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GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

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Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#701

Post by solid_fuel »

u_fucking_dork wrote: post #602
solid_fuel wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine has like, 8 walls, but sure. It's a box. Crucially, it was sold as a box. Not a thinking machine. Your attempt at an analogy will make sense when someone tries to install a house as middle management at some company.

If you ignore all the complexity and discard every detail, it’s literally just a box . Yet curiously you aren’t living in a cardboard box, or an aluminum shed. Point being, which you know and are being willfully ignorant about, is that it’s more complex than that. And you’ve neatly discarded the detail that they’re multi modal. I will freely admit though, analogy is useless when interacting with someone who has alrea…

Well that’s the problem with arguing through analogy, when you’re wrong you just come out looking like a Fucking Dork.

Truly your analogy isn’t wrong, it’s just that you are wrong. A house is a box and it needs walls on each side and a roof like a box. But it’s good to remember that it’s supposed to be a box. That might sound overly reductive, but it’s important to keep the fundamentals in mind in case someone tries to sell you a bowl like it was a house. A bowl does not have a lid, and will not keep the elements out.

Similarly, people keep trying to sell token prediction machines as if they are capable of thought. They are not. They predict the next token, nothing more. Yet people keep trying to sell them as if they can think.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#702

Post by tootie »

DaSHacka wrote: post #415
tootie wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memo also says they're eliminating a lot of middle management tiers which has been a theme for a lot of companies recently. It's also been a theme historically. Really has nothing to do with AI. It's just the classic executive view that they are paying people who sit in meetings and write emails instead of writing code. Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.

> Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function. I don't know, I've seen more big organizations that have a dysfunctional amount of middle management and "meetings about meetings" than ones that truly benefit from that culture.

Meetings about meetings are frequently mandatory steps to navigate internal politics. Frame your questions, gather allies, hone your message. It's how you don't waste the time of very busy people that you need things from. Besides, the alternative is fewer managers dealing with 20+ reports and not knowing what anyone is doing. Institutional inertia can be frustrating, but it's also necessary to avoid chaos.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#703

Post by dgellow »

andy_ppp wrote: post #233
dgellow wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub was already pretty much perfected years ago IMHO. I’m not convinced we need that many original ideas here

To build good software you need to think for yourself rather than aimlessly making a pastiche, derivative work never produces good art.

Not a good analogy, lot of derivative work is excellent art

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#704

Post by solid_fuel »

tomjen3 wrote: post #695
wiseowise wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you scrape HN when they offer free, generous API?

Okay, fair. I am using the API to scrape it.

Sounds like you didn't even know what your own tool was doing. This would be a prime example of why relying on autocomplete based tools makes you look like a fool.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#705

Post by roenxi »

somenameforme wrote: post #641
roenxi wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the argument though, current AI aren't just autocomplete - because we could reasonably show an AI an image or a video and have them call a tool rather than return text. That'd be comparable to a pre-language human.

I'm not seeing the comparison because what you're describing is not at all an internal or emergent process. Without a human there to hand-feed the AI access to create these tools, create the interface, and then hand feed all of it the LLM, none of this happens. This is like Kubrick's monolith, bumped up a few orders of magnitude.

> I'm not seeing the comparison because what you're describing is not at all an internal or emergent process.

And (1) that process isn't an autocomplete because it isn't reliably text->text. It could be visual->sound, sound-> action, visual->action or visual->visual or any combination. As well as proactively seeking out new stimulus. Modern LLMs aren't limited to text, they just happen to leverage a large model of the language as their most novel element.

(2) We're not talking about internal or emergent processes, we're talking about intelligence. No human is born intelligent. They go through a pretty similar process to LLMs where a lot of data gets dumped on them and they start responding to it.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#706

Post by bombcar »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #689
bombcar wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you describe “our best employees can take a severance package”?

can't find this quote in the article

It’s not - but voluntary separation with severance often leads to those with the best prospects moving on; which are often the best employees-but not always.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#707

Post by thin_carapace »

DrewADesign wrote: post #639
thin_carapace wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i was indeed trying to pick a fight, with gitlab, because i think its pathetic to pivot and abandon values for money, regardless as to those values, and regardless as to whether the abandonment is done by a human or a corporation. your comment was a convenient conversational entry point, as you made the scenario political, offering a chance for me to generalize to my point. thats the way i saw it anyway. did somethin…

Consider that the negative reaction to your (flagged, not by me) pompous, blathering comment has nothing to do with politics, or the point you failed to make. It didn’t make sense in context, was purposelessly accusatory, and generally added nothing to the conversation. I’m done explaining the obvious to you. If you don’t get it at this point, it’s because you’re not letting yourself get it. Go back to Reddit or X or…

'no dei = suck it fascism' > 'both fascism/communism would get rid of dei, why is abandoning values good anyway' > 'fuck off you are polluting our forum'

between figuring out wtf happened here and letting it go ... option B thanks

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#708

Post by davebren »

mirekrusin wrote: post #384
solid_fuel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.

Your comment was also completion.

If you want to declare yourself an NPC language model then go ahead but let the rest of us that experience meaning carry on.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#710

Post by thin_carapace »

esafak wrote: post #651
thin_carapace wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there do exist objective arguments for the pursuit of diversity. there do also exist objective arguments otherwise. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641 heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this ca…

> on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings... Which homogenous country with thousands of years of existence did you have in mind when writing this??

none, because i said group, not country. the history of my own ethnic subpopulation can be traced back around a millenia or two, perhaps that biased my writing?
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