Very insightful. One key sentence sums it up: "He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade."
This is going to get worse, and eventually cause disastrous damage unless we do something about it, as we risk losing human institutional memory across just about every domain, and end up as child-like supplicants to the machines.
But as the article says, this is a people problem, not a machine problem.
What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.
They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.
Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.
It is staggering how much HP has fallen from grace. I don't think a lot of people my age even know.
If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell").
HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore.
The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor.
They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.
That was basically entirely on Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and the board of directors. It's pretty similar to what happened to Boeing.
HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company.
Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.
Not much of a story. Like I said, I was an intern so I mostly heard this stuff from my coworkers (it's been a while too).
My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off.
I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship.
Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day.
General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that.
The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to.
Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.
Well, it's not the same HP. If there was ever a case that Ship of Theseus is not the same it's with companies. It just takes but a few replacement to get an entirely different company, mostly same people, same name, same business, completely different. Yet alone when the company has turned over everyone over decades, including customers. This is not the HP we knew.
They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.
>Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates
They're not bad for $300-500 upgradeable Costco/Best Buy laptops, especially since Dell has deteriorated and Chromebooks exited their honeymoon period at escape velocity.
Isn't this an unavoidable company pattern? Early on you go all in to prove your mastery. Then your reverse course to ramp benefits or something like that.
The company you are thinking of still exists. It was split from HP in 1999. It is called Agilent Technologies. HP kept the name and went into the business of flogging commodity computer products, Agilent continues to design and sell low volume high end gear and kept the engineering culture that requires.
HP later split again into consumer and corporate. To put the result into perspective HP Inc's (consumer) revenue is $55B/yr, HP Enterprise is $37B/yr, and Agilent is $7B/yr.
Given the crap being thrown here you would think the splits were a disaster. I don't know if the engineering culture of Agilent would have survived if it hadn't happened.
This company sounds like it has months to live, or until the VC money runs out at most. If this idea is good, Anthropic et. al. will roll it into their own product, eliminating any purpose for it to exist as an independent product. And if it isn't any good, the company won't get traction.
Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.
Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.
I think it's much less cynical than that. People both fear and dislike AI, recognize that the "it may destroy my livelihood and commodify human creativity" complaint falls on deaf ears, and are latching onto anything resembling a credible ethical complaint that people may actually listen to.
Most people pushing back against data centers simply don't want invite something into their city that will use up resources (likely raising prices), while the big selling point is that it will put them out of work. You can say that won't actually happen and everyone will keep their jobs, but that has not been the messaging. CEOs want to know how many people they can get rid of once they start using AI. Why would anyone sign up to have that in their backyard?
> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions
The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.
You must have been misinformed, they tear down forests to grow soya to use as feedstock (mostly for beef). Nothing to do with fake meat tofu, quite the opposite actually.
"I'm not going to stop openly blaming vegan products after learning it's actually beef manufacturing that consumes all this soy" or how should one read this comment?
What was your point? My point is that if more people were vegan there would be less deforestation. Instead of eating the beef that eats the soy, you eat the soy directly, which is much more efficient. It's unclear if you think it's false or if you had a totally different point.
Why bring the vegans into that when they are the ones consuming the fewest resources?
Amazing hyperbole, and a deflection from the real issues. You can fight against wrongdoing without actually advocating people being killed.
Right now, climate change is an undeniable fact, its causes well-known, and the evidence for it now part of everyday life. If anything, its effects have been underestimated to date, and 'non-believers' in it are either fools or acting based on morally repugnant principles.
hostis humani generis is latin for "enemies of mankind". It is not hyperbole, it is not deflection. The GP is advocating that everyone is compelled to attack or persecute anyone who is "fighting against stopping or reducing global warming".
"hostis humani generis" implies "subject to violence and execution by anyone" (Wikipedia). The label has historically been a term/label for pirates, with the penalty for those caught generally being death. So yeah, they did suggest death for those people.
I know of no evidence of global warming affecting my everyday life, nor anyone I know. I am open-minded, please show me what I should be looking at to see evidence of global warming in my everyday life. I live in Western PA, USA if that helps.
I think it's fine to engage in a healthy debate with skeptics, informed with facts and well supported suppositions as long as you have the bandwidth. I also acknowledge that one does not have to respond to skeptics, as they can waste time and energy.
However, convincing the public of major changes of lifestyle and economy should be hard. At some point, you have to address the skeptics that bring up good, well reasoned arguments. Declaring them "enemies of mankind" is not persuasive, nor does it lead to peaceful resolution of important debates.
This is a great description of something I've been thinking about in terms of concepts like regression to the mean, clustering and median filtering - the space of LLM output is much smaller than that of the input, precisely because the LLM works so hard to extract minimal-information patterns from its input.
People seem to fondly remember the Microsoft phones. If they made them now though, I can't really imagine what sort of Copilot-filled abomination they would be.
This is going to get worse, and eventually cause disastrous damage unless we do something about it, as we risk losing human institutional memory across just about every domain, and end up as child-like supplicants to the machines.
But as the article says, this is a people problem, not a machine problem.
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