This has never been the case across the history of humanity -- there has never existed a non-biased institution, and it's incredibly naive to think that a German think tank funded by the German government would be any exception.
"Level headed" and "sober" people are not immune to the effects of incentives and conflicts of interest. Researchers are dependent on grants, on invitations to conferences, etc., and so are liable to follow trends (tariffs bad), and p-hack to support the mainstream narrative (as they do in this analysis with P values > 0.01).
> German academia is actually full of sober, level-headed, nuanced people
Thanks for the laugh. I hope you realize how pretentious this sounds. In actuality, Germany's GDP is about 1/6th of that of the US, so these German academics don't sound very bright for how "level headed" and "sober" they are.
If/since bias is everywhere and implicit because a person is that person and their own experiences, why point it out here so explicitly????
You do not point that out every. Single. Time. somebody argues even though it is true, or do you? Because that is just too shallow, that is the basis, nothing can be below that, so there is no point in pointing to the ground every time. So when you do point it out, it is YOU who has an agenda.
No, just when Europeans (like yourself) need a reminder that they're not exceptional in their "level headedness" and "soberness", and in fact are anti-exceptional when it comes to real world outcomes like GDP.
Today the S&P500 is at an all-time high, energy prices are at all-time lows, and there is no clear indication of recession. This, all in spite of the fact that for the last decade, economists have been crying that tariffs would ruin the American economy, trigger deep recession, etc.
The claim of this analysis is a significant backpedaling on the narrative they've been wrong about regarding the effects of tariffs. Instead of trying to reposition the goal posts on the effects of tariffs, it would be far more productive to simply acknowledge that the original dire predictions of tariffs did not manifest.
Blind person uses Meta Raybans glasses as a sight aid to help navigate her surroundings. For instance, asking the glasses what aisle of the supermarket she's looking at. Wanted to share this since it seems like a really cool usage of integrated LLM technology.
One should be suspicious of ulterior motives when the CEO of an AI company makes a claim like this.
On one hand, LLMs do require significant amounts of compute to train. But the other hand, if you amortize training costs across all user sessions, is it really that big a deal? And that’s not even factoring in Moore’s law and incremental improvements to model training efficiency.
yes, at least as long as you constantly develop new AI models
and you still need to run the models, and e.g. for GPT4 that is alone already non trivial (energy cost/compute wise)
through for small LLMs if they are not run too much it might be not that bad
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Generally I would always look for ulterior motives for any "relevant" public statement Sam Altman makes. As history has shown there often seems to be some (through in that usage "ulterior" has a bit too much of a "bad"/"evil" undertone).
To cut it short he seem to be invested in some Nuclear Fusion company, which is one of the potential ways to "solve" that problem. Another potential way is to use smaller LLMs but smaller LLMs can also be potentially a way how OpenAI loses their dominant position, as there is a much smaller barrier for training them.
Data centers cost 2% of electricity (Statistics from a few years ago).
AI inference is so costly at scale, one can easily see data centers start using 4% of total electricity, and in the next decade 8%. That will start to have severe effects on the power grid, basically require planning many years in advance to setup new power plants and such.
"Moore's law and incremental improvements' are irrelevant in the face of scaling laws. Since we aren't at AGI yet, every extra bit of compute will be dumped back into scaling the models and improving performance.
It doesn’t really matter how you manage changes to feature flags, but using version control gives you a couple of nice benefits:
* gives developers the opportunity to describe their change
* let’s you roll back a problematic patch
* blame and bisect problematic patches
Ideally, you should also be able to see your feature flag changes in prod much faster than it takes to cut a release. You need this in order to be able to quickly roll back bad features.
Awesome, that’s makes total sense. Am I right in thinking the practices described here at Facebook are more like progressive delivery?
As in, instead of adding code to call out to some external feature flag or configuration system, new changes are deployed automatically in isolation and requests are routed to them progressively for larger and larger cohorts? All while validating the health of the change automatically?
This is a classic example of the xy problem https://xyproblem.info/, where the author is asking for advice on his solution (how to study react on a vacation without internet), when for the vast majority of circumstances the best advice for the author would be to not waste his vacation studying React.
Thats all fine and dandy for a site like StackOverflow, but we’re on HN here - there’s neither an obligation for commenters to write the comments you want to read, nor a guarantee your question will be understood the way you like.
> You don't seem to understand what a conditional is; you'd have a hard time doing math or formal CS.
Ad hominems are against TOS.
Answering the question is irrelevant if it’s the wrong question to begin with. And for the wrong circumstances (ie if this is a family vacation) can be counter-productive. It’s far more productive to zoom out, ask why the author is asking for advice to study react on vacation, and address that instead. Consider this as you advance your career past recent college grad / swe1 :)
I'm sorry but I find your position and expressed attitudes to be patronizing. They are words I would expect from someone who's assumption is that they know better than the other people they talk to in life.
I've no idea what you meant by your reference to college grad / swe1 but it certainly didn't lessen the above-described impression.
I feel like this is a solvable problem:
1) make feature flags be configured to have an expiration date. If over the expiration date, auto-generate a task to clean up your FF
2) If you want to be extra fancy, set up a codemod to automatically clean up the FF once it's expired
I don't see the problem with developers using flags for configuration as a stopgap until there's a better solution available.
It can be done by opening a PR, I haven't tried it yet, but I'm curious to try out https://github.com/uber/piranha or maybe hear some experiences if someone has used it
AFAIK, it'd only open a PR if the flag is fully enabled and has some heuristics to determine when it's safe to remove. Honestly, I haven't tested it but I'm curious to know if someone had either good or bad experiences.
If all the PRs are instantly rejected, that would be a bad sign, but I couldn't find someone who effectively used it. I mean, it's been around for a while but it didn't spread out, so that already gives me some hint
If the cleanup only happens if the flag is not used, then the "expiration date" is basically meaningless. You can either delete it or you can't. Who cares if it's expired or not.
I think expires is just a signal for a feature that should "potentially" be removed. I believe it's a good way to focus on the ones you should pay attention to. But, it might be cool if you could say "Yes, I know, please extend this for another period" (or do not notify me again for another month)
Ads are not at all horrible. Ads help connect products with the niche markets of people that could benefit from them. Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. Yes, when done distastefully, ads can be quite horrible (ie ads for gambling and other vices), but when done well, both the user and advertiser benefit. This has to be true, otherwise, if users never found ads useful they would never click on them, and then advertisers would’ve never pay for advertisements since they wouldn’t benefit them.
I appreciate your perspective on the potential benefits of ads. However, I’m emphasizing a much deeper, existential concern here. Our lifes, essentially, are the sum of what we pay attention to. In this context, advertising doesn’t just sell products; it habitually redirects our attention, shaping our experiences and, consequently, our lifes in profound ways.
The pervasive nature of advertising can subtly dictate the rhythm of our lives, often reducing moments of potential introspection, creativity, or connection with others into opportunities for commercial engagement. It’s a constant auction of our attention at the cost of personal enrichment and depth of experience.
It alters our relationship with ourselves and with the world, as our attention is steadily guided away from personal priorities and towards commercial ones. This is a critical and largely unexamined impact of advertising. We are, effectively, paying the ultimate price, which is life itself. No amount of "taste" in individual ads can compensate for this.
Not to mention the way it shapes culture, inculcating children with the materialist creed of insatiable consumers before they even know what advertising is.
> Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising.
This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying.
Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.
> [At larger companies...] Talking to users is for PMs, silly! You stick to what you’re good at. At best you get a summary of user insights and a reasonable task priority list derived from it. At worst you get a confusing task list built off a mistaken understanding of users and the manager’s selfish vision, and no one can explain why each task matters.
Not necessarily. At the large companies I've worked at (>200 people), a UXR will drive the interview process with users, starting with compiling a list of questions from engineers, then conducting the interview sessions with users in which engineers can sit in, and then disseminating the insights and setting up a meeting to make the insights into a actionable engineering projects.
Working with UXRs is a dream, as they're trained to conduct interviews in an impartial way, leading to insights that are less biased and higher quality. Contrast to when I worked for startups and I or someone on my team would interview users, very often the feedback would end up contaminated because the interviewer would ask the wrong question, projected their biases into the questions, or even worse into the insights.
"Level headed" and "sober" people are not immune to the effects of incentives and conflicts of interest. Researchers are dependent on grants, on invitations to conferences, etc., and so are liable to follow trends (tariffs bad), and p-hack to support the mainstream narrative (as they do in this analysis with P values > 0.01).
> German academia is actually full of sober, level-headed, nuanced people
Thanks for the laugh. I hope you realize how pretentious this sounds. In actuality, Germany's GDP is about 1/6th of that of the US, so these German academics don't sound very bright for how "level headed" and "sober" they are.