Well, definitely read Jason's blog entry that I linked to[0], which gets into the structural problems. To be clear, there were some extraordinary sales folks at Sun (as was said to me when I first came to Sun: "Remember that our sales folks are so good that they sold Solaris 2.3 on Viking!"), and I always personally got along very well with them. I was happy to be put in front of customers, and they were happy to use me -- and some of my fondest memories were with sales folks in some of the geographies which were particularly strong (shout out to Sun Canada, Sun Australia, and to the Wall Street and Itasca offices in the US).
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
Ah, I love this framing of "visiting customers where they live." Definitely gets the bad taste of an eng-v-sales spat out of my mouth. Thanks for the details!
Heh, yeah, we're hearing that a lot. We'll find a way of getting these out to people, but we're still debating the best way to do that (running an online store isn't zero work -- but it's also not an unsolved problem!). Stay tuned!
Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
Agreed. When I was in the labs (2007 - 2010), my workstation was an AMD with Solaris on it, with a modern window manager and all, with IntelliJ and a great development environment. I almost didn't know it was Linux. But by then the ship had long sailed.
I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong.
Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
I'm reluctant to call anyone out. I liked Sun a lot, as well as the people I've encountered who worked there. There was a thread between a couple of ex-Sun guys here on hn years ago - I can't find it right now - which made me feel there was a humorous and very human pattern in Sun postmortem comments: "man, that other team really killed Sun, we were doomed after that thing they did." I was pretty curious what the people on that other team (the SPARC microprocessor designers, in the case of that comment thread) might have said in their own defense, where they might have spread some of the blame, and so on.
(perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread)
> Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome
I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.
wtf is this chart lmao, did you just google a line-going-up chart to stick your shower thought onto?
> My life is pretty typical, I have a good grasp of what is normal vs weird, and people imagining very different futures with digital people and Al and space travel are indulging themselves in silly sci-fi speculation.
The students in the computer lab had no guarantee that they wouldn't, say, download a copy of Napster infected with the CIH virus later. The fact that they were not under imminent threat from some kind of Hollywood-style network worm did not mean they were immune from more realistic attack vectors.
Likewise, one can quite reasonably say there is no credible existential, Hollywood-style threat from AI in the foreseeable future while recognizing far lower-stakes, yet important risks that need to be addressed.
the earth has been 1 decision away from explosion for nearly a hundred years now. do you anticipate a change to this agenda very soon? personally I imagine the same trajectory continuing.
certainly I behave like the article's author and yourself all the time, this isn't meant to be some sort of moral point. watching all these smart people talk so confidently regarding things nobody knows about, it reminds of the confidence ai shows in hallucination. would you say that the singular choice of vasili arkhipov did not prevent annihilation?
> would you say that the singular choice of vasili arkhipov did not prevent annihilation?
He prevented a catastrophe, but not annihilation. We were not at risk of that in 1962 and even if he had decided to go with the others, more decisions would have been needed (not just his) to fully escalate to full scale nuclear war. I will reiterate: We have never been one decision away from full scale nuclear war.
But in case you don't understand why, it's because no one person can actually launch all the missiles. And considering the two major arsenals (US and USSR), there has never been a time when two people could make the same decision (launch) and actually launch all the missiles. The orders still have to go out and acted on, many decisions have to be made in order to have full scale nuclear war and come close to annihilation.
I like the way you frame your opinion as a truth with an obligation to be understood. still I disagree that a decision can only be said to affect its direct successors.
If you think AI will be powerful enough to change the world in huge ways, then it does seem reasonable to assume some level of risk of destroying the world too.
Stating that the probability is zero when we simply don't know what the probabilities are does seem like an extraordinary claim.
Imagine how reassuring it would be to people if we had evidence that there's no existential risk?
> If you think AI will be powerful enough to change the world in huge ways, then it does seem reasonable to assume some level of risk of destroying the world too.
There's an opportunity cost in the doomsday prophesying, though.
The media coverage of "these extremely capable robots might kill us (according to the guys who sell the robots)" comes at the cost of coverage of the real, present issues surrounding the tech oligarchs that we're already facing.
Sure, there are some failure modes that lead to some really bad stuff, but human extinction seems exceedingly unlikely to be one of them, and "10%" is pulled straight out of Dario's derriere.
Far more likely are economic disruptions that impact the tenuous balance between labor and capital and lead to unpredictable societal upheaval.
No it does not seem like an extraordinary claim, unless this is your first time hearing such claims. For the rest of us, we've heard this every decade and it turns out to be entirely untrue.
Nuclear, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Y2K Bug, Global Warming.
No, you explained why the selection bias doesn't matter, which I agree. The self-report data still is completely worthless in the first place though.
People are really, really good at lying to themselves, let alone to an online poll. They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, just like how they'll tell you they like healthier food, they prioritize personality instead of look for potential dates, how they use LLM "only as a spellchecker", and how they use tiktok for educational videos. As long as there is no stake, people will just say what make they feel better.
Self-reporting data for human behavior is just noise.
I mean, fine, it's anecdotal -- but the numbers are also overwhelming (and don't seem to disagree with the tenor here).
And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.
Interesting! Amusingly, if I feed that detector this blog post, it identifies it as confidently robot (97 out of 100 test passages). And running through my last five blog entries, they are all over the map, with three deemed at least "likely robot." Looking further back in time (and taking a somewhat random example), a blog entry from 2008, "Concurrency's Shysters"[0], is also deemed as similarly confidently robot (also 97 out of 100); do you expect this high a false positive rate?
My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin).
As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!).
In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
Now that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc.
False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people.
Well, give it a shot -- you'll likely find that that technique doesn't work nearly as well (at least with Pangram 4) as you think it might. When we had Max on the podcast[0], Adam explicitly asked him about exactly this (after all, you can give an LLM access to Pangram and let it iterate!), and Max reported that someone had attempted to do this -- and ended up burning through $700 in tokens and had a "sad Claude." Another interesting bit: according to Max, newer models are diverging more from human writing not less. I think that that was more anecdotal than quantified, but an interesting comment nonetheless.
99% of college essays and pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.
This is (obviously?) false, but considering how well-capitalized we are at the moment, you do have me wondering what a quid pro quo would be for; perhaps in this fictional universe Pangram has lucked into some of the PCIe clock buffers that we've been scrambling to secure enough of?
By "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts.
That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
Yeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
[0] https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
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