Just because people disagree with you does not mean "narrow reading".
OK, PG might have proved it's possible for someone to become a billionaire. But why is that a good thing?
The model is: rich old guys extract money from the populace with threats of violence (just try not paying taxes). The rich old guys get FOMO. They give this money to young people who work really hard. This means foregoing sleep in favor of vibe coding some BS that nobody ever asked for, and making it addictive.
Nobody in their right mind would give a penny to these very hard working young people. In fact they don't: their startups only make money through ads. Nothing they make is worth even a tiny subscription fee. And ads are paid for by resource strip-mining megacorps.
What we have is a two-tier population of a have-nothing underclass and a handful of nobility. If we continue down this path there will be a revolution. There always is. Now that is something you probably don't want your kids to live through.
Even though the founders of OpenAI are not exactly someone you'd root for, comparisons to theft are silly.
By that token it would be illegal to go into a library, read a book, and actually remember what was in it. Except in this case the reader is a robot.
LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense. Wait! Put the pitchfork down! I know, I know, stealing is stealing, and OpenAI founders are slimy. But what about derivative works? Why is a human making a hip-hop track allowed to sample, and a robot is not? Again, LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense.
It's actually surprising in retrospect that nobody did this sooner. Even back in the 80s books about computers would gush about how a computer has enough memory to store an entire library's worth of books. It's just that someone finally figured out how to put an index on it.
Where I agree: given that this is basically the sum of all humanity's knowledge, the company should have been a non-profit. It was a non-profit. And then greed won.
There are a lot of things that are fine individually that are extremely problematic at scale. Like "reading a book" vs "ingesting all the books and art that ever existed into a plagiarism machine"
If they illegally pirated books, i.e. downloading pdfs. thats illegal and piracy by no other name. If any of us do it, it's called pirating, why are you being disingenuous and saying it's not theft when a company does it?
But that's 95% of cars that didn't need to be tested. All that the testing requirement does is reinforce the (correct) public's perception that it's a free money scheme. If the "check engine" light is not on in a modern car it's pretty much good to go.
When cars do need an emissions related fix, it's almost always that little charcoal canister that people flood with gas because nobody told them why it's a bad idea to top off the tank after the first click.
> But that's 95% of cars that didn't need to be tested.
That would only be true if the government was aware of which cars were in the 95% ahead of time. The fact that so many cars fail means even the driver isn’t sure let alone the government.
Even cars significantly newer than the average age of cars on the road regularly fail the emissions tests without any obvious issues ahead of time. Which means without testing you don’t know which cars will pass.
I've had a few cars fail emissions over the years and it was never because of the vapor. It was normally P0420 codes that weren't resolved from O2 sensors and other attempted fixes on 20 year old Hondas. Or fouled EGR airflow spaces needing cleaning. Or EGR/manifold baffles that would get stuck.
AWS UX isn't bad because engineers are bad at UX. It's because inside AWS it's every man for himself, and every team for itself. They don't collaborate, they don't talk, they compete to ship everything as quickly and cheaply as possible - quality, usability, and common sense be damned.
FWIW, my team in AWS had help from UI designers who were cool people that impressed me with their work. We definitely had to push through some needless organizational friction, e.g., they were in a different org and frequently got left out of meetings, whereas we should really have been acting as one team. I don't think we saw it as everyone for themselves, we really tried to make it work and had a good, trusting relationship.
In the end, our leadership changed what we were building so often that all of the UI work was scrapped long before we shipped. We ended up launching a janky console, quickly assembled by SDEs who were racing against deadlines. We skipped virtually all operational readiness work to meet the launch deadline. After claiming the launch win, the director, two managers, and the pm promptly left for other orgs.
That's not just AWS. That's Amazon generally. All Amazon orgs I've worked for have been like this, and due to the nature of my work, I (and my teams) have been treated like pariahs for daring to suggest that there ought to be even a minimal amount collaboration, shared standards, and cross-pollination on ideas between teams.
