My hot take is that portions of both the pro- and anti- factions are indulging in the copium. That LLMs can regurgitate a functioning compiler means that it has exceeded the abilities of many developers and whether they wholeheartedly embrace LLMs or reject LLMs isn't going to save those that have been exceeded from being devalued.
The only safety lies in staying ahead of LLMs or migrating to a field that's out of reach of them.
Growth in manufacturing products for export, first in wrecked post-war Japan, then in Taiwan, and then in China, is what lifted all of them out of deep poverty into global powerhouses and technology leaders. You better believe that they were happy to have those jobs others didn't want and to capitalize on them to grow themselves.
People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.
> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
Both disturbing, both disgusting and both have psychological consequences. Neither are mutually exclusive.
Have you done either? If not then come back when you have.
I have by working IT for a meat industry where slaughter houses was a thing. Knowing you're working with machinary that kills animals taints your soul.
Working in IT for a money laundering pornography shop, receiving images of barely-legal women with silhouettes of guns in the shadows held up against their head is gruesome to.
I have done both and both fuck you up more than you've know it. You can't compared one to the other.
> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
The research and reporting, which looks at actual people's experiences says otherwise. This issue has been coming up for years.
People live through war, murder, torture, rape, etc. We can always find something worse but that doesn't make the current situation better. Human experience of pain and trauma isn't scaled relative to the worst possible pain and trauma.
The massive over-reaction and pearl-clutching surrounding "seeing stuff on a screen" today is really bizarre. I think Meehl called this kind of thinking in therapy the "spun-glass theory of mind", i.e. that people are so fragile and easy to damage that you have to shelter them from even the mildest of harms. Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer. Plus, plenty who grew up in the early era of the internet and who saw shit on 4chan know that seeing horrifying things on a screen does not have to be some kind of trauma. You just reported the post and hid it, and moved on.
And the horror of a thing is not actually solely a property of the thing. Different people are affected differently by different things. People the most upset and making the most grandiose claims about how damaging these things are are often projecting their own weakness / engaging in typical mind fallacy. They would do well to provide data to quantify and/or support their claims of the degree of harm here.
As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed.
However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise.
But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.
You stated an opinion but i gave you hard data by pointing you to a documentary which you are refusing to watch. You have not even read the description for the video which gives you a ToC with timestamps to jump to for the major themes. I can point you to lots of relevant data on the web but the onus of educating yourself is on you.
If you had just spent 5-10mins watching excerpts from above timestamps you would have seen interviews with workers doing such jobs from rural America/Canada/Spain/France/etc., sleazeball CEOs of sleazy companies taking these sort of contracts from Facebook/etc. and then farming it off to poorer parts of the World in Asia/Africa/South America/etc., psychologists who study and warn of the very real dangers of such a job etc.
So before asking for more data, start with the one i have already given you. The psychological harm caused by repeated exposure to graphic imagery is well studied; AI image annotation is one subset of that.
"Some workers report nightmares in which the violent images they reviewed replay in gruesome loops. Others experience intrusive flashbacks while riding the bus or shopping for groceries. Over time, many describe a numbing of their emotions-a flattening of joy, sorrow, or empathy-because the only way to cope is to feel nothing at all."
and bla bla bla. "Some", "Others", "many"... Wikipedia itself couldn't generate a better example of "weasel words". Like I said, we all know some people are traumatized, but all that matters is the amount. What if some is less than 1%? Less than 5%? More than 50%? The answer matters, but you are not providing answers to this.
Also, learn to basic science. Anecdotes are not data.
No, I am not watching a documentary for a collection of anecdotes, I clearly explained why documentaries don't count as serious sources of info when trying to accurately quantify things.
EDIT: And if you really know that traumatization from images on computer screens is "well-studied", you can surely link to one to three of such studies, rather than lame documentaries telling cherry-picked sob-stories.
Your opinions have no basis in facts; talking about quantitative statistics without having any idea of the raw data is ignorance. The documentary/article point you to such data. The article in particular has links to others including the book Ghost Work - https://ghostwork.info/ which contains lots of data. AI content annotation falls under this umbrella.
I had already mentioned that graphic imagery causing psychological harm is well studied. Psychologists call it Secondary Trauma with symptoms similar to PTSD (which you have helpfully noted above) - https://www.ptsduk.org/secondary-trauma/?ref=thebrink.me
In fact, Facebook was taken to court over this, forced to acknowledge the harm done and paid out a hefty amount;
A simple google search would have given you any number of articles/papers on the subject. But instead of educating yourself, you are merely asking to be spoon-fed.
Nevertheless, start here (two broad classes of graphic imagery);
I also remember having gone into research, because there were no jobs available, and even though I was employed at the time, our salaries weren't being paid.
Comedy gold. Of course, Nadella will never admit that dismantling the test discipline at MS was his own boneheaded mistake. Mostly likely he'll just double down on what already wasn't working by putting even more pressure on developers to "ensure quality", unfortunately for them.
I've put weeks of effort on the post and months on the project. I think it's worthy of being in HN and the votes so far seem to imply the same. I have been improving the title and posting at the time period HN allows. It's not a repost in the sense that it hasn't gained any attention. It just hasn't reached a critical enough mass. What does it mean to you? If you think the post is just not high quality perhaps you can comment on that, rather than the number of times it has been posted.
Lots of us put weeks/months into our projects. As somebody who's definitely had their fair share of "Show HN"s be swallowed into the murky depths, take the "L" and just give it a few weeks before reposting again.
Now onto some feedback:
**** What I like ****
The article is well-written and I really appreciate the candid nature of the journey to see this project through to the finish line.
**** What I don't like ****
There's literally dozens of JLPT flashcard sets (online and physical).
It's a bit hard for me to understand the point of the physical card aspect of this kickstarter. It pushes SRS/Leitner/etc - but I can't even fathom anyone trying to organize and set this up with physical cards.
The "no silly mnemonics" feels like a solution in search of a problem. Most of the flashcards that I've used for Chinese and Japanese had no such thing on them.
**** Questions ****
Did you work with a native Japanese speaker to vet your cards?
How can I rely on your expertise as a non-native speaker? Did you major in Japanese? What level of the JLPT have you passed?
I see no mention of 部首, are you incorporating radicals into the learning process?
**** Constructive ****
If it were a work of art, such that I could display the cards decoratively then I think I might be more inclined to invest. For example, if you'd gotten a Japanese calligrapher to do the kanji.
Thanks vunderba, that's a good point about the time and that's a better comment than the parent one.
The mnemonics really were the main feature driving me away from existing resources and to make my own.
On the questions: I am not an expert, but I didn't make anything up. All data is picked from dictionaries like JMDict/jisho.org. The layout and choosing which information to display how I found best was according to my studies.
On 部首: They're highlighted for each Kanji (back side) and annotated on the bottom right in the full form, but there are no individual cards for radicals.
All in all, the deck features and what makes it different is better described by the guide that I link in the post (which, while interesting, is better suited for the audience which cares about Kanji).
The post itself focused on the building and business part which I think is well-suited for the HN crowd.
Np. Thanks for the details. And FWIW I might just not be the target demograph for the product, but it does seem like you have an audience for it because the Kickstarter is gaining support~~
To improve your chances, looking for work posts should go into the monthly "Who wants to be hired?" threads that are posted by the site administrators on the first working day of the month. The most recent one can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857487
There's never been any shortage of hypocrisy here when it comes to intellectual property. Terry Pratchett captured it perfectly in Going Postal: “It was a little like stealing. It was exactly like stealing. It was, in fact, stealing. But there was no law against it because no one knew the crime existed, so is it really stealing if what’s stolen isn’t missed? And is it stealing if you’re stealing from thieves? Anyway, all property is theft, except mine.” The modern version of that last sentence would be "Intellectual property isn't real, except mine."
The suggestion that nobody was considering selling for-profit software on microcomputers out of hacker camaraderie seems rather difficult to believe, to put it mildly. CP/M wasn't free either IIRC and pre-dates Gates' BASIC.
[EDIT] Beyond that, if it hadn't been Gates, it would have been Steve Jobs. And if it hadn't been him either, it unquestionably would have been IBM, once they started taking the microcomputer market seriously and released the IBM PC.
You could very well be right on the money, Jobs might have been the one if Gates didn't beat him to it.
I really did exaggerate, it wasn't exactly nobody.
But things like CP/M were completely un-necessary on a proper microcomputer which has the OS in ROM like it's supposed to be.
I liked Jobs because at the time he was carrying on the idea of almost all code free for his hardware as much as possible, just like the other pioneering companies and enthusiasts.
CP/M was a specialty item for a small niche of super-enthusiasts, so they could utilize the additional features it provided right away without having to write code for that themselves. It was worth money to them. Once the PC came out with MS-DOS included, that was the affordable choice for PC's by far. People would have rather not had DOS either if the IBM brand had just included a ROM OS of some kind instead. We wanted disks for storage not for an operating system, that was supposed to be taken for granted.
By that time, CP/M was known for being exorbitantly more expensive than MS-DOS, and ordinary non-corporate users couldn't even come near affording Microsoft offerings as his letter describes.
Everything was going to be just fine once computers got popular enough for there to be enough critical mass among the majority, which were already making more than enough progress sharing without copyright annoyances [0], to overtake companies like Microsoft technically within a few years, except in those niche areas where that kind of thing once belonged.
By providing for user choice of a copyrightable OS, not only at different price points, but price points to being with, IBM set the wheels in motion for there to be far less choice for decades to come.
When you think about it, the way AI is finally capable of putting out some decent code that is so remarkable, is partly because it is effectively bypassing the progress that has been curtailed up until now because of its workaround of copyright alone. Compensating for people not having access to all progress that has been made up until any point in time, over decades, and coming out smelling like a rose more than you would have thought.
If people themselves hadn't had this restriction this whole time, don't you think overall human advancement would have made the amazing AI results seem less surprising and more of an incremental move?
[0] If I said most people were not thinking about it, that's not true. Almost nobody was thinking about it. Almost :)
I'm also sure they would have started thinking about it sooner or later, the ka-ching sound has quite an echo, but it would have been just fine with only patents and no copyright like it had been before.
"Altogether, according to an estimate by UBS Wealth Management, the United States is home to ~22m millionaire households — roughly one of every six households." from https://thehustle.co/originals/the-insane-growth-of-americas...
Looks like the Americans have the right idea and Steinbeck ultimately didn't.
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