What an excellent example of designing for the medium instead of trying to make the medium do something it's not good at! Your whole approach shows a real love, like a delicate respectfulness, that I think characterises early games and is less apparent as the systems get better (though I am sure it is still there).
I started building something like this myself (codename HFG - "Heroku for Groq") anticipating what we are indeed now seeing in ChatGPT viz. enshittification. The intention was to aim it at consumers and non-technical users who want a chatbot to help them draft reports, synthesise papers and so on. You've got a bunch of hackers in the comments going "But how can I run my own evals?" I think the answer for them is: this isn't for you.
Don't want to derail what you're trying to do with Echo in case I'm wide of the mark, but yeah even in that case, if you hadn't considered that use case for it, I reckon there will, probably inside six months, be a substantial market for non-technical users who are sick of seeing ads in a service they already pay a subscription for, and who don't care what the underlying model is - or, indeed, don't even understand the concept of an "underlying model" because they interface with AI as a product.
You have already taken the HFG idea way further than I had even thought of yet, and I feel vindicated in seeing someone else do it. I wish you the very best!
Not only do I think you're right, I think put this way it seems obvious - I am almost heaving a sigh of relief having a better historical comparison than "the dot com bubble".
Every point of friction, every struggle documented in minute detail, on a long and bumpy path to some kind of result. The stakes are zero, the whole project an act of pure expression. It is like a kind of oasis in a desert of articles about new ML models. I don't mind that HN is all about new models all the time now, but content like this being on the front page is soothing.
Here in the UK there is an ongoing debate happening more or less behind the scenes around the language that should be used for families of patients nearing end of life. The standard question is: Should we "do everything possible" to keep someone alive? The proposed better question is: Should we "allow natural death"? Any doctor understands intimately that these two questions are equivalent. Understandably, the average person doesn't. Why wouldn't you "do everything possible"? In most of these conversations the argument against just doesn't come up.
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before age eighteen." Attributed to Einstein 1948.
I realise this is the Internet, and it's not for me to convince you of anything. But you've formed an opinion on what is normal and "neutral" strong enough to bring it to a thread about something else online. Is that opinion informed, or received?
For example, you say: trans women can compete in sport with cis women, and that is unfair. Is it? I don't see an a priori answer either way. I certainly don't think banning the "promotion" of trans people in public is a viable solution.
Genuinely curious: what makes you think the moral panic around trans people is structurally different to the moral panic around gay people decades ago? All the arguments you've made here are more or less identical to arguments made to keep homosexuality illegal previously.
This is what neutral language sounds like. It sounds to me like you'd prefer to pretend these people don't exist. I'd like to remind you that male homosexuality was illegal in UK as recently as 1967. Section 28 was in force up until 2003. Same sex marriage was illegal until 2014. The ideology you are seeing in this job ad is liberal democracy. The ideology you are defending is something else entirely, and very much not a form of neutrality.
Enjoy? No, but a lot of reading and writing is very functional, for communication purposes for business etc. (documentation is a good example). In these cases the important thing is that it's accurate.
I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impulse to fill it with wizards and dragons is understandable.
As someone who has had to do some grub editing on the computer in an AirBnB because peripherals were all messed up on the guest account (no internet, no sound, you could only see a tiny part of the screen, I honestly don't know how they had managed to do it) I am super pleased to see this resource. Stuff like this is a bit, you know, hopefully you never need this, but when you do, it is so useful to have it.
I think this is maybe the most important point in this entire thing. It's not just tech. Things change. The funny thing is things change now faster than ever before, yet we still have that tendency not to notice while we're in it which we always have had. To be honest it's part of why I tend to try to put some bits about tech history in my blog posts - it puts a perspective on life more generally which helps me psychologically.
I think this is a really important distinction to make. The OP seems to be making a fallacious equivocation on the word "parameter" - specifically, any individual "parameter" in a large ML model has no unit of measurement because it doesn't mean anything on its own. I watched a great documentary about the "Soft Hair on Black Holes" paper where they talk about having to move from the blackboard to the computer because the equation explodes into thousand of parameters - the key thing to understand being that each of those parameters represents some "real" thing, a momentum, a charge, a curvature, etc.
I'm not convinced for one reason above all: short-circuit evaluation is available to use in most any programming language I've ever used, including Python and C. That said, I have seen this idiom in a lot of bash scripts. I've never understood why it's idiomatic and I'm not seeing an explanation here.
As someone who's big into UK Bass who finds new music mainly through a mix of Spotify, Beatport and Reddit, I found this recommender quite good actually! It seems to respond better to descriptions of the kind of music than to "Find tracks like these: <list>" which is what Spotify is good at.
So I came to Babylon 5 late in life, when my partner's mother revealed she had the entire box set on DVD. My partner had recently introduced me to The Expanse, which, like many, I consider the greatest sci fi TV show of all time - she described B5 to me thus: "Babylon 5 walked so the Expanse could run." Suffice to say, my expectations were sky high.
No other TV show has so greatly exceeded my expectations.
It is like make but designed specifically for the way non-C(++) users - people like me for example adding scripts like "make run" and "make build" to my node/python/PHP/etc repos - use it. It is great! I still don't use it literally just because make is already installed on any *nix system I encounter day to day.
> Are we supposed to find the figurative "gym for problem solving" the same way office workers workout after work?
That's it, yeah. It sucks but it's part of the job. It makes you a better engineer.
You're absolutely right that this isn't sustainable however. In one of my earlier jobs - specifically, the one that trained me up to become the senior engineer I am now - we had "FedEx Fridays" (same day delivery, get it?). In a word, you have a single work day to work on something non-work related, with one condition: you had to have a deliverable by the end of the day. I cannot overstate how useful having something like this in place in the place of business is for junior devs. The trick is convincing tech businesses that this kind of "training" is a legitimate overhead - the kinds of businesses that are run by engineers get this intuitively. The kind that have a non-technical C-suite less so.