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How to write stuff no one else can

thewritetoroam.com

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Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#61

Post by fxtentacle »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #4
yamrzou wrote: post #2

This sentence caught my attention: > You can’t just Google these kinds of things. That’s why they’re so interesting. So what Google did is dilute the information advantage. The more interconnected we are, the harder it becomes to maintain that advantage.

The fact is that we're not that interconnected though. Finding people that have useful, actionable information, and want to share it with you, is extremely difficult.

Or maybe we have just conditioned people to not share useful information publicly anymore.

Amazon selling what used to be open source projects has certainly had a chilling effect on people publishing source code under a permissive licence.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#62

Post by oldandtired »

snoman wrote: post #26
oldandtired wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make the following comment regarding artificial stupidity systems (AI) > since it knows how to correctly apply exist concepts to previously unexplored areas and yet these systems know nothing at all. Far too many people (including the developers of such systems) have failed to understand that none of these systems can go beyond the programming that humans have incorporated into them. Yes, they appear to exhibit c…

I get what you’re saying, and will echo that these systems are still just tools that enhance what we, as humans, are capable of doing. But I think you’re failing to consider that even comparatively simple systems can exhibit emergent behavior, well beyond their programming. You’re being unreasonably reductive and dismissive.

Emergent behaviour can occur, not a problem. But if you study such systems, I think you will find that the emergent behaviour is based on the programming involved and is not "beyond the programming".

When it comes to intelligence, this is not something that we can say is actually emergent.

There are currently a number of projects that are looking into intelligence and free-will. There are researchers on the same teams who hold quite different opinions - the results for these projects are not at all conclusive.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#63

Post by neilv »

For my back-burner startup, the reason it would work (in theory) was due to a particular thing we were doing that none of the other players in the market would do, even if they thought of it.

(Unfortunately, just as I got time to move it to front burner, it was probably killed by LLM consumer popularity.)

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#64

Post by austin-cheney »

munificent wrote: post #51
austin-cheney wrote: post #44

The article misses something super critical: why? . More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership . Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership loo…

I'm sure all software developers have been exposed to strong personalities. Often in the form of bullies, primadonnas, class clowns, big men on campus, pointy haired bosses, etc. The problem is that—as a generalization—strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence , and software engineers esteem the latter above all else (because a machine is not swayed by charisma, after all). Good leadership is re…

Competence at what?

Avoiding strong personalities purely for the sake easing hostility sounds a lot like cowardice. A better course of action is conflict resolution.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#65

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

Aurornis wrote: post #39

> For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time. > But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’…

What's the impetus for headhunters to do all this legwork though? Just like noone got fired for buying IBM, the headhunters at large FAANG almost always go for the shiny, smiling LinkedIn profiles.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#66

Post by zmgsabst »

edmundsauto wrote: post #57
Madmallard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence" citation needed

Not to support the generalization but this describes my bias. Just as the flashy person with diamonds and a nice car does not indicate class. It also kinda makes sense if you think it through. Strong personality types receive less feedback. Feedback helps us grow.

Aggressive personalities aren’t the same as strong personalities, in precisely the way status trinkets aren’t class.

I’d say strong personalities are essential for consensus:

When it’s clear who is holding court, there’s much less talking over each other and bickering, precisely because the leader has made it clear what the expectation is — and everyone knows it will be enforced.

“Let’s quiet down for a moment, I really want to hear what @edmundsauto is saying.”

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#67

Post by tirthvora »

To double down on one of the points a bit, its well observed and accepted that the CEO or senior authorities get all the attention, even in politics; But there's always the less-known team behind it that did most of the work. They don't get the credits because they couldn't take the RISKS, that the senior folks did. Senior positions come with its associated risk and stakes, and not everyone has the guts to tackle that kind of exposure.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#68

Post by ozim »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #65
Aurornis wrote: post #39

> For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time. > But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’…

What's the impetus for headhunters to do all this legwork though? Just like noone got fired for buying IBM, the headhunters at large FAANG almost always go for the shiny, smiling LinkedIn profiles.

For headhunters none, for you if you are running your small company - huge. Great hire can pull you out off troubles, bad hire can run company to the ground.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#69

Post by jwilber »

adtac wrote: post #21
hawski wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also something I often encounter with ChatGPT. It often is very wrong about things I ask, because I often wonder and try things off the beaten path. That's our advantage against LLMs.

Purely probabilistically, trying things off the beaten path is just a matter of higher LLM temperature. Turning up GPT-4's temperature is basically an expensive /dev/urandom pipe today, but I don't see any fundamental reason why LLMs can't catch up. Maybe all it takes is tinkering with how temperature is calculated.

No - temperature is a sampling measurement from a distribution. If you adjust temperature, you still ultimately pull from the same distribution.

Parent is saying the advantage is in pulling ideas from outside that encoded distribution.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#70

Post by nl »

oldandtired wrote: post #60
encomiast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is a novel, never-before-seen image that comes out of DALL·E 3 "encoded in" in the system? The image may be, in a sense, encoded in the latent space of images, but so is every image (of the same dimensions) that ever has been or will be.

The images generated are based on two things: 1). the code within the systems 2). the data entered into the system. Those images are the result of how the data is processed by the code. Even if you put in a random number generator, the code processes those numbers based on it internal code constraints. Now a well designed and built code base may be able to generate every image of the same dimensions. You can certainl…

This isn't really true except in the most reductive sense.

If you ask for a picture of Shakespeare dressed as Spiderman reading a McDonald's advert on the moon, no one has programmed that and the fact it knows these individual concepts is no different to the fact a human has seen them too.

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