Wait, isn't that just Doublethink from 1984? Holding two opposing thoughts is a sign that your mental model of the world is wrong and that it needs to be fixed. Where have you heard that maxim?
No you've got it completely backwards. Reality has multiple facets (different statements, all of which can be true) and a mental model that insists on a singular judgement is reductionist, missing the forest for the trees. Light is a wave and a particle. People are capable of good and bad. The modern world is both amazing and unsustainable. etc.
Holding multiple truths is a sign that you understand the problem. Insisting on a singular judgement is a sign that you're just parroting catchy phrases as a short cut to thinking; the real world is rarely so cut and dry.
"Leaders" have to stop pretending that they know better than the developers who are actually doing the work. Let the developers decide how their "Developer Experience" should look like instead of deciding it top down. Show some real humility.
A good example from the article is AI. Leaders think it is the greatest thing, but two out of three developers don't see the benefit. This needs to be solved bottom up. Devs love new shiny tools that make them more productive or that make work more fun. That's why we invent a new framework or language every three days. If the two out of three developers can't find a way to make AI work for them, then their non-technical leaders surely won't help.
Your intuition is correct. I think you accidentally swapped %s and %d in one of your previous posts, leading to the confusion.
The "backwards" in the article is referring to the way the list is processed by the recursive function. The list and the resulting type are in the correct/intuitive order. I also found this sentence confusing.
By the way, thinking of a function of type a->b->c as a->(b->c) is technically correct and useful in certain cases, for example, when you are currying. But in most cases you can just read this as a function taking two arguments of types a and b, returning something of type c.
Degrading public institutions is not the conclusion of the article, it's an objective fact. The conclusion of the article is that public don't want to do anything about it because people don't like bad news and prefer to shoot all the messengers.
So, that commenter was just wrong, and his wrong assumptions are perfectly explained by the article.
Except it's not an objective fact. It's a widely held opinion, with a fair amount of strong evidence behind it, but there's nothing objective about measuring the strength of public institutions.
There's folks who profit off panic, and prophets of doom should be treated skeptically like anyone else.
Half of my country is destroyed and showered with hundreds of thousands of dead humans and who knows of how many dead animals, while half of US politicum support the invaders and destroyers.
Everything may look as an "opinion" to you, but only until facts start hitting you literally.
>prophets of doom should be treated skeptically like anyone else.
the only difference between a cold truth and a prophet of doom is the lens you view it in. In other words, the opinions of the ones receiving the news.
Skepticism is good to have, but this article wasn't about an anthology of 2000's to 2020's unfettered capitalism. The audience of such an article needs to have some awareness of the modern economic situation to get the most out of this.
LLMs are really good at system 1 thinking (fast, intuitive) but can't do system 2 (planning, calculating) at all. Just like in Go/Baduk, neural net based AIs were good at tactical play but fell apart against pro players with good long term strategy. Until NNs were combined with Monte Carlo Tree Search and we got AlphaGo with great tactical and strategial play.
We need a good search strategy that fits LLMs before we can get AGI. Maybe Chain Of Thought can become such a strategy, but it always felt too clunky to me.
We already do beam search, which allows LLMs to backtrack on branches until they find the highest probability path. Discounting things like Toolformer, this is about as good as it's going to get.
> The blame squarely falls at the IA's feet; being an idealist doesn't give you the rights to delve into illegal behavior
This way of thinking is the reason why we are losing so many great things. Laws are created by people to support a society we want to live in. When laws no longer sever the society, then the society must rise up and change them. Like with any bug, fixing it early is cheaper than fixing it later.
> it's clear to me who is culpable
"Look what you made me do. If you hadn't acted up I wouldn't have had to destroy you."
>> The blame squarely falls at the IA's feet; being an idealist doesn't give you the rights to delve into illegal behavior
> This way of thinking is the reason why we are losing so many great things. Laws are created by people to support a society we want to live in. When laws no longer sever the society, then the society must rise up and change them. Like with any bug, fixing it early is cheaper than fixing it later.
Let me put it bluntly: the IA went about pursuing that change in stupid and impulsive way, and their actions may very well accomplish nothing while causing us to lose more "great things."
"I'm going to pretend the laws I don't like don't exist in order to try to change them," is an activity for people with little other responsibility and little to lose.
In hindsight, if the IA wanted to try something like the "National Emergency Library," they should have set up an independent entity to take the fall and contain the damage if it didn't work out. And since they didn't do that, they should probably have tried really hard to settle and fight another day than go down in a blaze of glory.
You already live in one. Publishing house shareholders get most of the money, even for online books. If you pirated the book and donated to the author, they'd actually get more money.
> You already live in one. Publishing house shareholders get most of the money, even for online books.
Doesn't this apply to every mass-market creative endeavor - software engineering included? There a whole lot of machinery sitting between {code|book} author and the paying consumers, leveraging efficiency of scale and demanding a pound of flesh in return. Agents, editors, lawyers, proof readers, marketers, book cover artists, sales people, type-setters, and requisite admin support staff all of them necessary to publish and distribute books at scale. If you think authors don't need an entire industry behind them, try sifting through the self-published dreck on Amazon.
And it is pretty clear who would be first to exploit system where authors don't have copy rights. That is Amazon to start with followed by all other big companies who can effectively distribute the works.
The vast, VAST majority of money that an author makes is from their advance. It is exceedingly rare for a book to sell even enough to cover that advance, and even rarer for it to have sales strong enough that the author sees meaningful, life changing residuals.
>> I don't want to live in a society where authors don't get paid, so the laws are just fine.
> The vast, VAST majority of money that an author makes is from their advance. It is exceedingly rare for a book to sell even enough to cover that advance, and even rarer for it to have sales strong enough that the author sees meaningful, life changing residuals.
This is how author advances would work in a world without copyright: authors would self-publish their books, and there would be no advances. If the book proved to be popular and successful, all the major distribution platforms would "pirate" it and pay them nothing. No conceivable DRM would save the author's income, because the platforms can afford to pay people to manually key in the work.
And why should I even offer you an advance if I’m not going to make any money off your book. Heck, why should I invest any money in editing your book for that matter.
I’m not sure it’s exceedingly rare for an author to not make some beer money on top of single dollar advances but it’s not a full-time job for many authors. It mostly works to support the day job or as a hobby.
But many authors might as well self-publish today. I mostly have.
Generously you could say they're reacting to the "real danger". The danger to them personally is that someone else does better at a currently fancy project and appears more capable than them to others.
I dont know why your up-playing their IQ. there may not be a ton of forrest gump tier dummies, but they're often profoundly average people.
I've done consulting at F500 companies and was consistently not-impressed by director levels and above, dudes in tech for 30 years and didn't have an understanding of what "production" meant. Outsourcing literally their basic day to day job responsibilities to Accenture and McKinsey to the point where pretty much anyone reading HN could have been in their role.
A lot was "flash" -- looking good, speaking grandly, and sticking to broad approaches that they could assign to a technical senior manager or contributor. And a lot of the time, to be honest, that worked: sometimes you just gotta motivate people with big gestures. But once it became time to actually get outside of the box and generate new ideas they were stuffed shirts.
Why not both? Pharma and Social Media profit from depressed people. Nothing ever has a single root cause. There are always multiple causes often working together in a vicious cycle. Also, what's wrong with vibrators?
Since GP has replied, I'll now add: I think of the divide as "extroverts gain energy from group social interactions; introverts lose energy during group social interactions".
IMO, it's not shy vs open, as my wife is on the shy side but clearly extroverted, while I'm more visibly/apparently comfortable but I find it exhausting to be in groups for a long period of time.
