skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This finding is not unexpected. Once you let workers do away with the commute to and from the office, office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings, the need to wear and take care of business suits and other costly and often uncomfortable attire, you should not be surprised that they will feel happier."

Gee.. how weird... people get happier when you don't force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming and frustrating corporate [insert your favorite animal feces right here].
There's this, and then on the next page ...

Mortgages Stuck Around 7% Force Rapid Rethink of American Dream

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-28/american-...

So strange to the see the disconnect from the facts over at Bloomberg, and the opinion from WaPo.
Science does change based on ideological beliefs.

See, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I've struggled with ending my shift and mentally checking out of work. However, I wouldn't impose going back to the office on others who can do this effectively. I think the comment is about maintaining a work-from-some-office-space capability.
I love this, though:

> Second, there is a negative selection effect into the office, since workers who prefer home-based work are 12% faster and more accurate at baseline
In my last job (10,000ish employees at a UK financial services organisation) we worked at home for the whole of the Covid period... apart from one small team in the whole organisation (which soon got dealt with as they were basically just slacking), productivity went up.

After Covid, we went into the office one day a month and didn't really achieve anything additional at all, if anything those days were less productive due to the heavy socialising that went on.

In my current job, pan-European financial services organisation, I am the only person in my team in London, everyone else is in Brussels. I've never physically met most of them. The one day a week I'm required to spend in the London office is a complete waste of time and money and usually involves me sitting on Teams meetings all day as I very rarely need to interact with anyone else in London. It's my least productive day of the week.

I'm also not in a "mostly lone producer" role like developer, I'm a project/programme manager and my job is interacting with people all day.

I think it just depends if people are able to refocus their mind into a new way of doing things.
I read this as "the updated versions can now tolerate the option that makes future versions behave the same without calling out an error: invalid flag"

This is exactly how you want an LTS to be supported long term.
Thanks, insightful, especially TIL that there's a fuzzy area between nonprofit and for-profit organizations, by the way I realized that this is true for Switzerland, too.
> In my career, I have taken a particular approach based on building new systems from scratch (before they succumb to the three laws), but this is a lot harder than it sounds

This seems like an infeasible solution in most if not all real world cases I've seen. Especially if you have a system with 15 years of legacy and some thousands of man-years of effort put into them.

Now, the obvious "don't let it get to that point" is a smug IT nerd answer I often see regarding this, but this seems like the kind of green-field startup thinking that doesn't apply to 90+% of software development. We have an existing system. This needs to be maintained and extended because it's our core business. We cannot just say "oh it's become too complex. Let's go and spend the next few years creating a new product, so we'll have a multi-year feature freeze".

The only feasible way I see to do anything even close to this is to split up the software into domain-like silos slowly and incrementally. At that point you can start considering rewriting silos as they become too complex/cumbersome/big. However, at that point you're already doing complex, lengthy and generally risky refactoring, and speaking of it being a write from scratch is very obviously not true.
Question for those in this thread who hold this view: Please share your stories, along with which language ecosystem you're working within.

(Cards on the table: I've occasionally vendored stuff for a variety of reasons - because we needed to apply a patch that upstream didn't want or didn't accept quickly enough, or because we were stuck on an old version and needed to backport a fix - I've also on occasion copy-pasted 50-100 lines of code for a specific bit of functionality to avoid bringing in a 5MB library. These are exceptions - in the general case I prefer to depend on upstream wherever possible.)
I guess this article is about good quality workers who don’t want to go (back) to the office. I have seldom been in an office (30 years career) and I wouldn’t, at any price.
While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also didn't took action when sama didn't told them about startup fund. Only after Toner's paper and sama's move, all these became important.

Overall, I genuinely believe that the board needs to get out of way. They are not the founder, they are not even technical. They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings but politics and brewing up secret coups is not their job.
In every organisation I've ever worked in, from military to SAR to healthcare to software, the issue has never been bandwidth. More often the issue is lack of concise communication. All higher bandwidth provides is more noise to signal.
I hadn't noticed that particular nominative determinism before, interesting
The link you shared isn't on the front page now, though :(.
It probably should. The amount of ancillary and contextual information required to correctly distinguish between legal and illegal settings and application is invasively high.
> Second, there are employees who are trapped in their jobs, either because of family or community obligations or because they lack the skills, knowledge, and abilities to move to other jobs.

With the current job market, I think there are more people in this category than the article makes it sound. That's actually why companies think they can get away with forcing you to come back to the office against your will...
At the sort of correction you're talking of you're talking about millions of people going in to negative equity.

In the US market this may be tolerable because you have full-term mortgages, so people can just stay put even if they're pushed in to negative equity.

In the UK it's death. Here mortgages typically last for 2-5 years. Homeowners would be pushed in to negative equity and be unable to remortgage.
C++ programmers will do anything to avoid using a proper package manager. I say this as a C++ programmer.
Sounds like Altman's version of P.Diddy's "I'm sorry"
No really, you can setup nexus repo and keep things there. Vendoring is kinda bad for git repo, especially modules based ones.
Show HN: VoiceMouse: Control Your Mouse with Voice Pitch and Volume
I only listened to parts of it but I did not get that vibe. For me it sounds like there was a lot of pressure applied. Particularly given the secondaries it does not at all surprise me that it was a very likely outcome.

If a leader does not want to step down and the leader has power, that leader can wreck chaos where the rational move is to leave the leader in place. I don’t know enough about OpenAI or Sam Altman to judge the situation but given the absolutely chaotic situation when it unfolded it sounded very rational to restore the prior status quo.
> things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all.

I’d argue that the fact that the author thinks that “office politics” have somehow disappeared is a reason to discredit anything the author might have to say wrt work altogether.

It’s possibly true that with WFH the “politics” people have become much more adept at hiding the fact that they’re playing “office” politics, especially from those, who apparently like the author seem unaware of what’s actually going on at work, but the actual “office politics” has only grown significantly. It’s just more insidious now and the outcomes are not visible until much later.
This seems disingenuous on her part. Almost the entire company was posting hearts on X in support of Sam.

The essence if her claim is they were doing that for their stock options?

Cynical take to me.
> a well-designed system is an unstable, ephemeral state; whereas a badly designed system is a stable, persistent state

It's kind of entropy: I wouldn't say that a badly designed system is "stable", it is just as unstable as a well-designed system and keep evolving, but there are many more ways to be "badly designed" than to be "well designed" so without actively fighting entropy, it'll be unstable but consistently "bad"
how does 2) work?
do you have a catch-all service?
say I want to give my custom address to a John I've just met, can I tell them to write to john@horsellama.xyz without actually creating that address?
My thoughts on the office/home work management debate:

- Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick

- Be mindful of workers with families or other dependants who see wfh as a great benefit

- Don't count days in office and assess people on it - by doing this you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count.
First law implies that it is impossible to change a badly designed system into a well-designed system through incremental changes.

I disagree with this, it is certainly possible to improve the state of some system without starting from scratch.
I'm taking a closer look, but from the looks of it I'm not a fan of adding yet another sub-language with differing syntax and semantics. This leads to complexity, it's a path to madness.

Without being involved -- I have no intention using any of these Contracts in whatever form. I will say though that I wouldn't care if there is UB in the contract language (just like there is in the normal language). I would prefer the variant with UB if it is simpler and more aligned with the language core. Removing the UB here is an academic exercise. Safety absolutists are uncompromising about the goal of correctness and provability. They are blind to the pragmatic issues created by the idealism. Contracts in either form could probably improve correctness by a lot, like 99% or whatever. So why should I care about the paper which could in theory bring the remaining 1%? It doesn't affect me pragmatically.

The flaw with either is that this is only in theory. In practice, I will never create enough formal contracts in to significantly improve correctness. Whatever system it is. Why? The costs are just too damn high, the only way to achieve 100% correctness when considering also pragmatic concerns, is to just not write any code.

My approach of just coming up with a simple design (not in code), trying to implement it in the most straightforward way, and fixing the code until it works, as described in my other comment, seems to have achieved something very close to correctness (maybe even 100%? Probably not).

Again, I'm not saying that UB is good or should be tolerated. I don't want it in my programs and if I find an instance of UB I'll try hard to get rid of it. However there is a reason why UB exists in C/C++ (as well as many other languages that may not have as much of it, but still have a lot of it even when not defined explicitly). And alternative approaches, trying to prevent UB mechanically, come with a cost that may not be worth it depending on what you're working on. I feel strongly like it isn't worth it for me. If you're building a fully verified or certified product, tradeoffs are likely different.

If we're citing big names, here is a well known person describing their view, which I find myself agreeing a lot with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJRdXxS_jqo
OpenAI's speech to text API is the official Whisper implementation. It's expensive.

Many small providers will host Whisper as an endpoint (Replicate for example).

Groq has Whisper in a private beta; if they open it up for commercial usage, cheap and fast, that'll be a game changer.
she deservedly got the boot, along with the other that had no business sitting on the board of a tech company on the frontier. this is just sour grapes after the coup failed.

the ai safety apparatchiks huffing and puffing about an ai takeover are nothing but status grifters and hopefully all the rest follow leike to anthropic so we can forge ahead faster without having to pay lip service to how much we're doing for "superalignment".

and thank fuck sam released chatgpt. if it were up to the apparatchiks, we'd have them sitting on it like the geniuses at google who couldn't figure out they had a gold mine under them even if you pointed it to them with a thousand spotlights.
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Let’s dive deeper into these top features and see how they can enhance your development workflow.
> They instead hack into the javac compiler to be able to modify class files, which is a very different mechanism

They only do that because there is no public Java API to do the things they want to do. If a public Java API to do the same things were made available, I’m sure they’d gladly migrate to doing that instead
Well, ~75 tons of fuel per three units fully loaded plus a few times that for the spent nuclear fuel pools. Also bear in mind that fuel being melted with concrete and metal becomes one, so you can add a hefty multiplier to the above figure. So it seems like 800 tons is in the ballpark of the fuel assemblies plus molten metal structures of the lower part of the reactors vessels.
Ultimately it’s pg who owes this community locally and humanity globally for inflicting Altman on the world, but as much as I likewise respect pg on 99/100 things, he seems to be digging his heels in on this one, so I’m not holding my breath.

I gather anoxia is a bad way to go.

Absent that, a few other recognized OG legends like yourself looking into the matter and rendering an opinion might represent the daylight between the status quo and disaster.

Certainly he’s nothing to do with your honestly-held convictions about merit prevailing in efficient markets oriented to novel contribution.

I know you believe in markets, but I think we agree there’s nothing capitalist or meritocratic about failing up repeatedly until manifestly unqualified and ill-intentioned people wield arbitrary power off an unbroken litany of failures punctuated by the occasional success in taking credit for the efforts and achievements of others via PR and powerful friends.
See also https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0904/1402957-offices-work...

There's usually a hugely simplified model of the workplace in play, where workers are turning some handle marked "economic output" and bosses are selfless agents of the company which is in turn entirely operating in the interests of the shareholders. People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships, the social reward of "subordination"/"bossness" given to managers (which doesn't work when they don't have any visible subordinates), and so on. That requires a lot of anthropology.

(Personal observations: I don't mind being in my current office, but commuting is a pure deadweight loss; the social benefits of contact are real, as are the benefits of being at home; many of my coworkers are on a different continent and I cannot be in the same office as them anyway)
Developers livings as monks and coding away in a dark delapidated castle surviving on their 4 donated cups of coffee a month while addressing 43,000 GitHub issues a month created by enterprise users who are working on commodifying the FOSS product into their cloud solution.
Many religious belief dont hold in front of modern science. In Western world it was the evolution theory and Aborigines have other problems. By labelling science 'Western', people try to equalise both.
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81tauranga_M%C4%81ori#Rel...
OpenAI dual structure also makes things super complicated and adds gas to the fire. Like Altman doesn't own anything but has some weird VC fund, and all fuckery around employee compensation.
> And we almost all will be where you are now, if we live long enough.

And given the US healthcare system, somebody is gonna take all our money too, one way or another. :P
Altman impersonating Roko's Basilisk is very much on-point for an AI company.
Mildly surprised to see no mention of my top 2 LLM fails:

1) you’re sampling a distribution; if you only sample once, your sample is not representative of the distribution.

For evaluating prompts and running in production; your hallucination rate is inversely proportional to the number of times you sample.

Sample many times and vote is a highly effective (but slow) strategy.

There is almost zero value in evaluating a prompt by only running it once.

2) Sequences are generated in order.

Asking an LLM to make a decision and justify its decision in that order is literally meaningless.

Once the “decision” tokens are generated; the justification does not influence them. It’s not like they happen “all at once” there is a specific sequence to generating output where the later output cannot magically influence the output which has already been generated.

This is true for sequential outputs from an LLM (obviously), but it is also true inside single outputs. The sequence of tokens in the output is a sequence.

If you’re generating structured output (eg json, xml) which is not sequenced, and your output is something like {decision: …, reason:…} it literally does nothing.

…but, it is valuable to “show the working out” when, as above, you then evaluate multiple solutions to a single request and pick the best one(s).
896 vCPUs and 32TB RAM... I do not want to see the license cost for SQL Server on one of these! Doing some quick maths: 2vCPUs = 1 Core (give or take) so I think these are 8 x 56 Core Xeons... SQL Enterprise (needed to use the 32TB of RAM fully) is around 7K per core, so the license for SQL alone would be $3.13 Million... It looks like Windows Server 2022 Datacenter is another 6.1K per core, so $2.75 million for that... $6 Million for licencing on SQL and Windows alone... And at $407.68 for the base rate (PAYG) it's another $3.4 Million for the hardware per year...
You're right; I hadn't scrolled down to the wide-view shot. I stand corrected.
Those do look good, and in the last 3 years the price has dropped significantly. in the uk those cost about $3k, so not much difference. alas, they are not covered by the health service, only lesser ones.
>This article doesn't mention people who don't enjoy WFH because of the unification of the workplace and home

Maybe because companies seldom try to force people to work from home.
Board found out about ChatGPT on Twitter?
Maybe she did but I kinda doubt Ilya was in the dark.
I think this is a consequence of near-term expedient decisions being taken, and not having the ability/time/confidence/courage to make major refactors when needed.

At TableCheck we have a Ruby monolith app we've been working on for 11 years, and TBH it feels better/cleaner today that it did 8 years ago. Granted we haven't had a lot of personnel turnover and spend a lot of time on maintenance tasks.
I think we can look into the notion from complexity theory of attractor states. If you want to make a change, you need to shift your system enough that it moves into another state.

In more normal words - the codebase will fight your changes. And that means that small incremental changes may not be enough, and you will need at least a few big leaps.
> "poor self-discipline" is quite the judgy statement to make dude.

I certainly didn't think it was so extreme that it needed to be flagged.

I simply find it an incredible concept that a person needs to physically leave a building before they can mentally adjust to "being at work"/"not being at work".

I don't have a special 'office space' in my home environment. Over the years I've intentionally trained myself to not need anything other than my laptop to program on. In this way _even before the pandemic_ I was able to work under a tree in the park, at a café, on a train, at home or even (the most noisy and distracting place) at the office.

Admittedly, when at the office I also needed noise-cancelling headphones - along with every single other programmer employed there because of the constant distraction of people talking, managers making personal phone calls, sales high-fiving each other, and so on.
I think you missed the majory of public part.

Interesting. So you make decisions based on what the press tells you? Do you believe the news the press choose to report and not to is based on what they think is good for you? Do you believe the press actually can know what is good for you?
> They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings

Would lying to the board not count as "intentional and significant wrong doings"?
> It seems pretty obvious that he's a dark triad type personality

The obvious moustache twirling villains mostly end up in prison almost immediately, precisely because they're so obviously bad.

Subtle and careful ones, that normal people don't notice are being manipulative, are generally the ones who get furthest — the darkness isn't shown to those who must not see it.

This is why so many in the US blame all of Congress except their own representative.
Cool idea! Just a little suggestion, let the demo work without making it necessarry to fill in an OpenAI key, perhaps for the first 3 prompts or so. It would make a way better first user experience.
Redis Containerization – Ready Yet?
High bandwidth communicating is also a firehose of noise, though.

You may find that the extra capacity to communicate is detrimental as people spend their time talking about marginal issues.

If your communication is limited, you will use your time on the most important things.
Hm, I need to read up on the trade offs of going this route.

Thanks!
Re: first law ... one thing I have been thinking a lot lately is just how much like gardening software is. But in gardening we are not afraid to trim the plants and put them in shape as we go. In software we end up just adding stuff on top, without regard for the overall design. There is this bias towards always adding rather than removing things, and the key to keep things in order is to remove things, to say no, etc.
> I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to not just amplify and filter (even if it's in very clever ways) but to isolate and enhance/reconstruct voices in noisy environments.

I often see AI hopes expressed in this format. I would put it another way:

> I hope the advances in "AI" will make it possible to restore hearing to baseline average human level

Wishful thinking would be to enhance it beyond baseline. It's perfectly reasonable to think AI-advances can help researchers restore hearing in most cases, and reasonably within 10 years or so.