> Why is it necessary for big tech companies to act this way?
This question gets directly at the cause of the author's nihilism: the necessity is borne from the endless pursuit of positive quarterly growth, the "binding fiduciary duty to shareholders". Which is a lie, there is no such legally binding fiduciary duty. So the aforementioned necessity is also a lie. Companies could operate on a longer time horizon, let engineers write better code, make better products, maybe even consider societal good in their strategic planning, and still turn a healthy profit. But the cost of perhaps taking a few degrees off their YoY trend line is unacceptable to the insatiable greed of their controlling shareholders.
The flight attendants/safety card will tell you to stay buckled whenever seated, even if the seat belt sign is off, but many (most?) people will ignore that guidance and stay unbuckled for as long as they are technically allowed.
Only aviation professionals or recovering flight phobics like me who have watched every episode of Air Crash Investigation will take proactive safety measure of their own accord. To normies it's all just a pointless hassle.
I stay buckled and I’m just a “normie” not afraid of flying that understands turbulence doesn’t always happen in a bell curve with some notice. Not sure if that makes you feel any better? :)
I'm amazed how many grown ass adults on airplanes act like little kids when it comes to seat belts and basically everything else.
Not just ignoring flight crew advice and common sense to generally stay buckled in order to gain maybe a minor amount of comfort and convenience being unbuckled, but unbuckling even when the seat belt sign is on and again common sense says being buckled in is the smart move. On my most recent flight I heard quite a few people unbuckling their seat belts while the plane was still rolling down the runway after landing. You couldn't wait 5 more minutes until the plane is at the gate?
lol yep. It's like they have the same mentality as being a schoolbus (which, it's similarly wild to me that kids are just implicitly allowed to not wear their seatbelts on them but I guess thats an even more intractable enforcement problem).
Also: people clapping the second the back wheels touch on landing is particularly hilarious to me because it implies an acknowledgement of the precariousness of flying, but a complete ignorance of the fact that you're just entering the second most dangerous 30 seconds of the entire flight.
It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be fine.
Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
> Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv.
It boggles the mind why people keep using Linus as an excuse to justify rudeness. Linus apologised, he recognised what he did for years was not OK, and took time off to reflect and become a better person.
> Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
Are all the people who commented in that submission commenting on this one? No? Then it’s not the same group of people, and opinions are different. There’s no “mob”, HN isn’t a hive mind. If it were, you’d be part of it and agree.
I'd venture to guess that whatever legal logic resulted in the SC deciding that corporations should have the same right to free speech as individuals presumably doesn't hinge on any semantic blurriness between different subsets of "persons", and even if they didn't use overlapping terms it would still have ruled thus.
That said, it certainly is nice free marketing for our corporate overlords.
I think GP meant structural damage to the airframe. That said, I think there are some modes of structural damage a modern plane can sustain and still fly, but to gp's point, probably not many.
The FAA limits the mass of a weather balloon for this reason. I also would not be surprised to see new regulation on the distribution of that mass as a result of this incident.
There are some limitations on such balloons already. For example, if the payload is 4-6lbs, stricter rules apply if the weight/size ratio is greater than three ounces per square inch (measured by the smallest surface on the payload).[1]
Also for larger balloons, any trailing antenna must break if subjected to an impact force of 50lbs, or the antenna must have colored streamers every 50ft.
The ideal measurement would be some sort of crash testing. eg: The payload is accelerated at some standard velocity towards some standard target that represents the weakest part of an airplane (either cockpit glass or leading edge of a wing) and must not damage the target beyond some threshold. But that seems like it would be expensive, since every change in payload would require re-testing. Limits on sectional density seem like a good compromise.
Yea the "No take, only throw" game seems more endemic to Mastiff descendants, as opposed to the true "retrieval" behavior described in the top comments about Retrievers. My boxer/bulldog mix loves to chase the ball, but will fight like hell to not give it up. Like you, I rely on bribery or manipulating the properties of the ball to make it more easily relinquished.
My trick with my previous dog was to just always have two toys for the fetch session. She'd usually drop the one she was holding when I wound up to throw the next one. Kinda like juggling.
Thoughtful comments can provide the why, but they can just as easily be a redundant re-statement of the what in the code, which llm comments quite often are.
> Altman decided to let GPT-5 take a stab at a question he didn’t understand. “I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said.
If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?
Pay close attention to these demos. Often the AI is ok but not amazing, but because it’s shaped like the right thing they don’t look any deeper.
It makes selling improvements fairly hard actually. If the last model already wrote an amazing poem about hot dogs, the English language doesn’t have superlatives to handle what the next model creates.
This statement is definitely just marketing hype, but if we're being pedantic there are tons of questions that are hard to answer but have easy to verify solutions, e.g. all NP-complete problems.
>If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?
Also, 'thing that I don't know about but is broadly and uncontroversially known and documented by others' is sort of dead center of the value proposition for current-generation LLMs and also doesn't make very impressive marketing copy.
Unless he's saying that he fed it an unknown-to-experts-in-the-field question and it figured it out in which case I am very skeptical.
There's plenty of things to roast Altman about, but this isn't really one of them. A specialized problem might not be understood by someone unversed in that field even if the solution is simple and knowable. "What is the Euler characteristic of a torus?" for a rudimentary off-the-cuff example. Altman could easily know or check the answer ("0") without ever understanding the meaning of the question.
There's nothing new in your claim (or his) that wasn't 100% the case with GPT4. This is Altman's brag on GPT5, not generative AI in general, so it's gotta say something it couldn't about GPT4 or it's just bullshit filler.
It takes a really special kind of self-delusion to recognize that you don't understand the question and also think you are qualified to evaluate the answer.
I can only assume that as part of the GPT's answer came a thorough explanation of the question, which meant that dear Sam got first to understand his question, and then could read further to see that the answer was good. One can dream, or at least that's what he wants us to do.
If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:
- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report
- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.
- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost
This question gets directly at the cause of the author's nihilism: the necessity is borne from the endless pursuit of positive quarterly growth, the "binding fiduciary duty to shareholders". Which is a lie, there is no such legally binding fiduciary duty. So the aforementioned necessity is also a lie. Companies could operate on a longer time horizon, let engineers write better code, make better products, maybe even consider societal good in their strategic planning, and still turn a healthy profit. But the cost of perhaps taking a few degrees off their YoY trend line is unacceptable to the insatiable greed of their controlling shareholders.
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