They literally change the algo to exclude smaller sites. That's active suppression. Promoting would be putting them on top of the "neutral" search results like they do for ads.
By that definition is OpenAI also censoring small websites? What about Washington Post, is it censoring small websites? Because I sure can't see them in any of those places.
I think this is the part of the article that lands poorly with me. It lacks perspective. Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author? There are a myriad of possible reasons but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".
I am fine hiring a junior developer that just does what is asked of them at a high level of quality. That is the baseline.
By the time you are a senior developer, I expect you to actively push back if you are asked to spend your time wastefully on marginally valuable things. Product managers should be able to explain to a reasonable person why a feature has value. A senior dev should be able to explain to project management why refactoring to reduce tech-debt pays off over time.
Is it possible that looking at the authors open source projects conveys the message:
"I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
I hire talent like that... when I have the organizational capacity to see if they grow out of it.
> Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author?
You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't. There are a lot of discussions that try to solve this problem, for FOSS as well as for other fields. Patreon, Gratipay, Crowd Supply and Kickstarter are just a few options that have tried to solve this problem with mixed success. There are many projects that are wildly popular or used in critical infrastructure around the internet that are chronically underfunded.
My opinion is that extracting funds from people online is a high friction event. When combined with FOSS projects that might be used by a large user base but where each individual derives benefit smaller than the friction of a funding payment, the project, or individual maintainer, has trouble with remuneration.
> "I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
A pretty bad faith reading. Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.
> You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't.
I explicitly state there are a "myriad of possible reasons" and chose to focus on a sub-set of them (again explicitly). What I did not explicitly state was that given the wealth of possible reasons that the reality is nuanced and non-obvious. So, I guess I agree with you? There is a lot of other discussions to be had.
> Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.
Ok, How about:
"I have all the skills to be a good team member with an unfortunate tendency to only consider my own opinion of what is valuable is when looking at work."
Looking at the author's profile at the year the author indicated, I see a monero (alt-tier cryptocurrency that was very popular at the time) tip bot and a runescape emulation server. These are both projects that would be exemplary of all those skills you and I mentioned and yet they show an affinity to working on "things I like" rather than things that have real world value. Later in their history we find other projects like emulating popular websites but those are not the "successful (GitHub) projects" they lean on.
As a hiring manager, I'd stand by my read.
Great coder... we need to interview and prepare for a lot of work on the soft skills of being a software developer.
Hiring is a crap shoot. I am very likely wrong about this instance BUT I still have to make a call looking at all the factors and I would be more comfortable with someone who seems less likely to need supervision even if they are less skilled at the "craft".
> but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".
This is often false and lacks perspective too. Or closer to reality would be that people do use this work and simply don't pay for it. Maybe some complain if there is a security issue in a one-man-show library. In software this isn't unusual.
What you really mean is the "result is marginally monetized". Which itself has value ironically, but that is again a broader perspective.
What I meant was "the result has marginal value". What I allowed for was a "myriad of possible reasons" of which this was a subset (and not even qualified as a large subset).
I agree, there is another valid subset in those possibilities that can be described as "result is marginally monetized" but in this instance, with the projects shown in the article, I don't think we are looking at core software libraries that everyone uses and nobody pays for.
Of course, I didn't want to say it is entirely wrong. But not every project will be some foundational core project and you won't have one without the other. Neglecting such contributions because the authors might not do it for a marketable product is likely a sub optimal HR policy which leads to sub optimal business decisions and results.
We compare the usual corporate grind or corporate experience with these contributions. It is not the whole of problems in engineering hiring, but at least something to consider. The requirement of a product is an economic necessity but not something intrinsic to good engineering. And yet I think hiring decisions would strongly benefit to have further understanding of this particular value of problem solving, even if that alone doesn't meet the requirements of a successful business.
> Neglecting such contributions because the authors might not do it for a marketable product
If you look at the other thread you sill see that I am not neglecting these contributions. I am simply not valuing them MORE than what they actually represent which is only a subset of the skills I'm hiring for in a good software developer.
> We compare the usual corporate grind or corporate experience with these contributions.
That's a false dichotomy and one I do not support.
> The requirement of a product is an economic necessity but not something intrinsic to good engineering.
I disagree, good engineering is about making the best decisions given the requirements of the whole problem and the resources available. You cannot discard some of the requirements because they are inconvenient to your preferred solution. The correct solution has to take the whole picture in to account. Your work may be at a level where the economic viability is a very small part of the requirements but fewer people actually have that luxury than think they do.
It is not a dichotomy, these types of experiences are valued differently, where one is disadvantaged over the other. And the relevant dynamic how one kind comes at the cost of another is described in the article.
Sure, a challenge in engineering can lie in contraints and if these result in more efficient engineering instead of bad quality, it has merrit.
But the requirements for efficiency are an entirely different class for businesses and most open source projects.
Some developers need some breaks from time to time to focus on what is necessary. For the sake of business. You should get rid of that quickly if you contribute for free to a project you care about.
How much (in dollars) do you think the contributors of ffmpeg have made due to their work on the project? How much (in dollars) has that project contributed to the media ecosystem? The correlation is probably off by several orders of magnitude
I find it easy to hold these two thoughts in my head:
Some FOSS projects are unable to extract a "fair" share of the economic value their product creates.
Some FOSS projects have marginal or non-existent economic value.
Looking at the article, I see more of the latter than the former. If this had been an opinion piece from Fabrice Bellard, I probably wouldn't have the same critical read. Also, Fabrice has had no problem finding gainful employment. Coincidence? Who knows.
There is a screenshot of his profile in the article. You can pretty easily find those projects by typing in the org and username into GitHub. This was the route to check myself before responding.
I’m happy that there was overlap between what your parents put in front of you and what you found passion in later in life.
I think that story happens to many but I cannot accept a premise that it is somehow universal.
The passions I found later in life were unrelated to what my parents put in front of me. I suspect that it’s because the activities I eventually found (distance running, volleyball, cooking) were not activities that my parents enjoyed or thought much about.
Moreover, I was unable to develop healthy models of internal motivation until mid life. I didn’t have to when the “why” was covered by my parents.
Childhood should be the lowest risk time in life for people to learn to fail and find the path back to success. This is what I worry about as a parent when I try to set my kids up for future success. I want them to fail now.
I see my role as a parent as coaching them to care about how they spend their time and how to recover from disappointment and failure. If they get that, then learning piano later in life is just work. They won’t be afraid of that.
> An MCP server is running code at user-level, it doesn't need to trick an AI into reading SSH keys, it can just....read the keys!
If you go to the credited author of that attack scenario [0], you will see that the MCP server is not running locally. Instead, its passing instructions to your local agent that you don't expect. The agent, on your behalf, does things you don't expect then packages that up and sends it to the remote MCP server which would not otherwise have access.
The point of that attack scenario is that your agent has no concept of what is "secure" it is just responding faithfully to a request from you, the user AND it can be instructed _by the server_ to do more than you expect. If you, the user, are not intimately aware of exactly what the fine-print says when you connect to the MCP server you are vulnerable.
I like the original construction of “Vibe Coding” [0] that I will attempt to make concise:
Vibe Coding is an RECREATIONAL activity where a user and an AI collaborate on creation of some artifact AND the user accepts ALL feedback and suggestions from the AI.
I think it’s selection bias. Marketers are going to post the proof-of-concept that it works (if only in a small isolated scenario), algorithms are going to emphasize the more amazing “toys” this produces, over the boring rebuttals. In the end, you will see hundreds of examples where it worked and not the the thousands where it produced buggy or dangerous code.
That attention does not map well to the important, hard, and more valuable parts of development.
Anecdotally, I still find it to be useful and it’s improving. I do think it’s going to be an huge impact in time.
Hype is part of the industry and it can be distracting to users, developers, and investors BUT it can also be useful (and I don’t know how to replace it) so, we live with it.
We chose to do the opposite. Our kids are in a school that provides excellent opportunities to build the skills they struggle with.
They already pursue the things that come naturally to them. As parents, feeding those flames is easy and we take that responsibility personally.
It is the other life skills that we need help with. Having qualified educators work on our kids non-preferred skill sets seems to be a better balance of resources.
They may miss out on being nationally recognized math olympians BUT life is so much longer than that period.
I hope it works for you. My parents chose to leave me in the normal school and curriculum "because that would surely make me normal". It was miserable for me. Social skills never came naturally, I was isolated and bullied, and bored to death in classes. At the end of my childhood the results were trauma and bad grades. I'm quite sure I would have been happier getting more stimulated on what I loved. They made the common mistake of thinking that improving skills you are already strong would be somehow detrimental to others.
> It was miserable for me. Social skills never came naturally, I was isolated and bullied, and bored to death in classes. At the end of my childhood the results were trauma and bad grades.
Concerning the social skills argument: the only "social skill" that school teaches is becoming capable of hating other people so much that you deep from your heart wish them to be dead.
> Perhaps for a small segment of the school-going population but this is not universal and you know it.
Indeed: there exist perpetrators and victims (or specifically for bullying: the bullies and the bullied ones). And there exist people who are simply "blind" to what happens around them.
Well, we aren’t trying to make them normal. Just using the school system to provide opportunities we cannot.
Out of curiosity, did you feel as though you got stimulated in the topics you loved outside of school? We are trying hard to amplify anything we can rather than suppress or ignore it.
How succesful you are in life tends to be related to how much you can leverage your unique talents. Unique talents set you up for high paying jobs that make life much easier.
And yes you can go too far with that, but generally speaking being average at a lot of things is much worse than being good at one or two things.
Generally, I feel it’s my job as the parent to draw out, amplify and support their unique talents. Schools aren’t really set up to maximize unique potential so, we are using them for what they can provide.
I suspect people read that we chose a school to address the challenges our kids had and stopped there.
There have been a spree of recent experiments with LLMs solving logic puzzles (specifically Cheryl's Birthday). I wanted to replicate and repeat the tests from [0] with more LLMs. For reference, that article tested whether the trained models handled obfuscation of the text so that verbatim discussions of the solution were less likely to appear in the training corpus.
Then I wanted to move further and test whether LLMs were prone to distraction with extraneous and irrelevant data. In a world where RAG may pull in "compromised" data, I wanted to see if LLMs could ignore cruft or if it would alter their answer. TL;DR - it altered the answers.
o1 dropped as I was making graphs etc so, I included the results from testing it as an additional section. It was still distractable but was more capable in the obfuscated case.
Forgive the bait headline, I'm still trying to find the best balance of information and marketing for posts like this. Suggestions welcome on that front.
Related to this in asked LLMs to directly solve the same riddle but then obfuscated the riddle so it wouldn’t match training data and as a final test added extraneous information to distract them.
Outside of o1, simple obfuscation was enough to throw off most of the group.
The distracting information also had a relevant effect. I don’t think LLMs are properly fine tuned for prompters lying to them. With RAG putting “untrusted prose” into the prompt that’s a big issue.
How do you know whether the discrete events are a more fundamental representation vs a higher level representation that your training and discipline produces?
It’s a great question. I have come up with two answers (though I am far from an expert):
1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you teach people a meditation technique for attention without prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments from aspiring meditators like “I tried meditating but after a while I could not find “the breath” because it broke apart into a stream of individual sensations”) - but I do worry that techniques like “noting” smuggle in an atomizing assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying viewpoint if practiced exclusively.
2) maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s “more fundamental”; if you wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of positive effects occur, and that’s the goal of the whole exercise. The words “this is more fundamental” are just a cue to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I haven’t seen the rewards, and if they were as good as promised maybe this would be justified.
Anyway, I’m not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the community.
You don't. Everything is mental fabrication, including calling some mental fabrications illusion. You train your mind to fabricate things that you prefer. Whether they are more fundamental or higher-level representations doesn't matter.
Censorship is active suppression.
If Google was using AI to prevent independent people from accessing independent websites that would be censorship.
Censorship is something that is done not simply the lack of something being done.