It costs advertisers three whole dollars for a user to click on one of these things? That’s hilarious. I’m switching to ChatGPT and I’m going to click on every one. Maybe I’ll even write a browser extension that does it for me.
Assertions are for testing at runtime. They demonstrate that the behavior is correct on one input when it runs. Formal verification proves that the code is correct on _all_ inputs _before_ it runs.
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
It’s astonishing how quickly attitudes have shifted on this forum since engineers have been reminded which side of the labor/capital divide they’re really on. I can scarcely believe some of the comments I’m seeing on here these days.
I'm starting to wonder if I can adapt, or how much longer I'll be able to take it. It's painful to read the botspeak all day, but it's more than that. The incentives to crank out loads of "results" are immense, but I no longer trust anything "I" "produce," and I'm not building on my knowledge of the system. They just want more and more slop. It's slop on slop at this point. I can't raise concerns or I would get fired. But I'm still responsible for the slop. It's starting to make me anxious.
Me too. It feels like I’m taking psychic damage from reading so much of this stuff. Contrary to the theory that it’s “just the contract workers’ Nigerian English,” I think the models are developing an ultra-terse hyper-stylized dialect of their own under RL pressure. They seem to be writing increasingly in _code_, and I don’t mean computer code. The words don’t mean quite what they mean to humans.
Of course they don’t believe in or care about any of this lol. To them it’s a minor inconvenience that some of the walking future cash flows have bleeding hearts, so they’ll make placating noises sometimes, but they obviously don’t care. They’re winners, everyone else is a loser, get over it, etc.
Indeed. The most self-important butthurt dweeb I knew in college is now a self-important butthurt founder-influencer with a massive following on X of the sort of unkempt right-winger engineers who are driven by high school revenge fantasies. Good for him, I suppose, as unhappy as he still seems to be.
In my lifetime I have seen the tech ethos shift slowly, then quickly, from “don’t be evil” to “don’t be a pussy.”
It took me utterly by surprise when, after finishing my PhD, I decided it would be less damaging to my soul to go into finance. Even more surprising, I think I was right.
I was glued to the window while flying over southern China recently. There is so much infrastructure you can see from the air, even in fairly rural provinces. So many bridges. So many wind turbines. It is visibly a country on the move, a country that believes in itself and its ability to do things. The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.
He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.
So he goes away sour;
And, 'tis said, to this hour
Declares that he's no taste for grapes.