> my conclusion after dealing with them for many years is they will lie, cheat, and steal to get whatever they want
Honestly, it's not even that extreme in most cases. I think it's usually not malice, it's incompetence.
That's why I don't trust big companies with my data. Nothing to do with some CEO's evil plans, but more to do with the hundreds/thousands of mid-level "not my job" or "doing my best" workers who are actually in charge of handling my data.
> Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and should be treated accordingly.
I disagree with this as stated. Maybe in the right context you could make a case for it, but in general? Heck no. Intent matters a great deal, and there is no justice in treating someone incompetent (or negligent) the same as someone who is actually malicious. Both things are bad, but the latter is worse than the former even if they lead to the same outcome.
> Nothing to do with some CEO's evil plans, but more to do with the hundreds/thousands of mid-level "not my job" or "doing my best" workers who are actually in charge of handling my data.
The CEO is responsible for what their company does. If a major breach can occur through the oversight or "incompetence" of one worker, the CEO has already failed, whether through negligence or malice.
In China, CEOs go to prison or are executed. Not all the time, but enough. In the US, they are given a golden parachute and make more money at their next posting. There is mostly only failing upwards.
Pardon my French but bull-fucking-shit! A CEO _should_ take responsibility for what their subordinates do. It's preposterous to simple throw up our arms and say "oh well, some employees were sloppy so we lost some 100 million user IDs and other sensitive information that we promised not to store but we lied. Oopsie, silly me, pardon my wee incompetence tee-hee". No no no NO NO!
At some level, and certainly at the level where you get paychecks of 10 million a year for the "huge responsibility you are bearing", then incompetence IS malice!
Uhh. I think you misread my comment pretty badly here. I am not making excuses for anyone.
I am saying that it's less likely to be some evil machination that led to the misuse of my data and more likely to be negligence or incompetence.
Both are inexcusable, but one is more common/likely than the other.
You can certainly link them together and yes leaders should be held responsible no matter what, but from my perspective as the user who had his data leaked, it doesn't really matter how/why it happened, does it?
It's probably both, vis a vis negligence. I just wish it was treated as criminal negligence. This will continue as long as CEO's face no real punishment for mishandling PII.
It's malice. Compliance tends to not "maximize the shareholder value". Why pay millions/year to maintain a compliance team when you can get away with paying a small fine from time to time?
I came to the comments to see the discussion and almost all of them are just complaining about LLM-assisted writing.
It's exhausting and tedious, like people nitpicking grammar.
It's also off-topic. I'd love it if HN banned (or strongly discouraged) this kind of repetitive low-value off-topic meta-discussion.
We get it, LLMs are used to write now. Some people don't like it. No need to broadcast that dislike every time, it adds noise to the discussion. :-(
(yes I realize I am also adding off-topic noise but this thread was nothing but that, so I guess I am on-topic until actual Postgres discussion starts).
I urge you to read the article. "assisted" is doing a lot of load-bearing work here.
The problem is not just the writing style, but rather that it doesn't make sense at all.
Take the example for PGQ. "Two ordinary tables, one graph on top of them:" The example makes zero sense, because the fucking tables aren't even there. You can't be lazier than writing a prompt: "please make a blog post about the new PostgreSQL release, and give code examples for each new feature", then ctrl-c, ctrl-v the output.
You can write articles with the most horrible style if you want, but this level of disdain for readers is beyond belief.
You can add the following statements in the first example and click "Run" button in order to understand the underlying tables' structure and contents mentioned in the example:
SELECT * FROM person;
SELECT * FROM follows;
You can explore the database used in this example with any valid PostgreSQL statements.
I think you're being pedantic to the point of losing all credibility. And you're gatekeeping in the worst possible way.
Your argument that using an LLM means you didn't "make" a thing could just as easily be used to say that if you used a framework or a library, you also didn't "make" a thing, because you didn't write all the code yourself and you didn't understand everything.
Would you say the authors of YT-DLP didn't "make" anything because they are a wrapper over FFMPEG and CURL?
If you produce something useful (even just to yourself), you "made" a thing.. It has a purpose, and it's useful. Who cares how you made it or how long it took?
For example I've made plenty of bash scripts over the years that were effectively thin wrappers that combined other tools, but they did something novel and useful that saved me tons of time, and I've shared those as gists or in other ways.
Some of these scripts took me mere minutes to make. I didn't use an LLM to make them, but the "heavy lifting" definitely wasn't in my script. No one ever showed up to berate me and try to tell me that I didn't actually produce anything useful in any of these cases.
So this "in the past" that you imagine where people were held to some bullshit standard for what is accepted as "making" a thing?
That past doesn't really exist, and if does where you are, it sucks.
People do care - lots of people do. Maybe you don’t, and maybe the argument the other poster made wasn’t fair, but you make just as spurious claims when you say „who cares how you made it or how long it took?”
Really? You care about some stranger's work and how they created it?
Pro tip: you shouldn't.
Care about your work if you want, but "caring" about how someone else makes things and how they talk about it is just being a judgemental busybody and again, gatekeeping.
As for my comment, I stand by it.
If I made something genuinely useful, then it should not matter if it took me 5 minutes or 5 days to make it.
You'll never convince me that more time spent making something (all other factors being equal - yes, quality matters) gives it more value or credibility.
Thanks for the tip haha. I am personally divided on it, but it’s more complicated than just quality or output for me.
I will apologize if I came off combative - was in the backseat of a car so may have been a little direct.
I think people care, all for different reasons. You care too - just when it comes to quality as you mentioned (and I’m sure other factors).
In this case many people correctly pointed out that there were clear indications of a lack of direct cognitive effort on behalf of the operator - including code quality, comment / git history, and including copy that he didn’t write. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the LLM which did most of the work (or not? How can we know without an auditable prompt history) didn’t produce quality work.
When it comes to something that was made in 5 days AI assisted - the idea may be novel, but without a full prompt history it does become difficult to assess quality of cognitive effort on the operator at least.
In any case - it’s hard for me to know what to call the author. And I do think this applies to traditional media as well, so Im definitely not saying it’s all one sided (Bah! AI!)
That's fair, I guess I was really reacting to the narrow gatekeeping-like case the OP was advocating, where time spent/invested - or only doing things a certain way - was correlated to legitimacy and being able to claim you "made" a thing.
That said one could argue that phones are now "solved" and the idea of iterating and changing just for the sake of changing is unwelcome. Much like laptops?
I don't want my next phone to be something I need to figure out all over again. I want the buttons in the same place, the OS to work the same way..
My phone is just another thing in my daily life like my car or my coffee machine. The less I have to think about any of those things - vs. just using them and getting on with my day - the happier I am.
A phone can only get so big, and there's only so many viable shapes and form factors. I don't know what more innovation anybody expects in a rectangular tablet form factor that can still fit into pockets and purposes. Folding phones are expensive and a gimmick so far and have not achieved much market share.
There's advances to be had in cameras, battery life and other tech inside the rectangular slab, but in terms of innovating on the form factor, the practical reality of what people want to hold and put in their pockets will dictate the maximum size and form factor.
Tbh I want my 3GS form factor back. That design was the "right" one imho, and we lost it due to market pressure for bigger screens and better cameras, when what we needed to do was keep the utility but largely stay off our screens.
But they do keep evolving the iPhone and its functionality. You need taste and a great sense of user experience to do it well. Apple also sells more things than juts iPhones.
I never said that. I said I don't want to see change for change's sake.
If you can come up with a better experience and it's a worthwhile change that materially improves the product, I will take it of course.
On the software side iOS introduces new useful features for sure, I don't deny that. They also took a nice simple flat UI and glass-ified it in a really dumb way. And the OS is so bloated that I lose 10-15% of my storage to packages and installation files (seriously go look up how much of your phone's storage is used by "System files").
But on the hardware side these days they're just fiddling with the camera and moving the buttons around, and that's not something I want to have to care about when I upgrade.
This is of course all subjective, I'm sharing my view here, not implying that I speak for the world.
You could also try a bowl of mashed potatoes on Donald’s head.
This was one of the very embarrassing things that happened to Donald as a boy, done by Freddy Trump (his late older brother), when everyone had enough of him.
> You are not entitled to compensation for everything shitty that happens in the world.
This is true, but not relevant here?
If you pay for a service, and you don't get that service, are you implying that you should just be SOL?
If the plane has an issue, and the pilot rightfully lands it for safety concerns, but the paying passengers don't get where they are going, that sounds like the airline's problem to me, not the passengers' problem.
At the very minimum the passenger should be refunded for their ticket, because they didn't get what they paid for.
There are already too many negative consequences in the world of commercial transactions that the end-consumer gets saddled with simply because they don't have the leverage, money or time to fight for redress.
> Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Hmm curious to know where you live that you still get Youtube-supplied ads with YT Premium?
Because "ad-free" is literally the headline feature.
Unless you're talking about in-video ads and sponsorships added in by the video creators themselves, and then that's not something in YT's control (although they provide the "skip commonly skipped sections" feature in Premium that helps with this).
This would not be enforceable. Do you understand the scale of Youtube?
Also why would YT get involved in the content of videos themselves, beyond legal moderation requirements?
That's a slippery slope in itself, and it would just lead to a cat-and-mouse game where creators try to incorporate sponsorships in less obvious/visible ways, which is a net bad thing for the audience.
Now at least creators are required to disclose when their videos contain sponsored segments or paid advertisements. What you propose would take away that accountability.
As it stands, you can see when a video includes ads, and you can choose to not watch it. That's your choice.
This might be true if cable companies did not make a profit.
In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers.
Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service?
I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
FYI for any new or casual Mermaid users, it comes with a built-in alternate layout called `elk` that I find does a much cleaner job on complex flowcharts.
Mermaid does indeed provide alternative layout engines. Please do try ELK before Line9. My experience is 1) hand-tuning the layout of Mermaid, having to try alternative engines or parameters, is not what I want. I just want a graph that I can use straight away. 2) ELK more often than not does give a clearer flowchart that I might be satisfied with for personal use but I still wasn't happy putting it in a presentation in front of others.
For sure, I was not implying ELK was a replacement, it's just been good to me for some types of flowcharts that get messy with the standard Dagre layout ...
Excellent work on Line9 BTW, it looks fantastic. :-)
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