our slide into storytelling. Genetics and evolution are testable and falsifiable, giving them scientific, correlational validity. That book is not pop sci at all, it’s written by the leading endocrinologist of our time and has over 2K citations of deep scientific study. Pop sci it is not.
If you're already into neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, I recommend looking one step up the emergence chain into Ethology too (biology's answer to psychology, across all living organisms) . There's still a lot you can do by treating the organism as a black box and treating behavior empirically; in an evolutionary framework.
I’m more a neo behaviorist, neo Darwinian leading into ecological psych and coordination dynamics. The 4E approaches make little sense to me. The black box is revealed by affordances etc.
> all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable
Isn't that also true for "Sapolsky’s Behave and linger" and what you're currently believing? Why does it work different for other stories than the one you happen to believe in?
Easy: alone, struggling to contact coworkers (while mostly trying to diagnose the problem). I've done both (the alone state didn't last for hours because we did have emergency communication channels, and the hotel was a ski lodge in my case). The surrounded by coworkers is much better.
That's assuming these are actual coworkers, not say a dozen escalating levels of micromanagers, which I agree would be hell. The where isn't really that important in my experience, as long as you've got reliable Internet access.
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