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I get the sentiment, but thinking and planning are important steps to doing things. Obviously you can’t stop there, and you shouldn’t spend too much time on that part, but it is still important.

Planning to do the thing is a new thing, thing2

Doing the thing2 is doing the thing2


Ok, but thing2 is a dependency of thing, so you have to do thing2 before you can do thing.

What do you gain by saying it isn't thing? You have to do it first either way.


Right, but conversely you can’t run the marathon unless you train. You can’t skip straight to doing the thing.

Sure, but a lot of the things on the list marked as “not doing the thing” are actually important early steps to doing the thing.

That is totally fine... as long as you don't call it 'production grade'. I wouldn't call anything production grade that hasn't actually spent time (more than a week!) in actual production.

I think it's a pretty big deal for a major company to put out a blog post about something that is "production grade" and pushing customers to use it without actually making it production grade.

The WD-40 website says that is a myth, and it is a lubricant

https://www.wd40.com/myths-legends-fun-facts/

Myth: WD-40 Multi-Use Product is not really a lubricant.

Fact: While the “W-D” in WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, WD-40 Multi-Use Product is a unique, special blend of lubricants. The product’s formulation also contains anti-corrosion agents and ingredients for penetration, water displacement and soil removal.


"WD-40 Multi-Use Product is a...blend of lubricants"

How does the author of that fun facts page know this for sure? I just heard that only executives get to see the ingredient list. Is this fun fact author an executive?


Sure, and sand is a lubricant in the right scenario. This of course completely misses the point.

Anyone who actually use wd40 will eventually notice it not only has poor ability to stick around under load, but also likes to oxidize, forming a varnish or horrible goo depending on how thick it was left on. While this doesn’t matter (or is even desirable) for loosening a bolt, it’s a poor choice on tools, hinges, etc.

If long term lubrication is needed, then people should just use an appropriate grease or a non-oxidating* oil meant for staying around and lubricating.

*Plant based oils generally contain high amounts of polyunsaturated fats, which love to oxidize. Great for seasoning cast iron, but bad for other things. The goo/lacquer you get on kitchen pans and around the oven is oxidized fats linking together. There are rare exceptions to plant based oils being a bad idea for lubrication, involving genetic modification to produce mostly monounsaturated fats and further processing, like with alg’s “go juice”.


Yeah WD-40 is good for cleaning up old grease or loosing up seized mates more than anything but pretty much as soon as you get it moving you want to clean it up, let it boil off, and then replace it with lithium grease.

Yeah and water and gas are maybe a "lubricants" too. It's a pretty shitty lubricant.

Lubricates well enough for 99% of the homeowner things it gets used for.

That number goes down by a lot if you want lasting lubrication.

Why does it having the ability to do something has mean it is ‘unusable’ in a professional setting?

Is it generating CP when given benign prompts? Or is it misinterpreting normal prompts and generating CP?

There are a LOT of tools that we use at work that could be used to do horrible things. A knife in a kitchen could be used to kill someone. The camera on our laptop could be used to take pictures of CP. You can write death threats with your Gmail account.

We don’t say knives are unusable in a professional setting because they have the capability to be used in crime. Why does AI having the ability to do something bad mean we can’t use it at all in a professional setting?


Because corporate aint gonna approve the vendor that lets their dumbass employees generate child porn when the other vendors do not.

This still doesn’t make any sense. If they are worried a dumbass employee would generate CP using the tool, wouldn’t that same employee also download it from the web? Or use a web based tool to generate it?

Any employee that is going to use a corporate AI tool to generate CP is going to use other corporate tools to do worse things. There is no point in worrying about it.


Your boss tells you to choose a vendor for your AI integration. Your options:

Company A - First to the market, Reasonable Cost, Most well known name. Very easy integration.

Company B - Well regarded tools, Higher cost, Better performance and reviews from team. More difficult to integrate

Company C - Reasonably Priced, Performance is reasonable, Has a connection to an extremely controversial individual, Currently being lambasted for being an CP/Revenge Porn generator

Ok, now pretend you're talking to a guy who signs your paycheques. Which one are you NOT gonna pick?


There was an article about targeted advertising a number of years that really changed my perspective on it called, "Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful": https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

The basic idea is that the real value in advertising is as a signaling mechanism, and targeted advertising removes most of that signal.

I feel like personalized pricing has some of the same issues, in that it erodes consumer trust and makes it more and more difficult for consumers to confidently spend their money in the market. I am not sure how we fix the problem, though, because it is a collective action problem; any individual company will need to use personalized pricing to compete, but that behavior will hurt the economy as a whole.

I don't know the solution to this problem.


There's bqsically IMO two types of ads - marketing and sales.

Marketing ads are signalling, brand recognition, etc. You want the cool earbuds that everyone knows. You want to buy them from a big, reputable company with good r&d.

Sales is simpler - click on the ad and buy the product. It tends to be a bit sleasier - sales doesn't care as long as it makes a sale.

There's often a bit of tension between sales and marketing. A 50% ooff exploding offer can be good for sales in the short term, but can make the brand look cheap.


The in-industry terms for these are "brand marketing" and "performance marketing," FWIW. Brand marketing is the first thing, performance marketing is what you're calling sales.

Don't ban it, just require that next to the current price merchant displays low/high/median price for the same good/service in the last 30 days.

Exactly. Most of the icky stuff is based on a lack of consumer knowledge.

> I am not sure how we fix the problem

Regulation that causes big business to lose money and rich people to be a little less wealthy so society is better


no that's crazy talk. There must be some super obscure technological solution to a societal problem. Ideally something that can be sold as a SaaS.

I remember a successful advertisement for a yogurt in the 90s with a naked woman in a shower (so not in the US). I remember in the 2000 ads for Nike (or another shoe brand) not even showing a shoe. Recently there was a (very nice) ad for a retail corp that became viral and didn't even talk about the retails

the goal of advertising is not to inform, it is to sell, even if that means manipulating people.


Why isn't making it illegal a solution?

> that behavior will hurt the economy as a whole.

I don't quite follow... Advertisers want their product sold. Consumers want to buy whichever product is most suitable for their needs (based on both price and performance), ad networks have every incentive to connect these two.

In an ideal world an ad network would show me 10 ads for products I want to buy (ie. new shoes, ice cream, etc). I would have confidence that those products are the exact ones I want and that any more research would only show up inferior (worse value) products.

The ad network gets to take no profit margin - since if it did, I could find that same product cheaper elsewhere.

This leads to an equilibrium where the ad network shows mostly the perfect products - and charges a small margin - where the margin size is set to be slightly below my willingness to shop around for a better deal.

Personalized pricing just represents different users estimated willingness to shop around - but if the model is correct, even those paying a higher price are happy with the situation or else they'd shop around.


Ad networks have every incentive to lie to consumers to get a sale. If the strength of the economy is measured in total sales, that's great. If the strength of the economy is measured by consumer satisfaction, not so much.

An ideal ad network would not show you a product ideal for you, but a misleading ad for the lowest-cost product you'll buy for the most expensive price, with 95% of the difference pocketed by the ad network.


Informing the target that a product exists is a small part of advertising. It's important for the small players, but for the big advertising spenders it's much more about communicating values, trustworthiness, emotions. Building a brand image, and maintaining brand awareness

Just the fact that you are running an advertising campaign of a certain size used to be a signal in itself. Same with advertising in or for subcommunities. That signal is heavily dilluted by targeted advertising

Similarly, personalized pricing is removing signal from the price. Sure, price was always a noisy signal, but better a noisy signal than no signal


Sometimes it's not even a part. I remember ads for a shoe company not even showing or mentioning shoes

What is the incentive for ad networks to suit you to whichever product best fits your needs? On price, if an ad network knew how much you needed something, why isn't their incentive to show you the the highest confidence-weighted price you'd pay rather than the absolute best deal?

e.g. if they know you absolutely need to get on a flight (dying family member or something), what is their incentive to find you the best one rather than gouging you? And if they sell that information to other groups so everyone knows to gouge you?


None of these ideals are how reality works though. In reality consumers aren't completely rational, don't have access to perfect information, and the models for pricing/advertising have perverse incentives to extract as much as possible from consumers.

>In an ideal world an ad network would show me 10 ads for products I want to buy

Ideal for who? What if you don't want to buy anything, much less have all of your personal information hoovered up and sold/shared/exfiltrated around to everyone in the world for the benefit of the advertisers that have no value for you?


“Collective action” < union < regulation

... < union + regulation

... < democratic socialist republic without social media

You don't need to resort to communism, you can have a market economy where companies are owned by their own employees. It took millenia for humanity to dump its broke-ass monarchies for democracies, and yet we still haven't realized that our prevailing corporate structures are just the same broke-ass monarchies with a king at the top and the serfs laboring beneath.

ares623 did say "democratic socialist"

That doesn't contradict the point, though. The negative impact on the environment is not reduced by making a less powered chip.

No, hence "all around."

Weird, I helped manage a transition of a few hundred repos from GitHub enterprise to Gitlab enterprise, which included helping a few dozen teams migrate their CI to gitlab ci.

I had such a better experience with gitlab CI than any other I have used. There are quirks, but they make sense after you learn them.


Same experience, GitLabs CI/CD language is to me so much better - it has really strong abstractions and you can model a lot of developer experience into it. Especially when it comes to security practices of GitLab CI, but also custom runners, web terminals, ... there is just so much that is shining much more than any other Git forge with built-in CI/CD.

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