Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.
Regardless of whether it is 'appropriate workplace behavior' to call a jerk a jerk, firing someone for it is so far outside the range of 'appropriate behavior' that it's hard to make a comparison.
What a wild cultural difference. Where do you live?
Over here in the USA, I don't think any customer service worker expects to be able to openly mock a customer and still have a job. I struggle to imagine the idea of calling my boss a wanker to his face and still expecting to have a job. To insult the CEO seems like it might as well be a resignation - if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
> if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
What an astoundingly dumb question. Most people work somewhere to get paid, and If you think its unusual to hate the boss, oh boy, do I have news for you!
There's a huge difference between "I hate my boss" and "I'm willing to publicly humiliate him to his face". Are you really struggling to understand that distinction?
Over there in the USA there's a culture of extreme deference to corporate leadership, probably stemming from the slavery and servitude past. It's very similar in Brazil as well, sharing from the same past.
It's funny that such a cognitive dissonance between freedoms and rights vs the absolutist tyranny of corporate life making a mockery of those freedoms can coexist in the same society with the same staying power.
You aren’t wrong, but having worked in China as well as the states (and a short stint in Switzerland), I think east Asia (china, Japan, Korea) has that even worse, probably due to Confucius. As China is looking more and more like the future, I fear that this gets worse before it gets better.
East Asia definitely has a similar flavour of this issue, Confucianism's filial piety forces unbounded respect to hierarchies, coupled with social harmony as a virtue and criticism of anyone "above" you is highly frowned upon.
I just think it's stranger for the USA's work culture to be so deferential to leadership while its societal values are outwardly quite loud about freedoms, it's more understandable to me for East Asia to be that way. For the USA case it's probably a mixture of the servitude/slavery past with still being quite religious compared to other Western peers.
Let's bring this close to home. You hire someone to mow your lawn. They come in every week and mow your lawn. And you pay them. One day you walk by and they're talking with your neighbor and you overhear them saying you're a rich a-hole and a jerk, and an idiot. I mean not appropriate workplace behavior. Are they going to still have a job or would you prefer that someone else mows your lawn? I mean they just said nasty things about you- nbd. not something that should affect their status as your "employee".
Several things severely wrong with this example. The employee didn't talk to an outsider, they didn't talk to someone the CEO would be likely to have known personally, and they're so far removed from the CEO nobody thinks they'd know them on a personal level.
You just can't talk about a CEO as if they're a person interacting and hiring people individually because they just don't.
In a small company a CEO may approve all hiring. In a larger company they delegate that. But they run the company. Everyone in the company including those hiring reports directly or indirectly to them.
When an employee communicates broadly inside a company, even if it's not directly to outsiders, that is essentially public. As we can see in this thread some random person chimed in with the details. But s/neighbor/your wife/ if that helps the analogy and insider vs. outsider is the issue. It's an imperfect one as they all tend to be.
This is why for example quarterly results are not generally communicated to all insiders in a company before they are released, because they are going to leak.
I think my analogy, though imperfect, demonstrates that when you have some sort of employment or other relationship, "bad mouthing" the other party, either in public or in private, is expected to be damaging to this relationship. The CEO of your company is the closest thing to the single person employing you. He runs the entity that employs you.
> … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.
> Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Wow. I mean, come on, thats like the least offensive thing ever. At the most, maybe tell the manager to tell them thats not the “spirit” of the workplace, but firing for this is a step too far.
If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
There's no "free speech" at work [-places] in the USA. That's not what free speech means anyways. You can and will be absolutely be fired for saying things at work that are incompatible with your employer's opinions. I can't think of a faster way to get fired anywhere than insulting the person running the company you work for, private or public company, definitely in public.
The US has less free speech than some other countries. Especially now, but this was always true at corporations. In the US you can be fired for anything, including speech.
What are the odds that Zuckerberg would still be CEO if he didn't have a majority stake in the company? From the outside it seems like he has made one terrible financial decision after the next. Can anyone be surprised that things aren't going smoothly given his track record?
Given that he has been running the company for many years and the valuation/profit/or whatever has gone up 100x times, I'd say the board is probably gonna be patient with the guy.
Imagine the guy made you $1.4 trillion dollars but lost $14 billions. Would you fire him?
After enough chances, yeah. Zuck probably has a few more big mistakes to go before the stock price is crushed and flat lines for awhile… in that environment a change of CEO would be needed.
Of course, Facebook themselves acknowledge that 10% of their revenue is literal scams. Like, people pay them to forward their scams to the targets of said scams. They know this is happening.
Obviously criminality pays. I wouldn’t hold up a drug dealer’s returns as evidence of good leadership
Some people in tech want companies to innovate and take risks by spending on R&D instead of just funneling it back to investors or safer existing markets, others will complain that they took those risks and failed despite still running profitable businesses.
I'm in the former group where I personally support Meta taking risks on big ideas while still being profitable. Just like SpaceX and others. I don't blame Mark for getting excited about AR which is very likely a big market in the future, the gamble on the tech being affordable enough was just far too early for the scale of investment. Their investments there might still pay off as it gets cheaper.
I hate the guy personally, but still understand that at that scale, if the leader is so conservative that s/he never risks losing, they are already losing. Like airline manufacturers never investing in jets because early ones weren't safe.
MSFT's bumbling idiot Ballmer Threw away at least a billion on one of the failed early versions of the Surface, but it went on to be profitable (or at least successful with customers) later. They also burned billion(s) acquiring skype, only to switch to Teams. Say what you want about their terrible products, but somehow they are still successful businesses.
Unfortunately looking at CEOs that don't have a majority stake but make one terrible decision after another (waves to Satya) I think odds are pretty good he'd still be around.
You mean his terrible financial decisions of founding a company in 2004 that IPO at 104B within eight years, and now 14 years on is valued at 1.6T? Are we looking different track records?
I can foresee a future of induced demand, where by making PRs "easier" to review, you will end up with way more PRs to review, leading PR backlogs as backed up with PRs as ever. Except now dev teams will have trust-me-bro LLM reviews convincing them that they don't actually need to do full code reviews on code they're putting into production. What could go wrong?
Very good point. So when we designed this we actually had that in mind. Devin Review is not supposed to replace your judgment and “give the answer”. It just organizes the PR in a way that makes it way easier for YOU to understand.
I was being partly facetious and I think this is probably the way things are going. I guess it's just hard to stomach that devs will end up relying on these tools more than their own intuition. But I suppose that ship has sailed already for a lot of people.
Every big new model release we see benchmarks like ARC and Humanity's Last Exam climbing higher and higher. My question is, how do we know that these benchmarks are not a part of the training set used for these models? It could easily have been trained to memorize the answers. Even if the datasets haven't been copy pasted directly, I'm sure it has leaked onto the internet to some extent.
But I am looking forward to trying it out. I find Gemini to be great as handling large-context tasks, and Google's inference costs seem to be among the cheapest.
Even if the benchmark themselves are kept secret, the process to create them is not that difficult and anyone with a small team of engineers could make a replica in their own labs to train their models on.
Given the nature of how those models work, you don't need exact replicas.
There's a checkbox on whether you want to use it or not in the settings page, does this not change these settings?
I don't feel opposed to them changing the browser in principle--certainly there have been many improvements to web browsers over the years. Is privacy the concern here?
If the checkbox you're referring to is the "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" one, then I can't see what setting it changes. It's not the browser.ml.enable flag. I tried unchecking it, restarting the browser, and that flag was unaffected. This is in version 144.0.2.
Searching for "AI" shows one other setting: "Quickly access bookmarks, tabs from your phone, AI chatbots, and more without leaving your main view." But I'd already disabled that apparently. Despite that, there are plenty of flags that were enabled mentioned in the article.
Last I checked there wasn’t and you still had to fiddle with a few about:config options to actually turn off all the ai stuff. I would be fine with it if it was just a settings page rather than hidden settings.
One thing I think this article overlooks is that Argentina was a superpower, at least before the Panama canal was built. Before that, pretty much all shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific had to go south around Argentina and Chile. Buenos Aires was one of the best stops along that route, and so it became one of the richest places on earth. After the Panama canal was built most of this traffic dropped off, and so did Argentina's fortunes. It's just so far away from everywhere that it has never been as geographically significant since.
Seems like Argentina was wealthy till the 1940s the Panama Canal was completed in 1914. I visited buenos Aries twenty years ago and it reminded me of Paris. Grand old architecture, big buildings wide avenues. Something happened in the latter half of the 20th century that caused it to decline and stagnate. I always thought it was dictatorships, civil unrest and hyperinflation, but maybe those are symptoms and not causes.
Militarily they where powerful however they bought that power they didn't build it (UK was primary supplier of their battleships when they had their arms races with Chile and Brazil respectively) so it was a bit of a glass hammer situation.
I have a theory: all these people reporting degrading model quality over time aren't actually seeing model quality deteriorate. What they are actually doing is discovering that these models aren't as powerful as they initially thought (ie. expanding their sample size for judging how good the model is). The probabilistic nature of LLM produces a lot of confused thinking about how good a model is, just because a model produces nine excellent responses doesn't mean the tenth response won't be garbage.
They test specific prompts with temperature 0. It is of course possible that all their tests prompts were lucky, but still then, shouldn't you see an immediate drop followed by a flat or increasing line?
Also, from what I understand from the article, it's not a difficult task but an easily machine checkable one, i.e. whether the output conforms to a specific format.
If it was random luck, wouldn't you expect about half the answers to be better? Assuming the OP isn't lying I don't think there's much room for luck when you get all the questions wrong on a T/F test.
With T=0 on the same model you should get the same exact output text. If they are not getting it, other environmental factors invalidate the test result.
TFA is about someone running the same test suite with 0 temperature and fixed inputs and fixtures on the same model over months on end.
What’s missing is the actual evidence. Which I would love of course. But assuming they’re not actively lying, this is not as subjective as you suggest.
Yes exactly, my theory is that the novelty of a new generation of LLMs’ performances tends to cause an inflation in peoples’ perceptions of the model, with a reversion to a better calibrated expectation over time. If the developer reported numerical evaluations that drifted over time, I’d be more convinced of model change.
your theory does not hold up for this specific article as they carefully explained they are sending identical inputs into the model each time and observing progressively worse results with other variables unchanged. (though to be fair, others have noted they provided no replication details as to how they arrived at these results.)
I see your point but no, it's getting objectively worse. I have a similar experience of casually using chatgpt for various use cases, when 5 dropped i noticed it was very fast but oddly got some details off. As time moved on it became both slower and the output deteriorated.
but I use local models and sometimes the same ones for years already, and the consistency and expectations there is noteworthy, while I also have doubts about the quality consistency I have from closed models in the cloud. I don't see these kind of complaints from people using local models, which undermines the idea that people were just wowed three months ago and less impressed now.
so perhaps it's just a matter of transparency
but I think there is consistent fine tuning occuring, alongside filters added and removed in an opaque way in front of the model
I've been reading a lot of (human-written) books lately, and one thing this has made abundantly clear to me is that AI writing just doesn't stack up. For one AI writing is often completely wrong about the details. But it also just tends to be bland and superficial. If you want a 5-minute summary of something, sure, it can do a passable job. But if I want something substantial and carefully thought out, I'll choose a book written by a human expert every time.
Maybe this will change at some point in the future, but for now there's no way I would substitute a well-written book on a subject for AI slop. These models are trained on human-written material anyway, why not just go straight to the source?
reply