Seems to be the MO around here - create and profit off of horrors beyond our wildest imaginations with no accountability and conveniently disappear before shit hits the fan. Not before writing an op-ed though.
Is it really fair to saddle the conscientious objectors with this critique? What about the people that stay and continue to profit exponentially as the negative outcomes become more and more clear? Are the anti-AI and anti-tech doomers who would never in a million years take a tech job actually more impactful in mitigating harms?
To be clear, I agree with the problem from a systemic perspective, I just don't agree with how blame/frustration is being applied to an individual in this case.
Is that the right word for it? I feel that a "conscious objector" is a powerless person whose only means of protesting an action is to refuse to do it. This researcher, on the other hand, helped build the technology he's cautioning about and has arguably profited from it.
If this researcher really thinks that AI is the problem, I'd argue that the other point raised in the article is better: stay in the organization and be a PITA for your cause. Otherwise, for an outside observer, there's no visible difference between "I object to this technology so I'm quitting" and "I made a fortune and now I'm off to enjoy it writing poetry".
Nuremberg/just following orders might fly if we were talking about a cashier at Dollar General.
This is a genius tech bro who ignored warnings coming out institutions and general public frustration. Would be difficult to believe they didn't have some idea of the risks, how their reach into others lives manipulated agency.
Ground truth is apples:oranges but parallels to looting riches then fleeing Germany are hard to unsee.
Unfortunately, the real horrors are just the mundane uses of AI: Whitewash excuses to keep the same people out of prison, put the same people in prison, hire the same people you want to hire, and do whatever you want because the AI can do no wrong.
Hint, there's no AGI here. Just stupid people who can spam you with the same stuff they used to need to pay hype men to do.
And people kept downvoting me when I said it has always been about advertising and marketing. It's optimal personalized mattress sales all the way down.
It's claimed Adam Smith wrote hundreds of years ago that (paraphrased) division of labor taken to extremes would result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
This era proves it out, I believe.
Decline in manual, cross context skills and rise in "knowledge" jobs is a huge part of our problem. Labor pool lacks muscle memory across contexts. Cannot readily pivot to in defiance.
Socialized knowledge has a habit of being discredited and obsoleted with generational churn, while physical reality hangs in there. Not looking great for those who planned on 30-40 years of cloud engineering and becoming director of such n such before attaining title of vp of this and that.
It's really hard to take people like this seriously. They preach sermons about the perils of AI, maneuver themselves into an extremely lucrative position where they can actually do something about it, but they don't actually care. They came to get that bag. Now they got it, so instead of protecting the world from peril, they go off and study poetry. LOL. These are not serious people.
It never occurred to me that a rebuttal to "not using lines of code or bugs solved because it can be gamed" is just to point out productivity is literally always gamed
Edit: Anyways I like this. Love the idea of companies taking over for helping out the underrepresented in their ranks. This is a natural progression from remote work.
1. 1. 1. is on purpose, the Markdown rendering software will number it. This has the advantage that you don't need to update the numbers in the source if you move/add/remove lines.
The lack of official spec is really holding back markdown, I always find it grating when someone mentions that their site renders "Github Flavored Markdown". It should just be markdown. It would be great if Github didnt have this vendor lock in on markdown
"Vendor lock-in" implies that by choosing GitHub flavored markdown apps are somehow beholden to GitHub. Plenty of independent markdown parsers support GFM. Using GitHub flavored markdown is no more "locked in" than using the Airbnb style guide for JS is. It's just a convenient shorthand for "here are the conventions we use".
I'd argue the official spec is now https://commonmark.org/ - it was partially reversed from the actual implementations in use and their behaviours, and is very highly specific compared to the original guide.
The purpose is to give the indication that it's a numbered list to the rendering engine in each case. If the spec was to use # # # for a numbered list and a * * * for a bulleted list, it would have have the same result.
That 1. 1. 1. and 1. 2. 3. are both rendered the same is a statement to the loosens of the spec, not the incorrectness of 1. 1. 1.
I’d argue that seeing 1. 1. 1. Is actually better than seeing them increasing but being out of order. Less of a hack and while reading them unformatted you just think of it like a HTML OL with list items. Or of the 1 as a keyword meaning ordered list item.
Interesting. With editable docs, things sometimes get added above the points or reordered and then re-numbered which makes the discussion misleading. The reason I prefer bullets is that it encourages people to quote the relevant section when discussing.
The judgement about whether an email needs a response is left to the receiver who would be responding, in their statement. I like that mental model of things. :)
That leaves room for miscommunication, though. If someone expects a response from me, I'd rather they make sure to ask it at the very top so that I don't miss that request with everything else that's going on.
Re-reading the statement, maybe they simply mean replies should be above the original e-mail rather than inline?
The core purpose of Markdown is for the source to look decent and readable, not match the output exactly. You can tell it's a numbered list, so it works.
Hacker News often trims clickbaity words from headlines. Modern headlines are low on substance and high on curiosity-inducing phrases ("How", "Why", "You wouldn't believe..."). This is in contrast to the style of newspaper headlines before the internet, when editors tried to summarize the entire story in one sentence. Naturally such a headline was low on detail, but the goal was the beginning, middle, and end of the story, so that a harried reader could skim the headlines and know the news of the day.
This is because the paper already had your money. Nowadays, news sites don't make money until you click each story. A sad situation for readers.
I have read the article. I can make an attempt at an old-style headline. Something like, "International cooperation halted the depletion of the ozone layer 1989-2019." Less enticing, eh? Now you know whether you really care for the details.
Which brings me to another problem with the article: it could be a third as long. This was a general problem even pre-internet, moreso in magazines than newspapers, which William Zinnser pointed out in his book On Writing Well. The first few paragraphs can often be excised, with nothing lost. It's as if the writer is warming up to writing the article, out loud. First there is a lot of philosophy. Then there is what could pass as an encyclopedia entry for Ozone Layer. Then a human-interest story of the discovery of the hole. This has its place (like in an encyclopedia) but you need to bear your readers in mind, and you are doing them a favor if you omit information that most of your readers already know. No need to bring newborn babies up to speed with each article.
The headline isn't even accurate, because we have not "fixed" it. The damage stopped at the beginning of this century, but the article itself says that the layer won't completely recover until the end of this century.
'Related Geoengeneering'-Pickings: 'A Weight, suspended from a System of String where cutting one of the Strings would actually increase the Tensions make it move...'? (-;
Sometimes I look at stuff like this and sit in despair that I'm not learning anything that will let me work these kinds of problems while I work at a defense contractor maintaining 20+ year old code.
great resource on transformers, which underpin the openai breakthroughs (the "T" in GPT-3 stands for transformer): http://peterbloem.nl/blog/transformers
The field is young and unlike mature fields such as physics or mathematics it doesn't take a lifetime of study to master, yet. Neural nets are actually pretty simple at their core; seemingly too simple to work as well as they do.
It's entirely possible to learn this stuff to near state-of-the-art level with a year or two of self-directed study outside of work. All the research is published open access, the software is open source, there are many high quality datasets available, hardware access is simple and free through Colab, and there are dozens of online courses and lectures at every level from beginner all the way to the cutting edge, again all free.
Haha you are not alone as I do the same on an old CRM for non-profits. I'm thinking about going back to school to gain the missing math and science I need to get myself to a more challenging job. Boring business software just ain't fun. But it pays :)
