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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Might wanna read it again, it’s right there :)

    The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

    It’s an incredibly critical part companies love to completely ignore.

    If you assign devs to teams and lock em down, you’ve violated a core principle

    And it’s a key role in being able to achieve these two:

    Agile processes promote sustainable development.

    And

    The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

    This is talked about at length by the likes of Fowler, who talk about how locking devs down us a super fast way to kill sustainable development. It burns devs out fast as hell.

    Note that it’s careful not to say on the same project


  • That’s actually a pretty important part of its original premise.

    It’s a big part of why scrum meetings were a thing, as the expectation was any curious dev could just join in to see what’s up, if they like.

    Not tying devs down to 1 specific thing is like the cornerstone of agile, and over many years of marketing and corporate bastardization, everyone had completely forgotten that was literally the point.

    The whole point of the process was to address 2 things:

    1. That client requirements can’t easily be 100% covered day one (But you still need to get as many as you can!)

    2. To avoid silo’ing and tying devs down to specific things, and running into the one bus rule (“how fucked would this project be if <dev> got hit by a bus?”)

    And the prime solution posited is to approach your internal projects the same way open source works. Keep it open and available to the whole company, any dev can check it out, chime in if they’re familiar with a challenge, etc.

    One big issue often noted in non-agile companies (aka almost all of them) is that a dev slent ages hacking away at an issue with little success, only to find out far too late someone else in the company already has solved that one before.

    An actually agile approach should be way more open and free range. Devs should be constantly encouraged to cross pollinate info, tips, help each other, post about their issues, etc. There should be first class supported communication channels for asking for help and tips company wide.

    If your company doesn’t even have a “ask for help on (common topic)” channel for peeps to imfoshare, you are soooooooo far away from being agile yet.


  • I’ve literally never actually seen a self proclaimed “agile” company at all get agile right.

    If your developers are on teams that are tied to and own specific projects, that’s not agile.

    If you involve the clients in the scrum meeting, that’s not agile.

    If your devs aren’t often opening PRs on a variety of different projects all over the place, you very likely aren’t agile.

    If your devs can’t open up a PR in git as the way to perform devops, you aren’t agile.

    Instead you have most of the time devs rotting away on the sane project forever and everyone on “teams” siloed away from each other with very little criss talk, devops is maintained by like 1-2 ppl by hand, and tonnes of ppl all the time keep getting stuck on specific chunks of domains because “they worked on it so they knpw how it works”

    Shortly after the dev burns out because no one can keep working on the same 1 thing endlessly and not slowly come to fucking losthe their job.

    Everyone forgets the first core principle if an agile workplace and literally its namesake us devs gotta be allowed to free roam.

    Let them take a break and go work on another project or chunk of the domain. Let them go tinker with another problem. Let them pop in to help another group out with something.

    A really helpful metric, to be honest, of agile “health” at your company is monitor how many distinct repos devs are opening PRs into per year on average.

    A healthy company should often see many devs contributing to numerous projects all over the company per year, not just sitting and slowly be coming welded to the hull of ThatOneProject.


  • I mean, that’s just how it has always worked, this isn’t actually special to AI.

    Tom Hanks does the voice for Woody in Toy Story movies, but, his brother Jim Hanks has a very similar voice, but since he isnt Tom Hanks he commands a lower salary.

    So many video games and whatnot use Jim’s voice for Woody instead to save a bunch of money, and/or because Tom is typically busy filming movies.

    This isn’t an abnormal situation, voice actors constantly have “sound alikes” that impersonate them and get paid literally because they sound similar.

    OpenAI clearly did this.

    It’s hilarious because normally fans are foaming at the mouth if a studio hires a new actor and they sound even a little bit different than the prior actor, and no one bats an eye at studios efforts to try really hard to find a new actor that sounds as close as possible.

    Scarlett declined the offer and now she’s malding that OpenAI went and found some other woman who sounds similar.

    Thems the breaks, that’s an incredibly common thing that happens in voice acting across the board in video games, tv shows, movies, you name it.

    OpenAI almost certainly would have won the court case if they were able to produce who they actually hired and said person could demo that their voice sounds the same as Gippity’s.

    If they did that, Scarlett wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court, she cant sue someone for having a similar voice to her, lol.


  • There’s basically no reason to keep using windows.

    Debian or Linux Mint are both easy to install, work out of the box, and the only thing that might take a smidge of effort is the 3 commands you gotta run to install gpu drivers.

    Steam proton works incredibly well. I ran my entire steam library (most of which were “windows only” games) and even single one worked with proton as is without issues.

    I’ve been using steam link from my debian box for months now and it’s smooth as butter.


  • Well tbh Quests dont really bug you much about anything FB related. After you setup the account the only thing you deal with is the initial menu starts opened to the app store with suggestions based on what you already bought.

    But that initial menu let’s you also set quick access buttons for your favorite apps.

    So it’s only a single click to go from “put on headsst” to “open thing I want” usually.

    It’s not any different from steam starting you out in the store tbh, I can accept that level of advertising as it’s pretty transparent and half the time it has something of interest for me anyways.

    It’s about as big of a deal as a gift shop at a museum.









  • NYT hasn’t actually won that case yet, so it’s pointless to bring up. OpenAI has publicly stated that NYT heavily has misrepresented their findings.

    OpenAI’s value would plummet and crash if they gained a reputation for using illegal material to train their AI on, investors would drop them so fast.

    This is just a simple fact. LLM providers reputation is heavily staked on the legality of their data.

    So far the courts have ruled in these companies favor.

    But it’s extremely likely illegaly scraped Dara from reddit would not pass the sniff test and debestate an offending companies reputation.

    If you don’t understand why, you have to do some brushing up on why these LLM services are worth so much and who is using them and for what. Once you understand that, it becomes extremely apparent why legally owning the entire history of every reddit post ever would be extremely valuable, and why a 5bil price tag is actually not that crazy.


  • Scraped data isn’t legal to resell, scraping isn’t even legal in the first place.

    Just because you can scrape the data doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.

    Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.

    If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.

    So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.

    And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?

    If they literally own the original data themselves


  • Do you actually think this has any impact? That’s silly.

    Reddit’s servers have the original copy of every single post made, undoubtedly, and everytime you edit your post, they store that copy too.

    So not only has everyone “poisoned” their data ineffectively, they literally have created training data of “before” vs “after” poisoning to compare the two for training the LLM against poisoned data.

    Whoever buys the right to that is going to have a pretty huge goldmine, and perhaps they will rent it out, or perhaps they’ll use it themselves.




  • I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.

    You want to know why it’s worth that much?

    Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.

    Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?

    5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.


  • The goal of the sprint meeting is very straightforward:

    1. Everyone gets informed what everyone else got done yesterday, so they know where people are at
    2. Everyone gets informed what everyone else is doing today, same reason as above.
    3. Anyone who is currently blocked on a task can quickly ask for assistance, and with everyone in the meeting someone can jump on that or direct them to a person who can help
    4. Anyone who doesnt have anything to do can ask if anyone else needs help with anything

    Its an all hands meeting meant for everyone to get their morning baseline “what is everyone else doing” understanding.

    It’s also extremely critical for company culture, morning standups keep individuals anchored to “who is my team” and “what do they do”, so they understand when asked who so-and-so is and what they do here.

    Without the standup meeting, you typically get situations where everyone is operating in their own glass boxes and they start to disconnect from the team. They have no idea what other people are working on, they have no idea what other people even do for the team, etc.

    You dont want a situation where your developers have no idea what your QA team is busy with, and no one knows what the UX team is currently tackling. Thats how you get a lot of divergence and disconnect.

    The standup helps keep everyone not only aligned, but also knowledgeable of whats coming up next.

    Your devs hear about what the UX team is finishing up so they know that in a couple days thats going to be next on their plate, and your QA knows what the devs are finishing up so they know whats next to focus on.

    You can consider the morning standup to be your cross pollination meeting for infoshare.