Are you complaining that when they cut their pay from 400k to 32k that wasn’t enough? Or are you complaining that they didn’t cut their 32k salaries down further?
I mean, if you think "salaries" doesn't include 800MM in bonuses (the number that's been thrown around), then you're speaking differently than others in the thread.
The argument is - engineers are expensive so why pay for the expertise to setup and run machines? There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.
We don't let pencil pushers with MBAs anywhere near what we're doing, and it's going great.
I know this isn't the most usual configuration but if undervaluing my skills and trying to bottom dollar on them is going to be their rules, then I'm just going to do my own thing, and they're just going to have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for talent.
I hope the zeitgeist changes any time soon. God knows how many unicorns have been sacrificed with that kind of paradigm which could be successful companies by now.
I don't know how that changes the equation. No one is undervaluing your skills; it's would you rather spend your time driving to a colo center to replace a RAID array or working on $product.
With AWS you are outsourcing an IT team, not just processors and how you approach pricing should reflect that.
I hear this bad argument often (“replacing hard drives”) and I don’t understand why. It’s as if we’re mentally stuck in a bad hacking movie from 1999.
If you’re doing colocation to save money, you’ve also figured out that going to the datacenter sucks and it’s a terrible place to do work.
You’re not building your own servers from scratch, you’re generally purchasing them from a vendor who offers a warranty and optional on-site service.
Or you’re leasing them from a hosting company who will take care of those pesky RAID alarms for you.
You (or your hosting providers) have likely outfitted your server with remote out-of-band access to allow you to get into BIOS or the RAID controller without physically being in front of the server.
And finally, you have remote access to power cycle the server (or a batphone at
your hosting provider to do it on your behalf).
I want to say that these datacenter-visit-prevention techniques have been near standard practice for a decade-and-a-half.
Nope, this seems to be the norm. I've worked on a couple colo servers that nobody at the company had ever actually seen in person. They figured out colo in Germany was the best deal, so they had some servers delivered straight to the DC and the staff there installed them and plugged them into an IP KVM. Not sure if this is a standard service most providers offer, but I'm sure a big enough cheque would convince most - and considering the cost of transporting both the hardware and engineer to install it, that cheque can be quite large.
So you've just explained why 'the cloud' is better than DIY.
Take all those things you just talked about, and expand them horizontally and vertically up the stack, and you have 'AWS'.
So not just 'a guy to replace the hardware' - but now it's software configurable, has all sorts of other, fancy things.
Time is money, and it's expensive to pay people to mess with things if they don't have to.
It's like this:
If your company needs 3 cars, you rent/lease them. You do not hire your own mechanics, even if technically speaking "we could change the oil for so much less!"
If your company is in the business of transportation, and you have thousands of trucks, you may want your own repair/maintenance team etc. instead of paying some service company a fat margin to change the oil.
The original discussion was around price-performance of physical servers vs cloud VMs. That being the case, it's not a clean a distinction as you describe it. It would be more along buying a few trucks and taking them to the garage when needed (which is rare in small numbers) vs renting many more vans, for higher margin, just to avoid the garage.
Maybe you need an MBA to help you understand that in many cases, it's incredibly more cost effective to use the cloud, because the marginal savings that could be achieved with on prem hardware are dwarfed by the cost of labour, and especially lost opportunity cost.
For most things 'local prem' is an optimization that usually needs on some degree of scale to justify, or, you have a peculiar setup i.e. a couple of well versed hardware and networking guys who have no problem with a bit of a physical setup. Which can be a bonus.
"I hope the zeitgeist changes any time soon."
No, it won't, it's going in the 'other direction' forever, because the 'economies of scale' at Amazon, it's incredibly difficult for individual engineers to compete with those efficiencies.
Just the opposite of 'being a problem for startups' , the 'cloud' has basically made entire swaths of types of startups possible where they wold not otherwise.
Like everything, you have to use think about it a bit but their costs are really, really transparent (imagine Oracle trying to do it ...).
I love that you say “demand” like somehow engineers are forcing companies at gun point to pay their salaries. No, stop. It’s the result of market pressure and actual engineering degrees + peng certifications being hard to acquire and desirable.
Never understood that argument. How exactly an expertise of setting up and running (your cloud provider) instances is cheaper than expertise of setting up a physical machine?
I would imagine it will end with a similar outcome to video game likenesses - a person owns their likeness and you can't create products that includes their likeness without their consent.
What would that mean for parodies though, death of satire. Can likenesses have fair use or perhaps only for for positive representations of the person?
The author took someone else's IP as training data, trained a model on someone else's compute, and then gets extremely bent out of shape when others use the model without crediting them?
This entire thread is honestly so disturbing, this comment especially. Not only is it rife with misinformation (using copyrighted material for training is totally legal and the whole project is paid out of pocket), but is it really that big of a deal to want credit for the work they’ve done? The developer has had their work stolen by companies, influencers, and grifters, and people here are getting pissy that they can’t wait 10 seconds to wait for a popup.
I don’t know why, but I honestly expected more from HN.
You're right about the compute part being wrong. I never said it wasn't legal, just that they took someone else's work to train it. I would hope that voice synthesis is illegal without permission from the voice's owner, but I imagine it is untested so far.
But it's not just about the popup - it 's more that when your work is fundamentally about using reusing someone else's character, it feels pretty hypocritical to be so focused on making sure you get credit.
If they are used in a tool that lets you generate someone's likeness as part of user-specified new content, yes. But unlike 15.ai that isn't their core purpose and no such tool exists.
The problem is that after having to wait for 10 seconds to reject their terms of service (which you should be able to reject right away) before even being able to see what the site is about, they are rickrolling you, effectively giving you the finger for not wanting to agree to their terms without context. That‘s quite unprofessional, counterproductive and antagonistic.
I share this sentiment entirely. There seems to be a growing trend on HN that negativity is popular. A project like this, to me at least, would seem to be right up HN's street.
Shame to see the toxicity over a passion project, whos creator generously went out of his way to answer the questions and ridiculous comments.
Making things up out of thin air like “the creator used someone else’s compute” goes beyond negativity because someone thinks the project is in the grey. That is just straight up disinformation.
Here is a 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos that I like where he talks about why he created Amazon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM. He describes a purely logical explanation of seeing data about internet growth and identifying books as being a uniquely good product to sell on the internet.
Which is not to say he wasn't "willing to dedicate [himself] entirely to solving the problem", but I think it agrees with your take about finding market opportunities rather than following a passion.
You're pretty quick to act like there is a lot of blame to be allocated, but GTA 5 is arguably the most successful game in history. With games that truly have technical problems so bad they ruin the game, people don't complain - they just don't play it.
Maybe a long load time just wasn't that important for the success of GTA.
Close to 0% chance someone would find out, as that would involve the person revealing the question also facing consequences - unless the company has some elaborate scheme involving modified and unique questions tailored for each candidate, and keeping track what candidate got which question. But that obviously wouldn't work with a trivial question like the one OP got.
Either that, or some third party which could have intercepted the communication between OP and the friend revealing the question. But again, what are the chances...
And on a tangent - should candidates "grinding leetcode" reveal that they've encountered the question before? That's the whole point of leetcode.
I've seen candidates deny that they've seen the problem given, blitz through the basic version (intended as a quick warm-up), and then completely choke when a slight twist is added. Let's just say that really raises some questions...
So his argument is that the text clearly maps to concepts in the latent space, but when composing them the results are unexpected, so it isn't language? Why isn't this better described as 'the rules of composition are unknown'?
But don't we already know that composition exists in DALL-E? Don't the points shown in the tweet indicate that some form of composition exists? The 3D renders are clearly render-like, the painting and cartoons are clearly in the appropriate style.
"That there exist rules of composition of the hypothesized secret DALL-E language" is a much stronger claim than that it "understands" composition of text in the real languages it was trained on.
Though I'll also point out that even evidence for that weaker claim is tenuous. It definitely knows how to move an image closer to "3D render" in concept-space, but it doesn't seem to understand the linguistic composition of your request. For example, you'd have an extremely hard time getting it to generate an image of a person using 3D rendering software, or a "person in any style that isn't 3D render"; it would probably just make 3D renders of persons.
I haven't played around with it myself, I'm going off the experiences of others. For example:
