You can be unsympathetic to the corporation’s bottom line while being sympathetic to the human beings that had their work trivialized by some cocky blog post.
You can also just acknowledge that we don't know what they did (and that is because they chose not to tell us). Apparently, until not so long ago Jev would spell out its identity as Q-w-e-n if asked, so we might as well assume that what they did is at least similar to what this blog poster did (who chose to tell us).
My source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783999#49785351 I don't have an account so couldn't check, a friend couldn't replicate with a one-letter attempt (first letter A 50%) - performed by his agent, though, so not sure what he did exactly.
But, critically, it does change how and why that event was dangerous. As a deliberately extreme analogy to illustrate my point, consider that pure botulism toxin and home cleaning chemicals could both potentially kill a few hundred people if mishandled.
The toxin requires extreme diligence, knowledge, equipment, etc. to avoid a mass casualty event. The deaths might trigger new policy for handling or access. The company would probably receive a fine and would be on the hook for civil damages.
Home cleaning chemicals would require extreme levels of negligence to accidentally create a mass casualty event. The deaths would likely not change the availability of any of the chemicals, but the people themselves would probably be imprisoned.
With the toxin, the most dangerous part was the chemical itself. With the cleaning chemicals, the most dangerous pet was the idiots handling the chemicals.
OpenAI had to really work to get it as dangerous as it was, deliberately ignored the flaws in the security environment, and didn’t monitor it as it ran. To me, LLMs seem to be a lot more like the cleaning chemicals than the botulism toxin.
I also have ADHD-driven blah blah blah. I find achieving brevity laborious, but find LLM results to be unacceptable. A journalism class taught by a well-known professional food critic helped most, but consistently using the free “Hemingway App” editor was almost as beneficial. Blindly following every suggestion pares your writing down to a nub, but it’s great at highlighting sentences you need to rethink without blurring your voice and ideas with bland suggestions.
That's a solid recommendation, thanks. I also did journalism. So I can write succinctly, I just have to put effort in like you. Which is much more than I'm willing to put in after I just wrote a treatise on the human condition to send to the lead developer at 07:30 on Monday.
That’s what happened in US manufacturing. It’s now 20-30 years down the line and the economically important US manufacturing sectors, like defense, are scrambling to hold onto institutional process and trade knowledge as the final remnants of the old industrial system retire. We all know how useful someone with a fresh comp sci degree and no experience is in a real dev environment is. Imagine the leads showing them the ropes graduated two years prior?
And to dismiss criticism of the report’s obvious slant is even more foolish. Just because the report isn’t outright lying about the facts doesn’t mean it’s an objective, definitive, and unimpeachable analysis of what happened. It definitely shouldn’t be the only thing anybody should read on the topic. This article also has a slant. It’s not an objective, definitive, and unimpeachable analysis of what happened, either. It also, definitely, shouldn’t be the only thing anybody should read on the topic.
It really doesn’t though. It criticizes how the news media reported on the incident but this opinion piece is no better. Just read the original source itself.
I did read the report. Yes, this article does criticize the presentation of the events in that report. This article doesn’t say that the report is lying, but it does say that it deliberately sensationalized aspects in unhelpful ways, and de-emphasizes important considerations. That is important when it’s pretty obvious these companies are using fear to signal their products are more powerful than they are.
You’re comparing the sub-minimum-wage offshore template jockeys to average designers, not “high end” designers. A high-end designer making a one-off poster for a local fair is about as likely as a senior engineer at a FAANG company making a website for it.
It would be like someone paying for a simple website for their small business saying off-shore fiverrrr Wordpress hacks are average coders, and anyone making anything close to a reasonable dev salary in this job market was a high-falutin’ luxury option.
An average graphic designer would ask what unique, non-informational things about the event the poster should portray, do a little bit of research and exploration, and then figure out how to communicate that in pure visual terms. It draws people into the vibe of your event, and hints at the visual impact of experiencing it. You get the nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. for free because those are the tools average graphic designers use to visually communicate. This is not expensive compared to the expertise required. With both AI and the Fiverrrr designers, at best, you only get nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. You’re not paying for design — you’re paying a graphics software technician for a graphic, like you would at a sign shop.
An average designer is who you’d want to make your posters and maybe a few other types of advertisements, such as postcards, or bus shelters or billboards or banner ads. Someone in a country with a minimum wage of less than a dollar is who you get on fiverrrr. A high-end graphic designer is who you’d contract to do a complete branding and identity overhaul.
But there’s rarely one correct answer. Conveying the same approximate message to multiple types of readers is extremely difficult in a handful of words. People with subject matter knowledge are annoyed by headlines written for laypeople that don’t know the jargon or have a mental model of the important concepts that jargon represents. They always seem to miss important distinctions, make poor analogies, or the like. Headline-length blurbs that successfully convey those things to the knowledgeable are often utterly opaque to laypeople causing them to ignore articles about topics they’d find interesting. The only option is trying to estimate the subject matter expertise of the audience, and despite many people in the tech world assuming their software knowledge gives them technical expertise in many non-software fields, the layperson headline is absolutely the best approach here.
> Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters
Sadly people lost the skill to write a standard form concise 3-paragraphs-of-3-sentences cover letter even before keyword-based ATS initiated the beginning of the end. It wasn’t supposed to be a summary of a CV and an essay about your lifelong passion for automated ad-bidding quality checks or some other shit employers delude themselves into believing someone might organically be really into.
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