Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.
Ugh, I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline.
This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
And yes, I totally admit, some kids (very few actually depending on the locale) didn't survive. But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively affecting their development. I highly recommend the writings of Jonathan Haidt - he not only has great arguments but also has a lot of data to back up his conclusions.
Kids don't need more tech, they need less of it (and FWIW, most adults, too).
Worked on two GraphQL projects; I was quickly cured from the hype. I recognize a lot of points in this article.
In both these projects the GraphQL had started small. I came in during a more mature phase of these projects (2 and 4 years). That's where the requirements are harder, more specific, and overall complexity has grown. Adoption and demand on the API were growing quickly. Hence you logically spend more time debugging, this is true for any codebase.
But GraphQL has everything in it to make such problems even harder. And both these projects had clear signs of "learning-on-the-go" with loads of bad practices (especially for the N+1 problem). Issue descriptions were much vaguer, harder to find in logs and performance issues popped up in the most random places (code that had been running and untouched for ages).
Fun fact; in both these projects the original devs who set it up were no longer involved. Probably spreading their evangalism further elsewhere.
RPC and REST are just more straightforward to monitor, log, cache, authorize and debug.
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker
Oh no, more of this.
What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?
Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
Sorry you ran into that. I distinctly remember testing the 13 mini, due to notch layout issues, so this is unexpected. As soon as the crash reports come in, we’ll dig into that.
Unfortunately, while we had a QA person on this, and nearly 100 beta testers, the iPhone camera APIs are a mine field. We’ll get a fix out as soon as we have details.
It's important to remember that all best practices are not created equal. I'd prioritize readability over DRY. I'd prioritize cohesion over extensibility. When people talk about best practices, they don't talk about how a lot of them are incompatible, or at least at odds with each other. Writing code is about choosing the best practices you want to prioritize as much as it's about avoiding bad practices.
I bought into the hype and I feel bad for the company where I implemented it. One true endpoint to rule them all and cause endless headaches in the process.
With most tech that I screw up I assume that "I wasn't using it right" but with GraphQL I'm not sure how anyone could. The permissions/auth aspect alone is a nightmare. Couple that with potential performance issues (N+1 or just massive amounts of data) and I want nothing to do with GraphQL anymore. Everything we attempted to fix our permissions issues just caused more problems. It would break existing queries and debugging GraphQL sucked so much.
If you only live on the frontend and someone else is responsible for the backend GraphQL then I understand why you might like it. From that perspective it's amazing, you can get as little or as much as you want with the specific fields you want. No waiting on the backend team to write an endpoint. However even then you end up saving queries as files or abstracting them (maybe IDE support has improved but it wasn't great last time I was using it ~5 years ago) and now you just have REST endpoints by another name.
At one point we considered whitelisting specific queries and that's when I knew we had gone too far and made a mess for ourselves. If we had taken the time to just write REST endpoints instead we would have gotten way more done and had way fewer grey hairs.
> They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the role of the board of directors. It's often been said that the board (of any company) has basically one job: to hire (and fire) the CEO. While that may be a slight exaggeration, the wisdom behind that quote is that things turn out badly when the board meddles in decisions of a company's executive leadership - if they don't like the decisions being made, they should replace the CEO, and that's where their power lies.
You talk about "filing formal complaints" - what does this even mean?? They're the board, who else would they file formal complaints to? "Hand off Sam's responsibilities to other people"?? Again, any corporate governance expert would say that's a recipe for disaster, never mind not even feasible the way corporate hierarchies work.
I've commented many times before that I think the way the board handled the Altman's filing was, at best, woefully naive, and their communication at the time (even after he was fired) abysmal. But neither do I think it was some sort of "coup", and your recommendations simply don't make sense.
I ran a multi-million dollar a year non-profit and had a full-time job. It's not unusual to chair or "run" a non-profit and have a regular job, non-profits are actually set up to make this easy to do. If that non-profit somehow mystically turned into a for-profit enterprise, for a multitude of reasons (some less obvious) I would have clearly had to pick one or the other. If said non-profit had commercialized transformer as a service, I'd have quit DigitalOcean (double so if I was well vested).
Just to make it fair with the situation: I honestly don't know if I would have proactively quit one or the other. Depending on the workloads, I may very well have tried to moonlight both for a while, I'm unsure.
The license for this [1] prohibits use of the model and its outputs for any commercial activity, or even any "live" (whatever that means) conditions, commercial or not.
There seems to be an exclusion for using the code outputs as part of "development". But wait! It also prohibits "any internal usage by employees in the context of the company's business activities". However you interpret these clauses, this puts their claims and comparisons on completely unequal ground. They only compare to other open-weight models, not GPT-4 or Opus, but a normal company or individual can do whatever they want with the Llama weights and outputs. LangChain? "Your favourite coding and building environment"? Who cares? It seems you're not allowed to integrate this with anything else and show it to anyone, even as an art project.
At 24 I ended up as the chair of a not for profit that stood on top of $30 million of real estate _because no one else wanted to_. Getting quorum was impossible because we needed three out of five board members to show up to a meeting.
People have this idea it's mustache twirling villains running these things. It's usually the idiot thats about to burn out.
There's some irony in the fact that people will ignore this license in exactly the same way Mistral and all the other LLM guys ignore the copyright and licensing on the works they ingest.
Smartwatches may be an overlooked answer to the kid phone conundrum. Watches have the communication and location tracking that parents demand without the distraction of phones.
I could not hear anyone in any crowded situation. At middle age I thought my hearing was leaving. Yet every audiologist I went to said my hearing was fine. So I found the best audiologist in my fairly large metro area, and scheduled a year in advance (the wait list was that long).
After a whole day of tests the audiologist comes in and says I have good news and bad news and good bad news. The good news is that my hearing was beyond great, it was at the level of a 5 year old. The bad news: I could hear so well I was unable to differentiate sound; my hearing hadn’t gotten worse, my brain’s ability to separate sound had. The good bad news is that my hearing would inevitably deteriorate, as all ours does, and for several years I’d be able hear in public places!
I think part of what has made this worse is that restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Most bars opened in the last 15 years have cement floors, very little sound insulation, and they’re based on the idea that you’re not having a good time unless your ears are ringing.
I’ve stopped patronizing these places if only because I literally cannot maintain conversations.
One of the #1 issues I’ve seen with DRY over the years seems to stem from a misunderstanding of what it means.
DRY is not just about code duplication, it’s about information/knowledge duplication, and code happens to be one representation of information.
Hyper focusing on code duplication quickly gets into premature optimization territory, and can result in DRYing things that don’t make sense. Focusing on information duplication leaves some leeway for the code and helps identify which parts of the code actually need DRY.
The difference is important, and later editions of the Pragmatic Programmer call this out specifically. But the concept of DRY often gets a bit twisted in my experience.
If the size could shrink to the size of a small earplug, I'd love to use this as a person who is not hearing-impaired (at least they couldn't diagnose me with it, so now I'm not sure if their diagnostics sucks, or I'm just a normal person and others pretend better that they hear everything well).
In groups and with friends, it's inevitable that you end up in a busy restaurant or a bar, and it always frustrates me that I don't hear something, I ask the person to repeat only to not hear it again, usually because they repeat it at the same low level (considering the circumstances). Missing jokes and throwaway comments is even worse ("hey what are you all laughing about, I didn't hear it, could you repeat it for me like three times until I hear it").
I've seen the "coup" framing a lot I just don't see how that's justified. They're the board of directors! Hiring and firing the CEO is core to the job (as is maintaining mission alignment, in the nonprofit world).
Unpopular opinion: I'm actually a fan of singe page specific endpoints. You get much easier debugging, easier to audit security, easier performance optimization an the imho pretty small price to pay is that it's "not elegant" and a bit of backend code
Aside from all the valid points listed in the blog I found out that the frontend engineers in my company save some queries in central library and reuse them even if they don't need all the field returned by this array just to save themselves the time they spend writing queries so they are basically using GraphQL as REST at the end and now we have the worst of both worlds.
A lot of people here bending over backwards to try to interpret this maximally negatively.
Probably because the "Sam Altman is an amoral, power hungry mastermind who was run out of all his previous gigs" is a more interesting narrative than whatever is actually happening.
> This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
This topic is always so alarmist. I have kids and a spouse. We all have Find My and Location Sharing on our phones. I don't FrEaK oUt that my kids are going to die if I'm not tracking their every movement. But it's nice to glance at Find My app and see if the kids are still hanging out at Starbucks or they got to school on time. It's convenient to see which corner of the park they're at when I need to go pick them up. I can see if my wife's still at Whole Foods and send her a message to pick up baru nuts. They can see if I'm still at work or headed home.
This idea of helicopter parents vs free-range glory is a false dichotomy.
Great article! We've updated the OpenAI API to 403 on HTTP requests instead of redirecting.
$ curl http://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer 123" \
-d '{}'
{
"error": {
"type": "invalid_request_error",
"code": "http_unsupported",
"message": "The OpenAI API is only accessible over HTTPS. Ensure the URL starts with 'https://' and not 'http://'.",
"param": null
}
}
This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into autonomous driving (car manufacturers). That’s why it’s working for them. (IIUC, Cruise has pretty much also always been legit?)
Don’t even get me started on the “didn’t take psych 102: Attention and Memory”-level cluelessness required to believe a human can safely pay attention well enough in a vehicle that reliably tricks you into believing it’s autonomous to take over in the split seconds before a disaster…
I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. I mean, what are they going to say? “It’s too hard so we’re just waiting for Waymo or Cruise to license their tech once it works”?
I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…
This mindset assumes that the only measure of success is monetary. If he left Google to try and get richer than staying at Google, then sure, he probably lost.
However, he kept trying again before job hunting or returning to big tech. This tells me the monetary factor was smaller than something else.
You mention the underrated educational experience in your last sentence, but there's so much more than that. He was probably never worried about his autonomy, being laid off, working with (or for) people he didn't want to work with, corporate politics, or anything else corporate bureaucracy introduces. This likely freed up his brain to be more creative and actually be used to 100% of its capacity.
I believe the obsession with TC in tech is highly problematic and there are a lot of talented folks optimizing for promotions via internal politics, rather than solving real problems for real people.
I also wish healthcare wasn't tied to employment, but that's a post for another time.
I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems.
American land of the free is being able to bring a gun to school but getting a fine because your grass is too tall. These HOA type stories are always so funny. It blows my mind people buy in places with rules like these.
