I kind of like it. I mean here we all are on it. And sites like HN can just be written by one person and put up by one person with no permissions. The alternative if the government controlled it would be something like the Apple app store where you have to pay a fee to maybe be allowed to do something.
No it would not. We're already in some alternative where the government says that you can't make a website to sell CSAM, for instance. And we all agree that this is a good thing.
The goal of regulations is to prevent undesirable behaviours by making it "too costly" to do. The goal is not to take 30% on every app sale.
The post I replied to was on an internet designed with a "profit motive". What you describe is still basically profit motive with laws to stop bad things. I'm not quite sure what you get if you removed the profit motive. Maybe the app store wasn't a good example. Maybe something like the BBC?
My point was that the post you replied to was not saying that the alternative would be that the government would run it for profit. It was just saying that maybe it's better to have rules set by the government than to have the whole thing driven by profit-maximising machines.
1. Microsoft was heavily involved in orchestrating the 95% of employees to side with Sam -- through promising them money/jobs and through PR/narrative
2. The profit incentives apply to employees too
Bigger picture, I don't think the "money/VC/MSFT/commercialization faction destroyed the safety/non-profit faction" is mutually exclusive with "the board fucked up." IMO, both are true
> was it just Helen Toner’s personal vendetta against Sam
I'm not defending the board's actions, but if anything, it sounds like it may have been the reverse? [1]
> In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company... “I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight." Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever... later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed
I feel like the "safety" crowd lost the PR battle, in part, because of framing it as "safety" and over-emphasizing on existential risk. Like you say, not that many people truly take that seriously right now.
But even if those types of problems don't surface anytime soon, this wave of AI is almost certainly going to be a powerful, society-altering technology; potentially more powerful than any in decades. We've all seen what can happen when powerful tech is put in the hands of companies and a culture whose only incentives are growth, revenue, and valuation -- the results can be not great. And I'm pretty sure a lot of the general public (and open AI staff) care about THAT.
For me, the safety/existential stuff is just one facet of the general problem of trying to align tech companies + their technology with humanity-at-large better than we have been recently. And that's especially important for landscape-altering tech like AI, even if it's not literally existential (although it may be).
No one who wants to capitalize on AI appears to take it seriously. Especially how grey that safety is. I'm not concerned AI is going to nuke humanity, I'm more concerned it'll re-enforce racism, bias, and the rest of human's irrational activities because it's _blindly_ using existing history to predict future.
We've seen it in the past decade in multiple cases. That's safety.
The decision that the topic discusses means Business is winning, and they absolutely will re-enforce the idea that the only care is that these systems allow them to re-enforce the business cases.
I think the surprising thing is seeing such cohesion around a “goal to ship” when that is very explicitly NOT the stated priorities of the company in its charter or messaging or status as a non-profit.
To me it's not surprising because of the background to their formation: individually multiple orgs could have shipped GPT-3.5/4 with their resources but didn't because they were crippled by a potent mix of bureaucracy and self-sabtoage
They weren't attracted to OpenAI by money alone, a chance to actually ship their lives' work was a big part of it. So regardless of what the stated goals were, it'd never be surprising to see them prioritize the one thing that differentiated OpenAI from the alternatives
Probably some combination of:
1. Pressure from Microsoft and their e-team
2. Not actually caring about those stakes
3. A culture of putting growth/money above all
It’s interesting to see all these ideas built around the idea that “more anonymity is better.”
I think the opposite is usually (not always) true, and that many of the issues we see in today’s internet stem from the fact that we have completely lost a human connection to the people on the other end of our interactions. (You can even go further and connect this to the larger loss-of-community trends across modern society.) Developing a real relationship with someone increases empathy and trust; it leads to healthier, clearer, and more productive communication; and it generally is good for everyone’s mental health and happiness.
Personally, I want a less anonymous and more communal internet (and society).
You can observe plenty of people acting like the worst imaginable human being on Facebook or Twitter - all under their own name. I think you're spot on about the issue, but I'd argue the reason is simply scale.
When you have only 5 people in your vicinity you're going to form deep relationships with them, whether or not you want to - or whether or not you like them. It will simply happen due to the fact you're going to be around these people day in, day out. 500? Well that gets more difficult. It'll require some degree of mutual effort to form relationships, but it's still very doable especially as you'll be still somewhat regularly bumping into the same people.
5,000,000? You will, in all probability, never see the same person twice. And even if you do, you probably won't remember them among the jungle of faces. You will never form any sort of a relationship unless you aggressively go out of your way to do so. And whoa, who's this random guy trying to be so aggressively buddy buddy with me? This dude is weird. Let me smile, nod, and find the nearest exit. And in the internet, you're around hundreds of millions to billions.
Oh for sure! I’m not saying using real names automatically creates real relationships and trust, just that it helps. I just generally want to see the internet moving toward deeper, more meaningful interactions, which, like you say, is a big challenge, and almost certainly means some form of making things “smaller.” But making things more anonymous strikes me as the wrong direction.
Completely appreciate the points you laid out in both of your comments, thanks for sharing!
One counter-point, just from my own personal experience, but adopting a pseudonym online has actually allowed me to be more authentic and more sociable. I've made a lot of awesome friends that I don't think I'd have made had it not been for being pseudonymous. It can be quite liberating and reduces the fear/impact of trying new things, speaking to new people, and more.
That’s a fair point. I guess there are contexts where pseudonymity can be useful and enable types of interactions that otherwise might not be possible. Especially in online contexts where you’re interacting with people you don’t know anyway, so using your real name doesn’t add much value in terms of trust.
I’m still skeptical that work is a context where I’d want/need this. But it’s a thought-provoking idea!
I'd also add, that in many ways I feel sorry for the guys who grew up during the age of social media. I would never, in a million years, want what I said/felt/thought/etc when I was young being attached to my name now. And as the years pass I find I can often define "young" as Current_Age - 10.
This comparison feels like it's less about Node vs Rails and more just about "batteries-included framework" vs not. (Although, perhaps there isn't really a Django/Rails equivalent in Node yet? I'm not definitively sure.)
>I’ve always found it hard to climb out of the plumbing, forget about it.
This is the crux it of it, and it's true for any web project not relying on "magic" frameworks. And of course, it comes with tradeoffs. Namely, frameworks can be inflexible, and they can be difficult to understand/debug under the hood.
There is no escaping these tradeoffs, with any framework or language. More magic means less plumbing and more initial speed, but less flexibility and potential issues as complexity/scale increases. It's all about trying to choose the best tool for the job.
1. I'm not sure about this premise: "leader of the production-ready frontend-as-a-service space." They def seem like a good fit for some frontends -- but they're certainly not a good fit for ALL frontends generally. (For example, sufficiently small sites should probably just go with static hosting, and sufficiently dynamic web apps still will want a SPA.)
2. At the end of the day, web backends are just a lot more varied and complex than web frontends. On the technical side, a web frontend is always just bundles of JS, HTML, CSS, that have to be transmitted to the client. And functionally, there's a relatively large set of common things they pretty much all do (routing, serve images, etc.) Therefore, it's relatively simple to build an opinionated framework that can still cover a good number of situations.
By contrast, a "backend" is really a lot of different things (like the four you mention, plus various types of storage and caching), which can use many different languages/technologies, all working together in different ways. It's hard to conceive of a universal "backend" framework that could cover all of that complexity.
3. There are some efforts to do this kind of thing (to some extent). Google's Firebase and AWS Amplify are the two that I think are closest -- they try to give low-configuration generic backend building blocks. (I'm currently using Amplify for a project -- still too early to tell. It also works with Next.js!) There's also platform-as-a-service options like Heroku.
Backend is probably a lot easier than the frontend, which is why you can see service like hasura and supabase. Backend is a highly patternized work, which is why it can be low to no code, whereas front end as a service is merely just deployment as a service.
> At the end of the day, web backends are just a lot more varied and complex than web frontends.
> No, they aren't. On the technical side, a web frontend is always just bundles of JS, HTML, CSS, that have to be transmitted to the client.
First, that's factually untrue; web front-ends can contain a wide array of things beyond those three (WASM, content in formats other than HTML that is read and used by the JS/WASM, etc.)
Second, on a similar level of reductionism, web backends are just bundles of bytes that need to be deployed on servers.
Even completely leaving aside the language/software diversity, the point is that the vast majority of web "frontends" are really just one thing (rendering the UI and responding to inputs) whereas web "backends" are frequently not really one thing (1 or more types of storage, 1 or more types of computation, responding to requests, perhaps event processing and scheduling, etc.)
I did not mean to imply that all, or even most backends are more complex than frontends -- only that the problem space of backends is larger and more varied (for typical web use these days, at least.)
Not sure I agree with your first point. Next can output static sites easily, I've used it for some tiny marketing sites recently and I think its fine for small sites. You get auto routing, and can use react components without any hassle.
And 'sufficiently dynamic web apps still will want a SPA' doesn't make much sense to me because you can just use nextjs in full SPA mode and its just as 'dynamic' as any react app
This is a really strong argument. At the end of the day I think it is possible (with iteration) to get the level of abstraction correct for something approaching some semblance of the universality you refer to.
I really just want a framework that allows me to:
1) Run locally like Next.js's "npm run dev"
2) Do end-to-end unit tests because the framework provides the abstraction layer
3) Deploy to the cloud via push to Github and have it run exactly the same as (1), but do it at scale (deploy to serverless functions, use actual SQS Queues, Eventbridge, etc.)
Of course the core would a developer experience like Vercel, Stripe, etc.
Check out Amplify! I've heard good things and my limited experience is good so far. (Although running locally isn't the best, unfortunately... but that's always going to be an issue the more you lean on a cloud services.) Deployments are easy. In terms of scalability, it's all massively scalable AWS services under the hood, and it seems relatively easy to "eject" if you ever need to.
