I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem
For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'
On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are
And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta
(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)
Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop
Overall it seems we don't have good intuitions for what kinda work AI 'displaces'. Years of hand-wringing about programmers being put out of a job and instead programmers are the ones paying $200/mo for LLMs
And on the flipside a lot of AI vendor ideas like helping doctors turn voice transcripts into notes has just been annoying for the prospective user--they feel they may as well type it up themselves if they then have to review and correct the AI notes
In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs
There are definitely guys in some companies just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" and hence need a lot of orchestration tools but for the rest of us do we really need the AI to do all the build steps and the testing steps... or do we just need the new feature that runs when the button is clicked and then we can check it out in the browser ourselves. The code gen is what I need the AI for, not the 'smoke tests' and the tsc finagling. I'm willing to spend some mental calories myself in figuring this feature out step by step
Actually this makes me wonder if some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc
> just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys"
I still don‘t know if this is real. If it works like that, where are the companies that only kept every tenth, 10x‘d AI enhanced dev? They should have significantly higher margins. The companies that keep all devs and 10x‘d them, finally bringing that backlog to 0 should have exploding revenue and profit.
Exactly. If you can free engineering capacity from tedious busywork (fixing bugs), you have them available for implementing/delegating to implement experimental features into new revenue streams.
Why fire anyone in this scenario? Growth is only going to keep coming.
I don't think devs are that expensive relative to a big company.
Airbnbs revenue last year was 12b. If they have 1000 engineers,maybe average 200k/yr that's only 200m. If they got rid of their engineers still only a fraction of of the revenue
> some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc
That's accurate. There are a lot of people (some of them quite senior and/or skilled) who operate in the way you described.
The build and test steps allow the agent to self correct. Why would I want to waste my time trying out a half-finished or outright broken feature if the AI didn't even run a type checker on it to see if it even compiled?
What this page doesn't mention is 301 or 302 redirects. SEO has made "old URLs staying live" more of a widespread concern than it was at the time. And WordPress etc ship with inbuilt redirects upon slug rename
So to a large extent this has been mitigated and not using the suggestion here, which is to create a permanent URL ontology upfront
That said eventually neglect, removal, reorgs (or simply websites going offline) still happens... but the way the suggested goal has been advanced is due to becoming a business priority and with redirects and CMSes as tech to help
That said one suggestion made here turned out to be very useful and indeed is the default in WP:
http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chairs
If you use date as part of the taxonomy then -- as Tim BL says here:
> A reason for using a topic area as part of the URI is that responsibility for sub-parts of a URI space is typically delegated, and then you need a name for the organizational body - the subdivision or group or whatever - which has responsibility for that sub-space. This is binding your URIs to the organizational structure. It is typically safe only when protected by a date further up the URI (to the left of it): 1998/pics can be taken to mean for your server "what we meant in 1998 by pics", rather than "what in 1998 we did with what we now refer to as pics."
Indeed. Back when I worked at a small software sweatshop^Whouse, I was tasked with migrating the company's static-ish website (a bunch of PHP files) into WordPress. Heeding the linked advice, I carefully set up 301 redirects from the old pages to new ones. When I look up the website now, the redirects are gone. Nobody cared to maintain them.
A lot of 'numbers' startups cite are basically fake I think. Like if someone says we have this many users as a statement to TechCrunch you have no idea what they are actually calculating
But there is a clear line that gets crossed if you start actually making a database of millions of synthetic users and that's what happened with 'Frank' that sold to JP Morgan and eventually the founder was prosecuted
Not just users, but number of companies. So many startups list out all the companies using their products, who also happen to be an army of startups. I doubt they're all using each others products, just doing what they can to juice each companies perceived metrics.
Supposedly B2B SaaS companies in YC have been known to enter into agreements to “buy” each others’ products so they can all book more users and revenue despite a single dollar not changing hands.
In the current environment I doubt Elizabeth Holmes would go to prison. She would be saying the machine would work by early next year. After all a drop of blood is just a smaller quantity. Making the machine work is just an engineering problem.
If she were really clever she would recruit a social media army of all the weird conspiracy theorists who think "medbeds" are real.
Of course now we know that a drop of capillary blood containing interstitial fluid and a random mix of venous and arterial blood is unsuitable for most blood tests. At least you will have googled that if you're an Elon stan preparing to tell me how they're not comparable.
Cool thought process, but the real reason Elizabeth Holmes would not go to prison if she pulled that shit today is much, much simpler: She would know to make a nice sized donation to the current administration (or a sweet business deal for one of his family members), and the justice system would simply be completely hands-off her. She'd give 5% equity to Jared Kushner or something, and go on committing fraud with confidence. It's not complex anymore. Pay to play.
The big difference was that she was in the medical field. She used her machines that worked unreliability on patients and caused actual damage to humans. Then she noticed that this could be a problem and switched to blood analyzer from Siemens. But she still continued to say that the machines do work. She lied to investors. I still feel her case is a lot different to what musk is doing. I think you can definitely say “coming next year” and actually needing 5 years. You cannot blatantly lie and harm people along the way
But what if you say that FSD is actually here and that the only reason you can't fully use it is regulations and then need an extra decade (at least -- still pending)? As one of many examples....
Are you a biochemist? Would the Theranos machine have worked with new tests using new reagents? Is the needed blood volume not similar to, for example, payload capacity? Are we discriminating against people who affect an unusual voice?
It wouldn't have worked, period. You can't use capillary blood for the kind of blood tests they were claiming to. It's statistically impossible because the sample isn't big enough and drawing more capillary blood doesn't improve the SNR. Two samples taken at the same time from different spots on the same finger can yield wildly different results.
Everyone in diagnostic medicine knows this (they've been dealing with this problem since the glucose finger prick test). That's why no biotech VC ever invested in Theranos and they had to get tech VCs and fancy board members like Henry Kissinger. A cursory glance at the proposal by someone qualified would have shut that down immediately, but tech VCs don't do due diligence anymore.
That's the point. As yet uninvented tests and reagents are the same kind of line of BS as "let's make the rocket bigger." While I have the advantage of having a mother who is an immunologist and did in fact work in developing diagnostics, all it really takes to call shenanigans is a knowledge of project management and critical path analysis. By the time you're launching 15 or 25 starship missions to refuel one on its way to the moon, the whole project is irrelevant.
It’s not a lack of due diligence, it’s a lack of prosecution of fraud. They think they can just unload to some sucker for a big payday. See also the entirety of cryptocurrency.
> They think they can just unload to some sucker for a big payday. See also the entirety of cryptocurrency.
That's also the entirety of the biotech VC industry, except even more so.
Biotech startups require far more capital to make it to market than tech startups, so biotech VCs take the role of early stage funding for R&D. Then the startup IPOs (with zero revenue and unlimited scientific risk) and uses that to fund its clinical trials, while the investors dump their stock. Then, because ramping up manufacturing and quality control takes even more money, the biotech startup sells out to a pharmaceutical company once its passed its trials or the results are promising enough to take the risk, closing the financing loop. Most of these startups stop existing before they even earn a single dollar in revenue, either because they fail or they're acquired by someone who can actually manufacture and distribute their product at scale. This has been the way of the industry for at least the last 20-30 years ever since the small molecule cliff hit like a brick wall.
So, the VC industry whose standard operating procedure is to unload companies onto public investors long before anyone even knows whether the drug or device would work, wouldn't touch Theranos with a thirty foot pole.
You might need to qualify that a bit harder or someone could quite easily point out that all of these worthless shitdribblers cause actual damage to humans.
They all lie, they all continue to claim that they hold the future in their feeble sticky hands.
Just to take, take, take.
You seem fixated on lying being a problem but only one of these two liars causes you to feel that her case is different? Maybe the difference between the two is in the lie of the beholder.
> Like if someone says we have this many users as a statement you have no idea what they are actually calculating
I think that's BS. User metrics are usually very explicitly defined (e.g. monthly or daily active users have always been clearly defined wherever I've worked, even if just for the sole reason that people collecting those numbers need to know what to count). User quality is definitely a gray area and estimating bot percentage has become increasingly difficult, but user metrics are not some ill-defined, fuzzy math notion.
Right I'm not saying that Zuck's staff doesn't know how to calculate MAU or ARR. I'm saying I'm not sure we can trust the 'median' (median on a scale of super-scrupulous to outright-dishonest) CEO is not counting things like inactive cohorts, newsletter subscribers, website hits when counting 'users'... or being very optimistic about whether a customer will renew when calculating 'recurring revenue'
I may be wrong! But I am definitely giving such claims the side-eye
For example, at a major social media company I worked at in the early 2010s, bots/spam users were deleted after earnings calls, not before. IIRC an employee had the temerity to ask "Is this honest behavior" in an all hands!??!
I'm 100% convinced that accidental website hits and bounces from unique IPs when viewing the ensuant shitty content counts as MAUs for most, if not all, major tech companies.
This is an area where deception is possible. For example, if the metric is background API calls, you can fake that too. What matters is how you define 'active users.' In fact, this is a common technique used in well known scam apps in Korea, often called 'vanity metrics.' Generating abusive users and background traffic that create no real business value, then packaging it as user growth. There are even people who specialize in this.
if someone says they have a billion users because they are connected to the doubleclick exchange... they aren't lying, they might be deceptive or simply foolish.
As part of due diligence, the buyer/investor should ask how these numbers are calculated and make their own judgement. Unfortunately I believe startups select for those who dance the border of deceptive and foolish.
It's interesting that so much of the 'Anti-Big-Tech' movement over the last decade focused on tangential things like potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome or breaking up Facebook while Apple had this chokehold on the actual financial transactions in their ecosystem.
App store fees is a much more obvious example of something subject to regulatory scrutiny vs what much of what Biden's FTC under Lina Khan was working on.
As with many questions of what people seem to be focused on, I think this has a lot more to do with media coverage dynamics than the facts on the ground. A major case against App Store fees has been ongoing since 2020, you just don’t hear as much about it because it’s less controversial.
I distinctly remember the transition from "Tech used to be good" to "Tech is actively malicious" being when Epic Games decided to pull a Stallman-tier stunt against Apple over something that had become the industry standard. In fact, it was such a direct shot against Apple's monopolistic control that when the Biden FTC did attack Apple, it was over a handful of side issues[0] that Epic hadn't addressed and were thus still open to pursue[3].
There is still a subset of people who still think Apple's 30% is a religious tithe to keep the App Barbarians out rather than an usurious tax, but those people got a lot quieter once Tim Cook started bribing Trump with shiny plaques.
One other issue with antitrust action against Apple is that, strictly speaking, Apple did nothing (legally) wrong. The mistake we made was in the 1970s when we decided to grant the protections of creative expression to computer code[1]. Apple's argument - which, so far, courts have been willing to accept without issue - is that they are allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. It is very difficult (though not impossible) to argue that Apple deciding to bill developers for the OS instead of users is anticompetitive - in fact, Epic's lawsuit failed specifically on those grounds.
Anyway, you should probably bug your politicians to sponsor OAMA, or whatever new bill is being introduced to replace OAMA. The solution to Apple has to be legislated, not litigated.
Aside from that, the rest of Big Tech is significantly more vulnerable to antitrust than Apple is. Breaking up Facebook would actually be way more consequential than you think. Basically all of Facebook's apps were things bought specifically to destroy competition. They control the political narrative in every country in ways most newsmedia would only dream of[2]. There's a book you ought to read - Careless People - written by an ex-Facebook exec that Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to sue into the ground.
[0] "Super apps" and third-party Apple Watch pairing
[1] To be clear, I do NOT believe code should be considered expression and I have far less qualms about AI slop code than I do AI slop art.
[2] This is also why Elon Musk bought Twitter - although, in that case, he was a lot less successful than Zuck was.
[3] To be clear, if any DOJ attempted to sue Apple over the 30% today, it'd probably fail at the pleading stage.
Yeah... If you even say to Claude I want to make an app like github.com/user/repo it's not gonna just clone it and do some touch ups. Anything can happen of course, but my spidey sense says generally AI won't fork a project unasked (just because of the implied maintenance burden of applying future patches from upstream if nothing else)
Yeah - the whole Claude did it thing here reads to me like blaming a grammar issue on an LLM. Yes they have their issues but this isn't one of them - they're not deterministic they aren't going to make the exact same bug as a project you never heard of unless it's a specific technical shortcoming/training data gap/skill issue of the model. If you say "I want something exactly like xyz in every way" though then sure - but you're claiming you never asked for that? Not passing the sniff test here
I have tried this with Codex, and if you ask it to implement a project based on an algorithm or design in a given repo, it always puts an attribution link saying that part of it was adapted from that repo. Unfortunately I think we’re being duped here.
Also, Claude has the habit of finding and fixing bugs without being asked - for example, in code that an earlier version of itself wrote. So while you can never be sure, there's a non-zero chance that even if it had copied the original code it would have found and fixed the accidental trap.
I have had Claude and Codex look at third party repositories on several occasions as reference material for something I wanted to make my own version of, and not once have they ever cloned it unless I told them to. Sometimes I would notice they would just keep reading the repo through a ton of API calls so I'd just stop them and clone it for them and tell them to look there. And not once was the output anywhere near that close to the original, plus they usually added attribution info if the results were even (unscientific estimate) 50-60% similar.
So the thing that drove this person to Gruber et al's notice is an RSS Reader that doesn't count how many new items are pending? It's the kind of thing that can get you significant mindshare among the last few people who use RSS readers and have disproportionate impact on the discourse apparently
This whole affair seriously undermines Terry's credibility, however it needs to be said that his take on how RSS readers should work is genuinely new and -- to some audiences -- interesting.
It's as if real people are not all good or all bad, but can do good things, and bad things too.
Do you utilize RSS? I've been trying to find a good RSS reader that incorporates some of the ideas his advocates, but I prefer Linux. Right now I'm using Thunderbird for it, but I'd love a good recommendation!
I don’t particularly buy the author’s story here, but “doesn’t count how many new items are pending” is a feature for me. I don’t want my RSS reader to feel like yet another list of tasks I’ve to get through.
For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'
On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are
And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta
(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)
Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop