I guess it's obvious, but haven't really thought about this. Back in the day we had media companies and advertisers. Magazine publishers/newspapers/TV Studios on the one hand and the Leo Burnetts/Ogilvy/Wieden+Kennedy on the other. There was always a tension between what advertisers wanted and what creatives wanted. The studio/publishers knew that bowing completely to advertisers was a fast track to making crap and the advertisers knew they needed to remind the publishers that they are only as good as their audiences.
With Meta we these have more or less merged. It's not really clear now who the customer is. They need to attract both eyeballs and money. I'm not sure what the long-term consequence of that is, but my hunch is it leads to accounting and advertising winning since they actually generate money. And the result is junk creative.
Meta seems to be completely tone-deaf when it comes to products and features. I wonder if this is a function of a single person, surrounded by people with little incentive to disagree, having all the decision making power in a company.
Of course you might be right. But if we look at our past ability to predict the future by extrapolating from the present and recent past, you might also say it is naive to think that _this time_ is somehow different, that this time the future is clear.
Also, I think you've set up a straw man. I haven't seen anyone arguing that this future isn't possible. What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.
> ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?
Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek, but in case it's not.
No, nobody does. Consider that a person in their lifetime could have seen the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, then the first jet engine in 1939, then commercial jet travel in the 1950s. That is an amazing 50 years for air travel. If you were living in 1950 and were to extrapolate where air travel would be by 2026, you would think we would be taking routine trips to Mars. Instead what we got was TSA, cramped seats, and better safety. But "progress" leveled off dramatically. Commercial air flight has looked pretty much the same for my entire life.
We have no idea how far transformers and LLMs will take us. It certainly isn't obvious where this is going.
When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.
I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.
Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.
It's not just CORS that's hard to understand. Many (most?) developers don't really understand the threat model. And even when it's explained it hard to see why it's a big deal. Part of this is that backend developers usually have to configure CORS and it's not an access privilege protection. From the point of view of the backend it doesn't seem to matter. Bad guys can't get it. From the point of view of the front-end it's often seen as a nuisance.
The article does a nice job giving a concrete example.
Yeah, Amazon has been garbage for a while with old books, especially classics. It seems like everything is just keyed off title/author so it takes a ton of effort to make sure you are getting the edition/translation you want. It's 100x worse with Kindle where it looks like some random cheap scan into-kindle format has 2k five star reviews. And of course user reviews where they seem to mix all the reviews together for various editions.
If you are really talking about dependencies, I’m not sure you’ve really thought this all the way through. Are you inspecting every line of the Python interpreter and its dependencies before running? Are you reading the compiler that built the Python interpreter?
I think this is a useful way to look at things. We often point out that LLMs are not conscious because of x, but we tend to forget that we don't really know what consciousness is, nor do we really know what intelligence is beyond the Justice Potter Stewart definition. It's helpful to occasionally remind ourselves how much uncertainty is involved here.
Point taken. Still, isn’t an activity like learning a new library, language, or platform a fundamental part of being a software developer? Haven’t we all complained at some point about companies hiring react developers because we all know the real skill is the ability to pick up new things. And to be clear, this isn’t moral panic, it’s a concern that we may end up in a future where people don’t know how systems work anymore and we are dependent on two or three companies and their data center moats to maintain any technology.
uh...okay. The legend of Faust is the classic work where a person sells his soul to the devil for power/knowledge/pleasure. Goethe has Faust make a wager with the Mephistopheles: show me the good life (pleasure, power, knowledge, whatever) it will never be enough to make me stop striving, to make me want to linger. If you can do that my soul is yours. To me it reads a _lot_ like our contract with AI.
With Meta we these have more or less merged. It's not really clear now who the customer is. They need to attract both eyeballs and money. I'm not sure what the long-term consequence of that is, but my hunch is it leads to accounting and advertising winning since they actually generate money. And the result is junk creative.