The first three authors, who are asterisked for "equal contribution", appear to work for Anthropic. That would imply an interest in making Anthropic's LLM products valuable.
The notion that a vulnerability researcher employed by one of the highly-valued companies in the hemisphere, publishing in the open literature with their name signed to it, is on a par with a teenager in a developing nation running script-kid tools hoping for bounty payoffs.
To preemptively clarify, I'm not saying anything about these particular researchers.
Having established that, are you saying that you can't even conceptualize a conflict of interest potentially clouding someone's judgement any more if the amount of money and the person's perceived status and skill level all get increased?
Disagreeing about the significance of the conflict of interest is one thing, but claiming not to understand how it could make sense is a drastically stronger claim.
> Having established that, are you saying that you can't even conceptualize a conflict of interest potentially clouding someone's judgement any more if the amount of money and the person's perceived status and skill level all get increased.
If I used AI to make a Super Nintendo soundtrack, no one would treat it as equivalent to Nobuo Uematsu or Koji Kondo or Dave Wise using AI to do the same and making the claim that the AI was managing to make creatively impressive work. Even if those famous composers worked for Anthropic.
Yes there would be relevant biases but there could not be a comparison of my using AI to make music slop vs. their expert supervision of AI to make something much more impressive.
Just because AI is involved in two different things doesn't make them similar things.
Documentation absolutely has a cost, but that last sentence is a substantial overgeneralization. Counterexamples include a search engine, a quilt, an impact driver, and a box of a basic LEGO bricks.
Why exactly should construction workers clean up, change, and get briefed for free? How are those not work? Do you attend work meetings for free? Why don't construction workers deserve breaks? Do you ever take breaks at work? If so, why do you deserve to be paid for these things when construction workers don't? Be explicit.
The idea that US politicians never cross the public sector unions isn't compatible with the facts. The Taft-Hartley Act is law, and PATCO was destroyed.
Everyone deserves breaks and for some level of setup/cleanup to be on the clock. Some amount of what is enshrined in the work rules is just excessively cushy.
However there is a big difference between stuff built into these work rules vs what happens in private industry.
The basic question is - do the work rules restrict employers from adapting to productivity enhancing technology changes over time?
The goods&services in the US which go up in cost much faster than inflation are the areas where we are unable to harness labor saving productivity - education, medicine, and it would seem municipal capital construction projects.
Does your employer retain Fortran programmers on-staff in the break room because they signed a contract when Fortran was important?
If your employer moved all your compute to the cloud, would you keep 100% of your now redundant datacenter staff onboard?
Does your employer keep the underperforming 25% of the team perpetually and just grant paid overtime in the $100k+ to the superstars to cover the gap?
Does your office building maintain an elevator operator in each cab despite having automated the elevator 50 years ago?
This is the difference between private firms and the public sector union stuff you deal with in places like NYC.
I mean yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice work environment and I'd love if my (easier/safer) office job had all that paid time, rules and work limits built in.
However.. I get why it seems nothing gets done in NYC construction because of it?
A fun example - there was a 6 month project to replace a set of 2-story staircase at my subway station. The demolition work was rather swift. I assumed they were building on-site if it was going to take 6 months. Lo and behold, it was actually a pre-fab staircase they trucked in. However not only did it take 6 months to simply install that pre-fab staircase, but they ran over by a few months! They actually had to come back and re-close it and do some repairs afterwards too.
Meanwhile at the corner below that train station there was a McDonalds. I laughed as I watched them gut renovate it over the course of a weekend so they could be back in business by Monday selling food to riders.
If you haven't seen NYC municipal construction up close, its hard to fathom just how screwed up it is.
I'm glad you admit everyone deserves breaks; it seems to have been remarkably easy to convince you. I'm also glad to see your position on paying for the rest shift from outright opposition to unspecified contracts being excessive.
None of the rest of your reply is actually a response to what I said, though some of it is interesting. You also notably didn't respond to what I said about politicians.
Regarding Fortran programmers' contracts being honored, I would certainly hope any business would meet its contractual obligations (when they are moral and legal). Surely you aren't actually suggesting they shouldn't? Whether signing such a contract was a good idea or not, the very concept of a contract is founded on actually executing the terms of the agreement afterward.
I have never encountered a business that consistently swiftly dropped the underperforming parts of the team. I know that stack ranking firms supposedly exist, but they are far from typical. Even if your employment history is atypical, surely you've encountered less than efficient employees at clients, at vendors, and just out in the world in retail or restaurants; have you never happened to observe some of them staying in those positions at length? If you have seen private enterprise up close, it's hard to fathom the idea that it runs lean operations without waste.
Furthermore, many businesses have employees, sometimes many of them, who don't have the kind of clear work products that would make "the underperforming 25% of the team" potentially conceptually coherent. Plenty have employees with as little to do as a TBM oiler or an elevator operator. The market isn't just taking its time in pushing them to be more efficient, either. Actual markets and actual managers don't work like in an entry-level economics class.
"Governments aren't (supposed to be) private entities."
Governments are not 'private entities' but they certainly can have 'private information'.
It's really quite difficult to debate this with you guys.
If you can't imagine that diplomats can't have private conversations with their counter parts, that bureaucrats can't have private conversations with employees - then I have nothing to say to you.
Once you accept that there is a lot of information that should not be publicly available, both 'secret' and 'mundane' (HR records etc..) - then you accept the government can keep private information - and then it becomes a matter of how that is regulated: oversight by congress, committee, judiciary - and access to information wherein it's appropriate.
And once you accept that - you accept that Manning's release was totally immoral and unlawful. There is nothing in his cable releases that should have been released - though you could debate the release of the video of reporters dying in friendly fire.
> If you can't imagine that diplomats can't have private conversations with their counter parts, that bureaucrats can't have private conversations with employees - then I have nothing to say to you.
Just to be clear: I think many people here believe that "diplomats" and "bureaucrats" are subject to deprecation. You are holding on to the notion that the government is going to keep existing (and bungling society, economy, and environment) alongside the internet, but it's perfectly reasonable to surmise that this is not so.
Government has been a necessary evil for a stage of human evolution that is now coming to a close. And it will wither with a whimper, not a bang.
So, per your directive, it may just be that you have nothing to say to us.
Why would I ever want to find every reference to a loop or lambda variable with a given name in a file? Such variables repeat frequently with distinct meanings, and each has a narrow scope.
In any case, I wouldn't use an IDE that was so glitchy unless I was forced by necessity; I certainly wouldn't adopt a coping mechanism for it into other languages. Also, for a typical compiled language, deleting the declaration gives you all usages as long as you can (attempt to) build.
Are there any other reasons?
Edit: Is this advice perhaps intended to be specific to a particular context?
Actually, if your cursor is on the variable "i", just pressing * or # will do the trick. I'm pretty sure other editors have similar functions.
If you really want double-letter names, :%s/\(\<[a-z]\>\)/\1\1/g would probably do the trick (well, except that every occurrence of "a" in a comment will become "aa": how to avoid it is left as exercise).
Just tested it in some different editors with some javascript because I care way too much about editors or something.
Sublime Text 3 captures the independent 'i' correctly. Though it also picks it up in comments and strings.
VS Code incorrectly highlighted all instances of the character 'i', even if it was part of another symbol. "Change All Occurrences" affected all instances of the character 'i'.
Atom doesn't appear to have this feature without plugins (though someone should correct me if I'm wrong).
IntelliJ and it's variants handled it perfectly, even understanding the actual variable, rather than just the symbol. "Rename All" would ask if I wanted to affect strings and comments, or just code (if there was an ' i ' in a string or comment, otherwise it wouldn't prompt), and it would only rename the variable within the correct scope. I tried it with both var and let.
I would try more, but I think I'm wasting too much time, haha. But moreover, like others are saying, I can't think of a time where I've ever actually wanted to do that. Renaming all instances of a single letter variable? Generally the single letter is a very common convention I wouldn't change (i,j,k, u, x,y, _), or is in a very small, uncomplicated function where I wouldn't need a text editor's help to rename it because it only occurs once or twice. Anything more advanced than that gets a more verbose name that any of these editors could easily ctrl+F.
The internet's supply of masters is much larger and more accessible. Is there a reason to think the video or other sources he found are from someone inferior in expertise to a local? Does that reason apply even for people who live outside major urban centers?
Also, that line of thinking is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Remember the most likely outcome before was recognizing the cost of acquiring the knowledge exceeded the benefit of having it; there would have been no learning at all.
The Internet's supply of poseurs is far greater still.
I think Stack Overflow is the canonical example. It feels like I deal daily with people who paste something from Stack Overflow instead of reading up on a library or API. It is made worse by all those to game their score system by being very quick to paste in a semi-related "answer".
At least on the internet you can tell who's lying and who isn't. SO lets you vote. If a bartender blatantly lies to you, you don't find out until days and there is no accountability.
Most people good at making videos have better things to make videos on than random niche hobbies and crafts. If you step out of the popculture, you'll see a lot of videos made by those who do the work.
I'm subscribed to YouTube channels devoted to crafts such as woodworking, cooking, metalworking, development, sewing, drink mixing, and others, and very few of them use professional equipment or editing software. Some of the most entertaining ones do, of course, but mostly because they started small and were able to grow their audience enough to turn it into a career, over the course of which they picked up the skills to improve the quality of the videos.
Those other skills form the foundation of successful online video channels, with the video skills following suit.
Yea, there are plenty of people worth following out there. But, a few minutes of random searching is probably not going to show you one of the gems. Unless, I am just bad at finding videos.
Consider then finding an on-line community of enthusiasts first. Like, in case of woodworking, /r/woodworking and some of the other subreddits listed in the sidebar there. Spend few minutes there, and you'll know where to find the best 5% of woodworking sources available to mankind.
Let me emphasize it - thanks to the Internet, you have access to the best knowledge and experience entire humanity has produced. All it takes is some experience with using the Internet and spending little time on filtering links.
I think your vastly overstating what videos people put online.
I think woodworking is hard to qualify. So, let's simplify.
1) A master craftsman video demonstrating how to make an Italian style flat bread oven from someone that spent ~15+ years learning and building them.
2) One of those small but highly accurate mechanical clocks that's accurate enough for navigation at sea.
3) A European ed: (English) style saddle made by a craftsman, as in someone that made and sold 100 others before it.
I am sure there are at least a few hundred people with those skills world wide, but actually finding a detailed video made by one of them online seems much harder. As in something that's good enough to learn from not just advertising or a 'how it's made' video showing some highlights.
It's 3:30 EST on Friday. Let's give it 24 hours. ;)
Moving the goalposts to the furthest conceivable distance isn't going to prove anything to anybody. Nobody claimed you could completely master a trade skill just from watching YouTube videos.
IMO, there is a fair amount of. "Those who can do. Those who can't teach."
Sure, you can find some videos of people making a wooden clock online. It's much harder to find master craftsman making a watch. A few PHD students putting together an electric car vs. someone at GM actually designing a car. Home cook vs. Five Star Chef.
Granted, generally an amateur is fine. But, don't be surprised if there making several mistakes without noticing.
> IMO, there is a fair amount of. "Those who can do. Those who can't teach."
That applies to occupations, not to hobbies. I.e. those who can't find a proper job using their skill go on to teach that skill.
It does not however apply to the most valuable content - one made not for money, but out of love for the subject. A lot of masters in all occupations simply like to share. Our industry is probably the best example - it's almost entirely built upon masters who gave away their knowledge. But it happens in other industries too.
That was an interesting read, lots of good points. But I think that articles points are orthogonal to mine. I agree the US is a much less healthy place than many other industrialized countries. But that isn't a reflection on our health care industry, that's a cultural issue. If the US has a higher rate of breast cancer remission, but an even higher rate of breast cancer occurrence, that would reflect well on the health care system while resulting in a increased years of life lost.
You're doctor can't make you stop being fat, he can't make you jog, and he can't make you stop stressing about not jogging and being fat :P But in the US he can give you an edge over other countries in beating cancer.
It's an extremely tough problem to determine what is cultural causes, what is genetic, and what is health care. But just normalizing on age incidences, the US does well. I bet if we adjusted for relative health (impossible, but I'm wishing for perfect data), the US would do remarkably better.
If I have time later today, I'll dig up my sources. But I lost interest in this years ago when people overwhelmingly thought that because the US has a higher mortality rate, our health care system must suck :/
What is the confusion here?