>Part of me wonders if Karp might just be mocking recent rants by the Trump & Tech Bro's gang.
You haven't been following Palantir in the news in Trump's second term I would wager. This is definitely not the case. If it is, Karp is engaging in a multi-year performance art gimmick.
Palantir and other Big Tech execs were given the rank of Lt. Colonel in the army last year:
If it's interesting to note that there are mostly nuanced takes and positive vibes in the thread, and an otherwise low-value meta comment is deemed to be a worthy top comment for saying so, then I suggest an auto-generated AI summarization comment pinned to every long HN thread. This will surely save everyone the trouble of doing so...
(I am not claiming the top comment is AI generated, only that an AI generated summarization of the thread can function just as well in its stead, despite the occasional inaccuracies)
>people also want phones these days that are physically durable,
Anecdotally on this front, I have had to replace the screens of my iphones at least three times in the past (different models). Incidentally, I have never needed to replace the screen of a phone that had a replaceable battery. YMMV, but this seems needlessly defeatist.
>maximum battery life
One could also claim that bespoke charging cables allow for faster charging or longer battery life, but I don't know any iPhone users that are a crying a river for their deprecated non-standard chargers. But again, YMMV I guess.
I don't understand why people don't just say "This is wrong. try again." or "This is wrong because xyz. try again." This anthropologizing by asking why seems a bit pointless when you know how LLMs work, unless you've empirically had better results from a specific make and version of LLM by asking why in the past. It's theoretically functionally equivalent to asking a brand new LLM instance with your chat history why the original gave such an answer...Do you want the correct result or do you actually care about knowing why?
>Introspection mostly amounts to back-rationalisation, just like in humans.
That's the best case scenario. Again, let's stop anthropologizing. The given reasons why may be incompatible with the original answer upon closer inspection...
I definitely do this, along with the compulsion sometimes to tell the agent how a problem was fixed in the end, when investigating myself after the model failing to do so. Just common courtesy after working on something together. Let’s rationalize this as giving me an opportunity to reflect and rubberduck the solution.
Regarding not just telling „try again“: of course you are right to suggest that applying human cognition mechanisms to llm is not founded on the same underlying effects.
But due to the nature of training and finetuning/rf I don’t think it is unreasonable that instructing to do backwards reflection could have a positive effect. The model might pattern match this with and then exhibit a few positive behaviors. It could lead it doing more reflection within the reasoning blocks and catch errors before answering, which is what you want. These will have attention to the question of „what caused you to make this assumption“, also, encouraging this behavior. Yes, both mechanisms are exhibited through linear forward going statical interpolation, but the concept of reasoning has proven that this is an effective strategy to arrive at a more grounded result than answering right away.
Lastly, back to anthro. it shows that you, the user, is encouraging of deeper thought an self corrections. The model does not have psychological safety mechanisms which it guards, but again, the way the models are trained causes them to emulate them. The RF primes the model for certain behavior, I.e. arriving at answer at somepoint, rather than thinking for a long time. I think it fair to assume that by „setting the stage“ it is possible to influence what parts of the RL activate.
While role-based prompting is not that important anymore, I think the system prompts of the big coding agents still have it, suggesting some, if slight advantage, of putting the model in the right frame of mind. Again, very sorry for that last part, but anthro. does seem to be a useful analogy for a lot of concepts we are seeing (the reason for this being in the more far of epistemological and philosophical regions, both on the side of the models and us)
By what metric? You have to go through Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, and a few Eastern european countries before you get to the US on voter turnout. Not to mention labor unions striking as a form of political protest (eg Italian labor unions striking against the Gaza war). And depression prevalence also seems to be higher in the US. Did you mean worse than Europe instead of "almost as" bad?
Like you said, it is a failure of imagination. When someone says, "the billionaires and trillionaires won't need anyone else," the dystopian scenerio is not neccesarily "therefore other people won't exist or will eventually become extinct or killed" it's that other people will be straight out enslaved. With all the torture and suffering that entails. You know, the dystopian scenario that is more in line with centuries of recorded human history...The point is the rich won't need to listen to anyone else.
They don't just wake up one day and want to do this. They fear losing their power and want and try to maintain it at considerable cost to others due to that fear. The dynamics of society become such that the power imbalance and wealth inequality continues to increase, until eventually the threshold to something that is indistinguishable from slavery is passed.
Edit: By the way, just the other day the Trump admin trotted out a Doordash grandma in front of the cameras and asked her what she thought of trans women in sports. This grandma is doing doordash to pay off the medical debt of the cancer treatment of her dead husband because the US of A does not provide the minimum healthcare befitting of the richest country on Earth. We are already living in a dystopian fantasy.
>The Agile industry moved beyond The Agile Manifesto almost as soon as it was popularized.
Yeah, spending the amount of words in this thread trying to diagnose or complain about this simple problem in abstract strokes seems silly and frankly confounds me when considering the amount of time people wish to waste discussing the problem.
As with political parties, bad gentrification in cities, and all the rest, once money and consultants turn things into an industry you're pretty much fucked.
People should just immediately stop taking people with conflicting interests at face value when they talk. Stick to concrete details when you talk about stuff, avoid industry terms, don't let them turn things into abstract and general discussions. It only feeds the trolls (consultants) when you even complain generally about it.
Fight it with your day-to-day actions, not so much with your words. And then let it die in silence, it will die faster (I'm referring to any tech topic captured by consultants and monied interests).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835490
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47845197
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