> I think it “understood” the question because it “knew” how to write the Python code to get the right answer.
That’s what makes me suspicious of LLMs, they might just be coincidentally or accidentally answering in a way that you agree with.
Don’t mean to nitpick or be pedantic. I just think the question was really poorly worded and might have a lot of room for confirmation bias in the results.
> List of US Presidents with their ages at inauguration
That’s what the python script had at the top. I guess I don’t know why you didn’t ask that in the first place.
Edit: you’re not the same person who originally posted the comment I responded to, and I think I came off a bit too harshly here in text, but don’t mean any offense.
It was a good idea to ask to see the code. It was much more to the point and clear what question the LLM perceived you asking of it.
The second example about buckets was interesting. I guess LLMs help with coding if you know enough of of the problem and what a reasonable answer looks like, but you don’t know what you don’t know. LLMs are useful because you can just ask why things may not work or don’t work in any given context or generally speaking or in a completely open ended way that is often hard to explain or articulate for non-experts, making troubleshooting difficult as you might not even know how to search for solutions.
You might appreciate this link if you’re not familiar with it:
I was demonstrating how bad that LLMs are at simple math.
If I just asked a list of ages in order, there was probably some training data for it to recite. By asking for it to reverse it, it was forcing the LLM to do math.
I also knew the answer was simple with Python.
On another note, with ChatGPT 4, you can ask it to verify its answers on the internet and to provide sources
You’re also scarface_74? Not that there’s anything wrong with sockpuppets on HN in the absence of vote manipulation or ban evasion that I know of, I just don’t know why you’d use one in this manner, hence my confusion. Karma management?
I saw a blue icon of some kind on the link you shared but didn’t click it.
No worries, that was somewhat ambiguous to me also, and confusing. I thought you might be a different person who had edited their comment after receiving downvotes. I mean, it’s reasonable to assume in most cases that different usernames are different people. Sorry to make you repeat yourself!
Maybe email hn@ycombinator.com to ask about your rate limits as I have encountered similar issues myself in the past and have found dang to be very helpful and informative in every way, even when the cause is valid and/or something I did wrong. #1 admin/mod on the internet imo
I ask the same question, if Netflix decides to incorporate in Canada are you going to make a law that forces ISPs to block them? Are large newspapers not allowed to produce their own content? Do you draw the line at newspapers and news organizations because of freedom of the press and the do you allow Netflix to produce thier own documentaries but not fictional shows?
blocking studio owned distributors from other jurisdictions makes sense, though I'm sure its the sort of thing that would happen on a case by case basis.
Newspapers in general don't syndicate most stories to begin with, so no I don't think it makes sense in that context.
by the way, this isn't some weird new policy. the equivalent applies to studios and movie theaters [1]. we just neglected to extend the policy to online distribution because the powers that be decided vertical monopolies are OK, actually.
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...
It’s actually not only not been extended, the actual consent decree has been sunset .
Back when it was decided, the only method to get your content in front of an audience was to ship physical media to a physical theater.
Now I can create a video from the device I have in my pocket that has much higher quality than was available in the 30s, upload it either to YouTube or an AWS S3 bucket and upload a yaml file that creates a CloudFront distribution (AWS’s CDN) and distribute it worldwide and create a web page that anyone with a $70 (unsubsidized) Android can watch.
Not only that Comcast - a cable company - owns both the modern distribution pipes that have far more reach than the studios ever had and a studio (Universal) and a broadcast TV and an Internet streaming service.
But there is no “monopoly” on either video creation or distribution or streaming.
I can’t believe someone is actually advocating that the government block foreign content over the internet because you don’t agree with producers being distributors. Are we going to create the “Great Wall of America”?
And who gets to decide what content that should be blocked?
So let’s take Fox News or any other news organization or even the Discovery network. They all create documentary content. Should they not be allowed to stream their own content? Wouldn’t it be against the freedom of speech and/or press to say that you can’t stream your own content via your own website?
> Now I can create a video from the device I have in my pocket that has much higher quality than was available in the 30s, upload it either to YouTube or an AWS S3 bucket and upload a yaml file that creates a CloudFront distribution (AWS’s CDN) and distribute it worldwide and create a web page that anyone with a $70 (unsubsidized) Android can watch.
I think you're vastly underestimating the degree to which corporate players see a different world than you or I. I'm not talking about limits on personal actions. I'm talking about corporate, and even there for the most part publicly traded corporations.
> Not only that Comcast - a cable company - owns both the modern distribution pipes that have far more reach than the studios ever had and a studio (Universal) and a broadcast TV and an Internet streaming service.
I mean, do you seriously think I don't want Comcast dismantled and sold for parts? I agree its worse, but it's a somewhat different conversation.
> But there is no “monopoly” on either video creation or distribution or streaming.
Vertical monopolies are still monopolies. If the only place you can get Disney movies is directly from Disney's own service, that's a form of monopoly. Fwiw, I'm relatively sympathetic to netflix; if it weren't for movie studios getting into the distribution business, they probably would be doing quite well right now, having a significant headstart on how to do distribution.
> And who gets to decide what content that should be blocked?
Any company which owns their own distribution network and preferentially distributes over that. Seems like the sort of thing the courts and FCC can work out. Will it work very well? probably not, but the point is to add enough friction that its easier for those producers to sell on the open market instead of forcing users to buy their entire bundle, or none of it at all, not to exclude them from the market.
> So let’s take Fox News or any other news organization or even the Discovery network. They all create documentary content. Should they not be allowed to stream their own content? Wouldn’t it be against the freedom of speech and/or press to say that you can’t stream your own content via your own website?
No. Those programs should be syndicatable by anyone else who wants to distribute them, at the cost that they charge their own network for.
The point isn't to stifle speech, it's to stop networks from bundling together a bunch of terrible garbage with their best products to force users to buy junk they don't want.
> I'm not talking about limits on personal actions. I'm talking about corporate, and even there for the most part publicly traded corporations.
The now defunct consent decree was put in place specifically because small players couldn’t distribute movies anywhere besides theaters. That is not the world we live in today. Anyone can distribute movies worldwide by doing just as I said without an intermediary. I literally have a bash shell script and a CloudFormation template on my work computer right now that creates a static website hosted on S3 distributed via CloudFront where I could make any video I have available to anyone in the world.
> it weren't for movie studios getting into the distribution business, they probably would be doing quite well right now, having a significant headstart on how to do distribution.
There is no moat around video distribution. To a first approximation, anyone can distribute video at scale and create an entire streaming service using services available on AWS combined with a third party company that specializes in it. Do you think that all of these streaming companies have the in house expertise to do this at scale?
Hell, I know how to use AWS services to distribute content, transcode it and distribute it to millions of people around the world. Would it be cost effective at scale? Probably not. (former AWS ProServe employee).
> Any company which owns their own distribution network and preferentially distributes over that. Seems like the sort of thing the courts and FCC can work out
You really want the FCC and courts to have the power to block content on the internet and force all ISP’s to block foreign traffic?
You didn’t address the part about how this would work for international content, are we going to give the FCC the power to block international content on the internet?
> the only place you can get Disney movies is directly from Disney's own service, that's a form of monopoly
That is by no legal definition a monopoly and actually Epic just loss a case against Apple in court trying to argue that Apple had a monopoly on the App Store. In that case the NY Times has a “monopoly” on thier content? Every producer has a monopoly on what they create.
> No. Those programs should be syndicatable by anyone else who wants to distribute them, at the cost that they charge their own network for.
You really don’t want to let any content producer to be the sole distributor of their content? Does that include software developers? Should they also have to go through an App Store instead of exclusive distribution on thier own website?
The law can be written in a way that leaves it up for interpretation. It's not a simple IFTTT statement, what's why judges exist and why they make rulings that get cited in other cases. It's a feature of our system that I don't need to answer all your needlessly pedantic questions and just leave it up to interpretation.
Because otherwise bureaucrates like you would cause everything to stall while looking into every contingency.
I also don't think you have to "pass a law" we already have laws on the book that can do this and, this might shock you, we have already used them to do almost exactly what you are saying here.
Well first that ruling was sunsetted three years for all the reasons I cited and was never a “law” binding new companies.
So now you want unelected judges to decide what can and can’t be streamed on the internet.
This is also not the 1930s. In 2024, movie distribution is not limited to physical meets theaters.
Your citation gets trotted out all of the time in these arguments like anyone in 2024 can’t put a video on a website and distribute it anywhere in the world. When the ruling was in effect, home video media didn’t even exist and even television was in its infancy.
And you still haven’t answered the question, do you also stop foreign companies from distributing thier own content ?
And there is always judge shopping, liberal judges would love to stop Fox News from distributing their own content on the internet as would conservative judges love to stop media owned by “woke” corporations
> Your citation gets trotted out all of the time in these arguments like anyone in 2024 can’t put a video on a website and distribute it anywhere in the world.
It's about scale, if you didn't read my first message then that's fine but just so you can ignore it again.
Me spilling 1 oz oil in my front yard is different that BP spilling millions of gallons.
Similarly Apple and Netflix teaming up is different than me and my local theater teaming up. If you don't like anti trust that's fine but don't act like it's impossible to understand.
But first, no one was talking about Apple and Netflix teaming up. Those are two competitors and independent companies in the same space - streaming.
The discussion was about vertical integration where one company gets to distribute its own content. It was specifically decided Epic vs Apple that a monopoly isn’t being in control of your own content. Nintendo is also not considered a “monopoly” because you can only play most of their IP on thier own hardware
You also failed to answer any of the questions
1. Should we not allow any large content producer to distribute their own content exclusively on their own website and how is video different than audio, news, books, software, physical merchandise, etc? A second part of that conversation does that also apply to news content? Religious content? Documentaries like what CNN does?
2. For digital media, should we block foreign companies that are vertically integrated from being able to be accessed by people in the US?
3. If Netflix reincorporated in Canada should we force all US ISPs not to do business with them? Should we block them like the TikTok ban that is being proposed?
I'm not answering your questions because they are stupid and you are just trying to cause inaction by being overly verbose.
> But first, no one was talking about Apple and Netflix teaming up.
I said Apple instead of Facebook to show how needlessly pedantic you are. There is absolutely no difference between Apple and Facebook here the point is the scale of the company (as I have said)
I wish you to have a needlessly pedantic life and I hope we never cross paths again.
and you still didn’t answer my very real questions.
If the US bans vertical integration for companies headquartered in the US, do they also block people from accessing content over the internet that is produced by vertically integrated players that is created overseas?
Exactly what type of content should not be allowed to be self distributed? News? Religious content? Fictional content? Documentaries? Trailers? Physical goods?
Do you want the government deciding what private corporations can distribute over the internet and do you want to block foreign content that doesn’t follow those rules?
And you still didn’t answer the question. Do you think that government regulators should block foreign content on the internet if they find that content producers are also distributors?
Where do yoh draw the line about what type of media should be able to be distributed on the internet?
Are you going to fine companies for putting their own content on thier own website without going through an intermediary and how does that help consumers when every part of the delivery chain is also going to want to make a profit and thus increasing prices?
My ideas are fleshed out just fine, you are being needlessly pedantic. Noone needs to enumerate every contingency to agree with a law passing or being enforced.
Yes details matter. And you don’t pass a law without thinking through those things - the obvious one is that you would have to block sites outside of the US that don’t follow the law
It’s a regulatory nightmare for smaller companies.
Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency did more to affect privacy - according to companies like Facebook that admitted on earnings calls that they projected billions in losses based on iOS users opting out
All of the AI regulations are just going to make companies say - forget it in the EU. How much longer did open AI take to come to the EU as opposed to the US?
I’m also not a lawyer but my understanding is that anti-trust law covers broader stuff than just monopoly busting. There’s no reason to require Apple to be a monopoly before we start to worry that they might be engaging in anti-competitive behavior.
IMO arguing about whether or not they are a monopoly is a losing pedantry battle that misses the point. People will bring up exact market share, and what exactly is a market—honestly, some good arguments about whether or not Apple is technically a monopoly—but, who cares? They are clearly a major player and so if they are not competing fairly that’s clearly a major problem.
Like you said, the US helped Carnegie stage actual massacres before the case was made that they were a monopoly. It's entirely feasible that Apple has and abuses monopoly power, but the politics of implicating them don't align yet.
I said that Microsoft’s customers were OEMs and that MS was found to be a monopoly because they forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses for every computer shipped whether or not the computer was running Windows. This was part of the lawsuit.
The reply was that there were other computers sold in Europe by the non big brands that did not include Windows.
You could not in fact run the “same” Windows software if you were not running Windows
Well, there is an existence proof by the lack of PWA adoption on Android and that companies aren’t forgoing the expense of creating native Android apps, that PWAs aren’t a “reasonable alternative” today on either platform.
So you are going to compare “every person you know” to the fact that hardly any company or app developer is exclusively creating an iOS app and telling Android users just use the web since PWA support is so good?
You really don't get how the human emotion plays into this, huh?
Happy to break it down.
iOS user installs your service's app. Android user wants to then install one-click Google Play Store, feels like a second-class citizen if they're instead directed to find a URL to log in, forced to create their own bookmark....
By focusing marketing on the App Store, and "Apps", which led to those goofy badges (App Store, Play Store, now Samsung/Amazon App Store sometimes), Apple made native apps "the thing". If you don't have those badges on your site or in your ad, you're not signaling you're "real".
But it's just a social trend, at the end of the day.
We can make the app's functionality the same, or better, wherever we want. Even in Safari gulp.
Link, bookmark, and to home screen not needed.
Pwas can be installed from the store... Native has zero arguments except if ya really need something the web can't do or if you're a bad dev.
It’s not just “some” people. Given a choice, to the first approximation, no one is leaving the Google Play store in favor of PWAs even though theoretically PWAs are so great on Android and that developers could avoid creating apps for the web and Android and avoid the “Google tax”.
Apple is not going to lose revenue even if did have perfect PWA support since most of its money from the App Store comes from pay to win games that wouldn’t monetize nearly as well.
Apple doesn’t care enough about PWAs because users don’t care.
And even with Chrome, much of the support is behind flags.
As far as universal platform - if you’re that old, you should know how much “universal platforms” for GUI apps have sucked since Java Swing.
You should also know how every mobile platform has said at one point that you can “build great apps with web technologies” - Rim, Palm, Microsoft, Android and even Apple - and they have all failed and sucked.
You seem very determined to make this matter of Apple breaking existing features and accepted standards, into an issue about Google…
Again you have failed to state what relevance one set of devs not wanting to use PWAs has on anyone else who might want to use them, you've just restated your previous case that some people don't want to use them.
> Apple doesn’t care enough about PWAs because users don’t care.
As already stated in response to your previous statement about users not caring: the users shouldn't need to care if the developers are free to choose the right tool for their task (native application or PWA) and platforms implement those options well.
Apple should care about PWAs if it cares at all about providing a standards compliant environment. It certainly seems to care enough to try to derail them as a petty consequence of being told to do something they don't want to do.
It’s not an issue for Google at all. It’s an issue that as I said to a first approximation no one cares about PWAs. If PWAs were so compelling and if it were only Apple holding adoption back, why aren’t they more popular on Android - 70% of the market?
If absolutely no one cares about PWAs, is this entirely thread, and those elsewhere, a figment of my imagination?
> as I said to a first approximation no one cares about PWAs
What you said was that no users care. That is fine: users shouldn't need to care. Users don't need to care about such implementation details if developers are free to choose the best tool for the job.
> why aren’t they more popular on Android - 70% of the market?
Largely because the apps have already been developed and there is no point rewriting for new tech just for its own sake. And for things like games (the main thing that has been mentioned here as not being done as PWAs ATM) a PWA might not be the best tool for the job as native can give better performance in some areas.
PWAs are more attractive for new projects, and those that don't need to take advantage of being closer to the hardware.
Well first, always be prepared to look for another job
1. Develop a strong network
2. Keep an updated career document with a list of your accomplishments in STAR format
3. Keep your skill set in line with the market
4. Live below your means and keep a cash cushion
5. Don’t be a “ticker taker” work on having projects with scope where you can talk about things “you led” or “you designed”
Now worse case, you can find another job quickly. I was PIPed from AWS last year and found another job within three weeks because I was prepared. I also lived enough below my means where I didn’t need “FAANG money” to be comfortable.
On the other hand, you need to know how to talk about trade offs within the holy trinity of any project - on time, on budget and meets requirements. When one changes, the others have to change.
The STAR format is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing. Here's what each component stands for:
1. *Situation*: Set the context for your story. Describe the event or situation that you were in. This could be from a previous job, from a volunteer experience, or any relevant event.
2. *Task*: After describing the situation, you talk about the actual task or challenge that was involved. This is the problem or issue that you were confronted with.
3. *Action*: Explain the actions you took to address the situation or task. This should be a detailed account of how you tackled the problem.
4. *Result*: Share the outcomes or results of the actions you took. Ideally, this should be a positive outcome that demonstrates how you effectively handled the situation.
Using the STAR format in a career document helps to clearly and effectively convey your accomplishments in a way that highlights your problem-solving and task management skills.
I tried asking the question more clearly
I think it “understood” the question because it “knew” how to write the Python code to get the right answer. It parsed the question as expected
The previous link doesn’t show the Python. This one does.
https://chat.openai.com/share/a5e21a97-7206-4392-893c-55c531...
LLMs are generally not good at math. But in my experience ChatGPT is good at creating Python code to solve math problems
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