> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.
I'm going nuts, because as I was "growing up" as a programmer (that was 20+ years ago) it was stuff like this [1] that made me (and people like me) proud to be called a computer programmer. Copy-pasting it in here, for future reference, and because things have turned out so bleak:
> They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. (...)
> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. (...)
> He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
Judging by what has happened last night with Qatar's LNG installations I'd say at leat the next 3 years. Unless the war were to stop right at this moment, but slim chances for that.
This is how I find out that the CEO of YCombinator, and at the end of it all the person who ultimately rules over this very web-forum, has been the 10th employee of the very despicable Palantir Technologies.
We had a related joke in the good old days of communism here in Romania, it goes like this: "Two Securitate undercover agents, unbeknownst to each other and while queuing for buying bread early in the morning, start making jokes about Tovarășul [Ceausescu], hoping that in so doing they'll make the other one acquiesce into saying bad things about Tovarășul so that that would be reason enough for a political dossier. As the two Securitate agents were outdoing each other into saying more and more jokes about Tovarășul a third undercover Securitate agent, their boss, comes in and scolds them: 'A little bit more spread out, my boys, a little bit more spread out!'"
The same goes with these Palantir and other related despicable companies' former employees, they should spread out a little bit more, it's becoming way too obvious.
> They’re slowly redefining AGI so they can use it for more marketing.
If they don't do that then those trillions of dollars that support their current share price will most probably evaporate, so there are very big incentives for them to just outright try and re-create reality (like what we usually meant when we were thinking about artificial intelligence).
The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over.
Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?
> The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me
I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.
For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.
Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an animal and then eating without washing your hands first, to be an issue of intelligence or knowledge?
The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't "knowledge", it needs some serious justification.
Expanding that: can you think of things that are "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social expectations)?
I think in some sense, separating knowledge and intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if you teleported an infant from 8000 BC to this day, they'd learn to function in our times without a problem. Adults are another thing, brains aren't CPUs, the distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear in vivo as it is in silico, due to properties of the computational medium.
Because comparing the human brain and the way it is thinking and seeing and interacting to/with the world to physical/mechanical things like CPU/SSD brings with it huge abstraction gaps, to the point of making the comparison null.
The definitions of the words are contingent on human experience, even more so than "code" are "data" where we try to be more mechanistic, and still most people make the mistake of thinking they're distinct categories (spoiler: they're not; whether something is "code" or "data" depends entirely on your perspective).
If we want to draw computing device analogies, then the brain is an FPGA that is continuously reconfiguring itself throughout its runtime.
> I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9
I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.
Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django code for them because they'd been asked to find a contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025 hosting.
Sure, I thought, this'll be fun.
Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable.
I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.
Not directly related to FTX, but to the public vs. private discourse, if I'm not mistaken there are now a lot of pension funds and related financial institutions which have redirected a big part of their funds towards privately-owned unicorns/big companies through indirect means, and if those privately-owned unicorns/big companies were to do some shady things those pension funds would be much less in the know compared to if they'd invested their money in public companies.
One could make the valid point that those pension funds shouldn't have been (indirectly) invested in those privately-owned unicorns to begin with, but doing that would have most probably come with opportunity costs for those pension funds (as for some reason or another private big companies have been seen as bringing in more money for each dollar spent compared to big public companies, at least when it comes to the last 8-10 years).
As the OP implies, there needs to be some sort of balance between public and private companies, each of them need to be, in effect, more like the other in the eyes of the State/taxman, State-run regulators and the like.
The opposite of what you’re saying was considered ludicrous and conspiracy theory-like until not long ago on forums like this one or on Reddit. Just go to almost any post involving Hans Rosling (especially just pre-2016, post-GFC but pre-Trump) and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
What you're saying is 100% correct, I fail to see how people are not aware of it.
We're talking about a $1.75 trillion (as per the article) company that is about to enter (a part) of the most important capital market in the world at a distorted price, of course that the market as a whole is going to become distorted, money and capital (and the accompanying money and capital signals) are one of the most "liquid" things in a modern economy (if not the most liquid), once you start putting a wrong price tag on them then those accompanying money and capital signals will for sure start doing their thing, imo that was one of the main lessons we should have taken from what happened back in 2008-2009.
Sorry, a lot of the comments around this have been really badly written and it's been hard to tell what they're actually arguing.
I countered a different argument (which does appear elsewhere in this thread). You are absolutely right that there will be general price distortion from this mess. I disagree that it will be extremely bad, but I do agree that it's a problem and needs attention. It's just been difficult to tell that this is what some comments have meant to discuss, instead of the more basic issues others have been talking about.
I'm going nuts, because as I was "growing up" as a programmer (that was 20+ years ago) it was stuff like this [1] that made me (and people like me) proud to be called a computer programmer. Copy-pasting it in here, for future reference, and because things have turned out so bleak:
> They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. (...)
> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. (...)
> He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
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