For me, it’s “learn everything”.
The best devs in XYZ language/framework aren’t the ones who are experts in XYZ, but the ones who are just good enough in XYZ and 15 other things that they see what XYZ excels at, and lacks, and how patterns from elsewhere could be adapted to supercharge XYZ’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.
Maybe. But I don't particularly care even if they are planning a global takeover or whatever. I just don't buy the idea of an organized shadowy cabal being able to comprehensively manipulate the world to their will.
Now, there are definitely people with ridiculously outsized influence compared to other people, and they definitely do deliberately try to achieve a specific outcome... and the world does eventually tend to organize itself to the benefit of those people... but it's more a consequence of aligned incentives and feedback loops that make it the most likely outcome given the initial conditions, rather than an open-ended question where they held the sole deciding vote.
And to me... That's actually scarier. The idea that even if we somehow wound up with benevolent people in places of power (which is difficult, because those places of power tend not to attract benevolent people), they would still be paddling against a merciless current of systemic mechanisms that are eager to undo any progress they might make.
To quote a brilliant man, Tim Gurner:
They have been paid a lot, to do not that much, and we need to see that change. We need to see insolvency rise. Landlords need to lose 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the owner class. We need to remind people that we produce the value so that they can freeload, not the other way around.
I mean, there has been a systemic change where landlords feel that the tenants are extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the owner class, which is what the whole -- you know, the world -- people are trying to do.
And we're seeing it. I think every capitalist now is seeing it. I mean there is definitely massive discontent going on. People may not be talking about it, but people are definitely agitating and we're starting to see more fear in the owner class. And that has to continue, because that will cascade across the oligarchy.
Microsoft is trying to pull the legal equivalent of the crypto bro strat of "Well, it can't be undone now, cuz it's on the blockchain."
Get so many people using your LLM that even if you did technically violate millions of copyrights to make it, it's so foundational to so many companies' processes that no judge would have the courage to stop it.
This is why it’s as much a question of philosophy as it is of engineering.
Because there are things we care about besides quantitative measures.
If you replace 100 pedestrian deaths due to drunk drivers with 99 pedestrian deaths due to unexplainable self-driving malfunctions… Is that, unambiguously, an improvement?
I don’t know. In the aggregate, I guess I would have to say yes..?
But when I imagine being that person in that moment, trying to make sense of the sudden loss of a loved one and having no explanation other than watershed segmentation and k-means clustering… I start to feel some existential vertigo.
I worry that we’re sleepwalking into treating rationalist utilitarianism as the empirically correct moral model — because that’s the future that Silicon Valley is building, almost as if it’s inevitable.
And it makes me wonder, like… How many of us are actually thinking it through and deliberately agreeing with them? Or are we all just boiled frogs here?
All the more reason to take this seriously and not disregard it as an implementation detail.
When we, as a society, ask: Are autonomous vehicles safe enough yet?
That’s not the whole question.
…safe enough for whom?
It's not a discriminatory bias
You don’t know that.
Speaking as someone who inherited a computer vision codebase from Asian devs and quickly found that it didn’t work on white skin…
Implementation decisions matter, and those decisions will always be biased towards demonstrating successful output for the people who plan, bankroll, and labor on the project.
How much of the 20% or 7.5% difference in detection is due purely to inevitable drawbacks of size and skin tone?
Who knows.
What we do know is that we did measure a difference, and we do live in a culture where we’re more likely to hear a CEO say:
“It works!” …and then see an article months later that adds “…except for children and black people.”
rather than:
“It doesn’t work!” …and then see an article months later that adds “…except for adults and white people.”
And that fact means we should seriously consider whether our attention (and intention) is being fairly applied here.
Journalist: “I want to report on how apocalyptic coverage of climate change breeds inaction.”
Editor: “Cool… Cool, cool, cool… But like, can you do that in an apocalyptic tone?”
Journalist: “…Fine…”
The bill defines female as “a person belonging, at birth, to the biological sex which has the specific reproductive role of producing eggs” and male as “a person belonging, at birth, to the biological sex which has the specific reproductive role of producing sperm.”
1.7% of the population is intersex, so where do they fit in?
Why do we let execs sell stock received as compensation at all?