If that were true, the response would have been, "no, you're a bit off," instead of apoplectic rage and trying to cancel the person quoting him.
Let's not view any of this in isolation either. None of those accounts will say a single negative word about Donald's (most recent!) shockingly disrespectful thoughts for the deceased.
There was one person on this site who looked down at candidates (for a normal software development job) who didn't answer his interview question well. And by well, I don't mean being curious and working it out on the fly, I mean that if the candidate didn't know the answer of the top off their head, the HN commenter deemed them uncurious and unsuitable. The question?
Interview questions get absurd when people are gatekeeping for various reasons.
People steal/phish resumes off sites all the time, and it is really hard to remain polite while listening to someone lie. I've met 300lb round cons that claim they regularly climb broadcast towers =3
As someone who has worked in three different countries in a variety of positions, Americans conversed in that way in proportions far larger than other countries.
Now this may be due to sampling on my end, but I did find the difference extraordinary when asking the same questions to different people.
Interesting. In my experience, the US still has one of highest food qualities in the world, especially when you take into account it's diversity and variety. Sure, some things get missed here and there, but it's also a lot easier to be safe and consistent if you aren't producing the types of food the US is.
I guess it depends on what you mean by safe. My wife gets a lot of migraines from a lot of foods in the US (less so if she can get organic). When we travel through Europe she can eat anything without triggering a migraine. I’ve read the US allows about 10X more chemicals (pesticides? fertilizers?) than the EU, so we assume this is the difference.
If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part.
When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more.
As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on.
Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important.
I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.
I really love your post, but I do think (and I come from an artistic background) that some skills have their own beauty, like work of art. Some love for creativity and what we create has a meaning of its own. Certainly worthy of an epitaph.
It’s why overuse of AI is a bad call imo. You skip a part of the journey. Like Guy Kawasaki says “make something meaningful”. If we are all AIs talking to eachother, everything becomes meaningless, we will become a simulation of surrogates.
That said, human compassion, relating to others and everything you mentioned trumps everything else.
Sure thing, but at the same time, there's creativity and then there's work; I could creatively write things in C or assembly for the art of it, but that isn't what my employer pays me to do. I could do my job in notepad or `ed` and type every character myself, but that's inefficient.
Same goes for art (which is often what it's compared to), some part of art is creative, but the vast majority of art that people get paid salaries for is "just work"; designing a website, doing graphics work for a video game or TV production, that kinda thing.
tl;dr, AI won't replace artisans but it's a tool that can help increase productivity / reduce costs. Emphasis on can, because it's a lot more complex than "same output in less time".
This is quite an interesting question, because I believe there's two facets to the surface of the question.
Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. You can pique their interest, they may praise you, but if they are informed enough, anything looking like magic can be dissected easily. So technical excellence is meaningless.
Given you're interacting with a competent hacker again, everything technical will be subjective. Creating is deciding trade-offs all the way down and beyond. Their preferences will probably lay at a difference balance of trade-offs. Even though you catch "objective" perfection, even this perfection has nuances (see USB audio interfaces. They all have flat response curves, but they all sound different, for example), hence, technical excellence is not only meaningless, it's subjective.
On a deeper level, a genuine person who knows its cookies well, even though with gaps is a much more interesting and nicer person to interact with. They'll be genuinely interested in talking with you, and learn something from you, or show what they know gently, so both parties can grow together. They might not be knowledgeable in most intricate details, but they are genuinely human and open to improvement and into the conversation itself, not to prove themselves and win a meaningless battle to stroke their own ego.
An LLM generated response is similar. It's lazy, it's impersonated, it's like low quality canned food. A new user recently has written an LLM generated rebuttal to one of my comments. It's white-labeled gibberish, insincere word-skirmish. It's so off-putting that I don't see the point to reply them. They'll just paste it to a non-descript box and will add "write a rebuttal reply, press this point". This is not a discussion, this is a meaningless fight for internet points.
I prefer genuine opinions, imperfect replies, vulnerable humans at the other end of the wire. Not a box of numbers spitting out grammatically correct yet empty sentences.
> Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them.
I disagree with this and would instead consider that a technical expert (in any field) being impressed with your work can be the most satisfying reward of craft.
Laypeople can be awed, but the expert can bestow an entirely different quality of respect to your work.
I agree with you that some people find this very rewarding, but this is not a given.
I for one, don't care whether anyone is impressed by my work. That's a nice bonus, but not a requirement. Instead, when I improve my work w.r.t. my previous one, the satisfaction I get is way bigger than an external validation. I seek my satisfaction inside myself.
That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
> That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
I agree with this sentiment completely. I do consider "the reason for craft" (which is a joy in itself) to be separate from the "bonus reward" of being able to discuss it with other craftsmen.
... and the latter often ends up surfacing even more challenging/interesting ideas to work on for both sides, which is a huge win.
More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information.
Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.
Great? If you're worried that somebody's actively trying to identify your HN comments against some other source of your writing perhaps. But using a LLM to "avoid deanonymization" is about as sensible for some everyday Joe, as wearing a tinfoil hat in public to avoid 5G radiation is.
Whether it makes sense for anybody to do it is the real question. The threat model where this is a useful thing to do doesn't really exist in my opinion, at least not for obfuscating random comments. Perhaps if you're doing some anonymous journalism that's uncomfortable for your country's regime, and you've previously written other stuff using your real name, it might make sense to run your writing through a LLM, maybe. In addition to a bunch of other Snowden-esque countermeasures.
Don't you think that as LLMs get better the deanonimization attacks will get easier?
Also, a journalist in a hostile regime might be one example, but a user that posted _very_ personal things under an alt account is also another example, and I bet the latter is much more common than the former.
Do you have enemies that would be interested in spending real money trying to link your public accounts to some (possibly existing, likely not) alt accounts with "personal things"? I don't think that's very common.
And no, while I'm sure LLMs can be used for stylometry in academic exercises, I don't think they'll really enable any sort of automatic mass-deanonymization of random social media accounts. But who knows, the US government probably has a bunch of new PRISM-like programs going on already, so it might happen.
There is value in technical excellence, but it’s not substituable for having and using a voice that isn’t the crowd-averaged AI normal. Better an unpracticed voice than a dull one, etc. (Also, AI is nullifying a great deal of excellence in favor of barely sufficient, just like Java did! so betting on the continued value of technical prowess requires some particular specializations that are not so easily replaced as the high quantity of devopseng cogs turn out to be.)
I wrote an extension that lets me tag users, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite, and it's interesting seeing the intellectual dishonesty from certain actors, yet because they produce "valuable" discussion the moderators take no action.
I'd be cautious about using Claude, given that they're designated as a supply chain risk by the US Government. Why not use the approved and officially certified ChatGPT instead?
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