Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Alupis's comments login

When you are an employee, you are literally selling your labor, knowledge and experience in exchange for money and services (healthcare, etc). Think of yourself as your own for-profit business - a business of you.

Just like selling anything - if the terms don't satisfy you, then don't sell. Find someone else willing to accept your terms of sale.

You have the power folks... not the employers. Many have been led to believe the power-dynamic is reversed, and that the employer holds all of the power. That's absurdly untrue.

You have the labor, knowledge and experience (aka talent). Be your own advocate.


I individually have almost no power to shape how the industry treats its laborers, I'm forced to maybe find the job marginally better than the median position for my needs. Collectively though...

Don’t waste your life trying to unionise.

They almost never work, because they are a bad deal for the company and a bad deal for above average workers.

You’ll waste years trying to push a rock up hill, when you should have just changed jobs.


Follow the money...

Unions make money off of your labor - and the more people they can convince to join the union, the more money they make. Put another way, a Union is a business and you are the product.

How much value does the average union provide a highly-skilled in-demand employee, such as those working at JPMorgan or FAANG companies? Very little if any at all, it would seem.


Negative value, because unions standardise wages.

They are under-performers teaming up to peer-pressure (bully) over-achievers into averaging the fruits of their labour.

If you’re a high achiever the absolute last thing you want is to work for a company that is unionised.


Check their post history, don't waste your time...

Just to offer a little counter point to your motivational speech.

I took a stand at a company where they asked for RTO. They fired me, I sued them, and the first phase of the trial just ended where the judges cut the baby in half and dismissed the "firing with cause" and offered a 3 months severance (to cover what would have been a notice period), but without asking anything more of the company. The lack of empathy for the worker was surprising to me, frankly. Overall it was basically pointless.

So, if you do try to offer resistance to RTO policies, make sure you're not entirely alone, and probably leaving on your own with garden leave is a better option than trying to fight them in court. (This was all in the EU, so YMMV.)


Fighting RTO is going to be an uphill battle. First off, it’s a fairly narrow class of job that can be performed in a WFH environment. Those same jobs can arguably (because there is no real solid productivity data either way) be at least equally productive in an office too. Prior to 2020 and the pandemic WFH was a rarity.

So you are fighting against work tradition even within your industry, poor productivity data supporting your assertion, and frankly a general work culture where most everyone else doesn’t work from home. Your deck is stacked against you.

I work from home, but if my company chose to RTO, I wouldn’t challenge it. I know from my team’s experience (same base group pre-pandemic) we are not measurably more productive WFH as in office. It would suck to add a commute back to my day, but prior to 2020 I did that for over 3 decades anyway.


Sure, but people need to start fighting that battle. Not in the least because asshole employers want it both ways: get people back into the office, but keep the precarious work environments of Corona times: shared desks, noisy environments, long commutes with no compensation which are not part of the work time, etc.

I'm all for going to the office if they're willing to compromise. But no, it's their way or the high way.


Seems like your battle is more about the work environment they are providing you in the office then WFH vs RTO. Still an uphill battle, it’s not like they are asking you to work in a dangerous and dirty factory for 8+ hours on your feet.

People need to get over the “long commutes” complaint, that is not your employers problem unless they just can’t find workers due to their physical location. If they can find suitable local employees without a long commute, your long commute is a “your” problem to solve vs. employer problem to solve.


I resent your paternalism a little. I understand your opinion, but please don't patronize me or anyone that might think like me. Nobody needs to get over anything that is important to them, despite not walking barefoot in the snow uphill both ways. Small problems for you can be larger for others.

If you're comfortable hypothetically giving up extra free hours in the day for a company that's fine, but please don't try to make me feel guilty for wanting something else in life.

> is not your employers problem

Of course it's my employer's problem, If I'm unhappy at work I do a less good job. It's baffling to me, and forgive me for being patronizing in turn, that individual people can have the same mentality as organizations, where people are just replaceable cogs in the machine. Yes you can replace them, but the cost, monetary and of knowledge is greater than retaining them.


> If you’re comfortable hypothetically giving up extra free hours in the day for a company…

You are not giving those hours to your company. The company gets no more or less for your hours of commute time than they do from your colleague who can walk to the office in 5 minutes. That is an investment you are making (because of your location), along with your labor, in exchange for money. If the investment is not worth it to you—why would you do it?

The “get over” comment is really meant for the realization that your location in proximity to your office is really meaningless to your organization. No need to feel guilty if you don’t want to make that time investment or location change. You do you. Just realize that your company’s concern for your individual happiness will be limited to what it can do for the aggregate net happiness of all its employees. Your individual reactions and feelings and how the relate to productivity outside their net HR benefits are kind of in your ballpark to solve.

You might hate the metaphor, but we really are just cogs in the machine. I have had a long career and can tell you that I learned long ago that the organizational cost of an unhappy cog is much much more than the cost of replacing them.


This is kind of true, but it depends on risking your financial stability in the short term. Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike. What are they going to do, not have IT? they’d be out of business in a month.

Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…


> Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike

Why would you do that? That is by definition, a hostile work environment.

Find a place where you don't need to pull a bunch of shenanigans to get what you want.

Especially in the IT field, you have a massive amount of options. People tend to only think about FAANG and friends, but there's millions of SMB's out there that need IT of all levels, pay well and offer generous benefits.


> Why would you do that?

I think they were offering that as a solution to the difficulty of finding new equivalent jobs quickly.

While it's true people can "just quit"... there's usually more factors that make that very difficult, like having enough money saved up to last until you get a new job, and actually finding a replacement job that pays enough to let them keep a similar quality of life as they have now.


You’re just making excuses for laziness.

It has never in all human history been easier to find a new job than it has been in the past few years.


I think a hostile work environment might be a fun outcome of ‘return to office’ mandates.

> Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike. What are they going to do, not have IT? they’d be out of business in a month.

Last year there were nearly 100k tech layoffs in the US, the year prior nearly 200k. Every tech opening is saturated with a few hundred resumes. Do you really think your company couldn’t hire replacements?

> Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…

Shame on your company if they don’t control security to prevent this. Shame on you if you are willing to withhold more than your labor in a strike situation. There is work stoppage and there is sabotage. If you are not relinquishing the only set of keys to the factory, that borders on intentional sabotage.


Taken at face value you are just repeating what Jamie Dimon said.

> And at the end of the day, Dimon stressed, employees have a choice in whether to work for JPMorgan at all. “It’s a free world,” Dimon said.

And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?


> And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?

And that means the GP is wrong when he says, "you have the power folks... not the employers." The employers have the power."

He'd be right if there was a lot more worker solidarity and unionization, but that's not the world we live in. Right now worker power is too diffuse and unorganized to make a difference. Individualism divides and conquers workers.


> And you might wish to consider whether there are any implications to your argument given that you and the billionaire CEO agree

Why? Are we now saying anything a billionaire (gasp!) says is automatically wrong or nefarious? Come on people, I expect better from the HN crowd.


I edited my comment for better wording.

No you got it backwards: Jamie Dimon isn't wrong—he is in fact a highly effective business leader. You are wrong. He knows that the company is more powerful than the workers and the at-will employment is theoretically fair but in practice tilts the balance of power towards the company. And yet you have not realized that.


While true, this is a bandaid and frankly a battle the common people will never win. Small, organized groups that have no morals will always win. There may be small victories (5 day work week) but they will eventually be eclipsed (nearly all households are dual income - the capital class ended up with 10 days worked a week per household instead of 7).

Americans need unity, and from that needs to come leaders who have a concept of noblesse oblige. We need rulers that care for their people and are judged by the state of their poorest. Unfortunately, America is far too diverse (both genetically and spiritually) for this to happen. Diverse democracies never succeed (there are many books on this - one was even on Obamas reading list). People will pattern match the solution to “facism”, “Hitler”, “tyranny” - reject it - and continue to live in a time of technological miracles worrying if they’ll be able to afford a place to sleep. The knee jerk rejection is exactly what the capital class has engineered to continue leeching off the rest of us.

We could unionize but what’s the point? Our leaders should love us and we should love them. And wealth gaps as large as they are are anything but love - they’re a moral failing.


> Diverse democracies never succeed

May be I get this wrong. This sounds like a bold statement. Switzerland, Canada, Belgium but also India are multi-lingual or even multi-ethnic democracies. They know tensions but they are not failed.


Ok, and?

That's probably why he's happy to work in the office seven days a week.

My guess is that it probably has more to do with the fact that Dimon probably has an entire floor all to himself with all kinds of customized artwork, couches, lounge chairs etc, with personal assistants, likely a private elevator, maybe even a private chef or personal catering everyday etc. He doesn’t have to deal with fighting for conference rooms, loud office mates, a shitty cubicle, etc.

Dimon’s office is likely bigger and nicer than most of his employees homes, so of course he doesn’t mind working from there.


i would work for the taliban if they paid me that much

Ok I laughed so hard at this.

But yeah, really tired of CEOs criticizing their workforces when they make as much money as they do.

Pay me your salary and I’ll live in the office.


We have FAANG'ers bringing in hundreds of thousands and still complaining about RTO.

We never had WFH before - it was an experiment. For many businesses, the experiment didn't work. If you don't want RTO, find some other business that allows WFH. It's pretty much that simple...


Where’s that data that it didn’t work? No one can show me this.

It works fine.


The data is all of the companies saying it doesn't work and calling for RTO. Does anything really think they're doing this for funsies? Does anyone comprehend how expensive it is to operate office buildings?

We think of these mega-corps as inhuman, penny pinching, stingy monoliths - yet we then believe they're blowing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars a month on office space that's unnecessary. The math ain't mathin'..


https://apnews.com/article/jpmorgan-chase-bank-earnings-prof...

Speaking of "math that ain't mathin'" what about the fact that their best year ever was a year while they had a shitload of remote workers?


You think these ego-maniac CEOs are entirely rational machines?

They’re just as into vibes as the corner shop trying to sell you spirit crystals.

Show me one CEO with a building and I’ll show you one who doesn’t have one. ThE MaTh AiNt MaThInG


If it didn't work how did JP Morgan bring home record profits in 2024? And in 2023, and in 2022, and in 2021?

Nothing is failing. Bro likes the office. He thinks everyone should too.


It’s insane to me how all these companies have profit numbers up and to the right for half a decade under hybrid policies, but then are like “you know what will make us do even better? Pissing off the whole work force all at once for no good reason.”

It’s just comically stupid.


Does he? I wonder what his attendance record is.

I doubt it, but he apparently claimed he does.

Similar to the recent Boeing whistleblower conspiracies, despite video evidence of the suicide etc.

Currently we're in some sort of weird anti-business mood, so anything that's negative about a perceived mega-corp is taken literally on social media, and amplified up to 11 by karma-farming bots.


But America didn’t vote anti-business at all so it’s just more rage posting on Facebook and Reddit that doesn’t do anything. If they want to blame someone, they need to look in the mirror.


I think I agree with you here.

However, one cannot use Reddit currently without seeing 42 smiling pictures of a murderer, with thousands of fawning comments.

Many are bots, manipulating people on social media. Unfortunately, too many people are pulled into that bubble and become convinced it represents reality. It doesn't anymore than the flood of Harris posts that suddenly stopped on a dime election night, leaving millions of young people wondering where all the support went (not realizing the support was never there to begin with).


> too many people are pulled into that bubble and become convinced it represents reality

I don't think you're describing any particular political phenomenon though. We saw the same thing happen in 2016 and 2020 overnight - people go from Facebook pundits to sheepish and sore losers in just 12 hours. Bots certainly play a role in all this, but I think you're wrong to blame them as the deus-ex-machina when human behavior explains it all just fine.

Support bases are real for Luigi Mangione and Harris in the same way it's real for MAGA and Elon. People are truly sucked into the cult of personality because it's big, and they don't understand how to contextualize politics outside of celebrity. In a world where people virtue-signal on their favorite politically-aligned platform, it's not hard at all to imagine the majority of this support being entirely genuine.

A lot of people thought the "Stop the Steal" folks were bots, until they showed up and rioted and subsequently hid their identities out of fear that they'd be lambasted for supporting an anti-populist movement. In a post-Jan 6th world I don't quite understand how you can still blame bots for stupid opinions that real people clearly hold.


Well it used to be that people would form their opinions on others around them, not online misinformation campaigns. Evidence of this is how much content gets retweeted, but not so much is original content from the poster.


A non-trivial percentage of young Trump voters also supported the UHC assassination, presumably from some kind of general anti-institution vibe


> But America didn’t vote anti-business at all so it’s just more rage posting on Facebook and Reddit that doesn’t do anything

Most of America (somehow) didn't know what they were voting for and just believed the empty promises.

See the recent regrets of steelworkers and trends of people searching "can I change my vote".

Oh yeah, and all of the people mad that President Musk is gonna increase H1Bs.


they are not anti business, they are anti-establishment politics. But misunderstand that big business does big politics in 'merica.


[flagged]


> broadly gestures to the late stage capitalism hellscape

To quote The Dude - "that is like, your opinion... man".

People are better off than any time in history. Some people are more better off than others... and some people perceive other people's success as the cause/reason for their own personal failures.

Jeff Bezos has made every single person's life in America better by making products accessible to everyone regardless of economic bracket. Bezos' Amazon has compelled all other ecommerce companies to do better and offer better service to compete with Amazon. Literally everyone has won - except now that Bezos has been rewarded for creating one of the most important companies in the US, people want to tear him down. How dare he have more money than me!

Let's pick any wealthy successful person, the story is the same.

Those who believe the people who've built these mega companies don't actually provide value and/or earn their rewards are the very same people who have never and will never attempt to start a business and employ other people. The work only gets harder and there's more of it... Someone like Bezos is responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs, perhaps millions when you consider all of the 3rd party sellers operating on Amazon these days.

But, it's much easier to just scream "LaTe StAgE cApItAlIsM!" than do anything about our own situations.

Read some books, work in industry to develop skills, then start your own business. Let's talk again in five years about this anti-business mood.


Amazon was successful because for the first 10+ years they paid no sales tax (edit: they exploited interstate laws to enable buyers to circumvent paying sales tax. This was true for eBay as well). This is not competition, in fact it's the opposite. thats nothing revolutionary. In fact, 'exploitative' is the adjective that comes to my mind (which coincidentally, also applies to his laborers)


> Amazon was successful because for the first 10+ years they paid no sales tax

Quite a history revision.

1. Businesses do not pay sales tax - customers do. No online webstore collected taxes until recently. That was not something special for Amazon...

2. The business employs hundreds of thousands of people. All of which pay taxes. Even if the business itself literally paid zero dollars in taxes (lol), it is responsible for millions of dollars of taxes every month via payroll and employees buying things.

3. More taxes is not inherently better. What is up with people demanding more taxes be paid to the black hole that is the government?

This idea that businesses don't pay taxes and therefore are bad is totally naïve.


what I meant was they sold goods across state lines, which absolved _buyers_ of paying sales tax. I will edit my original comment to clarify.


100% of online webstores enjoyed the very same "benefit".

I am disputing your assertion that Amazon was successful because of this. By that logic, all online webstores would be Amazon today... yet, there's only one Amazon.

In fact, the recent changes to online sales tax collection have places a significant burden on smaller online webstores. You now need a 3rd party service to calculate taxes for the gazzilion tax jurisdictions all across the US. In some cases you have to guess if you meet the minimum thresholds for collecting taxes in certain states. The entire thing is a mess.

Regardless, nobody is not purchasing online because they have to pay sales tax. Amazon's early appeal was being able to buy darn near any book and it was delivered to your house a few days later. No longer were you limited to the inventory of your local Barnes & Noble, etc.


The sales tax loophole made eBay and PayPal into mega corporations as well, especially at various times over the past 2 decades. At one point in time Amazon was growing because of book sales. That era is long gone. Their business model is one of exploitation. Of both employees, local governments, and to some extent their own customers due to their lack of action against counterfeit merchandise sellers.


> The sales tax loophole made eBay and PayPal into mega corporations as well

Your logic is severely flawed, as previously pointed out. Every single webstore that existed back then would be the size of eBay, PayPal, Amazon, etc. Yet, very few are.

The lack of tax collection by a webstore has absolutely nothing to do with a couple examples of extreme success.

Perhaps you should consider the companies you are using as examples. What sets them apart from the countless smaller, less successful companies out there? They were the first to do something new that literally changed the world. Online auctions from anywhere in the world, online payments from anyone to anyone, virtually unlimited product inventory and choices, etc. That is why those companies are huge - not because they didn't collect taxes for some state a customer lived in.

> Their business model is one of exploitation.

Again, fundamentally flawed logic. As an employee, you literally sell your labor/time in exchange for money. You literally have the power to choose how much you are willing to sell your labor/time for. This fictitious narrative of exploitation requires quite a mental leap and assumption people have zero other options but to work for $COMPANY.

If you worked for Amazon and felt you were underpaid - quit and get a different job. It's literally that simple.


You're reaching to suggest that lack of sales tax was a reason that customers used Amazon. Like the sibling comment mentions, every other e-commerce site or platform had the same advantage.

The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.


for 2, why would you ascribe that to the business and not the employees?


Because the business is the one that created the jobs, not the employee. The employee is selling their labor to the company in exchange for money - and that exchange of money is taxed by the government.

The more jobs a business can create and pay for, the more tax money gets funneled into the black pit we call the government.


> Jeff Bezos has made every single person's life in America better by making products accessible to everyone regardless of economic bracket. Bezos' Amazon has compelled all other ecommerce companies to do better

By violating employees rights and encouraging other companies to achieve success the same way... No, he has not made life better.


Not an opinion, it's a verifiable fact that all gains have gone to the wealthy. Search "productivity hourly compensation graph" in your favorite image search. Effectively all gains for decades have gone to the already rich, not the working class. "Hellscape" is a reasonable assessment for a world in which most families' kids have worse prospects than their parents, they get to live under the thumb of an oligarchy with even more power. The only way out of this is a massive readjustment, so get used to hearing a lot of stuff you don't want to, because the wealth gap is making anti-corporate, anti-wealth sentiment inevitable.


Suburbs. We get 84 squad cars showing up for noise complaints...

Many larger cities don't have the budget to provide adequate police coverage. So you get this sort of "best effort" response.

This is made worse with recent years of "defund the police" policies creeping into some of our larger cities.

It just reinforces the Pro 2A community's saying - when seconds matter, help is just minutes away.


I live in "Suburbs" I have never seen 84 police cars respond to anything, even school shootings.


Maybe try living in actual suburbs, not "Suburbs"?


The way you write this makes be think you rawdog'd Hibernate and Spring Framework. Don't do that... you will hate yourself.

Boot is something entirely different. You write very little code and get a ton done. The trade off is you are firmly now a "Boot" codebase, but once you learn how Boot works it's not a big deal.


I've had to maintain a couple Spring Boot apps and I absolutely cannot stand them: they pull in a whole pile of random dependencies and do weird things to your build with little explanation. Then, all the functionality involves a ton of classpath scanning and annotation-based DI that makes it hard to figure out how all the things fit together.


I mean, have you learnt the framework before attempting to do that?

Frameworks are frameworks, not libraries. You can't just start writing/understanding them - frameworks are different from libraries precisely because they call your code, not the reverse.


Yes, the problem is exactly that the framework calls your code instead of being called by you code.


That's how all frameworks work though. This is not a criticism of Spring Boot. You are criticizing the use of a framework at all.

Some people hate to write the same basic things over and over. That's where a framework excels. Write only the glue/logic you need to make your app work.

The way you have described your experience with Spring Boot seems to imply you did not take the time to learn it at all, and therefore its' unsurprising to us you had a hard time of it.


Not writing the same thing over and over again is a feature of abstraction. A framework is a user-hostile way to abstract because it makes the source code opaque to developers. There's no reason why a library-based approach has to be more repetitive than frameworks.


Right, so you cobble together 48 different libraries, wrangle all of their configurations and stitch them all together yourself.

You do this 18 times because you have 18 different apps with similar requirements but deal with different data/endpoints/whatever.

On your 19th app you decide to standardize how you cobble together all of these libraries so that you don't have to start at ground zero every single time.

Now you've invented a framework.


CRUD backends have well-understood requirements, in a way, a significant part of the work is done for you. You are there to customize certain parts only.

How else would you architect with this in mind? Given that literally every other framework is quite similar (RoR, PHP's solutions, etc).

There is another niche, the HTTP server libraries, but they are much more low level.


That's a great explanation. Thanks for that.


I was working with legacy code bases where the original Devs loved frameworks. Massive performance problems and nobody could understand how it all fit together at runtime.

Hibernate eventually got entirely nuked, Spring we couldn't entirely unwind easily; it had caused a whole bunch of crappy architectural issues and was too much effort to rewrite from scratch.

Although the code looked simpler using the frameworks and annotations, it was actually a huge rotten mess that didn't work well at all, with workarounds for all kinds of weird things in it.


Boot has an "app" (err, lib) for everything. It's fully featured, and highly opinionated.

Pretty much any modern computing problem you have, Boot has you covered[1].

So while you may not have ever used a Streaming library before, if you know Boot, then the Spring Boot Streaming library will already be familiar.

[1] https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot


So you all launched anyway? YOLO embodied entirely I guess...


That is unsurprising and totally wild.

Not very confidence inspiring.


Because the tech is in a move fast break things phase, not business critical to anyone and mostly just a toy


> not business critical to anyone and mostly just a toy

Except it's business-critical to OpenAI, who hopes to look impressive when you call the number.

Instead, for some unknown percentage of folks that call will become confused, or think OpenAI is a bit janky. Based on the anecdotes here, it seems the percentage of people who will experience this issue is not trivial either.

My guess is OpenAI paid a truck load for this 1-800 number and rushed it into "production" for this product launch without waiting for all old routing to be updated.

That's a pretty amateur mistake, honestly.


Maybe. I’m sure it was calculated either way and their mistake to make. Could be that they are working in the background and have a plan to resolve before next week. I don’t think people in general have such high SLA expectations. It’s a minor blip in the grand scheme of things.


The owner of an 800 number literally pays for your calls to them. This is a promotion of their services, not a business critical or even paid product.


I would expect nothing but hallucinations and nonsense coming out of any LLM regarding recently-released movies (aka. the ones you often find on flights).


In every post about LLMs there is someone to blindly say something like this.

When in reality if you ask ChatGPT for 10 good movies from this year you will get this.

Anora - Directed by Sean Baker, a compelling drama about the life of a sex worker in Coney Island.

Challengers - A provocative tennis drama directed by Luca Guadagnino, starring Zendaya.

Dune: Part Two - Denis Villeneuve's continuation of the epic science fiction saga.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - An action-packed prequel exploring the origins of Furiosa, directed by George Miller.

Inside Out 2 - Pixar's sequel that dives deeper into the complexities of human emotions.

Wicked - A musical fantasy adaptation directed by Jon M. Chu . The Zone of Interest - A thought-provoking film about Auschwitz, directed by Jonathan Glazer.

The Idea of You - A steamy romance starring Anne Hathaway.

Hit Man - A comedy thriller starring Glen Powell.

The Outrun - A powerful drama about a recovering alcoholic, starring Saoirse Ronan.

Let me know if you'd like more details about any of these!

Which is a great list.


Those descriptions are less detailed than the information you will see on basically any streaming interface and yet it still manages to not being very good. For example, no person who had actually seen Anora would describe it as "a compelling drama about the life of a sex worker in Coney Island".


I haven't seen Anora so I'll give you that one, but you cited that as if it was just one of many examples, when in fact I think it's the only one, as all the other descriptions seem reasonable.

Originally the problem was supposedly that it would hallucinate complete and utter gibberish, but now here we are quibbling over one example and insisting that maybe it's not quite as good as alternative descriptions.

The gap between what was produced and what you're looking for is small enough that I think it could be covered with some slightly tweaked prompt instructions.

I'm not saying you're wrong but want to note how the goalposts keep seeming to shift whenever we talk about these capabilities.


I'm not Alupis. I can't and am not trying to speak on their behalf. I'm therefore not moving the goalposts they established. I'm making my own related point.

That point is that the information provided above about these movies is worthless. It does not add any new value beyond what would already be available in the streaming interface. Several of the descriptions are nothing but the genre and one person involved in the making of the movie. And yet even with these descriptions being incredibly short and vague, they still manage to contain at least one misleading summary.


I'm aware that you're a different commenter but you are addressing yourself to a comment that was in reply to them and therefore not necessarily appropriate to measure such a comment against entirely new criteria that you want to bring into the conversation.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, these descriptions seem perfectly fine in that they're accurate and meaningful. And it if you want to start getting fast and loose with all kinds of new extra criteria and requirements for what it's supposed to do, they all seem squarely within the reach of the capabilities on offer, with some prompt tweaks.


>these descriptions seem perfectly fine in that they're accurate and meaningful

The description of Wicked doesn't mention either The Wizard of Oz or the Broadway musical. So yes, the descriptions don't contain obscene mistakes like calling Wicked a courtroom drama. If that is enough for you to call these "accurate" while ignoring the vagueness or the 1 in 10 failure rate on the Anora description, fine by me. But you must have some weird definition of the word "meaningful" to apply that to descriptions like the one of Wicked. That simply isn't a helpful way to describe that movie.


The comment thread you're at the end of started with this:

> I would expect nothing but hallucinations and nonsense coming out of any LLM regarding recently-released movies (aka. the ones you often find on flights).

The comment that replied to it (the one that you're arguing against) provides evidence that proves it wrong. You are correcting someone who isn't incorrect, and I think the person you're responding to is very justified in saying you're moving the goalposts here.


A reply downthread is not an endorsement of everything said upthread. I'm happy to discuss the points I made, but I’m not going to be made to defend something I didn’t say.


Well if you're not endorsing what was said upthread, then your comment is a complete non-sequitir. The parent comment said "LLMs can't give movie recommendations for recent movies because they'll hallucinate or spout nonsense", the next comment responds with a list of accurate movie recommendations, and then you come in and say this:

> Those descriptions are less detailed than the information you will see on basically any streaming interface and yet it still manages to not being very good.

The points you made were not relevant to the discussion at hand. It's like if people were having a debate about where to find the best tacos in town and you stepped in to say "tacos aren't as good as hamburgers, you know" and then got upset that nobody wanted to debate that point with you. It's not everybody else's fault if you don't understand how conversations work!


I don’t know why you are letting that one reply define the bounds of this conversation. My comment was directly relevant to the first comment in this thread and the comment I was replying to.


> I haven't seen Anora so I'll give you that one

It was literally the first movie in that list.

You tried making a counter example and the first part of it was already wrong.

That’s the point. Not that it _cant_ give good answers, but whether it does or not is a crap shoot.

Now to analyze how correct it was we need to verify each movie it gave… It’d be faster just to read the movie descriptions.


I _have_ seen Anora and I think that description is perfectly fine. It certainly isn't "hallucinations and nonsense" which is what the parent comment is claiming. What part of that description do you consider "wrong"?


You're still trying to imply that the list as a whole is as inaccurate as that one particular example.

And I think that's quite obviously not the case, most, probably every other example on the list is just fine.


I’m saying that because of the one incorrect example, I can’t just assume that the rest are accurate.

I now need to either trust a machine that I know gives incorrect information (as demonstrated by the first example) or I need to verify each example.

> probably every other example on the list is just fine.

Why don’t you check IMDb and let me know?

While you’re at it, don’t think about how much faster it would’ve been if you just looked up popular recent movies on IMDb or rotten tomatoes.


For comparisons, Wikipedia's opening paragraph for Anora reads:

"Anora is a 2024 American comedy-drama film written, directed, and edited by Sean Baker. It follows the beleaguered marriage between Anora (Mikey Madison), a young sex worker, and Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch. The supporting cast includes Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Aleksei Serebryakov."

I haven't seen the film, but it doesn't seem incompatible with ChatGPT's briefer description.


You see the issue here, right?

Instead of just checking with a first party source, you ask a statistical guessing machine for an answer.

There was a disagreement about the answer, so we needed to dig deeper.

You bring up Wikipedia, a 3rd party source of information. That description could also be wrong (it’s probably not, but stick with me)

Instead of just checking with a first party source (IMDb is very easy to search on), we went through several layers of obfuscation.

This was an issue for Wikipedia early on, but it has citations, at least. AI doesn’t and doesn’t have an army of people constantly fact checking every answer generated either.

There’s no benefit to asking AI for information like this. Especially since the in flight summary has accurate information that’s more than “drama, sex worker, cony island”

Maybe something like perplexity is better, since it has citations, but I haven’t tried it for very long yet.


These details are already available in the in flight entertainment interface


They were responding to a commenter suggesting it would produce completely unusable results, the question was never about whether the results produced would be redundant.

I know that any mention of fallacies, valid or otherwise, causes instinctive eye rolls, but in this instance I agree with them that this amounts to moving the goalposts.


This type of response is called moving the goal post. When someone responds to one claim, the claim is changed to something different which was not part of the original argument. This is debating in bad faith.


Great! Now show me a system that can verify that list for accuracy as well. Not to be flippant, but this is the complaint. You can't approach outputs uncritically. And no I don't want it to be as unreliable as a person who also forgets how English or basic knowledge works at random intervals.


They were responding to a comment that suggested that this was a category where the only thing you would get is unintelligible gibberish.

You don't even seem to be disputing the actual results here, just gesturing towards a kind of philosophy class exercise of whether we can ever "really" verify its accuracy. I see Wittgenstein's name increasingly tossed around in these parts (a good thing!), so I'll just note that one of the reasons he's hailed as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century is because he felt these puzzles about "really" knowing were frivolous.

I don't think I agree that what's needed here is some new and extra process of verification. I think the same usual quality control criteria that are already being used are good enough in this case.


Yes, like, how are corporations (like movie productions in this example) supposed to control their message?


> Great! Now show me a system that can verify that list for accuracy as well. Not to be flippant, but this is the complaint. You can't approach outputs uncritically.

In general you can't, but surely it's not that big a deal if ChatGPT offers an inaccurate summary of a movie you're about to use to kill time on a flight? I suppose it becomes important if, e.g., you're relying on it to tell you whether a movie is appropriate for children, but, if you're just asking it whether a movie is worth watching, that's a question that doesn't have an objective, factual answer anyway, so a hallucinated answer is probably about as useful as that of a not-previously-known reviewer.


If I invested money into a film, I would want its representation in the world to reflect what the movie is about at the very least.


> If I invested money into a film, I would want its representation in the world to reflect what the movie is about at the very least.

Sure, but that's the filmmaker's interest. As someone sitting on a plane trying to decide whether to watch a movie, I care about my interest, not that of the person who made it. I'm not particularly arguing for the use of ChatGPT here (I wouldn't use it), just that the risks it usually poses are fairly minimal in this case.


You're forgetting the information hazard of five years from now someone mentioning a movie and you saying "oh I didn't want to watch that because of the car chase" and everyone looks at you funny because it is a film set in the 1700s about a carriage driver.


Movie reviews are amongst the most subjective things, how do you define “verify” and “accuracy”?


If I run a business, I guess I would have the ability to bring a libel suit would be one way?


The system is I'm a movie nerd who knows all the best movies of the year and have seen them all.


You’d be pretty wrong, then. ChatGPT in particular will cite its sources via an internet site.

My wife wanted a pair of boots for Christmas that I couldn’t find in her size. Google was a wasteland of SEO, but ChatGPT found 5 sites and was able to tell me current stock levels.


Looks like this is using GPT-4 and has no knowledge after January 2022.

' As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2022, the last movie I have information on is "Spider-Man: No Way Home", which was released in theaters in December 2021. It was one of the most highly anticipated films of that year, marking a major event in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and the Spider-Man franchise. '


Here's a comparison of asking ChatGPT and Meta AI about actual in-flight movie choices.

I pasted the same initial prompts in both, but Meta AI needed more clarification. When ChatGPT found multiple entries with similar titles, it gave information about all of them.

https://gist.github.com/appsforartists/004bafe11a9e23a418fd5...


>[The Campaign] received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics. On the Rotten Tomatoes website, it holds a 65% approval rating from critics, based on 191 reviews, with an audience score of 60%.

The first thing I fact-checked, the Rotten Tomatoes scores are actually 66% and 51% respectively[1]. Probably not enough of a difference to sway any opinions, but an excellent example of the type of inaccuracy that the previous comment was referencing.

[1] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_campaign


Llama in WhatsApp can search the web, so usually gets these queries right.

Hilariously it often believes that it can’t access the web and then hallucinates reasons for how it can know things beyond its knowledge cutoff date. But in any case, it works very well for this use case.


I've heard that Twitter's (AKA X's) LLM (Grok) is really, really good at this sort of thing (in part because it has recent access to Twitter's data).


Web or other search access for LLMs really isn’t that new anymore, and I doubt that Grok will do a statistically significant sampling of everything on X, so I don’t really expect it to fare much better than a model with access to regular web search.


The people who require SAML, LDAP and Kerberos are often catering towards a specific userbase (ie. internal business customers).

The needs for Auth & Auth are different for public-facing apps/services. It's not entirely unsurprising many newer Auth solutions don't even attempt to implement SAML et al.

With all of the recent steep price hikes in the Auth SaaS space, it seems it's becoming increasingly important to actually own your user account data. By own, I mean have access to the database and be capable of migrating it somewhere else (even at a large inconvenience) if necessary.

KeyCloak seems awesome for this - but I am liking the "explosion" of new Auth providers that seem to be popping up everywhere these days.


Disclosure: I work for FusionAuth.

You should check out FusionAuth if you are looking at KeyCloak. We play in a similar same space (self-hostable, support for SAML, OIDC, OAuth2). I'd say KeyCloak has wider coverage for some of the more esoteric standards and is open source while we have a more modern API, dev-friendly docs, and great (paid) support.

FusionAuth is not open source, but you can self-host it for free and own your data[0]. Or let us run it for you. In the latter case, you still own your data--get it all from our cloud if you want to migrate.

I'm proud that the team wrote an offboarding doc[1]. It's your darn customer data, and every provider should support out-migration.

0: https://fusionauth.io/download

1: https://fusionauth.io/docs/lifecycle/migrate-users/offboard


Maybe I’m not your target audience but Yikes! Your pricing was unexpectedly high.

Also it’s not clear what premium features were or why MFA is a premium feature but only available at top tiers.


Hiya, thanks for the response.

Our pricing is kinda complicated as discussed before[0]. We're working on simplifying things.

Here's a list of features[1] which hopefully are clearer about what you get on what plans.

Where things get complex is that we sell both features/support and hosting, and you can buy both, either or neither from us. Our hosting isn't multi-tenant SaaS, but rather dedicated infrastructure providing network and database level isolation. That means what we offer is different than say a Stytch that offers a multi-tenant logical isolation.

Most folks that are price conscious run it themselves on EC2 or Render or elsewhere[2].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269197

1: https://fusionauth.io/feature-list

2: Here's render instructions: https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-on-render


To be fair, the pricing there is not out of line with other hosted SaaS auth services. The segmentation is also not out of line either.

However, the paywall (for all of these auth services) ends up being quite steep for the couple features that matter for a non-hobby app, such as custom domain name and MFA (totp or hooking up to an external SMS service). Unfortunately it makes these features expensive when you are starting out (paying ~$40 a month for only a handful of users, sort of thing...).

It is nice to see more and more of these services allow you to take out your data and migrate though - including the self-hosted options. Being vendor-locked for your user account data is a really big deal in my opinion. It often means having zero good options if the vendor decides to rake you over the coals one day.


Hiya, thanks for the feedback.

TOTP based MFA is included in the free, community plan.

As I mentioned elsewhere, for folks who are price conscious, self-hosting is the better option.

But I get it! The story I tell internally all the time is that when I was working at a startup, our entirely hosting bill was on the order of $200/month (on Heroku; it was a while ago). There's no way we would have paid $350 just for an identity solution. But we would probably have chosen to host FusionAuth community on heroku for much much less and operated it ourselves.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback.


Most b2b products are going to need SAML auth. Any reasonably sized tech business will want to onboard their employees into the software through SSO and the easiest way to do that is usually SAML if they are using something like Okta or JumpCloud.

Along with that, if they have compliance requirements like SOC2 then they really want the whole flow including offboarding any employees that have left the company.


You are describing enterprise, not normal b2b. Majority of businesses out there buying SaaS/PaaS products are not big enterprise with SSO needs nor compliance requirements. The SMB market is huge.

Enterprise types of users are their own beast.


KV Stores aren't magical... and you do need to store this data somewhere.

So what's different between this (or any of these new-aged Auth services) and something else more traditional? If anything, these new-age services make it easier to access your data if you need to, since you often control the backing database unlike auth0, etc.

Both DynamoDB and Cloudflare KV are queriable.

I guess I don't understand the negativity in your comment. If anything, your complaint sounds like an issue you and your team cooked up on your own.


I don’t think it’s the architecture or technology the commenter is reacting to, it’s this line: “You should never need to directly access any data that is stored in there.”

Statements like that are a huge red flag that the designers of the product are not particularly experienced with operating this type of system at meaningful scale.


Eh, the technology stack they discuss is directly accessible, though.

I read this as an advertisement, meaning if everything it working well you don't need to manage the database. Which is probably how it works 99% of the time in fairness.


The circumstances are immaterial; if the creators of a system are blasé enough to imagine you’ll neither need nor want to manage or query the underlying data storage, then they’re telegraphing naiveté and inexperience. Capacity, throughput, latency, consistency concerns exist in any nontrivial system and the pointy end/bottleneck of these is very often at the level of persistence. Auth services can add privacy and integrity to that pile. And so on. Consequently, glossing over it with a handwave is a bright red flag.


To me this statement read very differently. I read it as saying that the amount of state is small and portable enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about scalability issues or be married to a particular database product. I think the original complaint about it is overly critical and nit picking.


yes this was the intent


99% of the time is a rather high rate of failure .. 1% of a year is still over 3 days. 1% of a million is still a lot of incidents


Sure but you are allowed to put the 99% front and center in marketing.

A good chunk of the other 1% are square-peg-in-round-home situations.

It is good to support all the various edge cases but it is also on 6 to focus on the happy path


> since you often control the backing database unlike auth0, etc.

Auth0 has an option where you can use your own database for identities


Starting at $240 a month...


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: