Interesting. And all the history of Kafkaesque review interactions that various developers have had could be subpoenaed, as evidence of a pattern: that delays aren't necessarily due to excellence and good faith.
Given the sibling reply, I can imagine them claiming national security prevents them from releasing those records. But that’s okay; I am fairly certain we can find enough developers willing to tell their tales.
Given the short-term pragmatic, conflicted way that AI tech adoption is happening... won't encouraging distillation effectively taint the entire space of open weights models, with the undisclosed biases of a few models that are under the influence of parties (certain billionaires and politicians) known for aggression and duplicity, and not for admirable ethics?
Following news of companies and projects increasingly moving to open weights models.
As AI gets more central to society, we really need to know how the weights were determined.
Open weights isn't just "free as in beer"; it can be "free as in the mystery drug that creepy guy chatting you up at the bar offered you". And maybe even he doesn't even know everything that went into the tablets, since he too was being worked, by an organ-theft ring who will be harvesting both of you tonight.
That's an analogy to get your attention. Your LLM probably isn't going to steal your organs. But in the current environment, it does and will have ideological biases determined by those with direct and indirect influence over it. And there will be a massive market for commercial influence biases (look at how previous generations of adtech invaded almost all technology companies). And there's incentive for military and spying capabilities to be buried in the models, perhaps as long-term sleepers. Maybe some organized crime trojans, too, depending which model you pick up.
In this low-trust environment of the current real world, we need genuine open source models, not closed "open weights", and not mindlessly distilling black boxes gifted by sketchy powerful interests.
It's a good analogy that's probably occurred independently to a lot of us. Here's my version from a private email a few weeks ago:
> [...] I don't like the "great equalizer" effect. [...] Like a kung-fu expert who wandered into a wild-west saloon of drunks all packing six-shooters. (I'm still working on this metaphor.)
Might as well share the entire off-the-cuff email, replying to a great software engineer friend who recently went academic, when they asked what I thought about AI development.
> "You're absolutely right," as the chatbots say.
> I think Claude Code (which I think is currently regarded as the best brand for software development) is for banging out *something* when you don't care so much about the quality. Like most applications of generative AI (homework cheating, customer service, usual corporate ticket-closing).
> And I'm definitely not thinking through the problem very well. The first time I noticed this was on UI design, where Claude would emit a generic *something*, and then the mode is to make incremental tweaks, rather than going through the mental exercises and holistic thinking.
> So sometimes I'm thinking like a non-technical manager, giving initial spec, and then iterating on things I notice -- not thinking like a designer, architect, or engineer.
> Or, like a senior engineer who has to mentor a hyperactive intern who bullshits and plagiarizes like crazy, and makes empty apologies like a sociopath when caught, but is the CEO's nephew, so you can't just fire and blacklist them. You just have to get *something* out of them.
> I can do much better design and better implementation myself, but it's good enough. And it's better than at least half the industry software engineers, so a lot of people who never cared much nor got very good, are in trouble. And management is often a poor judge of skill, if they even care.
> Besides the questions of its performance and utility, and all the ethics questions, I don't like the "great equalizer" effect. Now a lot more people can do (or seem to do) many of things I can do. And I'm having a lot of trouble job-hunting, and companies mostly want people to be using or building AI. Hence learning the robo-plagiarism tools. Like a kung-fu expert who wandered into a wild-west saloon of drunks all packing six-shooters. (I'm still working on this metaphor.)
That conversation might've started when I showed friend my new gen-AI portfolio site, so the context would be realist assessment and handling it, spoken to someone who already knows I'm an enthusiastic hardcore engineer.
(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)
For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.
Looks like the IP address is from Linode. So it could be a $5 VPS running an inefficient server-side framework.
I currently host my personal Web site as static files via AWS CloudFront. But even static hosting on a $5 VPS with Nginx might handle an HN surge fine.
I host my AI-generated code portfolio site separately (to unambiguously distinguish it from my 100% human-written open source work), using github.io (seemed appropriate) with a custom domain.
>static hosting on a $5 VPS with Nginx might handle an HN surge
My personal site is hosted on this exact setup. Twice I made the homepage, twice I noticed no slowdown whatsoever.
The only problem is that in May of this year, when my SimCity 3k in 4k article was found by the HN crowd, its access.log bloated to 200Mb causing my logrotate script (that hooks in Goaccess) to blow up every time since when trying to process it, and this log has been growing every day since - because logrotate isn't doing much rotating!
When I can massage my VPS into processing it, I'll have the stats to enjoy.
Regardless of whether or not Google is liable, what would be interesting to me is how this happened, the role(s) at Google that were involved, when each knew of the problem, and what each did.
(I'm interested in what this says about current culture.)
> It's made even worse by the fact that [...] their external designs are unchanged from past ones, so there's no way to tell who's always listening to everything
Yeah, I just decided the entire Apple Watch brand is suddenly a creeper device, so I'm not going to wear mine out, nor otherwise around other people.
I don't want to endorse creeper devices by appearing to wear one, and I don't want to be insensitive to people who might wonder whether I'm "note taking" everything we say.
Also, I got an iPhone specifically to use the Apple Watch awhile, so I'm probably switching back to GrapheneOS sooner than expected.
This seems like a huge overreaction. I really don't get what the big deal is here? Are people worried about Apple snooping on conversations? They already have enough iPhone to track any device in the world with the AirTag network? Not to mention every phone has like 3 microphones lol
Are you worried about malicious actors snooping on conversations? They have always already been able to do that longer than I have been alive and a transcription app isn't going to change that
A complementary view of one point in time is the LA Noire video game's attempt to recreate a (condensed and simplified) 1940s LA environment, with 3D architecture, cars, and ongoing expansion.
The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.
Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.
Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)
Don't underestimate working for the medium size business nobody has heard of but prints money doing something semi boring. They won't change the world but it's often a reliable paycheck without all the BS
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