They don't care until the whole thing collapses in on itself from the technical debt. Then they have surprised pikachu face when it takes an insane about of effort to add a simple feature.
I agree, but nothing about LLM assisted coding is by neccessity "technical debt". Tons of developers will use it to spit out shitty code they don't even review themselves, but the concept at it's core doesn't always mean a lower quality end product.
I like Simon Willison's take on this: "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work". If someone is spitting out LLM trash and shipping it, that means the job isn't being done properly. That can be done with and without an LLM.
There's a little neighborhood park where I live, just down the street, where there have been 2 attempts to setup one of these. The first one was poorly constructed and the door fell off after just a couple of weeks. The second one I think the neighborhood kids broke on purpose. This, of course, after taking the books out and lighting them on fire for fun. There were charred pages all over for days. We're lucky they didn't catch the brush, of which there is plenty, on fire.
I've considered trying to build one myself, but I know it would just end up the same way.
My wife wanted one of these so bad that she fought the HOA on it to install one. It's been better than you describe, but yeah... Pamphlets, stolen books, etc. And we know they were "stolen" because if all the good books disappear at once and never return, you know someone stole them.
I've considered getting a stamp... But just haven't bothered yet. If the thefts start to really bother my wife, I'll get one.
She gets a ton of joy from seeing kids use it. And that's what really matters.
I don't understand the meaning of the word "stolen" in this context.
I've never seen a LFL with explicit rules on who can or cannot take out the books, or what they're allowed to do with the books afterward.
If someone sees "all the good books," are they not allowed to want all the good books? What if they take them and don't get around to reading them, are they stealing them?
I understand that there's a potential tragedy of the commons with a LFL, but if I put some of my books in one, am not going to worry about whether they're being read the "right" way. Mostly I'm happy to have had a place to donate my books, and figure there's a non-zero chance they'll be read again.
Sure, but how do you honestly know that? Is it based on the profile of the person you see looking through them? Some people don't look like they should be readers? Or the fact that the "good ones" -- the ones that people presumably want to read -- get taken?
I guess I'm happier not getting angry over things that I don't know for sure, I'm happier generally assuming the best of my neighbors, and I accept that the books are out of my control once I drop them off at the library.
Well first of all if thirty books disappear in one day, that's probably an inorganic usage. If none of them ever reappear, that's another indicator. And then if the person you see taking thirty books is dressed in rags with a shopping cart, you can be pretty confident.
Or maybe OP just means that none of them ever return; it's supposed to be a LF Library after all, not a LF bookshelf.
Huh, I've literally never heard of someone before thinking it's supposed to be a library that you return books to. Must be different attitudes in different places. I've always seen people treat it as a swap-shop. Take some books you want, and some other day drop off some books you want to give away.
Both are okay. Returning or just keeping, as long as you aren't excessive. You aren't supposed to just take all the "good" ones, no matter if you're keeping or selling.
And there's an unspoken rule that you should probably give back, too. It's a community good, not a charity.
I don't understand how it's bad to pirate a book, but fine to freely give one away. Both deprive the author of a sale. Either they should both be allowed or both be prohibited.
Same reason you're allowed to gift your gold watch to someone, or sell your car.
Both of them do potentially deprive the creator of a sale, but they keep the same total number of things in circulation.
Sure, you can argue that philosophically it comes to the same thing, but the problem is that, if you win that argument, the powers that be are more likely to ban giving away things you own than they are to allow piracy...
Interesting idea, but isn't the value of a book derived from the entertainment or reference usage? If I enjoy a story, the transaction is complete. I paid my money, got my product, consumed it , and now I can get another. If I transfer it to someone, the content is potentially consumed twice, but only one payment was made to the author. "Can't have your cake and eat it too - except for books"
Ah man, even my hometown in germany, which I consider to have a big drug problem - somehow manages to have these libaries(usually in old telephone cells) without junkies clearing them out. Apparently things can be worse it seems, what a shame.
Interesting. In New Hampshire and Vermont they seem to be mostly fine (if usually full of very bland romance books.) In the Netherlands there is a broader selection of books in my experience but they are more often vandalized / emptied.
It says in the OP's link. I was just wondering if book buyers respected the stamp and furthermore if the people stealing the books recognize it enough to be deterred.
And that's the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous at the flip of the switch.
The parallel for this is when Rome changed from only recruiting citizens for their army to recruiting anyone who could pass the physical. They had no choice, and the new armies were much better at fighting. But the soldiers also didn’t have the same stake in the republic that voting citizens did.
Citizens were loyal to Rome. Soldiers were loyal to their commanders. If commanders wanted to launch rebellions, the soldiers would likely support them.
A commander who commands the loyalty of legions by convincing a handful of drone operators would be very dangerous for democracy.
That's pretty cool. I'm guessing you're American, not Canadian, right? I didn't realize American schools had co-ops; I thought they mostly/solely had internships.
I'd especially hammer the point in this case, because clever hacks are very much on topic for Hacker News. They are, in fact, what gave birth to the word hacker and the idea of hacking in the first place. Not only that but it was precisely the clever hacks with no particular utility that were prized most highly!
If you are writing a chess engine you'll want to store hundreds of millions of positions while you search for the best move and at that scale a byte is important because it gets multiplied by an enormous factor.
But that is a totally different problem which requires far fewer bytes to represent. For that problem you are just considering of the valid pieces which made a move and what board that came from. Storing a single move is far cheaper than an entire board state.
Not when you include transpositions, where you arrive at the same position from a different move order, in which case saving board states instead of moves could be very valuable.
There are transposition tables for that though. They don't store the board state actually. For Stockfish, transposition table entries are 10 bytes each, 16 bits of which are the low bits(or high? Can't remember) of a zobrist hash of the board state. The other 48 bits of the hash are used for addressing into the hash table, but aren't stored in it. The rest of the entry will be stuff like the best move found during the previous search(16 bits), the depth of that search(8 bits), evaluation(2 different ones at 16 bits each), and various bits of data like node type and age of the entry(for deciding which entry to replace, because this table is always full). Collisions can occasionally happen, but saving a full board state to eliminate them would cost far too much, since no matter how big you make the table, it'll never be big enough to cache all the board states a search visits.
In Stockfish, there will only be one full-fledged board state in memory per search thread. So the size of the board state is pretty much irrelevant to performance. What's important is reducing the overhead of generating possible moves, applying those moves to the board state, and hashing the board state, which is what magic bitboards are for.
Its not. I know some ex bay area devs who are the same mind, and i'm not too far off.
I think its definitely stronger in MS as my friend on the inside tells me, than most places.
There are alot of elements to it, one being profits at all costs, the greater economy, FOMO, and a resentment of engineers and technical people who have been practicing, what execs i can guess only see as alchemy, for a long time. They've decided that they are now done with that and that everyone must use the new sauce, because reasons. Sadly until things like logon buttons dis-appear and customers get pissed, it won't self-correct.
I just wish we could present the best version of ourselves and as long as deadlines are met, it'll all work out, but some have decided for scorched-earth. I suppose its a natural reaction to always want to be on the cutting edge, even before the cake has left the oven.
> Are they unprofitable because they don't profit on inference, or because they reinvest all of the profit into scaling up?
They are scaling up using VC money, not revenue. As far as profit on inference goes, it's hard to separate it out from training: they cannot, at any given time, simply stop training because that would kill any advantage they have 6 months down the line.
For all practical purposes, you can't look at their inference costs independent of the training cost; they need to keep spending on both if they want to continue doing inference.
> Remember how long Amazon was unprofitable, by choice.
That was a very different scenario - AMZ was not spending their revenue on land-grabbing, they were spending their revenue on long-lived infra, while AI companies now are spending VC investment, not revenue, on land-grabbing.
The difference between spending your revenue on short-lived infra (training a new model, acquiring GPUs) and long-lived infra is that with long-lived infra, at any time, even after 10+ years, you can stop expanding your infra and keep the resulting revenue as profit.
With short-lived infra (models, GPUs), you can't simply stop infra spending and collect profit from the revenue, because the infra reached end-of-life and needs to be replaced anyway.
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