As said GP, yes this is exactly what I meant and "happy-path" was an unclear choice of words. They optimize for the unhappy path on the good days, and make the bad days much worse.

1. People add retries w/o backoff. Now we have a retry storm.

2. People don't add jitter so we get huge waves of highly correlated retries that cause self-perpetuating overload cycles and failure.

3. People add retries (even w/ backoff) at more than one layer (e.g. one in process, one in envoy), so now we have a deeply confusing multi-level of retries with super weird n^2 patterns.

4. People find ways to fetch from multiple data sources to make a composite object but don't cache/reuse data they fetched, so one data source being down causes DOS on _other_ data sources because of retries.

5. People add failover mechanisms where all failures happily pick the same failover target because, ya know, it has the most free capacity.

6. People underestimate connection setup cost so "failover" causes huge increase in overall load due to connection setup (often tls setup) causing huge influx of "new" cpu work in a loaded system. CPU spike causes unhealthy destinations, causing more failovers, causing metastable failure.

7. People realize purely local decisions aren't optimal so add a layer of global health metrics (e.g. global retry budgets) but these systems add a time delay to the metric (ie its the view of the world 5ms ago). This delay makes their naive control algorithm go into oscillations or divergence spraying stuff everywhere.

All of these things have a similar pattern that when things are almost all good, they will make the system more robust. You'll get an extra 9 of reliability on good days. But they make everything far worse when things are bad.

Other indexes do not have these multipliers, and are much larger. The exposure for e.g. VTI is far, far less.

VTSAX (and VTI) follow the CRSP index. This is float-adjusted but they likely will be fast tracked (these are two separate rules in how this index chooses to weight things and participate in new stocks). At ~5% float, these companies will be in the 50-100B range. So under all those assumptions, they'll be bought quickly but represent less than 1% of VTSAX (until they float more shares on the public market).

Some index funds have a very long horizon before they include them (e.g. a year). Others are "fast-tracked" (e.g. notably VTI). Most of those, however, are float-adjusted, so only the stock available for trade is considered part of the marketcap. So e.g. VTI / VTSAX will buy spacex relatively quickly after the IPO but at the float-adjusted weight of ~$75B because that's the % of stock available.

If you care alot about this, now is the time to understand how your index fund treats IPOs wrt to delays + float adjustment.

While I have almost zero belief that LLMs are conscious, I just don't think this is so trivially asserted.

The easy half of this is thinking that LLMs aren't conscious given what we know about how they work. The hard part (and very, very famously so) is explaining how _you_ are conscious given what we know about how you work. You can't ignore the second half of this problem when making statements like this... because many of the obvious ways to argue that clearly LLMs aren't conscious would also apply to you.

While I see what you are getting at, and I think its super important we come up with philosophical frameworks to push back on the central idea in question (ie, the moral hazard of "its gonna happen anyway so why not pour a little more into the river").... I think your writing/responses miss the central point.

As I see it, the fundamental issue with this essay, and your responses, is you keep conflating impossible with probability zero. People are saying "this is inevitable" to mean this has probability 1 of occurring, with basic game theory reasoning (its a giant iterative prisoners dilemna), and your response "but it's possible". Yes, with measure zero.

Telling us that such a path surely exists isn't useful. If you want to push back on "inevitability" you need to find a credible path with probability > 0 (which is not the same as impossible).

Even though all the criticism were, in a sense, valid, in the end none of it amounted to a serious challenge to getting good at the task at hand.

The premise that an AI needs to do Y "as we do" to be good at X because humans use Y to be good at X needs closer examination. This presumption seems to be omnipresent in these conversations and I find it so strange. Alpha Zero doesn't model chess "the way we do".

Though this was not the post I was expecting to show up today, it was super awesome for me to get to have played my tiny part in this big journey. Thanks for everything @je (and qi + david -- and all the contributors before and after my time!).

The top reply to the top comment has some useful quotes for the purposes of this discussion...

> This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade.

> Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.

> Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.

Heh.

Well... "a few" is probably more accurate.

https://twitter.com/tjaltimore/status/1763571057703723344?s=...

I have seen so, so, so many examples of systems where latencies, including and especially tail latencies, end up mattering substantially and where java becomes a major liability.

In my experience, actually, carefully controlling things like p99 latency is actually the most important reason C++ is preferred rather than the more vaguely specified "performance".

I fear there's going to be alot of homerolled "vector search" infra that accidentally wanders into an ocean of database problems.

It’s embarrassing, shortsighted, and destructive.