Unix programmer remembered that in there's no /dev/null in DOS and that it's something shorter, and tried null which worked. Didn't check the directory contents afterwards. So basically your first sentence - doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. (I mean, I think it happened to me at least once too)
Rather that avoiding delegating it to LLM for these tasks helps you practice that skill.
That said, I think it depends how you use it. You can learn from explanations, and you'd better avoid "rewrite this for me and do nothing else" kind of approach.
Right, but the LLM can help you practice the skill too. Without the LLM, you're in a self-guided, autodidactical mode. Obviously, that can have its own advantages, but most people—but especially novices—aren't in a position to assess their skill level or their progress. The average person isn't going to magically get better at thinking or writing without formal training, or at least some direction.
I think worth noting that a more impactful and maybe even bigger proportion of those opportunists is in management.
Regarding quality overall, I agree, it's truly a cursed field. It was bad before; and with LLMs, going against that tide seems more difficult than ever.
I think doublespeak is more along the lines of calling ads a "product recommendation strategy". This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.
> This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.
That's thinking like a normal honest human :-) My point is that it was likely not a statement about reality (true or false) at all, but rather a phrase designed to elicit some response in the listener, such as the idea: 'Sam Altman isn't the kind of CEO who would put ads in his products unless he really had to'.
He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.
> He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.
That is what a lie is. The fact that some people think he exists in a different plane of existence from normal humans does not change the meaning of “lie”.
Hold on, doesn’t he think ads aren’t cool, assuming he watched the movie The Social Network years ago?
Sam Altman wants you to believe he doesn’t like ads. Sam Altman wants you to believe ads are a last resort for him. Sam is losing money. Sam reached his last resort option.
I don't think that is, because, at the time, he probably haven't decided one way or another. I think about it like the Schrodinger's cat. If Schrodinger's said "I think the cat is dead" and you went ahead and opened the box and found the cat alive, would Schrodinger have lied?
Oh I think there's a big difference. One is clever, manipulative, meant to control or coerce, possibly to facilitate long term strategic goals. The other could be a simple immediate denial of fact to avoid blame. I think the personality and capabilities of the person in the former case is more concerning.
There's nothing clever about being asked "are you going to do X?" and replying "I would only do X under extreme circumstances" when you know it's not true. It's just lying. You know if you tell the truth it will sway the other person's opinion of you right now, whereas if you tell a lie it will only eventually sway that person's opinion, if at all. Telling such a lie requires the exact same reasoning as denying responsibility for something you know you did. Both cases just require the motivation to delay an undesirable outcome.
I don't want to split hairs but I posit there is a difference because 'how I want you to think about things' could be a mixture of lies, truths, and half-truths.
'Lying', to me, implies some relationship with reality - I'm lying if I know there's no orange in my bag but I tell you that there is. What we're talking about is someone who might not know or care whether the orange or even the bag exists at all, and is just saying things to get some specific response out of the audience. The deception or not is irrelevant really.
I don't think you're making a useful point about the situation.
In the case of the orange in the bag, both Altman and his interlocutor can see the bag and the truth can be exposed by rummaging.
In the case of ads in the oAI chat feed, at the time Altman made the comment he was probably planning to puts ads in the feed. But there might not even be emails about this, just conversation. And the engineers might not solve the "how" for a while... so there's nothing to rummage for.
However, in both cases Altman wants you to think something other than what's on his mind. There's an orange in his bag, but he wants you to think there is not. There's going to be ads because he owes the investors a tonne of money but he wants you to think it wont happen, or wont happen soon, or will be "nice" ads...
The distinction is in the nature of the underlying truth, not in Altmans words or actions in the moment. In the moment, in both cases, he's lying.
I agree with your point. Mine was about the word doublespeak for this, which I think it's not - it's a lie in effect, but I think it is something like what you say, for which I don't know a term of. A bunch of sentences that are said in a complete disregard for truths and untruths; instead they are supposed to get you to believe something.
This also kinda fits the profile of Altman that I'm getting from what I have seen - admittedly without looking in-depth. A person who is on surface a pathological liar, but in fact in a closer look he just says things. They just _happen_ to be complete lies, because that's what you need to do to achieve the goal in the set of circumstances. It's just that because it's as morally objectionable as outright lying, some people would pause and think before doing it, while he seems to just have no qualms at all.
I think gaslighting is more sinister and deliberate, but it's in a similar spectrum of manipulative behavior. Perhaps, as his statements are less filled with the style of Musk's bravado on topic of FSD, and they feel overall mid, I can propose MID: Manipulative-Impulsive Disorder?
>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name
If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part.
It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.
Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.
It happened, but not as often as you'd think. In 2017 I was arguing with someone that the back button should work and URLs should be obvious in a fairly large project and they said "people are used to the back button not working - like a bank website".
1. not use query params for key entities in the URL
2. to stick user identifiers at the root path! totally unheard of to occupy such an important path at that point!
Taken together, this was entirely novel. Next to nobody did this. Twitter was the one other notable example, and that's literally all I can think of.
The URL bar was so different back then. It wasn't search by default. The average tech savviness of internet users was higher. People cared about URLs despite the fact most websites had garbage cgi-bin query string slop. Lots of folks had personal domain names. People typed URLs and shared them a lot - so this was a big deal, because they were memorable, unlike the other slop URLs at the time.
To give more character - HN's urls would have been considered exceptionally nice back then. The average URL was way worse and was littered with hundreds of query parameters.
A great deal of websites put your session token in the query params. PHP had first class ways of spending "sessions" to all urls. Essentially a cookie. It was disgusting.
GitHub revolutionized urls as a product. Even today, not many companies followed suit.
Reddit did it, linked in, most social media really, this is all just a throwback to /~user/ paths from apache and other early webservers. I think slashdot used the same convention.
3rd level would be yourname.site.com, like LiveJournal and Blogspot had a long time ago.
4th level would be site.com/yourname, like Myspace had a long time ago, and Facebook had after that, and Github had after that.
Once you sink all the way down to the obscure depths of 4th level, there's not much difference between site.com/yourname and site.com/whatever/yourname
>It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
This seems like such a basic solution that I'm surprised that it isn't required by any of the mainstream standards before WiFi Aware. I wonder if this was some sort of a patent issue or similar.
I'm assuming the question should be further refined to "why does the service need to know the data". The things that you mention could be done with the service only having the encrypted blob.
Encryption is more work than not-encryption, and most software is optimally lazy and barely functional. The main goal of the developers is to make the app almost work most of the time, and not crash too much or be so inconvenient that users delete it. Anything past that is extra, and businesses don't pay for extra.
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