I did the same as you about 20 years ago. And about three years ago, I started reinvesting in physical ownership again for my music and movies. For me this started from a desire to reduce my reliance on major tech companies, especially licensed content like media. But since moving in that direction, I've found it very rewarding to curate a collection reflective of my evolving taste, and find I treat my time with a spinning record or blu-ray I had to insert with more focus and attention.
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
The em dashes didn't strike me as LLM because they had spaces on either side, something I don't typically see in LLM outputs as much. But the quote you highlighted is pretty much dead-on for LLM "speak" I must admit. In the end though, I think this is human written.
Interesting. Let's take the case of infra spend on AWS. Amazon says you invoked serverless calls 100k times and you are charged for it. How are you trusting them?
The comparison doesn't quite hold because AWS is a utility; they aren't an arbiter of quality. Amazon charges for a serverless call regardless of whether your code worked or crashed. You pay for the effort (compute), which is verifiable and binary.
Once you shift to billing for outcomes like "resolutions," the vendor switches from a utility provider to the judge and jury of their own performance. At scale, that creates a "fox guarding the henhouse" dynamic. The friction of auditing those outcomes to ensure they aren't just Goodharted metrics eventually offsets the simplicity the model promises. Frankly, I just cannot and will not trust the judgment of tech companies who evangelize their own LLM outputs.
How do you verify AWS charges? By inspecting logs? There goes the arbiter.
I get the binary part. The biggest difference is the subjective component of outcome? However, a tech provider - especially Agent provider - has to bring down the subjective to a quantitative metric when selling. If that cannot be done, I am not sure what we are going to be buying from Agent builders/providers?
Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout".
Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...
Completely agree. The movie ruined Dr. Frankenstein's motives by adding his benefactor, and ruined his monster by removing the inner rage he felt and expressed towards the world the shunned him. A very, very odd decision by GDT. Similar to Spike Lee remaking High & Low, but removing the critique of capitalism and the complicity of the wealthy so he could make Denzel the true protagonist.
As ever, the misbegotten apex species of our planet is fully prepared to sacrifice the actually real, mostly irreplaceable existence of the natural world for the societal construct of wealth. We've inherited a beautiful home with unthinkably-beautiful custom craftsmanship, but wouldn't such a home make for wonderful firewood?
Oh, there are plenty of villains here. But they're in offices and wearing ties.
And they should be smacked down hard, but that isn't going to happen because then - inevitably - the role of the regulators would come under scrutiny as well. That is the main issue here. The NTSB did a fantastic job - as they always do - at finding the cause, it never ceases to amaze me how good these people are at finding the technical root cause of accidents. But the bureaucratic issues are the real root cause here: an industry that is running on wafer thing margins with ships that probably should not be out there, risking peoples lives for a miserly wage.
Regulators should step in and level the playing field. Yes, that will cause prices of shipping to rise. But if you really want to solve this that is where I think they should start and I am not at all saying that the system is too powerful to change, just that for some reason they seem to refuse to even name it, let alone force it to change.
Fwiw and since you received several comments about it, your first comment did not come off to everyone as making excuses. It was pretty clear you were trying to turn peoples attention to the real problem.
There was also no fatalistic tone about the system being too powerful to change. Just clear sharing of observations IMO.
It is not unusual to receive this reaction (being blamed for fatalism and making excuses) from observations like these, I have noticed.
I suspect a lot of people commenting in this thread have never been on one of these ships or have any idea of what the typical state of maintenance is, and how inaccessible the tech compartments are when the vessel is underway. This isn't exactly a server room environment. When vessels are new (in the first five years or so) and under the first owners they are usually tip-top. Then, after the first sale the rot sets in and unless there is a major overhaul you will see a lot of issues like these, usually they do not have such terrible consequences. They tend to last for 25 years or so (barring mishaps) and by then the number of repairs will be in the 100's and the vessel has changed hands a couple of times.
Passenger carrying vessels are better, but even there you can come across some pretty weird stuff.
I agree with all of this and everything you've said thus far. I hope my prior comment was not interpreted as some sort of indictment or attack on your motives.
OpenAI has seemingly done everything they can to put publishers in a position to make this demand, and they've certainly not done anything to make it impossible for them to respond to it. Is there a better, more privacy minded way for NYT to get the data they need? Probably, I'm not smart enough to understand all the things that go into such a decision. But I know I don't view them as the villain for asking, and I also know I don't view OpenAI as some sort of guardian of my or my data's best interests.
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
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