I agree with this sentiment but I admit I can't see it cut so cleanly. It's fair that no screens is the ideal, especially for young kids. I struggle to see it as ultimately sad though; if this serves only to replace human interaction for young kids, that would be bad, but this isn't necessarily so.
I think there are real issues in today's world with screens, but software and education have an amazing capability. I'd certainly caution the business towards the subject matter. The moment that this becomes a way for parents to neglect children, or for children to avoid socialisation, then it's sad. Until then, it's good to see any software initiatives aimed at exploring educational software.
The decision to audit (frankly, aggressively) this guy out the gate with this comment on a discussion thread is not a good look. It's a very unnecessary way to tarnish the reputation of the devs by picking fights with someone sharing their experience. If you can't see how you did that, perhaps you should ask an LLM to help.
With how the record is so correct now, can you clarify for me who was right?
It's the wrong question; the first person was sharing their experience, and the reply jumped to collecting evidence that only vindicated the characterisation of a 'chilly response'. It's a human social skills thing. This place is not github issues. People who actually care will see. People who 'clarify' it here were never maintainers
SB212 is an AI bill. It also includes some guidelines around AI-controlled infrastructure. But, as the source explicitly discusses, the focus clearly seems to be around preventing AI regulation of private individuals (individuals also means corporations in the US).
> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.
> The MRTCA stands in stark contrast to recent regulatory efforts in other states, such as California, Virginia, and New York, where proposals to rein in AI technologies have either failed or been heavily revised. Montana’s approach leans toward empowering individual users rather than restricting access.
Sure, I completely believe this model legislation drafted by ALEC is being pushed by a "grassroots group" and not an industry lobbying organization. I wish reporters would be more careful with their language.
Maybe someone could have just came up with in a vacuum, but it looks like a response to other attempts to restrict AI by saying that models trained with more than X amount of compute resources have to follow tons of extra rules.
And, per the article, the group pushing this is AI and blockchain companies.
Can you clarify your meaning? Genuinely trying to understand. Is it that Beth criticises partisan actions (if you consider FDA's actions partisan, or the CDC's renaming of the mpox), while being partisan herself, which is hypocritical?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Sure, the US decision was certainly ideologically motivated (which isn't to say right or wrong) and one could notice that, but that rabid reaction to an absolute nothing is ridiculous and the arguments presented are questionable in tone and intellectual integrity (e.g. calling your side "the world" to put weight behind your opinion).
Let's be honest, since Ars has been bought by Condé Nast, it has progressively become something between Reddit and Gawkers.
And also, if you are democrat or democratic leaning, you are not allowed to criticize republican administration. Criticism, insults and such can flow only one way - from conservatives to democrats. Checkmate.
Several times people here on HN dismissed factually accurate articles I posted, that cited all their claims to trusted, non-controversial sources [1], because they thought the article publisher was too right-wing. The only way such dismissals stop, is if they are applied evenly.
[1] E.g. government statistics, or public announcements by a university regarding their programs, in an article about what kind of programs that university offers. I.e. sources nobody disputed for those claims.
Bo Burmham said, "self awareness does not absolve anyone of anything"
But here I dont think they (or their defenders) are still aware of the real lesson here.
Theres literally zero information thats valuable here. Its like saying "we used an 18 wheeler as our family car and then we switched over to a regular camry and solved all our problems." What is the lesson to be learned in that statement?
The real interesting post mortem would be if they go, "god in retrospect what a stupid decision we took; what were we thinking? Why did we not take a step back earlier and think, why are we doing it this way?" If they wrote a blog post that way, that would likely have amazing takeaways.
What did your internal discussion conclude for the question "Why did we not take a step back earlier and think, why are we doing it this way?"
Im genuinely curious because this is not singling out your team or org, this is a very common occurrence among modern engineering teams, and I've often found myself on the losing end of such arguments. So I am all ears to hear at least one such team telling what goes on in their mind when they make terrible architecture decisions and if they learned anything philosophical that would prevent a repeat.
Oh we had it coming for quite some time and knew we would need to rebuild it, we just didn’t have the capacity to do it unfortunately.
I was working on it on and off moving one endpoint at a time but it was very slow until we hired someone who was able to focus on it.
It didn’t feel good at all. We knew the product had massive flaws due to the latency but couldn’t address it quickly. Especially cause we he to build more workarounds as time went on. Workarounds we knew would be made redundant by the reimplementation.
I think we had that discussion if “wtf are we doing here” pretty early, but we didn’t act on it in the beginning, instead we tried different approaches to make it work within the serverless constraints cause that’s what we knew well.
I have had CTOs (two in my career) tell me we had to use our AWS credits since they were going to expire worthless. Both experiences were at vc-backed startups.
What's valuable about rediscovering that stateless architectures requiring network round-trips for state access are slower than in-memory state? This isn't new information, it's a predictable consequence of their architecture choice that anyone with distributed systems experience could have told them on day zero.
Sure, but there are some fundamentals about latency that any programmer should know [0] (absolute values outdated, but still useful as relative comparisons), like “network calls are multiple orders of magnitude slower than IPC.”
I’m assuming you’re an employee of the company based on your comments, so please don’t take this poorly - I applaud any and all public efforts to bring back sanity to modern architecture, especially with objective metrics.
And yeah you’re right in hindsight it was a terrible idea to begin with
I thought it could work but didn’t benchmark it enough and didn’t plan enough. It all looked great in early POCs and all of these issues cropped up as we built it
You don't need experience and there is not really a lot to know about "distributed systems" in this case, that's basic CS knowledge about networks, latency and what "serverless" actually is, you can read about it.
To be honest, to me it reads like people who don't understand the problem they're solving, haven't acquired the necessary knowledge to solve it (either by learning themselves or by asking/hiring people who have it), and seeing such an amateurish mistake doesn't inspire confidence for the future.
You should either hire people that know what they are doing or upgrade your knowledge about systems you are using before making decisions to use them.
Sometimes I see a post about sorting algorithms online. Some people seem to benefit from reading about these things, but often, I find there isn't much new information for me. That's OK, because I know somebody somewhere benefits from knowing this.
It is your decision to make this a circlejerk of musings about how the company must be run by amateurs. Whatever crusade you're fighting in vividly criticising them is not valuable at all. People need to learn and share so we can all improve, stop distracting from that point.
I'm surprised at this, LLMs have had many developments since Gpt3.5, technologically and culturally. What kind of developments would be impressive to you?
I get pretty good results with Claude code, Codex, and to a lesser extend Jules. It can navigate a large codebase and get me started on a feature in a part of the code I'm not familiar with, and do a pretty good job of summarizing complex modules. With very specific prompts it can write simple features well.
The nice part is I can spend an hour or so writing specs, start 3 or 4 tasks, and come back later to review the result. It's hard to be totally objective about how much time it saves me, but generally feels worth the 200/month.
One thing I'm not impressed by is the ability to review code changes, that's been mostly a waste of time, regardless of how good the prompt is.
Company expectations are higher too. Many companies expect 10x output now due to AI, but the technology has been growing so quick that there are a lot of people/companies who haven't realized that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.
If you're not using AI for 60-70 percent of your code, you are behind. And yes 200 per month for AI is required.
maybe if openai let me generate an image through api? that would impress me. instead, they took away temperature and gave us verbosity and reasoning effort to think about every time we make an api call.
I'd argue that technological change that is a simple enough iteration of existing technology that it can be carried out by small groups of people will happen independent of culture with a very high probability once a population is large enough.
In this case, so many people are curious as to whether we can make this work and/or see financial implications that this will happen irrespective of whether wider culture rejects it.
Prioritizing profit above all is still a culture though. And it is the choice of a people to give a small group with large amount of money huge cultural influence.
As a resident Duolingo apologist this is certainly awesome! I appreciate how little landing-page fluff there was before I could give it a shot. I tried Japanese and felt it was only reasonable in tandem with my in-built translation extension, since Kanji-reading knowledge itself is a major hurdle of learning. Furigana would really help this, but personally, being able to translate the words I pick helps a lot during the challenge of hearing new vocabulary in native Japanese.
As well, I am learning multiple languages, and noticed that the settings panel seems to be the way to switch between them. I think it's a little unnatural to force a user to do this, but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly. The pricing itself seems reasonable and I appreciate that I can feel the app out for free.
I focussed first on European languages as I'm learning French. But I'll put some more effort in improving the Japanese experience since it seems to be very popular.
> but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly.
Would a language selection box at the top be enough? Or do you mean a more elaborate way to switch between languages?
For me, the main interest would be to switch the interface for one language to another in ideally 1-2 clicks; so if there was an interface element that captured the languages I was 'working on' that would be neat. Then I'd be happy to peruse the full list whenever curiosity spikes.
Otherwise, great work on a good use of existing technologies to provide meaningful educational benefit for yourself and others!
I think there are real issues in today's world with screens, but software and education have an amazing capability. I'd certainly caution the business towards the subject matter. The moment that this becomes a way for parents to neglect children, or for children to avoid socialisation, then it's sad. Until then, it's good to see any software initiatives aimed at exploring educational software.