Did you know there are whole businesses that lend money through ‘receivables financing’? Basically if you have outstanding invoices, you can get the money for those invoices now, and you pay (let’s say) 15% in interest to get that money now. https://www.allianz-trade.com/en_US/insights/receivables-fin...

All else being equal, your profitability just went down by 15% taking that receivables loan; but businesses are willing to lend money at varying degrees of interest while the company that took that money still looks like they’re in great shape if you were to look at their revenue, but 2 or 3 of these sorts of advance loans can hurt a company really quickly.

The issue is that it takes a long time, if a business is engaging in shady business practices, for them to be held accountable (if they ever are), and there are lots of ways to keep a business afloat while effectively robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture, and says nothing about the health of a business.

If you’re looking to ‘be open’ about the health of your business, then the operating costs would be shared, the amount the founders are ‘taking out’ of the business in dividends would be shared.

There are businesses that operate 20MM a year in revenue, but practically speaking are broke, because of the way the business is being run.

So for folks that don’t know better, this is a very cool thing ente is doing. For folks that run businesses and know better, this is a way to show off and ‘gain cred’ without actually having to be open about how the business operates.

The article takes a position that assumes hallucinations do not occur, and then posits from that stance the question as to whether we rely on AI too much. We should be taking a step back before even asking that question and focusing on the part where AI does invent answers whole-cloth.

I am exhausted with having to figure out whether someone wrote something or let AI generate it for them.

Reading articles like this has become less pleasurable since the advent of generative AI. There’s no feeling or heart in the article, and it’s one of those cases where I can read the headline, read the article, and wonder why I spent my time reading it.

While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.

To wit:

> Another one is that “stochastic parrot” got picked up and interpreted by other people as a minimization or an insult. It was not meant that way. Other people might be using it that way, but that’s not how I intended it, because it’s just a description of what these systems actually are. To see it as an insult requires either the belief that the large language model is the kind of thing that can take offense, which it isn’t, or that these large language models should be understood as steps toward this grand ideal that I don’t hold of artificial intelligence.

> What I have been doing in many places—the octopus thought experiment, stochastic parrots, the phrase “synthetic text-extruding machines”—it’s all about trying to make vivid to people who aren’t in the business of building language technology what these systems actually do, which is not the same thing as insulting the systems or insulting the people who like the systems.

How do those chat bots discern that the ‘web searches’ they’re using are returning human generated information only that’s been vetted instead of LLM output?

As long as the term “AI” means by-and-large LLMs with additional features sprinkled on top, the answer is no. More likely (without careful vetting by the folks aggregating these models) is that the quality will go down as more and more AI-generated output gets subsumed into these models.

Even without that particular problem, LLMs-as-AI can only give us probabilistic outputs based on inputs; and by definition they’re reliant on humans to provide the training data for their model. Without specialized knowledge or training on that knowledge (And even with it, viz. Meta’s engineering), we don’t have to worry about AI itself. We do have to worry what investors who are looking for outsized returns will do to get those returns, job market be damned.

The problem for us isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that snake-oil salesmen can sell the idea that AI will take our jobs, investors buy into it, companies try it, fire their folks, the snake-oil salesmen IPOs, the companies that bought into this idea implode in some form or fashion, and the salesmen have already taken the money and ran. Of course, we still lose our jobs, but maybe (!) we get them back when this all fails?

The merits win in a lawsuit only if you don’t run out of money first.

We’re not innocent bystanders here, and it’s important to recognize that. Our hype added to the hype. Our optimism added to the optimism. After layoffs due to Section 172 and interest rates going up, technologists were looking for a reason to be in-demand again, and generative AI as a platform specialization provided that.

We can’t now criticize CEOs for being taken in by the same enthusiasm we pushed for our own purposes.

You probably don't realize this, but you're asking one of the hardest questions when starting a business, and one of the questions others are least likely to be able to answer for you.

"finding" a niche, and connecting to the business folks inside that 'niche' is hard, and is inherently a personal journey.

There's an old writing adage, "Write about what you know", and the same adage works in business: Do business with what you know.

Your question goes into another issue that you have to resolve when building a business: going into a platform specialization necessarily means folks know about that platform or they know they need you to solve a problem they have with that platform.

In general, there are two ways out of each problem:

1. Build an ecosystem with DuckDB at its center that solves a business problem that a particular niche cares about. 2. Build a reputation solving problems with DuckDB that would attract those that know they have a problem with DuckDB.

Honestly, best of luck here, becoming successful at business is hard if you're not already in tune with why folks buy and ensuring you're selling something they want to buy from you.

To be clear; in our current stage of capitalism, companies are largely optimizing for how much quality they can sacrifice before they lose too many customers to justify the sacrifice in quality.

Companies are optimizing for cost, and part of the backlash against AI is the backlash against the overt quality sacrifices made by companies.

This trend will hopefully continue.

If the spreadsheet is wrong, it’s because the math is wrong, it’s because I made a mistake. It’s not because all of a sudden the computer decided the nature of algebra should be different than it is.

Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506241

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The administration in charge (as recently as yesterday) still blames Biden for issues happening on their watch, even though he hasn’t been in officer for 16 months now.

This is not an administration serious about governing, and until we have an administration serious about governing and taking responsibility for their actions, we will continue to have this situation where half the country blames the half not in power for decisions it is making.

Congress of course is somehow worse, as instead of treating the executive like a branch of government they are meant to have oversight of, they abdicate their oversight role and roll over to the wishes of the present administration.

The net effect is those of us that live paycheck to paycheck (which is 2/3rds of Americans) are caught in the middle of a situation that would be deemed fantastical and not realistic to write about if it was described in a dystopian novel.

The Iran war continues with no oversight from Congress, and no authorized war while we pay the price. Vote them all out.