Hacker News: slowtrek

New comment by slowtrek in "The Software Engineering Identity Crisis"

slowtrek — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:46:05 +0000

We could always surrender the identity. Who ever said a Software Engineer should be a profession that should last hundreds of years?

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:17:36 +0000

Nuance is needed

So much so that your first reply froze me and made me think. This is not easy, it's absolutely in our nature to gate keep knowledge.

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:34:47 +0000

Can someone please vouch for this thread and unflag it? It's kind of the main tech issue of our time ...

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:23:58 +0000

It's not that hard. So if you want to ask questions or work with a Stephen King book, you have to rent it during your LLM session. OpenAi would make a small fee, the author would get the majority, and the user gets value. You don't have to be a billion-dollar company to set up a monetization structure like that. Startups could do this if they negotiate with authors.

For general questions, you can use the free wiki that's ingested into the LLM or pay a fee for general content like current events.

You keep the LLM free in the third-world out of necessity. OpenAI, in the first world, cannot ask to be treated as if it were a third-world company because we are too rich to be that ridiculous.

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:19:22 +0000

No need to even complicate it to that degree. A wrong begets another wrong forever unless someone stops doing the next wrong thing. That's literally what it takes.

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:08:21 +0000

Yeah, we have a wrong conception. It's fine, society often has wrong conceptions. We are just dead wrong about ruthless capitalism. A company is a custodian of a good society, it has responsibilities that far exceed profit.

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:04:40 +0000

The same way we can't process what a trillion dollars looks like, we can't actually process what large scale theft looks like. For shits and giggles, these people also have a trillion dollars.

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:00:36 +0000

Why is this flagged?

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:58:25 +0000

Not to be funny on purpose, but we are having discussions in America currently on if we should finance aid for poverty and the like. I love your idea though.

New comment by slowtrek in "OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:50:16 +0000

So basically, we know China is never going to pay the publishers/content creators (never). If we hold our principles to OpenAI (pay who you took from), they will go bankrupt. So of course they are speaking in end-game language. To suggest the race is lost even before it starts is an incredible thing.

How is it that we can theorize that the model would get better with more data, but we can't theorize that the business model would need to get bigger (pay the content creators) to train the model? Shoot first and ask questions later (or rather, BEG later).

New comment by slowtrek in "Mathematicians uncover the logic behind how people walk in crowds"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:46:56 +0000

Have we uncovered how crowds swarm digital content? It feels like these hidden algorithms trapped away inside Meta probably have the answer as well. Those would be meaningful research papers from Meta if they were ever to do it.

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 06:37:34 +0000

We need to start blogging about this, because it's been a torrent of utter filth advice being marketed to businesses.

New comment by slowtrek in "Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 03:20:34 +0000

Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing patters, etc etc etc.

This exists because there is limited courage to call this out. There are not many polite ways to tell someone this, you would need people in their life to pull them aside and point it out. It's very similar to being the friend that pulls someone outside and explains they need to brush their teeth (someone has to do this, with love). Maybe more working professionals need to blog about this so the broader community can be educated on behavior when it comes to excess vanity and general manners.

For example, it's simply rude to broadcast your new job when some people are struggling with it (will they ever get one? will they get fired? are they good enough?). Just the very fact that there are "some" should be enough to kickstart one's manners, even if that "some" is not a lot of people.

It's simply rude to continuously market things (anything) when there are people literally ... stressing themselves over the pressure of competition. Again, as an example, a person constantly marketing their looks is putting stress and pressure on many others - this is a simple fact. The same goes for those with wealth and opportunity.

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:58:37 +0000

How was that society taught this? Or how did they come to know this?

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:57:51 +0000

As in, if you are on the ship, we can absolutely find something for you to do. Here, color the fucking map, clean the sails. Why would we throw them off the ship?

New comment by slowtrek in "Bitter Lesson is about AI agents"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:45:51 +0000

We got better and better models when we threw more and more compute? I gotta work on my snarkiness. Seriously, that's pretty good empirical evidence. The smaller models we get are all some kind of distillation or student model of a larger model, so they can never claim they are not the result of large compute.

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:04:36 +0000

If we were to do this, we wouldn't just pick someone so out of the range of what's needed. So basically, if you reframe your question, would I hire a 70 average student on a team of 90 average students? Yes. We would not pick the 50 average students. This is all possible within reason, the kind of stuff being discussed in this thread is to purge people who are 80 average students (free riders in a 95 average class).

Will we need to tutor and support the 70 average student? Yes. Why would we do this? It's good for the soul. The stuff I'm talking about has no place in business, as far as we care to understand as a society at the moment.

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 22:18:06 +0000

a) Would make a great coffee table book.

b) Would make a great poster.

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:13:13 +0000

Could a company keep a subjective poor performer on for the lifespan of the company? As in, what is the plus or minus in overall revenue or profit from this charity? What if all companies did that? Could we distribute the "burden" of the charity across all companies for a better society? My point is, I don't even know if metrics are good or bad, we may need to look at why we see each other like this. Is it so offensive to the mind of the captain of a ship that they may have a few of not the best sailors? It's a chance for them to be on a ship, go on a journey. The concept of a "free ride" appears to be a serious moral hazard for us, but I can't figure out why.

New comment by slowtrek in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

slowtrek — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:11:50 +0000

Moral of the story:

Anyone that looks for the metric to find the weakest link, is the weakest one at heart.