These tools are still going in the direction of making a person sit in a chair all day.
What will really be a game changer is AI that can generate the bulk structure having been trained on our best of the best hand built models and we can iterate on the emotional details.
I’m working on the “bulk structure” part, training models to generate random game worlds that roughly adhere to the rules, look and feel like everyone favorites right now (while avoiding copyright issues).
After that my goal is empowering consumers directly to nudge the styles in their preferred direction.
I’m mostly motivated by the MBA-ifying of everything. My goal now is to just have AI produce new content for me, even if such a thing puts game developers out of a job. I’m starting to experiment with cartoons as well. Optimizing for myself like we do.
He also loves free speech except when employees discuss unions.
He wants Twitters algorithms to be open, but his cars must stay closed.
Requesting anything of him is anti-freedom then he projects at others how they could do better in the same contexts.
He’s like a crazy TV Lenny salesman who has never actually invented anything net new. He’s playing the acquisitions of other people work game to prop up his preference to not work.
Normal humans should not be given extreme leverage over other normal humans. Lie to me about “free markets” but as one of the 13% with and advanced degree, mine being in math, the average person has no ability to smell through his BS in detail, but they have a gut sense he’s just another used car salesman.
Xerox licensed it to them. They had no other path to market since nothing at PARC had to do with selling printer paper or whatever it is they did in the 70s.
Given that Musk has said himself that his titles don't mean anything[1], and the fact that he chose to give himself the title of Chief Engineer in response to people on Twitter making fun of him, it makes me believe that his self-appointed title as Chief Engineer is about as meaningful as his title of Technoking at Tesla.
Musk isn't an engineer, he has no engineer credentials and isn't licensed to engineer in any country. Moreover, Musk has never engineered anything.
Given the fact that both companies hire hordes of real, licensed and credentialed engineers, says that, yes, the engineers at both companies are responsible for the hard engineering work.
I prefer to stick with actual facts and not feelings or insults. I'm not sure why stating the basic fact that Musk is not an engineer would upset you so much.
It doesnt upset me, it goes against all evidence. There are hours of video online about him answering details about rocket technology, battery technology etc. He is a very technical CEO, not some bullshit artist like the Nikola guy.
He doesnt have an engineering degree, that doesnt mean a whole lot anyways.
This is the exact type of bias that Musk is trying to address with his stake in Twitter.
Nothing you stated can be backed up by anything real - all of it is taken directly from leftists twitter headlines that are more concerned with moral grandstanding then facts.
In the GP’s defense, the most vociferous anti-Elon folks online tend to also identify as leftists. It makes sense that they are because Elon is a capitalist billionaire known for being anti-Union, for overworking employees, and for being a general critic of leftists on his social media. He is the antithesis of most people on the left’s ideology.
>”Is asking that you practice what you preach leftwing these days?
Is being a two-faced lyer a concervative value?”
Now this is just playing dirty. This is a rhetorical cheap shot combined with moral grandstanding while also being nakedly partisan at the same time.
For years I used to be a fan of both Elon and Steve jobs, but when I learn about how Jobs treated his child or the 'diver saving kids in a cave is a pedo' incident, I have to conclude that they are shitty people.
I can imagine how a man forces another man out of a company, offers him a rotten deal or even robs him at gunpoint.
I cannot understand how a man abandons his child in poverty. The degree of irresponsibility required to live with yourself, to me is incomprehensible.
Elon's 'pedo incident' is simpler - he tried to butt in into a rescue mission with a submarine PR project, made a fool of himself, and instead of admitting his mistake has displayed infantilism and self control of a moody teenager. He could have shown at least some respect to the diver that has saved many lives. So maybe not irredeemable, but does not sound like someone you'd invite over for dinner.
Maybe it's not their fault, maybe the flaw is in our society and when you become super rich and people line up in a mile long-queue to kiss your ass, it starts messing with your head and you really start to believe that the sun shines out of your arsehole and other people are lesser to you, the ubermench. Thats just a hypothesis.
I know right wing people who hate both of them, reasons vary: disrespecting family values, pushing green agenda, whatever.
But sometimes you dislike a person because they are a shitty person, and it has to do with their action, not political leanings.
Really I just don’t think anyone should be above the real hands on work of supporting their existence.
Term limits for these roles should be explicit, not a game of they who can possess the most minds the longest wins.
The promise of human colonization of all of space time is still a high minded fantasy which makes this “hype/gossip my way to wealth” seemed designed to intentionally manipulate the same basal biology religion accidentally latched onto.
Who knows, maybe rockets to Mars are all wrong and we should be doing something completely different; information doesn’t need to just travel in a ship, but Star Trek seems to live long and prosper in his head.
All of it is taken from him not releasing source code.
From him not unionizing his companies.
From the officially documented history of his business acquisitions where he bought up business that already existed.
This approaching 1984 level double speak. It’s the lack of effort that speaks to his motives. Where is the code for his machines that can choose to plow into us? But somehow Twitters algorithm is super important.
Edit: tacking on his desire to burn up fossil fuels on rockets while the UN is announcing we’re firmly on track to an unlivable ecosystem. We are not optimizing human economics but Elon’s.
> There is a clear difference between open sourcing Twitter's algorithm that promotes certain tweets over others and Tesla's IP.
Given that the IP in question includes whatever solution Tesla adopts for the trolley problem, there certainly is a clear difference. Twitter's algorithm is for arguing about, Tesla's algorithm is going to be directly the cause of death for someone (arguably, it already has).
I am serious and any self-driving car engineer would agree with me. (I got this opinion from an AI lawyer at such a company.)
The truth is the opposite - not only will cars never make a "trolley problem" decision (because the only thing they should be doing is braking), it would be immoral to give them the capability, because it might decide it's in a trolley-problem scenario at the wrong time and randomly decide to sacrifice you.
I agree braking should be the default. But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
In fact self-driving cars normally change lanes as part of their path finding. So a failure to change lanes in an emergency would be unusual.
Disagreement over the correct behavior will result in lawsuits of course. "It should have attempted to miss me!" vs "It should have stayed in it's lane!"
We'll need legislation to settle this, for insurance purposes at the very least.
It shouldn't do what's correct, but rather what's predictable. Anything else is less safe for other people around it.
If the brakes turn out not to work, that is quite the problem, but hopefully it'll notice in time to not accelerate in the first place. Maybe it can still engine brake.
You don't "choose" because, as I said, it is unsafe to program your system to make choices. You brake because that's what a car does.
Your problem isn't real because the car doesn't exist in a logical world with N or M discrete things, it exists in a real world where it can be mistaken about what's happening outside it. Letting it make choices like that would have a bad outcome if it hallucinates (occupant+1) grandmas in front of it and decides to heroically sacrifice itself and you.
> But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
Even the tweet you've cited says:
> there is nothing in the street which you want to collide with. the correct response in every case is to evade the thing that's in the street.
(emphasis mine)
So braking is clearly not the only option.
I truly hope that you do not work on software or hardware that is in any way close to areas like this. You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system. Cars have brakes and steering wheels. Any real world system will use a combination of the two of them to try to keep the occupants and those outside the vehicle safe. Pretending that there will never be situations where there are conflicting choices to be made is ... well, I just find it unbelievable that anyone reading HN could try to deny that there will be situations like this.
I should point out that the guy I linked is an AI lawyer, so the replies aren't actually as valuable input in this case… also, I think he uses "evade" to mean "not hitting something" so braking still counts.
I've had other discussions with literal self-driving car company engineers where they told me it's not a real problem as usually defined. Though I can't link those, here's one where someone asks the Aurora people about it.
It's the best option because you're not the only moving thing on the street. Braking in response to a car in front of you is normal, but evasive maneuvers at speed aren't. You don't know what other people are going to do in response to that.
Oh, but I will let you turn or reverse as long as you signal first. I just don't think you should do it at speed with no warning even in a "least bad option" situation.
> You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system.
Sorry for being a theoretical murderer, but you weren't talking about real world issues, you're talking about a trolley problem! That's defined as:
- there's 2+ discrete paths you can take. (semi-true for cars)
- there really is something on each path you'll hit. (semi-true, in reality they'd react to you in good and bad ways)
- your knowledge about this is correct. (not true, SDCs' world-knowledge is not perfect)
- you are going fast enough to be dangerous. (semi-true, SDCs will drive at safe speeds more often)
- you must go forward. (not true, SDCs can brake or reverse)
#3 and #5 being the big problems making this unrealistic.
Maybe a real world problem would be driving on a mountain road and there's a boulder about to fall on you? In that case, I agree braking would not be safe.
Yeah there is a clear difference. I never said there was not.
Strawman.
I have a very high iq; in a past life I designed power switching machines and high performance boards for Nortel. Also that’s an appeal to higher authority.
Also these companies are pretty data driven through automation; big banks are run from 2GB excel sheets. It’s just people doing math and the ones doing best also happen to have political tradition on their side.
UAW is corrupt, encouraging them is a bad idea.
Unions are symptom of corporations where employees don't have enough equity.
Also a symptom of incompetent governments.
If you fix the government or give employees equity you don't need unions.
Tesla aspires to give employees equity.
There are many who became millionaires after joining tesla early and working the line.
There are many who became millionaires through unions.
It’s almost as if humans will work to enrich each other and the numbers game is artificial political semantics; millionaires appear in both constructs!
At least I can vote and discuss openly union operations.
Not so with Papa Elon. The outputs of labor are his preferred targets.
Why does humanity keep doing this?
Oh and governments serve at the will of the people which seems fine with the status quo. I’m not expecting much movement there. Any improvement on Main Street has to occur within politics as usual which means deflating Elon for change.
It’s really sus to suggest his vision for the far future is possible given he sits right at the same edge of discovery we do. “Outlook uncertain” for that far down the road is the only honest answer. Especially when “build rockets to nowhere” and even EV production are exacerbating industrial feedback loops threatening the species.
I don’t know when I learned it, but I’ve looked it up a few times to be sure I’m not day dreaming; after the WW2, declassified propaganda research became the basis for ad and marketing programs in university.
It’s always been about establishing a mood and inserting a meme to go with it. Maybe that’s “gotten worse” as we whittle stats looking for growth. I think people are just aware of what’s always been true.
Somewhere along the way it became blind allegiance to a certain kind of agency, like a religion. We’re all busy FOMOing, being ourselves, like the Sprite commercials told us, we miss that we’re just shuffling along the same old routine as dad and grandpa, feeling too unique to be required to grow a potato or sew a pillow.
I want to say it was during college years which for me was mid 90s. My focus latched onto anything I could apply elastic structures to; advertising/marketing and it’s effects on economics.
Circling high minded wisdom isn’t new. Tribal chieftains, god kings, preachers, now the nerds promising human longevity and prosperity for all-time to come… if we all just follow this model, it’s ours for the taking! Not so new.
I’m still waiting to be impressed.
Onward with the next generation rug pull. They got pensions in the 80-90s. It was reported Trump and co were looking into leveraging 401ks for gambling, but they used covid to hand over stacks of cash without question to leverage the average workers debtors prison they find themselves in.
Humans have longed relied on metaphor and analogy to provide context. Chemistry is a contextualized generalization of certain physical phenomena.
Neurons are just temporal spatial events of various mathematical parameters; gradients and ranges of heat, light, etc.
Everything is some form of “how matter happened to coalesce relative to light during $arbitrary_date_time_range”
Or it’s all the specialized language of chemistry and biology.
Six to one, half dozen to another. Normalizing the descriptions isn’t proof of correctness, it’s a specific normalized set of glyphs to simplify communication.
My issue simply stems from how people try to disconnect our conscious experiences from the physical phenomena that underlies it.
Perhaps its my own perception on how I read into statements that make these assertions, but humans have quite a long history of invoking magic "souls" and such to explain thought processes and behaviors. My insistence on referencing the underlying phenomena is an attempt to counter this.
there’s absolutely no reason, for example, as to why unitive consciousness as described in some Hindu philosophies would be in contradiction with our experience of cognition originating entirely within a chemical framework of understanding reality.
I'm not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting that companies shouldn't avoid hiring unqualified people that generate less value than their cost on average?
Research into who brings value, what technologies improve efficiency, has been inconclusive. The models end up with so many variables the conclusions are meaningless; any one parameter is insufficient, all the parameters needed mean no one parameter is greater than another. How can a value assessment being useful given all the required context that also has to exist? Is it a measure of value or traditional human bias?
Humans are prone to group think, belief in words of power, sigils; why believe in unfalsifiable value assessment when it comes down to tried and true ownership?
If traditional politics win at the end of the day why the belief this matrix of value isn’t just another cognitive boondoggle?
I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding in what interviewers are testing for. Interviewers at most companies aren't trying to evaluate or quantify a candidate's inherent value or general technical prowess. They're trying to determine whether or not the candidate can help solve immediate and real problems that the company has, while also trying to get a sense of whether the candidate has the potential to grow with the company long term.
There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.
A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.
I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”.
We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same.
Only 13% of the country has an advanced degree (mine is MSc in math earned in the 90s; I’m old) and knowledge is not locked away in those heads. Education does not make people infallible and omniscient.
This is a result of traditional political memes; owners rule, everyone else drools. The filtering and sorting inside that cognitive bubble is just the proles making proles dance like jesters. No scientific theory makes this the one true way of organizing effort.
Memorizing semantics is not proof they’re correct. If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal, our institutions are built on deference to BS, since that system is the bedrock used to prop up tech VCs.
"If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal"
Shorting is only illegal if it's naked. When I ask people who say this what they mean, the answer is usually that the shorting must be naked because so many shares are being shorted. But that isn't how that works. If you have other evidence though, I'd certainly be interested.
Here’s my investment advice; go back to the late 90s, load up on tech, use the gains to dabble in btc, use those gains to retire by 40.
Worked for me.
I know how the boring numbers game works and optimized for it. I’m being honest instead of equivocating in Anglo-babble reasons why a process is an acceptable measure for filtering some people. To see poetry in this is a bit weird. It’s the same old fundamental arithmetic operations applied to different geometry. Pretty routine for us been there done that’s.
You seem extremely jaded, and the way you speak about religion is rather boorish in my opinion.
I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor road infrastructure. At least a few people a week don't die specifically because a UAV I helped make was able to deliver them a blood transfusion. The company is for-profit, and in exchange for my work I am compensated in salary and in equity. The better the company does, the more people have access to life saving medical care, and the more money I personally make. The UAV system also requires people to operate them, and so the company employs hundreds of people in those developing countries. One of the earliest and most tenacious in-country employees quit a couple years ago because they got accepted to a robotics program at Stanford.
The last employee I personally managed the hiring of only had a couple years of community college experience and self-proclaimed ADHD. Despite my intent for them to only spend 6 hours or so on the interview process, they spent probably 16 hours because they found the interview process itself personally rewarding.
The company CEO drives a crappier car than everyone else at the office. By coincidence, I had a serious problem last week that required intervention, and I quite literally made the CEO dance like a jester for me in order to make a point. There was no scientific theory involved.
I'm right there with you regarding the corruption of most financial and government institutions. I don't think it's as black and white as "capitalism bad", though.
Have you ever been in a job or taken a class with other people and not been able to see the different between the more competent and more incompetent people?
Yes, but I only see facets of their performance. And I’m only interested in specific areas, and might be blind to other talents or issues. They might be the brightest bulb in the training class, but spend all their day reading hacker news and creating memes.
It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.
Re: experience and working hard vs. working on what the project needs, that's definitely a trait of more seasoned engineers. I'd say it's a matter of learning strategy over tactics. I've gotten pretty good at that balance over the years. When I came into my current project I focused on aspects of the software that had been sorely neglected before me, and plenty of folk where skeptical for the first year or so. Now in hindsight the results speak for themselves, and it's apparently become a story of legend that my coworkers tell new hires.
Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.
This is one of those things I stupidly thought I understood when I was a Jr. Engineer, and now understand quite a bit differently after decades have gone by.
The more competent people weren’t necessarily the ones getting more things done, or the most visible, but were those engineers who understood the long term implications of what they were building, how it related to the business, and their relationship to other teams and customers. It’s trivial to be a good “performer” toiling away on a feature or system that shouldn’t exist. It’s exponentially harder to have the awareness to identify where the real problems are, and make sure you’re investing effort where it actually needs to go.
Indeed. Experienced interviewers can size up a candidate in the first 10 minutes and fairly accurately predict how their debrief will go. The rest of the interviews are just building up confidence, and making sure there's enough redundancy to tolerate the occasional bungle or accidental awkwardness. Folk get hired all the time despite getting imperfect interviewer feedback. I've had interviews where the first 45 minutes were painful but then the candidate blew me away in the last 15 minutes.
It’s always people. Biden is a person. Putin is a person.
Hiding behind language like country or state is part of the propaganda and mind virus such people rely on, insuring agency defers to concept. They’re self serving people, not concepts.
> Software engineering should be about more productive UX, not flexing one’s ability to parse arbitrary syntactic art.
Tasks lists are generally useless without their context. It makes sense to have tasks along their context (be it plain-text, markdown, JS, python...) Also it's more maintainable and portable. YAML/JSON/SQlite will be a headache when the user decide to migrate to another tool. This approach only require a text editor, any text editor in any platform. You can plug in whatever you prefer for syncing and sugar.
For a very few cases I use YAML to store data that isn't parsed by any program (only by me). And I can write a comment like 'TODO: Do something.' or "FIXME: X isn't working.' On the terminal using a code searcher and a text editor I can easily find and jump on those.
UX creates context from the users perspective, not the back end data format. This format creates a headache in that nothing can parse or write it except the humans that learn it.
I can easily search an SQLITE file from a CLI (wrote me a tool a long time ago to fuzzy find). I doubt the YAML lib for Python is going to become obsolete soon. I can instantly work with that format on any machine with a common language. There’s already Taskwarrior.
It’s electrons in a machine, hundreds of different paths to porting it around, changing it, etc.
Look, don’t get me wrong; I’m not about to pour sugar down someone’s gas tank. I’m just walking through my inner monologue debating this format someone chose to put up for open review and discussion.
I write data that makes sense to have as normalized in YAML format even if I'm not parsing it in any program because I may do so in the future and YAML is ergonomic.
But for things that shouldn't be normalized I write then as plain-text notes using markdown notation. It isn't true that nothing can parse plain text. I wrote a tool to do that and it works as expected. Of course it's bad design if you look exclusively from the software engineering perspective but ergonomics also matter and parsing text isn't hard.
Don't get me wrong also. I'm just a guy with peculiar use cases and bad experiences migrating away from Evernote and later Joplin.
I think the viewpoints on that are wildly diverse. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the exact opposite. Hence, I think it’s great that there is a big variety of different approaches that everyone can pick from according to their own preferences.
Sure; I’m just expressing mine. The “glyphs and how to display or sort them wars” aren’t important enough to me to take real offense to alternatives. This is just idle discourse for me.
Lindy Effect type thoughts, why import another dependency; familiarity, existing portability, and habits with current formats; deep and wide tooling and language support… road built; let’s drive to shovel poetic drivel out the door.
When a mind latches onto a modal for problem solving, every problem is a nail.
Technocrats have to try and illustrate the value of their technocratic solutions.