I visit HN, that's one request. But I visit HN multiple times a day. So for the operation that serves the homepage, if you took e.g. a past 24hr latency p99 chart, the number of requests analyzed would not be the same as the number of unique users involved in making those requests, potentially drastically so.

So you might see a p99 you're comfortable with, and conclude that since only 1% of requests were worse than that, it's fine. In practice though, depending on how "well-trodden" that operation is, you might very well be in a situation where all users experienced at least one such beyond-SLO event that day, since the mapping is many to one.

The cross operation version of this is important as well, yes. You can have users experience snags across common flows too for example, same idea.

Regarding methodology, it's nothing special, I just rely on user IDs and correlation IDs. It really is just a perspective shift, the underlying data is the same. You can even calculate back the "number of nines needed to get an acceptable UX" using this, as long as the general usage habits are stable. It's just gonna be a lot more nines than two in my experience.

I find it much more inquisitive and visceral, to the extent that p99 now boggles my mind. 2N would be dreadful as an availability figure, yet for UX it's treated very different. So much so that my measurements corroborate exactly that; good UX requires the same many-nines reliability as e.g. DCs, not one or two.

I wonder if it's p90 and p99 to blame for the shoddy services we have, in a way. It's pretty hard to argue for fixing something when it's presented as only going wrong 0.5% or less of the time after all. Even if at scale that means most of your users are experiencing it weekly.

The vast, vast majority of websites have no business of using so much JS, especially in critical paths, anyways.

This trivial fact of life is observed every day by e.g.:

- students taking notes and finding it necessary to only jot down key facts so that they can keep up,

- stenographers who require special training and equipment to keep up verbatim with live speech in the courtroom,

- annoying colleagues who insist on "hopping on a quick call" or arranging big, wasteful, and disruptive meetings instead of just writing down their problem / sending a message or email,

- friends who insist on sending short voice messages in DMs instead of typing, because it's more "personal" that way (which to be fair it is, but not to the extent proclaimed).

Would love to hear some details on that one...

Or was that a typo and you meant the $200/mo plan instead maybe? That one I could believe, assuming no or frugal subagent use that is.

In close lockstep with @ai_fry_your_brain, who at least makes it clear right on the tin that they're not here to engage in any earnest capacity whatsoever. Always a mixed feeling between being appreciative of that, and finding it blatant.

Good thing it's AI ruining communities, a thought I have no doubt you also share in. If only people properly recognized the hard work of people like you in this.

Or for another perspective, why do you think a "sense of accomplishment" is an essential, and dominantly important thing for everyone? Maybe they feel two hot shits about such a thing.

Especially when the "accomplishment" in the vast majority of cases is in the realm of "having had the patience to endure the humiliation ritual of figuring out the arbitrary abstractions some other dude came up with, and doing the plumbing to reconcile that with the requirements to the extents possible"?

It's like that Star Wars: Battlefront PR comment's idea of a "sense of accomplishment". Outright asinine and cynical. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

When I make things, what I care about is exactly the function they provide. It's endlessly rewarding to make something useful. It's not some exercise in polishing my ego by proxy. I don't want people appreciating the things I make because they were hard to make. That's borderline condescending and pitiful.

But hey, maybe I'm mischaracterizing the way you meant "sense of accomplishment" myself. Maybe this is exactly what you meant too. But then how would people vibecoding be robbed of feeling this? Makes no sense.

Does it just sound like it or is it? Cause it sure as hell didn't "sound like that" to me last I checked, so that's 1:1 so far.

> At the very least to the extent that the whole setup limits national sovereignty.

That's how anything grouplike works indeed.

> I struggle to believe there isn’t a significant fraction of EU citizens who are frustrated with the EU’s laws.

Sounds like something that'd have polling data coverage?

I really don't know what's so interesting about auto-complete or next token prediction that it captures these people's attention so much. They're so blatantly not the salient quality to these products that is of interest to the common discourse, it's just baffling.

It's equivalent to professing how you just make apple pies from scratch, while your first step is to always reinvent the universe.

You're further magically blind to this operational fact being weaponized as a trope for furthering anti-ai sentiment (i.e. that it's a political dogwhistle at this point), and to thus you participating in that every time you repeat it?

* Ignoring the decoding caveat I already mentioned, along with the countless ways they're steered. There isn't jack that's likely about some of the responses they produce, and intentionally so. Including the whole chat partner act.

You know it perfectly damn well that a typical person's idea of statistics is not some insanely high cardinality stateful prediction, but a "well a coin toss is a 50:50, and a lottery win is a 1:100000000". You also know it perfectly damn well that as a result, people will just think that all the sentences chatbots ever produced to them were then just somewhere in the massive training set, letter by letter. This insinuation is often even explicitly appealed to.

And that picture is outright false. It's a statistical process, yes, so saying that it does what it does by "just doing statistics" is gonna be a generally correct description, but that's not at all inquisitive to how exactly does it do it, nor is it the zinger you think it is. If you did the aforementioned, you'd just get milquetoast nonsense, like you can see in the countless Markov-chain primers. And while the models do have a lot of the training set lossily captured, they do also absolutely generalize (that's how they can do that lossy compression), and you can quite literally find representations of those generalizations in them, and also see them activate.

It's like summarizing how any program works by just saying "well it just manipulates ones and zeroes". Not very informative, is it? Or how programs are written by just programmers sitting in a cushy office, ryhtmically pressing keys on a keyboard. Not a very fair or insightful description, which you'll know if you've done any amount of programming in your life on your own. Extends to all other white collar jobs too.

It's also not even true in the most literal sense: models can and do absolutely choose a less than maximally likely next token, that's what the various decoding parameters are for. "Maximally likely next token" further conviently skipping over how that likelihood is established in the first place, i.e. the literal point of the question, going in a cute little circle.

I'm so over this "stochastic parrot" bullshit.

You could argue that waiting an hour once a month is not that much of a hurdle, sure, but in my judgement it is. I like this. I wish it could go even faster. I'm so happy that the era of waiting a substantial amount of time for data transfer is just ~not a thing anymore.

Though a gigabit subscription here is dirt cheap and always has been, so that helps too.

Like with every invention ever? Cause that's the literal goal and idea?

You take things and then combine them until the ensemble performs a desired abstract function the individual parts alone could not. The end result then is a new thing of its own, arguably indeed a miracle (not in a religious sense of the word).

> and too tired to figure out why it came up with the answer it came up with

There are people whose entire career is this. They work at these companies.

> Factor in that psychology and it looks a lot less like we have invented something useful, and a lot more like we as a species are choosing to quit life en masse.

You're saying this as if people haven't been historically the masters of optimizing out the enjoyment from things. It's what we do. Provide an ultimate solution, and of course you'll extinguish a whole lot of motivation across the board.

A cheese-grater Mac is not a door stop either, yet look at it go.

Will people ever let go of being hung up on how exactly an LLM produces text, or do I really have to keep listening to this shit for the next several decades? As if being a program didn't already prohibit them from reading to begin with!

Tell me how you don't think a plane should be characterized as "flying" unless one is in "avionics-psychosis" or something. Surely you can appreciate how this narrow requirement for avoiding anthropomorphism and metaphors is entirely performative, and that engaging in them is in no way a sign of any mental illness.

And I get the performance aspect behind it, people wish to reject the metaphor to tear into the thing even that way. Or they come from a religious or spiritualistic background, and find the mere comparison insulting. But fuck it's so cringe. It's not news, and it's not insightful. Nobody who's ever had them shit out a page per second via like a dozen subagents, or utilized them being stateless and seed-bound, has any actual illusions about them being anything more than "just text generators". If they nevertheless assign intelligence, understanding, or similar traits to them, then clearly they simply don't agree with the anthropocentric philosophical insinuations performed. It's not some mistake or psychosis. Come on.

The other case is when I - gasp - do something myself, and the docs are actually reasonable / easy to reference. There are workflows where me doing the thing is just plain faster still, even when including hitting up the docs real quick.

What you propose makes fine rhetorical sense, and I can assure you it did reach me, it's just that a (very) cursory search yielded me no significant employment rate changes or drastic layoffs in the related sector over the decades. Instead, it suggested that people have been reshuffled to do waste sorting and other related activities rather, and that the field actually grew, directly contradicting your smug, sarcasm-laden, willfully demagogue framing. Traits that are not exactly the hallmark of epistemic rigor to begin with, nor do they further it, even if the given narrative did hold up.

It's so easy to be asinine and make up a story, especially when one feels morally justified in doing so, and considers the base facts & analogy to be "obviously correct". I don't think that setting people up for failure by feeding them correct sounding lies - or sending related discourse into a nosedive in quality just to get in some cheap zingers - would help the cause a whole lot though. Do you?

Put differently, it helps if the example provided actually holds up as an example for the topic discussed. Especially if that example is as dramatic as 80% of a given job disappearing, and the people involved just plain losing their livelihood supposedly.