I learn a lot from code I read, but don’t write. Did the author not read the code and simply threw it over the fence?

This is all valid (except probably the last sentence), but it also describes so many attempted changes right until they become darn near the default.

This sounds like why I heard Redfin wouldn’t work, or Netflix, or Amazon, or Uber, or PayPal, etc…. There are always these business complexities that make it seem like these spaces have too much friction, but if there’s enough money - if it can be done then people will figure it out.

tbh this sounds revisionist... I don't recall anyone saying that any of those services "wouldn't work". Uber I suppose is one where people thought they might run into regulatory problems, and with some of those companies people were concerned about profitability. But none those companies have I ever heard that the product itself was not going to work or be useful. (Nor, indeed, that the product was tested at large scale and performed 3x worse than the incumbent...)

Sorry that is revisionist. The idea of getting a movie mailed or streamed always sounded better than shitty blockbuster with limited selection and late fees.

The growth was fast for netflix/amazon/paypal/etc and people saw how it was an improvement from the get go.

I seem to recall a lot more hype for these companies than people saying it won't work. You seem to be cherry picking from the naysayers of the time, but not the broad consensus.

Code is usually over specified. I recently used AI to build an app for some HS kids. It built what I spec’wd and it was great. Is it what I would’ve coded? Definitely not. In code I have to make a bunch of decisions that I don’t care about. And some of the decisions will seem important to some, but not to others. For example, it built a web page whereas I would’ve built a native app. I didn’t care either way and it doesn’t matter either way. But those sorts of things matter when coding and often don’t matter at all for the goal of the implementation.

Well I think there are some people that disagree.

It may be unreliable to you. I see the life of most people around me getting better. Even people that are somewhat poor (not dirt poor, but free lunch poor) have homes, three squares and snacks, PS5, mobile phones with cellular data, and cable tv. The biggest life issues I see are usually strongly related to substance abuse and mental health.

Transplanting to even just the 80s would be a culture shock for most people.

Really curious. How is life getting better for most people? No one has kids, they can't afford families, medical care is unreachable, housing is unaffordable, I guess if your life is scrolling on an iphone its MUCH better but if you want to live, educate a family, retire, live in a safe community, or have healthcare its worse in every measure.

Still waiting on your evidence for peoples' lives getting better

There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.

EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.

If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.

Allergies are not simply overactive immune response. It’s the wrong type of response. What’s really intriguing is how much we can do innate immunity that we have done relatively little with.

> His first mistake was complaining to HR about another employee griefing him. HR is always going to consider the initial complainer as "the problem."

I can say this definitely isn't always true. In the companies I've worked at HR has always been extremely reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But corporate culture probably matters here, and I've never worked at a place like Uber.

That said, I would be curious to actual know the correspondence that was sent between the two. I can also say being a manager who has had to deal with a situation between two employees (more than once), they often both claim to be the one being harassed -- and usually even a little bit of digging reveals really clearly who the aggressor is.

The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.

My experience is also that HR is very reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But the thing is that when you have a legit harassment claim, the law is there to protect you. You could make things very expensive for the company in court, and so protecting the company does mean protecting you and treating you respectfully and cooperatively.

If HR investigates and finds you don't have a legit case and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. Your judgment and account of the facts is questionable in that case, and you're a liability from the other side.

I don't know exactly what happened in this case, but in the harassment case I've had to handle as a manager, the (male) employee said that the (female) victim had initiated everything and had this weird fascination with him, while the paper trail that everybody could see clearly showed that he was both the instigator and the one behaving improperly. Projection is strong in cases like these. So it's entirely possible we're not getting the full story from this anonymous blog post.

> and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you.

That protects other employees. If you are instigator and then go to complain to HR trying to make them punish the victim, firing you protects everyone around you. And it protects the culture from becoming toxic.

HR can play negative role, but this scenario is not one of those.

> The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.

I agree (although had interpreted the statement originally differently). Unfortunately, the part about "XYZ isn't there to protect you" applies to so much in life. Even police don't have a responsibility to you protect you (but just the public as a whole). The lesson from stuff like this is often to make sure your best interest are aligned with the most powerful and active stakeholder in the "room".

Or don't engage with people whose interests are not aligned with yours. You can do an awful lot, and carve out a pretty good life for yourself, if the powerful people whose interests are not aligned with yours don't know that you exist. Considering that everybody else has an incentive to align with the most powerful and active stakeholder in the world, this is the only way to avoid a unipolar dictatorship.

Relating it back to the story at hand, the blogpost's author would've done well to just disengage from the coworker who didn't like him, and also to not report them to HR. What I had to tell my report when HR got involved: "The right thing to do here was nothing."

Wait -- I'm fairly certain this is obvious to the person you were responding to. It may not be obvious to a lay person (who may not even know LLMs are trained at all). But I think this is obvious to almost all people with even a small understanding of LLMs.

I'm actually pretty convinced they're a troll or at the very least a high confrontation participant who is quick to move goal posts, ignore entire chains of logic, engage in ad hominim attacks of other posters, and is bringing zero novel insight anywhere in this thread

one of the posters said it can't even reason through chess, i ran the actual benchmark, spent money and actually proved that it can beat a 1000 elo chess engine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47316787

does this show i'm a troll? throughout this thread there has been misinformation that i have been dispelling.

what you are doing is ad hominem.

here's another post where i ran the prompt that the person asked which would apparently show that LLM's can't reason

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47316855

have you considered that you might be misinformed so what i say might look like trolling?

What do you do for work?

The most frustrating part for me is that this is how I used to write. I was always doing, "Why X works, but Y doesn't" and stuff like that. I may have seemed trite or pompous (or both) in the past, but now it seems like I'm copying an LLM -- which actually feels worse. One thing I haven't seen ChatGPT do much of is use sound-effects, so swoosh here we go with my new writing style schwing!

I feel you. I've been using en-dash in my writing for decades, but finding myself removing them now for fear of being mistaken for an LLM. (They tend to use em-dash, but I don't think people are going to distinguish between – and —.)

Do you think pre-AI writing is going to become really valuable because it is free of any AI assistance? If we all start using AI to assist in writing, then pre-AI writing may become important, similar to pre-atomic steel (i.e., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel)

>Do you think pre-AI writing is going to become really valuable because it is free of any AI assistance?

Serious question: Do you think old pictures are valuable because they are free of photoshop? Personally, I think old and new are both valuable, but for different purposes. Technology gave us new capabilities with new hope

Not the user you asked, but: Yes, it seems obvious that old pictures are valuable because they are free of photoshop. Not that this means that they are free of manipulation though, c.f. the famous picture of stalin at the river with/out his fellows.

I predict in the future a humans.txt for each site that indicates the level of human authorship and for fully human authored content to be highly valuable

I predict that this will not exist, given the existence of lying.

It's already important, for various reasons. E.g. I love older electronics books where they explain things in a very thorough manner (maybe because they had more time?). But of course reading older books is full of traps, in some subjects you need to be more careful than when analyzing the output of an LLM.

That is what I mourn the most. They were my punctuation get-out-of-jail free card.

I didn’t love them enough to figure out how to type them without doing two dash’s in Word and then backspacing out of one and hitting space again — but damnit, I miss it.

Before the LLM craze I didn't even know — was specifically different than just -, and I used it in the same way. But now I notice specifically when people use either, and when people use -- instead.

I think people do - it's one of the main ways you can reliably spot AI-generated content. M-dashes are so fat they stick out like a sore thumb.

En-dashes, set off with spaces, are an acceptable substitute for unspaced em-dashes in some style guides. See for example this Canadian government guide: https://nos-langues.canada.ca/en/writing-tips-plus/en-dash.

The use seems to be more common in British than in American English.

I would think to most people, (myself included!), it's just a 'dash'. A sentence was written with a dash - you could just ingest and read past it, like a comma.

Not saying this is accurate usage, maybe just real world usage.

I would hope most people can distinguish between the really short dash and the longer forms, even if they don't know any of the rules around them. But n versus m I don't expect people to notice.

I’m not sure I’m representative of “most people” in this respect (I have always used both n and m dashes), but I personally find the difference between n and m dashes bigger and more noticeable than the difference between regular and n dashes.

Because most people are ESL and really don't care.

I didn't even know there are multiple types of dashes.

I did know about multiple types of quotes because they kept breaking code on blogs. Still didn't care, but at least I learned how to spot and fix them.

Really looking forward to having the wrong kind of dash in code, but at least with current tech that seems like it won't happen.

Why wouldn't they. Never studied them. Never even thought twice about the dashes in a sentence. Didn't realize they were different till like a few months ago when everybody suddenly started focusing on how "AI" it makes everything look

And of course, the reason that ChatGPT sounds like that is that it's what a whole lot of explanatory expert blog posts did, and so when ChatGPT is told to talk like that, that's what it does.

It’s more a factor of how they structure the desired output. They follow a template instead of trying to come up with something on the fly

Just wait until someone makes a filter to turn emojis into sound effects.