HelloThere @ hellothere @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

I am well aware.

You're conflating copyright and patents.

I never said it was going to be easy - and clearly that is why OpenAI didn't bother.

If they want to advocate for changes to copyright law then I'm all ears, but let's not pretend they actually have any interest in that.

I'm no fan of the current copyright law - the Statute of Anne was much better - but let's not kid ourselves that some of the richest companies in the world have any desire what so ever to change it.

OK, so pay for it.

Pretty simple really.

There's a lot here. Some I can comment on and some I can't. Some bits are simply how you are viewing the world, and differ to how others view it. There is no possibility for objectivity there, and are better suited to discussions with mental health professionals.

For my sins, I'm a Product Manager. While I have a background in engineering (having done a CS degree and taught myself to code in my teens), I have never held a job as a developer.

As such, I have conversations pretty much every day with developers, dev leads, people with "architect" in their title, CTOs, etc, all of whom are considerably more technically literate than I am, about what new technologies we can take advantage of. Some times it's me asking them, sometimes it's them asking me, but one thing is always constant. Time, risk, and cost of implementation is what matters most.

The majority of the time, when I am approached by Devs, the conversation goes along the lines of:

• Dev: "there is this awesome new thing we absolutely need to use now"
• Me: "OK, what are the benefits?"
• Dev: "it makes X, Y, and Z so much easier and save us time doing them"
• Me: "OK, how long do we spend doing those things currently?"
• Dev: "eh, well, I don't know exactly, but it's, er, it's loads and doing this will save us that time and it's great and we need to do it now"
• Me: "yeah, I get that, but how much time do we actually spend on it?"
• repeat forever

In short, the benefits have not been quantified, and the costs ignored.

Other times, the change that is being suggested doesn't align with the current business need. I've had to reject suggestions to refactor systems because we've literally been down to the last few pay cheques, and we need to focus on revenue generation. This massively undermines the person making the suggestion, because it shows they are not understanding the actual priority of the business.

And other times still, it can be simply a pipedream. I once had a dev lead stand up and scream at me across a desk because I didn't agree with him that we immediately rewrite our entire app in Swift, on literally the day Apple released the beta back in 2014, and I had had the gaul to suggest that he needs to come up with a plan to iteratively develop some new, low risk, functionality in the language first, before saying he wants to spend "at least a year" doing a complete overhaul, and nothing else.

This is not to say that developers are idiots or anything. The vast majority of the discussions I have had with all my collegues across my career have been good, thought provoking, and helpful. But that doesn't mean they always get what they want, and nor does it mean I get what I want. I have definitely rejected work where that was the wrong decision, and I've suffered the consequences of it. I've also definitely accepted work that ended up being a complete waste of time.

None of us are perfect.

If you are finding that your boss is always rejecting your suggestions, I would suggest you need to consider these things:

• have you quantified the benefits and costs?
• are there competitors who are already doing this thing? If so, who?
• does the suggestion align with the strategy / focus of the business?
• have you identified a small increment / proof of concept / mvp, that takes a few hours, or days, or a sprint, to demonstrate potential value?

If you can explain the potential value, how it helps the business get to where it wants to be faster, and how you can identify unknown unknowns through low cost and quick to develop POCs, then you may be able to get buy in.

If you can't, or don't know how, then there are plenty of resources available. A good starting point would be to read The Lean Startup.

It is considerably more likely that the problem is with your skills of persuasion, and writing business cases, rather than all of technology being worthless.

Lastly, regarding discussions with professionals, one bit that did concern me is this

In my therapist's opinion he thinks we as a soceity are not taking 100% advantage of technology we have. I can't go into too many details bc our conversations are private but at the end I agreed with him. I'm seeing it now in my working day but he convinced me that it's everywhere.

My experience with therapists, and in discussions with friends who are qualified pshrinks, is that a therapist should never try and convince you of anything. Their job is to structure conversations you are in essence having with yourself. They may repeat your previous statements back to you, in a way that requires you to reconcile potentially conflicting views or opinions. They may even challenge your assertions and get you to explain more thoroughly your views. These processes may well cause you to change your views on things.

But if your therapist is actually trying to convince you of their world view, you need to get a new therapist.

I agree, but under our stupid system it needs to be something that inspires a plurality of constituencies.

And that, unfortunately, means tory swing voters are more important for electoral success.

I live in an incredibly safe labour seat, so if they push a policy that gets 1k more votes here it's pointless. If that same policy gets 1k here, and loses 1k in a target swing constituency, it's actually bad.

We saw under Corbyn - who I voted for as leader twice - that in 2017 with an inspirational manifesto it will inspire people, but unfortunately those people literally lived in the wrong places. His support was too concentrated. In 2019, in a glorified brexit proxy vote, we saw that the public believed that Johnson could promise the earth, and that Corbyn couldn't. Labour still had that, false, association with economic mismanagement.

Another way of framing this is that yes, some voter cohorts need to be inspired. But tory swing voters don't need inspiration, they need to be reassured. They need to not be scared to vote Labour for possibly the first time in 20+ years. They need to know that their mortgage isn't going to yet even higher, that Labour won't "max out the country's credit card", and every other lie they've been fed by the Tories.

Look, I'm not exactly inspired by playing it safe either, but to suggest no one is going to vote Labour is wrong.

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html

93% probability of a Labour majority, with the current prediction being a Labour majority of 184.

And this article is exactly what Labour should be pushing, they shouldn't be presuming that the above projection is a sure thing. Voter apathy is a real problem, and getting the vote out is critically important.

Politics in the UK has been sufficiently fractured in recent years that a lot of people are going to have to hold their noses to get the Tories out.

Yes.

But it still ultimately requires you in that chair to correct issues.

I don't doubt for a second that time is saved, especially in the boilerplate parts of writing code, but it's not going to remove you from that chair.

From my experience, Copilot is helpful, but we're talking a few steps above templates, Clippy 3.0, if you will. The bit that blew my mind a bit was realising just how much code I write is the essentially the same. "Automating" that has been a great help, but - like with the marketing stuff - it's not at a point where it can do it alone.

It's the same with driving, etc.

I'd describe those products as being in the "heh, that's neat" phase. At least, the good ones anyway. After a few hours you start the see the issues - like images with very weird fingers - and then you the illusion is broken.

For example, in work I've been playing around a lot with various LLMs to generate marketing copy for physical products. I'm being vague here for reasons I'm sure are obvious.

Across the first few hours it felt very impressive, it would pretty much instantly churn out descriptions in a variety of styles, even when the product information we provided was low quality.

The problem though, was that the copy it wrote was actually - if you sat down and read it - shit.

Now, the vast majority of marketing copy is also shit. The good stuff is excellent, rare as hens teeth, and incredibly expensive, but your generic boilerplate crap you see all over the Internet, that stuff, it could replicate perfectly. Even the lies.

If you want sales speak waffle, it's 11/10 every time.

So we're currently in a bit of a bind. Do we release a tool that creates boilerplate shit more easily, and will turn even the most inconsistent (and straight up conflicting or impossible) data in to fancy sounding text, and jump on the AI-powered bandwagon, or do we not, because what it creates isn't actually any good?

Imo spitting out crap in a second or two isn't a valuable improvement on where we were a few years ago, even if it is pretty neet.

Just one more lane!

I'm not sure why I feel the need to preface this comment, but, I work in software, I get how hard a problem autonomous driving is, how genuine safety improvements over human drivers are highly valuable, and how perfect need not be the enemy of good.

However, the level of sheer blind optimism from the AV crowd is the same as the AI "leaders" and the crypto bros before them. How their statements are not straight up fraud is beyond me.

The reality of them needing to have a remote team of drivers intervening every 2 to 5 miles of driving, within an urban setting very much designed for cars, is so far away from the picture they paint.

No wonder the tech industry has a dog shit reputation.

No.

Because liquids are harder to judge just from looking, compared to solids, and the UK has a history - pre weights and measures act - of fuckery.

Cheese, for example, is sold by weight, and back in the day markets would have weigh rooms so you could confirm that the grocer's scales were correct.

Yeah, exactly, so volume stays the same and designs can vary. That makes it easier for people to compare because it's 750ml vs 750ml, instead of both design and volume changing by small amounts.

You can't tell the internal volume of something based on its external dimensions, other than maximum potential size.

Surely as long as it's labeled clearly

And therein lies the issue, how clear is clear?

For example, if someone managed to get hold of bottles with slightly thicker glass, you could sell a bottle of wine with slightly less wine in than is obvious from the outside, increasing the price per mililitre by a few percent. Not much individually, but it all adds up over the year.

If you're buying that wine, and looking at a shelf of near identical looking shapes and sizes of bottle, you're already factoring in grape, flavour, price per 750ml, provinence, alcohol content, etc, so what benefit do you get from one bottle being 750ml, and another being 736ml?

Standardisation simplifies manufacturing (of bottles) as well as purchasing of the end product by consumers. There is no benefit to an overly wide selection of sizes.

Agreed - it's merry christmas and happy new year.

I don't see how Palestinians would cause the left wing to abandon all their causes and run towards the right wing

Then you need to read more about how deeply divided nations operate politically, and how people vote tactically.