America is a very big place, and homeownership looks very different depending on the type of home. Maintaining an old, free-standing house with well water in a rural area is a completely different experience from living in a newly built condo. People take on different responsibilities when they become homeowners, and their knowledge varies accordingly.
Idk why. We should be able to have a civilized, intellectually curious discussion about this. The future of Reddit (and its implications for the future of the Internet) is pretty on-topic to me for HN.
There's really no reason for them to be honest about this sort of thing and I've seen plenty of shady shit from moderation here to make me distrust them.
Which isn't me asking for an explanation/stance. However trustworthy you find the moderation to be here, any explanation they give is inherently biased towards an obvious desire to remain employed.
From my perspective - this is a forum/social media site that is popular and _not_ infested with ads. It seems obvious to me that what they do gain is influence with a certain group of people (investors) and as a filter/brain-drain/funnel for entrepreneurs.
It’s quite possible that people are just flagging these stories because it’s not interesting enough to facilitate 20 discussions without it turning into threads with 500 comments rehashing the same arguments.
Reddit might be a big deal to you but many people over here just don’t care and they don’t want to see topic after topic about a site they don’t care about. And it’s going to have the same impact on the ‘future of the internet’ as the demise of Digg. Not a whole lot really, sites come and go, in a year nobody cares. Remember MySpace?
Reddit is a big deal to me, I moderate multiple subreddits with 6 figure subscriber counts, from a third party app. With that said, the discussion on HN is basically played out. There isn't a lot new to say.
Not a fan of rage bait as much as the next person, but these are real quotes from Huffman from a major publication, hardly taken out of context. This is a major story. Why suppress it?
What they apparently did here was to selectively pick the most outrage inducing quote from the interview and put it into the headline, together with "slams". It's clickbait.
Somebody has got to help Steve get a grip. He's doing serious damage to Reddit and his own credibility. I can totally understand his disdain for people who he perceives are trying to ruin "his baby." But he's got to be smarter than this as a CEO. This is a matter of public opinion, and his defiance is just imprudent.
Hmmm... I'm surprised I'm not seeing anyone else question the validity of this taking "2 hours" Given that it's written on the blog for the product it's using, this reads to me a lot like a pure sales pitch. They want us to believe if you use Patterns (which is neat), your company will be much more cost-effective.
I'm not saying that's bad - that's probably the right thing to do with their company blog, and it's cool nonetheless. But I do get a little tired of people putting stuff out there like this that warps (some peoples) perception around how long things actually take. We wonder why, as an industry, we misjudge timelines on things left and right.
Even if we take it at face value, this is a person who's intimately familiar with this product. So sure, it's easy to set things up when we've done it a bunch of times. If you were doing this, solving the novel problem that you're faced with, is that how long it would take? Plus that's not really what most of us get paid to do. We have to learn on the fly and figure stuff out as it comes.
So rather than have the provocative headline and conclusion, like a lot of other people have commented... this is really something that could amplify that $50/hour employee, not take their job away. And maybe we shouldn't read into the alleged speed so much. YMMV.
Author here, I’ve updated the post. The first draft of this app and blog post took me two hours, but I kept coming back with new ideas and tweaks throughout the week. By the end, I’d certainly spent more than two hours (more like 8?), so you’re right, I just failed to update the post. The main point stands — it’s surprisingly good for the amount of effort put in (although unclear how much more juice you could get out of gpt with more effort. Clear diminishing returns)
I totally automate my roles on projects all the time so I can move on to more interesting things. I guess you mean that no one wants to be fired, but I don't see how that can result from automating one's work.
Also, I HATE doing repetitive things. Some people seem to like it though. To each their own, I guess. Reminds me of https://youtu.be/wNVLOuQNgpo
We all believe our job is so challenging and has such special requirements that it _can't_ be automated. It requires someone with the kind of experience learned with wisdom over a long time. Blah blah blah.
This makes it so that 1. my quality overall becomes better and my bosses always liked that (doing things per hand are more error prone, not on time etc.)
2. I can go on holiday knowing my company doesn't need me desperate
3. I can spend the free time of actually innovating and bringing more value to the company/product
The problem is not automating yourself out of a job but not being able to leverage the new gained capacity.
My way helped me succeed. I took my skills and my achievements (which i made in my R&D Time) to another company and got more money and than i did it again and got more money again.
Right. Presented with efficiency gains, firms tend to increase profit, not wages. One way to change that is to give workers more bargaining power through market shifts or unionization.
All the productivity gains are first transferred to the consumer(because of market dynamics) and then(by the market winners) to shareholders. The workers' wage market is not related to productivity but how the company is internally organized is linked to productivity.
It doesn't seem like you've really replaced anyone with this. You spent 8 hours doing the work that you could have paid an SQL analyst to do in much less.
Unless you're saying that your time is worth less than you'd pay the analyst?
Put the requests in a queue. Have the bot generate the response. Then forward the response to a human analyst to double-check. A human can surely double-check a response much faster than they can produce one from scratch.
In many professions, it is common to have junior staff members do the grunt work, and then the more senior staff just review their work and either sign off on it, correct it, or send it back to be redone. You could use the same pattern here, replacing the junior staff with an AI, but keeping the senior one.
The ones for which I would refer the question to GPT. We are still in control of which questions go to GPT/the intern analyst (less critical ones, where a fraction erroneous are okay) and which go to the resident expert analyst.
This is a good point. If the users know the difference the costs and benefits between using GPT and not using it then it certainly has value if those users are also willing to accept that not every answer needs to be 100% accurate.
In my experience business people often have a 'nose' for the right number and will bluff it out if the numbers are wrong and they're challenged.
Blue sky things or stuff you're putting in the annual report should be left to hoomans IMHO.
If there are extensive test cases with static dataset, this may help with query modifications (optimize query, fine-tune, etc.) Of course, this may not feasible for new queries as you can't have test script until the query is ready.
They built a bot which can answer any number of questions, each of which would have needed some analyst time. Given that the analyst rotation was an entire day once every N weeks, and the bot took 1 day to make, this is going to pay for itself after 1 week.
This all assumes that the bot doesn't need tweaking for every answer — i.e. it gets at least some answers right without needing modifications to the bot — which appears to be the case based on the examples in the post.
But, generally and unless there is a glaringly wrong result, only an analyst is going to know if the bot is right or not... what exactly does that gain you?
Maybe it's not a position where it is critical that all answers are 100 % accurate. Maybe getting it right every once in a while is enough to pay for the GPT compute time, but not really for analyst time.
Seems like the issue would be you'd generally get results that 'look' right but would never know if they were actually right without going through and... analysing them
I'm saying there are applications where you don't have to know! As long as the fraction incorrect is less than 50 % and you have 2:1 odds on the consequences you don't have to know which 50 % are incorrect.
Really? Then why pay for the thing in the first place. Why keep the data and make the queries if the results don't actually matter? I'm impressed that you have the ability to envision such a possibility, perhaps you can use that ability to come up with something reasonably likely as opposed to "conceptually possible".
I'm trying to think of easy examples. You're right that none obvious come to mind. I'm sure there is a sweetspot where we can make more money from cheap-but-sometimes-wrong GPT queries than paying for an analyst to be more definitively correct, but I'm tired and a bit fuzzy on the exact parameters.
I'll continue to think about it and write something up!
Hard to imagine a business model where you sell that data that is only right 60% of the time. Maybe in a world where the other best data is even less reliable.
If you're OK with garbage data you don't need ChatGPT - you can probably make up plausible data on your own. Unless you're building some lorem ipsum stuff.
I might not be okay with only garbage data, but data that are correct 60 % of the time may be good enough for some use cases, when it can be had for 1/50 of the price.
I haven't found GPT this reliable for coding. I've been maxing my hourly usage of ChatGPT since it launched and then switching to CoPilot and I have lots of good things to say about it. But reliability is not one of them.
It has a tendency to ignore instructions, as mentioned, but also to get hung up on certain approaches or to use a different approach each time its asked. I'd guess it's very reliable for text generation. But for code, I'm pretty sure the quality of the result would vary quite a from instance to instance.
This could very well cut the work needed greatly. But it doesn't come close to replacing anyone. ... Yet. Give it two years.
I gave up on ChatGPT for code generation because I ended up spending more time tweaking prompts/fixing outputs than if I had just written it myself in the first place. I think this is probably the future of "coding" but it's not quite there yet.
The UX of CoPilot is a lot better. It feels like a smarter version of autocomplete.
They're based on the same GPT3 model so the quality of suggested code is similar but the ability to accept/reject suggestions based on tabbing in CoPilot makes it much less hassle to use.
Same here. ChatGPT kept coming up with syntactically plausible Java code. However, it kept using library methods that plainly don't exist for specific fields.
Wasn't sure of their proposition/hadn't heard of them.
> Run and deploy web apps, task queues, massively parallel compute jobs, machine learning models, GPUs, and much more with a single unified framework for code and infrastructure.
I'm someone who tends to get along and work well with others. That part definitely has its advantages for employability (and life in general), and is recommended. However, taking it to this extreme is just dangerous advice. Constantly being a people pleaser can carry enormous risks, especially (but not limited to) to yourself. It's important to learn to be ok with people disliking you sometimes.
People pleasers can cause people to dislike them in a workplace, ironically. Being a people pleaser in software dev very often means you will over-burden yourself because you'd rather say "yes, I can do that for you" than "no, I don't have the bandwidth for that".
I'd rather a teammate who is honest about their current limitations than someone who tells me what I want to hear. If someone admits they are stretched thin, it's now an "us versus the problem" to find why you are so overtasked. If someone consistently takes on too much (because they can't say no) and causes the team to miss deadlines, it's now an "us versus you" problem.
The most hated guy at my old job would start every request with an elaborate hand-wrung introduction to make sure no one could possibly be offended by what he was asking for.
Because of this, everyone had to read one or two paragraphs of niceties before they had any idea what he actually needed.
It was incredibly annoying and actually quite selfish in practice since it wasted so much time.
A good manager would have broached the subject with the employee and gently moved them in the direction of adjustment and likely some therapy.
That sort of people pleasing behavior can easily come from a past where asserting even a minor need or boundary was met with abuse from caretakers or peers.
Not saying it's not maladaptive and irritating behavior. It is! But they probably came by it honestly.
I totally agree; unfortunately he was a contractor hired through an agency, which meant his management resources were poorly defined and somewhat diffuse across the two companies' reporting chains.
I'd imagine if he was strictly an FTE he would have been getting that guidance and support, but I guess the politics of trying to do so across company boundaries made it too much of a career risk for the "manager" he was assigned from my company.
Everyone has different and possibly ridiculous expectations;w whether they dislike you or not is not really within your control.
Edit: I'd maybe clarify that trying to get people above you not to dislike you is essentially the nature the politics of careerist ladder climbing. If you get laid off, it's just pretty common for people to see themselves as inherently superior because they weren't let go, and therefore think, right or wrong, that you'll reflect poorly on them, because they're careerist ladder climbers. So maybe it's best to carefully cultivate the people from the very start of meeting them which ones still have souls.
I imagine they’re saying that since the team is overall twice as productive, you could say this manager who got them there made each individual 2x productive. And if you add all those together you have > 10x impact.
Napkin pseudo math for sure.. but when has that even stopped us from categorizing engineers with these labels.
I have the exact same line of reasoning.. and unfortunately I think it’s often near impossible to know how laws may be abused (sometimes it’s completely predictable).
I think people have already touched on it potentially pushing certain companies out of PA.. which in theory reduces competition which is bad for consumers. So that’s one example of how this legislation that’s designed to protect consumers could end up hurting them from another angle.
Another thing I’d wonder about is: if laws like this were to catch on.. does it start to disincentivize subscription-based business models? We’ve seen such a shift towards subscriptions.. but would that potentially change dramatically?
