The way I have managed junior engineers is 90% via PR and testing, 10% via reading code in an editor or IDE.
It’s hard to let go of being the keyboard jockey, but in so many cases it is better to describe plans and acceptance criteria and just review the diffs.
I bought a new camera recently for a trip to Bhutan. I ended up getting a Nikon Zf which is great for shooting in full manual mode. There are some exceptional third party manual focus lenses.
It’s all very tactile and gets me out into the world. I really treasure the photos from it in a way I never did with smartphone photos. It’s also really nice to just leave the phone at home.
Sometimes I go for photo walks with a friend. We play with light and composition and just generally have a great time being present and creative.
The physical nature of being on foot, using your eyes to find compositions, and feeling the weight of a camera in your hand all contribute to that difference, that makes these changes rewarding. I am reading a lot of comments involve physical objects and the outdoors.
So far AFAIK this claim isn’t repeated by any reputable publishers. E.g. Associated Press and LA Times both published 2.5 hours after PEOPLE and did not make this claim.
Also, People is credible for this type of reporting. They're owned by a major company, IAC, and they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer. They likely just have sources that other news outlets don't.
>they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer
TIL that the 'National Enquirer' was the most reliable news source during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. According to a Harvard law professor who gave the media an overall failing grade, the 'Enquirer' was the only publication that thoroughly followed every rumor and talked to every witness. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6n1kz5/til_th...>
The Enquirer also broke the John Edwards (vice-presidential candidate) affair story well before mainstream media picked it up. That doesn't make up for the reckless and sometimes completely nutso stories they print, but it is a reminder that they aren't always wrong.
That’s going a little far, I think. The Enquirer was mentioned during jury selection and not for facts. When the defense wanted to leak a story, they went to the New Yorker.
> The Independent reported 10 minutes ago that LAPD is still claiming no person of interest in this case.
>
> Hard to know what’s real and what’s gossip.
I'm sorry, but it's People. I'm not a celeb gossip, but I don't recall them running bs headlines on this level. C'mon.
I've been following it on my own news app as well, just didn't share a link to it as I thought it might be a bit ghoulish to piggyback on an unspeakably tragic celebrity death for a bit of self-promotion.
Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source. People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
The LAPD "no person of interest" thing is also just standard procedure. Cops don't publicly name suspects until charges are filed. Totally normal that the official process is slower than journalism.
Worse, people take "fairly reliable mainstream news source makes mistake or publishes propaganda op-ed" as a pretext to jump to sources that are way, way less reliable but publish things they want to hear.
> Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source.
I don't read celebrity news, how should I know People's track record?
I don’t have a news app. That was a maybe too subtle bit of sarcasm aimed at the guy I was responding too who is apparently the creator of a news app called Particle, and who mentioned that he is following the news of these deaths on Particle without mentioning his connection to it.
Update: Looks like the parent post has been flagged. I thought that might happen (or the author might edit it) which is why I quoted the original.
> People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible. I don't think a brand has any inherent value and hasn't for many decades. The nytimes helped cheney launder fraudulent evidence for the invasion of iraq for chrissake.
Fwiw, maybe it is true. But reliable truth sailed a long time ago.
It's absolutely defamation if they have no or unreliable sources and something Reiner's son could sue over. They are a big enough publication to know the risks here.
They'll reveal those sources to a judge if it comes to it. They won't reveal them to the public because nobody wants to have their name attached to something like this.
It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
Meh. Information is often jumbled and wrong in the immediate aftermath of a newsworthy event, and it is tempting to accept tenuous claims which reinforce one's biases. Take the murder of Bob Lee, in which early reports were a bit off and convinced maaaaany people it was a street crime (confirming their biases about San Francsisco).
There's no real advantage to accepting PEOPLE's claim at this point. It's possibly wrong, and we'll probably know the truth in good time.
The Bob Lee comparison doesn't really hold up. The "random street crime" narrative there was driven primarily by right-wing tech executives on social media - Musk, Sacks, etc. - not by news outlets making factual claims. Fox amplified the SF crime angle but wasn't naming suspects (and I put Fox in it own category anyway, based on its track record).
Meanwhile, actual newsrooms did reasonable work: the SF Standard put nine reporters on it and ultimately broke the real story. Other local outlets pushed back on whether SF crime was as "horrific" as tech execs claimed.
Most importantly: speculating about the type of crime (random vs. targeted) isn't defamation. Naming a specific living person as a killer is. That's a categorically different level of legal exposure, which is why outlets don't do it unless they're confident in their sourcing. If this kind of reckless misattribution happened as often as people here seem to imply, defamation lawyers would be a lot busier and these outlets would be out of business.
That's still a terrible way of evaluating credibility, especially when a determination of defamation is not the same thing as a determination of truth.
> It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
I wouldn't have felt bad if it did turn out to be wrong, I certainly left room open for doubt. But what I know about media outlets is they aren't often willing to put themselves in positions where they could get sued into oblivion.
There are obvious exceptions, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Candice Owens, but I think those exceptions have a level of insanity that powers their ability to make wild accusations without evidence.
“They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible.”
Not if they want sources again in the future. Assuming they have credible sources, it will prove them correct in due course. The vast majority of people aren’t grading news outlets on a minute-by-minute basis like this: if they read in People first it was his son, and two weeks from now it’s his son, they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
And if People burned the sources who told them this, industry people would remember that, too.
> All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.
That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting. An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
And "wide variety of credibility"... what? Do you think major outlets just hire random people off the street and let them publish whatever? There are hiring standards, editors, and layers of review. The whole point of a professional newsroom is to ensure a baseline of credibility across the organization.
Seems like you've reverse-engineered the Substack model, where credibility really does rest with the individual writer, and mistakenly applied it to all of journalism. But that's not how legacy media works. The institution serves as a filter, which is exactly why it matters who's publishing.
> That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting.
This certainly a popular narrative, but... C'mon, there isn't a single publication in existence that is inherently trustworthy because of "institutional vetting". The journalist is the entity that can actually build trust, and that "institutional vetting" can only detract from it.
> An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
This is also another easy way of saying "capital regularly determines what headlines are considered credible". That is not the same thing as actual credibility. Have you never read Manufacturing Consent?
Granted, I don't know why capital would care in this case. But the idea that "institutional integrity" is anything but a liability is ridiculous.
I've read Manufacturing Consent more than once - it's one of my favorite books and Chomsky one of my favorite thinkers (really dismayed that he associated with Epstein but I digress). Anyway, you've got it backwards.
The propaganda model is explicitly not "capital determines what headlines are credible." Chomsky and Herman go out of their way to distinguish their structural critique from the crude conspiracy-theory version where owners call up editors and dictate coverage. That's the strawman critics use to dismiss them.
The five filters work through hiring practices, sourcing norms, resource allocation, advertising pressure, and ideological assumptions - not direct commands from capital. The bias is emergent and structural, not dictated. Chomsky makes this point repeatedly because he knows the "rich people control the news" framing is both wrong and easy to dismiss.
It's also not a general theory that institutional journalism can't accurately report facts. Chomsky cites mainstream sources constantly in his own work - he's not arguing the New York Times can't report that a building burned down.
Applying the propaganda model to whether People magazine can accurately report on a celebrity homicide is a stretch, to put it mildly. You've taken a sophisticated structural critique and flattened it into "all institutional journalism is fake, trust nothing."
Speaking of media, I found it really useless that before the names were published, the majority of news articles just said "78 and 68 year old persons found dead [RIP] at Rob Reiner's home", but I had to search for his and his wife's age to correlate that it's him and his wife. I think only 1 news article said, "authorities have not said the names, but those are the ages of Rob Reiner and his wife".
It's because they don't want to be wrong, while at the same time having to rush to publish because if they want clicks they need to be first. So they publish only what the cops initially tell them, even before they had time to inquire that the couple killed were indeed the residents.
That's a telltale sign of a news organization that doesn't have access to backroom sources.
I've always found it weird that the police cannot name them, but they can give out clues, even clues that are, to all intents and purposes, naming them.
Lol reminds me of that partially redacted document about the Titan submarine that imploded.
There was like "submarine expert number 2, name redacted" and in expert 2's testimony he said something like "you may recall from my film, Titanic, that..." and I mean it could be anyone or maybe is definitely James Cameron
That's not what was happening there. They weren't hiding the identity, it's that they had not positively identified the victims. The cops talked to journalists very fast.
They hadn't positively identified them, but they knew exactly how old they were?
It seems much more likely that they had identified them, but they hadn't gone through the full set of procedures (notifying family members, etc.) that are required before officially releasing names.
If that's the case, that's really just dumb side-skirting of compliance rules, how much difference does it make for a yet-notified family member to read "Persons aged [dad's age] and [mom's age] found dead at residence of [their last name]" compared to "Mr. and Mrs. [their last name] found dead."?
In any case, tragically, their daughter lived across the street and found them.
This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to automate everything will be out-competed by companies/countries that use humans and robots together to maximum effect.
Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon.
Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset.
Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement.
This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's energy and gpus.
Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of million can be employed there?
Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.
Honestly, this comment sounds like someone dismissing the internet in 1992 when the web was all text-based and CompuServe was leading-edge. No "revelatory tech" just yet, but it was right around the corner.
In the backend, not directly customer facing. Coca cola is two years in running ai ads. Lovable is cash positive, and many of the builder there are too. A few creators are earning a living with suno songs. Not millions mind but they can live off their ai works.
If you dont see it happening around you, you're just not looking.
I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.
> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight.
Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell me why I'm wrong.
Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.
Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.
> Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes.
Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made.
I (not that I'm even as good as "mediocre" at chess) cannot legally get from my current location to the USA without some other human being involved. This is because I'm not an American and would need my entry to be OKed by the humans managing the border.
I also doubt that I would be able to construct a vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic safely, possibly not even a small river. I don't even know enough to enumerate how hard that would be, would need help making a list. Even if knew all that I needed to, it would be much harder to do it from raw materials rather than buying pre-cut timber, steel, cloth (for a sail), etc. Even if I did it that way, I can't generate cloth fibres and wood from by body like plants do. Even if I did extrude and secrete raw materials, plants photosynthesise and I eat, living things don't spontaneously generate these products from their souls.
For arguments like this, consider the AI like you consider treat Stephen Hawking: lack of motor skills aren't relevant to the rest of what they can do.
When AI gets good enough to control the robots needed to automate everything from mining the raw materials all the way up to making more robots to mine the raw materials, then not only are all jobs obsolete, we're also half a human lifetime away from a Dyson swarm.
> Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for the point being made.
The point is that even those things require oversight from humans. Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.
Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and those computers will soon turn into lumps of scrap unable to do anything.
Sad state of affairs when not even the HN crowd understands such basic concepts about computing anymore. I guess that's what happens when one comes to tech by way of "Learn to code" movements promising a good job instead of by way of having an interest in technology.
> Everything humans do requires oversight from humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.
'cause you said:
Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.
The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast, suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it ("chess grandmasters") are different with regard to the task ("show up to elite tournaments"), and thus can manage without the stated limitation ("anything without human oversight").
> Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans can be exterminated from life and computers can continue to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the human oversight and those computers will soon turn into lumps of scrap unable to do anything.
OK, and? Nobody's claiming "today" is that day. Even Musk despite his implausible denials regarding Optimus being remote controlled isn't claiming that today is that day.
The chess-playing example there was an existing example of software beating humans in a specific domain in order to demonstrate that human oversight is not a long-term solution, you can tell by the use of the words "end state", and even then hypothetical (due to "if"), as in:
If successful, the end state is full automation
There was a period where a chess AI that was in fact playing a game of chess could beat any human opponent, and yet would still lose to the combination of a human-AI team. This era has ended and now the humans just hold back the AI, we don't add anything (beyond switching it on).
Furthermore, there's nothing at all that says that an insufficiently competent AI won't wipe us out:
And as we can already observe, there's clearly nothing stopping real humans from using insufficiently competent AI due to some combination of being lazy and/or the vendors over-promising what can be delivered.
Also, we've been in a situation where the automation we have can trigger WW3 and kill 90% of the human population despite the fact that the very same automation would be imminently destroyed along with it since the peak of the Cold War, with near-misses on both US and USSR systems. Human oversight stopped it, but like I said, we can already observe lazy humans deferring to AI, so how long will that remain true?
And it doesn't even need to be that dramatic; never mind global defence stuff, just correlated risks, all the companies outsourcing all their decisions to the same models, even when the models' creators win a Nobel prize for creating them, is a description of how the Black–Scholes formula and its involvement in the 2008 financial crisis — and sure, didn't kill us all, but this is just an illustration of a failure mode rather than consequences.
> The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast, suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it
I know it can be hard for programmers stuck in a programming language mindset, especially where one learned about software from "Learn to code" movements, but as this is natural language, technically it only draws what I intended for it to draw. If you wish to interpret it another way, cool. Much like as in told in the Carly Simon song of similar nature, it makes no difference to me.
What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is, that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even really understand their moves or why they do them and have no hope to ever compete.
The same will be true of every other intellectual discipline with time. It's already happening with maths and science and coding.
The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires legions of people to make it work.
This is the outcome of that whole "Learn to code" movement from a number of years ago, I suppose. Everyone thinks they're an expert in everything when they reach the mastery of being able to write a "Hello, World" program in their bedroom.
But do tell us what planet you are on as it sounds wonderful.
The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent on hardware and paying people to right software for that hardware.
Writing that software is becoming automated and it’s not hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you’re left with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center based on what automated systems flag as issues and other automated systems explain you the troubleshooting to go do. There might be a specialist they fly in for an insane rate (in the shorter term) if none of that works but we’re talking about a drastic reduction in workforce needed, and this is for the data center maintenance which not many companies have anymore since the cloud migration
The... article? There is nothing in this subthread about an article. It is an extension on what was asserted in a segment of an earlier comment.
At least the source of your confusion is now clear. I suggest you stop doing that stupid HN thing where you read individual comments in complete isolation. This isn't programming where an individual pure function is able to hold significance all on its own. Context setup throughout the thread evolution is necessary to take in. But you do you. We enjoy the hilarity found in watching the stumbling and grasping, so it's all good either way.
I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone. I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.
B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off.
And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes.
The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.
Businesses need consumers when those consumers are necessary to provide something in return (e.g. labor). If I want beef and only have grass, my grass business needs people with cattle wanting my grass so that we can trade grass for beef, certainly. But if technology can provide me beef (and anything else I desire) without involving any other people, I don't need a business anymore. Businesses is just a tool to facilitate trade. No need for trade, no need for business.
Can the process be similar to a sudden collapse of USSR's economic system? The leaders weren't stupid and tried to keep it afloat but with underlying systemic issues everything just cratered.
Can the process be modelled using game theory where the actors are greedy corporate leaders and hungry populace?
This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.
The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social stability. Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What Would Xi Jinping Do?
Look at what China does to protect its citizens against social media. You see China enacting many of the social media protections that many HN enthusiasts demand, yet Sinophobia makes them reframe it as a negative. "Children shouldn't have access to social media, except when China does it then it's bad!"
> Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process?
If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess), the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this case the Chinese government) want it to do.
That can be all the social stability stuff they want. Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family in a big detached house with a white picket fence, everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc.
I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I don't know what their equivalents to any of those things would be.
Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case that grandmasters playing with computer assistance ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or humans alone.
Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X.
People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.
Yes, I understand that it's about saving on labor costs. Depending on how successful this is, it could lead to major changes in the labor market in economies where skilled workers have been doing quite well up to now.
I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the competitive landscape between employers and workers.
In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go on for years to matter.
A strike going long enough and becoming big enough becomes a political matter. In the limit, if politicians don't find a solution, blood gets spilled. If military and police robots are in place by that time, you can ask yourself what's the point of those unproductive human leeching freeriders at all.
In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work, but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.
What happens when the drainage (he said PVC pipes below, waterproofing cloth above) fails? Seems like you'd have to rip up all this concrete to fix it..
fwiw Particle News is paying publishers to run their full text content in the Particle app and this is just a staff pick. unfortunate that it gave the opposite impression of being an ad
The backend system that drives the app has many potential B2B applications that we expect to support keeping a totally free or freemium model for the app.
We have a homepage redesign coming in the next month that should make the experience significantly better. For a long time the web site was just a stopgap—glad to finally be giving it some love. Stay tuned!
It’s hard to let go of being the keyboard jockey, but in so many cases it is better to describe plans and acceptance criteria and just review the diffs.
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