These guys (the publishers) are fighting last year's war. Nobody (to a first approximation) gives a shit about going to the NY Times website, or The Guardian website, or the BBC website, etc. to find information. They expect to use search engines and AI services to find stuff, and then maybe click through to the source site(s) for more details or whatever.
The publishers need to rethink their entire take on how the Internet works or any "victory" they earn is going to be extremely Pyrrhic.
... and only until the whole thing can be fully formalized with an approved PEP. I'm no Python insider, but that doesn't sound horribly controversial to me.
And yet, I have a hunch it will piss off a lot of people nonetheless and lead to much outrage and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hopefully it all works out in the long run.
I don't remember one specific moment, but I was fairly impressed with ChatGPT from the first time I started interacting with it. Was I ready to call it "AGI"? No, absolutely not. But it was clear that it was something new, and it was also intuitively obvious to me that "this AI is as bad today as it will ever be" and that predicting the rate of change would be difficult.
The more I use these things, the more I'm 100% convinced that it makes sense to say they are "intelligent" (for some meaning of "intelligent"). AGI or "human level intelligence"? Still no[1]. But some kind of intelligence. And I'm quite happy to allow that there can be "intelligence" that doesn't work anything at all like human intelligence, so arguments of the form "this isn't real intelligence", etc, etc. carry very (very) little weight with me. I've actually been sitting on a half written blog post on this very topic for a while, titled "The Marquee Sign Says 'Artificial' Intelligence"[2]. Finding time to finish it has been the challenge.
And before somebody says "Use AI to write it for you". Nah. I am generally what you might call "pro AI" and / or an "AI enthusiast" but I still draw lines. I'll use AI for research, for outlining, for brainstorming, etc. sure. But I have a hard-line stance against letting AI fundamentally write for me. I want anything that goes out with my name associated with it to have my genuine voice.
[1]: I like the term "jagged intelligence" that Demis Hassabis has been using. That is to say, the bounds of the intelligence are jagged or spiky: very intelligent in certain areas, much less so in others.
[2]: for any old-skool pro-wrestling fans, yes, that is an intentional nod to "Double A" Arn Anderson and his "The marquee sign says 'wrestling'" catchphrase. :-)
C'mon man. I know everybody has seemingly given up on trying to have non-ambiguous / redundant names for things, but that's a little on the nose, considering that there is an actual programming language called Arc already.
It's amazing that after all these years, a famous criticism of Neuromancer seems to have been mooted. That is, the bit about Case having that stash of stolen RAM that was his "big score" for the moment, and how Linda Lee stole it from him, yadda, yadda. For years people have read that and said something like "WTF? RAM isn't valuable enough to be a black market commodity".
Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!
I haven't always been the biggest fan of systemd in some regards, but I will say that I mostly agree with this sentiment. I've almost completely quit using cron, and now favor systemd timers for scheduled jobs - at the "system" level anyway. I might still embed Quartz for scheduling that's scoped to a particular application or something.
Why? It's one of those fuzzy and somewhat hard to explain things. The systemd approach just maps more cleanly to my mental model of "how things should work" I guess. And maybe some of it is that I did indeed experience plenty of " Ambiguous $PATH settings make cron script execution difficult to predict" in the past, although it's not just that.
I won't sit here and claim that systemd timers are necessarily better than cron in any universal / objective sense. But they've won me over, for what it's worth.
And there's nothing "wrong" with the GoF Patterns per-se. The issue was always people applying them blindly without understanding why (or more to the point, "if") they were needed. Once writing code filled with patterns became "the thing you do"... all bets were off. :-(
I remember putting stuff like this on my resume "developed X using visitor pattern" . ppl would ask "what is your favourite design pattern" in interviews. lmao.
I do have a favourite (couple of) design pattern(s)
SOLID
and
Hexagonal Programming
But these are not GoF patterns (although Singleton's are, and I do recall how it was incredibly difficult to produce a singleton in some languages - eg. Python)
> I don't quite get it why they can't take another LLM and vet the output of the first with the second one.
Yes, this technique and its variations[1][2] "work" but it's still not 100% perfect. And it's not as widely used it might be because, among other reason:
a. it takes longer to implement
b. it costs more (more tokens spread across multiple llm calls)
c. higher latency (getting an answer takes longer due to multiple llm calls involved)
d. the final answer is probabilistically more likely to be correct, but is still not guaranteed to be error free, so you can never fully escape the need for Human in the Loop.
The publishers need to rethink their entire take on how the Internet works or any "victory" they earn is going to be extremely Pyrrhic.
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