"Rocket, coriander, cumin? Somehow I doubt the Babylonians had Mexican herbs and spices." Turns out I was wrong about where these come from! All three are native to the Mediterranean/Middle East and would certainly have been used in this recipe at the time.

Someone may need to explain to me what is wrong with this sorry. Is it because it bloats the app with functionality that some users will never use? I feel like that is fairly usual for productivity/business apps generally.

I don't see anything wrong with it, I just think it's interesting.

Oh right, yeah I agree. It's the kind of thing I can imagine the harness downloading in the background anyway (or instructing the user to do) at some point so I can see the sense in just skipping that bit. Kind of comforting they just do it the same way the rest of us do - if it ain't broke and so on.

It does, however, introduce a potentially enormous attack surface into ChatGPT, along with creative opportunities for less security conscious individuals and LLMs.

You aren't worried about the provenance of the installed apps?

How do you mean?

I trust OpenAI to have installed apps that at least work well enough for their intended purposes.

You aren't worried that these binaries may have unfixed vulnerabilities?

That's the nature of installing software.

I'd like to know OpenAI's approach to updating these things - their auto-updated is pretty aggressive already, but does that cover their vendored cached apps too?

I think it's overbloating my computer

Actually, people do use and require the functionality, which is the point. The title as posted might be incorrect.

Yes, that's what I mean - maybe that didn't come across cos I said "bloats". I work for a business that builds web apps for corporates - LibreOffice is bundled in most of the repos of ours that I've seen, a bit like Imagick is in the broader sector.

> A signal only carries information if it is expensive to fake. The male peacock’s mesmerizing tail of evil eyes works precisely because a sickly peacock cannot grow one.

This is by far the most important insight in this write-up and I will be thinking about it for days to come.

Much obliged. I like using footnotes to get more unhinged than the actual post, I think simonw reblogged one of my footnotes a few months back which was just a personal note and that was killer.

At the place where I was taught this lesson, it was "getting Hasselhoffed" - in short, you find photos of David Hasselhoff in Baywatch (wearing as little as possible, you see? Speedos were very much in in the 80s), and you set it as the desktop. Perfectly harmless, like actual porn would be too far, but it was far enough to be genuinely embarrassing - not least because every Dev gets the same warning on day one (you leave you computer unlocked, you get Hasselhoffed) so everyone knew what it meant anyway. Everyone would, of course, play along - "Didn't realise you liked Hasselhoff that much - bit of an unprofessional image though don't you think?" And so on. If I remember rightly, I literally came in from a cigarette and the first person I saw just went "Do you admire David Hasselhoff's body?" and I already knew what I had done.

I'd just set my wallpaper to Hasselhoff as soon as I found out about the tradition and be done with it.

More seriously, the wallpaper stuff is OK, but I never found some of the more disruptive office pranks on the list to be particularly endearing (e.g., switching keycaps, taking the ball out of a mouse). It's work, and you sometimes need to do something urgently, and it's annoying to troubleshoot or clean up after someone wrapped your entire cubicle in shrink wrap, tied your shoelaces together, or something like that. If it's more fun to you than to the recipient, don't do it?

I did some office pranks, but tried to keep them nice. A tall stack of TPS reports on a manager's desk, sure.

one th ing you can do to your manager is screenshot their desktop, hide all their icons and menus andset the screensot as their background. they will be very confsused.

Don't forget to flip the photo and them flip the monitor.

A real hacker doesn't hack the software system...

I worked at a place almost exactly like this article. No surprise, it was one of the many startups that came out of the “PayPal mafia” in the 2010s

When the culture demands you spend every evening in the office, the actual work output is often secondary to the theatrics. Look at how crazy we are. Can you believe we have a kegerator?

All the shenanigans also means nobody is productive or even present until well after noon the next day. But nobody bothers asking what the point of all that was in the context of getting shit done because ultimately you just have to be one of the bros.

It’s frat culture with someone else’s money.

i didn't experience anything like that from 2004-2007at PP

In Brazil we had a soccer player who was the cover of a gay magazine back in the 90s. That was the wallpaper of choice.

lol that's hilarious. you couldn't get away with that shit now. i remember around 2005 at paypal the team of interns had this email thread going on developer@paypal email list and they were talking eubonics. i said to someone "oh they're gonna be fired" they were all canned the next day.

This is great but it would be useful to have some indication of cardinal directions - it is not clear to me which way I am facing.

I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.

"Machine learning architecture is second nature to us AI researchers, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for gradient descent and ReLU."

"And softmax of course."

Hello Daniel! Do you have a landing page/portal for all these games so I can go through them one by one of a morning (a bit like the NYT games)?

What an excellent example of designing for the medium instead of trying to make the medium do something it's not good at! Your whole approach shows a real love, like a delicate respectfulness, that I think characterises early games and is less apparent as the systems get better (though I am sure it is still there).

Yes, it reminds me a lot of the ports between 8-bit computers in the 80s, and also console ports pre-Playstation.

Agreed - I expected someone trying to render a simple object or scene and was pleasantly surprised.

I started building something like this myself (codename HFG - "Heroku for Groq") anticipating what we are indeed now seeing in ChatGPT viz. enshittification. The intention was to aim it at consumers and non-technical users who want a chatbot to help them draft reports, synthesise papers and so on. You've got a bunch of hackers in the comments going "But how can I run my own evals?" I think the answer for them is: this isn't for you.

Don't want to derail what you're trying to do with Echo in case I'm wide of the mark, but yeah even in that case, if you hadn't considered that use case for it, I reckon there will, probably inside six months, be a substantial market for non-technical users who are sick of seeing ads in a service they already pay a subscription for, and who don't care what the underlying model is - or, indeed, don't even understand the concept of an "underlying model" because they interface with AI as a product.

You have already taken the HFG idea way further than I had even thought of yet, and I feel vindicated in seeing someone else do it. I wish you the very best!