This is super sketch for others on the platform. First hand experience from using OCI - they have severe capacity constraints and need _lots_ of heads up when you want to increase your usage of things. Auto scaling it ain't.
So if OpenAI starts drawing significant resources from their cloud hardware, good luck gettin your own. Including me :)
I always get very skeptical with putting more technology in the classrooms (at least here in the US). The primary problem is funding and too many kids for a single teacher. Educational innovation comes in with a bang and out with a whimper when the study turns out to be flawed, often quite severely.
I'm sure LLMs can augment learning in some settings, esp in higher ed, but putting more computer time for kids learning basics (I mean K-8 mostly) I hope is handled more carefully than things like Quizlet...
One of my high school teachers had a quote she was fond of repeating:
"Education requires three things: a teacher, a student, and a stump. Unwilling to change the first, unable to change the second, educators spend all their money on the third."
> I'm sure LLMs can augment learning in some settings, esp in higher ed
LLMs are great explainers of known theory. They can adapt to the level of the user and illustrate with concrete examples. They have infinite patience, there is no pressure.
When they don't lie. When they don't make up citations that don't exist.
I think GPT-4 is moderately useful for software development, and I use it daily, but I have to check even very minor things, and having ~25 years of programming experience means I can do that intuitively. A kid doesn't have that.
> When they don't lie. When they don't make up citations that don't exist.
I think this will be close to 0 of a problem when explaining to a HS biology student something like, what a mitochondria does or what mitosis is. It only fails (increasingly rarely) when you push the boundaries of human knowledge.
That assumes that the asker doesn't then ask follow-up questions that do probe beyond the could've-been-a-Wikipedia-page starting point. And I don't know about you, but how `structlog` should be configured had better not be "the boundaries of human knowledge". As I experienced yesterday evening, GPT-4 doesn't even do that right without human assistance.
LLMs are useful tools. They are dramatically less useful if you can't detect bullshit. By definition, a student is poorly equipped to do so, and moreso if allowed to atrophy in the area of research capacity because they can just ask an LLM. (A pocket calculator is a good analogy--life carries much less friction when you can efficiently do arithmetic and basic algebra in your head, because the affordances of dragging out a calculator to know how to minimize the change you get back are bad.)
I don't think it can. I have some experience in teaching and one of the worst issues I initially had was that you can't believe how messed the knowledge can be in heads of the kids. They literally mess everything – topics, words, culture, personal experience. Everything. To teach kids effectively you have to have a lot of background knowledge – from their family background to the info from teacher in previous class and you have to adapt constantly.
People who are talking about automation of education are grown up people who think that all people think structurally and just lack the specific knowledge. Kids actually don't do it.
Honestly, I think the primary problem in the US is parents completely offloading the responsibility of educating their kids onto the teacher. You need to have the appropriate push and environment at home for a successful education. You would never see that in South or East Asia.
This is a very economically driven situation in the US. Upper middles load their kids up non stop with educational stuff outside of the schools, but the lower middle on down can't afford this (it's really expensive) and school often functions primarily as child care.
I think you’re discounting relatively cheap fixes like mindset and pushing your kids to succeed at home. There’s plenty you can do besides throwing money at a problem. A lot of first generation Indian and Chinese immigrants exclusively rely on those methods, and this is usually after a day of working long hours at intensive jobs.
We were there over the summer and this was such a fantastic activity for my kids. It got them looking up at the buildings and really helped draw their attention to architecture and build a better mental map in their heads of the city. Not going to comment on if having a map is good or not, but the project is amazing.
Has anyone else noticed that their connection count stays 'correct' but a significant number of people that I used to be connected to now are surfaced as recommendations for me to connect with? It's absurd! I doubt people regularly go through their networks and unconnect from people that they don't want to keep in touch with, kind of defeats the purpose. So wth?
I have started thinking more about the traditional relationship between labor and management whenever someone brings up the topic of managing in the modern era. (Perhaps its because my highschooler is taking US History...) What I always find missed is that modern management glosses over the fundamental clash of interests, the IC interest versus the business interest, and that it is the manager's role to guide through carrots and sticks the IC to achieve the business interests. It often take many layers of management to complete the messaging gymnastics required to guide and hide the IC workers directions. But if you don't understand labor, you're missing a big responsibility of management.
Analyst firms (ie Gartner) are a big driver of this too. Couple that with the start up / VC model which needs to create new 'categories' to demonstrate differentiation, and you have a total mess.
I work for a vendor that sells a CNAPP. I've worked with this product before and it's been around for several years.
Until last week, I had never heard or read the term CNAPP.
"CNAPP is a term first coined by Gartner in 2021 to describe an all-in-one platform that unifies security and compliance capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to cloud security threats. A CNAPP integrates multiple cloud security solutions that have been traditionally siloed in a single user interface, making it easier for organizations to protect their entire cloud application footprint."
Thanks, Gartner. What a racket they have as a self-ordained arbiter of market segments.
What I find sketchy is that it is not easy to find out who is behind this service. The norm is an about us or a link to a parent site. Briefly skimmed the legalese (ToS & Privacy) and still not clear who these people or where they operate from. The linkedin link shows 8 people working there, mostly in BD from outside the US.
I don't think there is a nefarious purpose going on, i.e. getting people to sign up and stealing their info or payments, etc. However, it contributes to the erosion of trust on the internet. You're no longer sure if you're talking to a real dog in pajamas online or an AI pretending to be one.
I find that a lot of Show HN (YC companies included) that make it to the front page have the same problems. I usually don't make comments on it but I find it crazy that someone would launch either a paid product or something that takes your private information without knowing where they exist or who they are.
The FAQ https://generated.photos/faq directly answers this: it's made by the same company as Icons8, which has a long track record. The founder is Ivan Braun, who is indeed a real person (I've known him since the Icons8 days).
This could just be a side-project by some guy working in a tech company with a 'no inventions/IP clause' in his contract. People prefer to stay anonymous in such cases, and launch silently, as to not pull attention from their main org. Not everybody can be a twitter-tech bro announcing his creations on ProductHunt and not get in trouble for it.
It could be an attempt at entrapment by a hostile foreign power attempting to get blackmail material on western engineers by tricking people into accidentally viewing CSAM, and then leveraging that to try to turn western engineers into unwilling foreign agents by blackmailing them with the threat of turning them in to law enforcement and/or ruining their marriage. I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory but this is an anonymous site, which is free to use, targeted at English-speaking engineers, which generates extremely sketchy content. Some of the comments in this thread make it pretty clear that this site generates CSAM some percentage of the time. If you use the site you are rolling the dice and might become guilty of a crime, putting yourself in a position to be a pawn of a N Korean or other foreign country's intelligence agency.
Edit: If you get contacted by a foreign intelligence agency attempting to blackmail you, please report them to https://www.inscom.army.mil/isalute/ and also to 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324).
Doxxing refers to private individuals not companies and organizations.
In Germany for example every commercial website (which is defined very broadly and applies to most websites) is by law required to have an imprint listing the person/org responsible for the website and how to contact them (an e-mail address is not good enoguh). This means you can go to any German business website and get the full address, EU VAT ID and registration number of that company.
Under the GDPR more broadly (which also affects foreign companies offering services to EU residents) every company is required by law to have a privacy policy and that policy must include whom to contact for concerns and requests regarding personal data of the user/visitor and who (which legal entity) processes and stores the data.
This is the opposite of doxxing. It protects private individuals by making transparent to them who they are interfacing with and who holds their data. This is necessary for informed consent.
Sidenote: the website/app's cookie notice is pointless as it's using the same "redirect to google.com if user says no" logic porn sites used to do (do they still do this?) for age checks. The app also works without accepting the terms, so either it can work without accepting them or (more likely) it doesn't actually wait for the user's consent. Either way it doesn't do anything and doesn't comply with any privacy laws I'm aware of that would require it.
It's the same attack, to deanonymize, to hunt people down from the internet because you don't like what they say or do.
Germany is the only country in the world with that Impresseum policy because of it's highly leagalistic Prussian background, and you would find that many in the hacking community (e.g. CCC) take huge issue with it
The hacking community takes issue with it because it is overly broad and applies to sites any reasonable person would consider personal and non-commercial. The infamous precedent were early 2000s era personal homepages with banner ads on them to pay for the hosting. The presence of ads made them commercial and thus subject to the Impressumspflicht.
The CCC has a strong anarchist tendency unlike the US tech bubble which has a more libertarian (i.e. free enterprise) streak. They absolutely do not want companies to hide from accountability, which completely abolishing the Impressumspflicht would do.
Also note how I said the GDPR also requires transparency with regard to who processes and stores your data. This doesn't translate to the same requirements that exist for an Impressum but for companies and registered organizations it's enough to make them identifiable and recognizable, especially in combination with the Transparency Register, which is also part of EU law.
Fair enough, I'm just very aware of the doxx culture we live in and the insanity of the modern internet.
You're right legally, but obviously the GDPR is not fully followed -- Big Corpos just ignore it and pay the fine, and small companies can skirt it.
I don't understand your overall point about "data" though. Do you mean for free usage when people accept cookies from their logging, or just for customers of the API since you make an account?
In any case it looks like the FAQ now links to the parent company, but I could have imagined it just being a guy who didn't want to get doxxed or wanted to stay private.
I think being able to make a website or tool or thing and say "hey check this out" and stay anonymous is a key part of the internet, and frankly I don't mind if they make a small amount of money on the side. I know this is probably Ketzerei in Germany but in Anglo countries it's sometimes notoriously hard to track down corporate structure to people and such.
Germany is definitely incredibly pro copyright though so that probably plays a role.
> I don't understand your overall point about "data" though.
Data about you is your data. The GDPR defines it as such. As long as data can be traced back to you, even through pseudonymization, it remains your data. This includes anything from IP logs to what you did in the app. If it's tracked, that generates data, the data is tied to you, so it's your data. Given that the app invites you to upload pictures, which themselves could be other people's data, it's very relevant to know who is storing, transferring and processing it and for what purposes.
> Germany is definitely incredibly pro copyright though so that probably plays a role.
Sure, to some degree. I'd also like to believe that we have a heightened cultural awareness of the dangers of governments and corporations having access to personal information when things go south. The biggest civil control mechanism of the East German government was what at the time would have been considered an excessive amount of data collection about anyone even remotely suspicious of being critical of the state (and anyone affiliated with them). And prior to that the NSDAP used intricate record keeping to identify "Jews" and suspected enemies of the state. It doesn't matter if it's a corporation that has the data or the government because fascism doesn't make this distinction. So the only way to protect data is to have full transparency over who has it and why.
I haven't seen much discussion in defense of Reddit protecting their content from LLM training competitors. This to me is why they have to crack down on their API, it's no longer just SEO links back, it's training someone else's models on your content and community for free. This to me is the elephant. It's horrible how they treat their app community, but this is a massive problem for them.
Even if we ignore the idea of just scraping the site, how much would it cost an API user to grab most posts just once? Is it actually enough to stop anyone?
I put a lot of blame on the new POS 'self checkout' style that Square and Toast popularized. These let you configure the system to default add the tipping prompt, and it detaches the service provider from the self consciousness of asking for a tip at inappropriate times. Previously, there were only a few times when a consumer would be prompted for a tip in an official capacity - i.e. from a server at a restaurant - now, it can be institutionalized with the push of an admin button in some backend web console that any finance person can push and configure.
I also hate how it's pretty evident when you're not picking any of the default options and are going for a custom amount. It's always obvious and it makes me feel guilty.
So if OpenAI starts drawing significant resources from their cloud hardware, good luck gettin your own. Including me :)