> The second will teach you how to negotiate salaries, raises, and promotions among other things.
“Never split the difference” is a really good book, but I'm really confused by this context. The book is 90 percent 'how to encourage rational thinking in your counterparty.' The author's experience is in suicide prevention and hostage negotiation, where all you really want is the counterparty to do whats already in their best interest. Hence the focus on emotional IQ advice, like slowing down, mirroring, building trust, etc.
In contrast, salary negotiation is a completely different beast. The book has a single chapter on "classic" MBA negotiations, but the counterparty is far more well informed than you are, and engineered the entire process to favor them -- multiple candidates, salary bands, structured interviews.
Where this book shines in the business world is project management and resolving priority conflicts, where you need to build cross functional relationships built on trust.
Granted, I'm just a single data point, but I've applied Voss' recommendations when negotiating purchases, salaries, and daily with my children. It's really improved my negotiation skills across the board.
In fact, negotiation is about helping people realise what's in their best interest among the options out there, rather than the options they want to be out there. But people won't hear what the available options are until they're sure you've heard what they want the available options to be.
Another good book in the same vein is How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk. It's not just about children.
"How to win friends and influence people" contains so much self-repetition that it should be easily compressible to four pages, no doubt many people on the Internet have done that. Read one of those instead.
This reminds me of a communication professor I had. He claimed that, over time, professors have the ability to explain something simple in 5 minutes or 2 hours.
I think the point is, there's many ways to make a point. Communication is hard. Reading a four page overview of a book is not the same experience as reading the actual book. Neither is reading a four page overview written by somebody else.
I also didn't like Carnegie book for the same reason you mentioned, but I wouldn't dismiss it for that reason
They didn't read it then. I read it a while ago and from what I can remember there was nothing about manipulation or dishonesty. In fact I'm fairly sure manipulation and dishonesty were explicitly discouraged.
I never read it cover to cover, but paged through some random parts and it certainly contained guidance away from authenticity and towards identifying and saying/doing the right things to achieve your goals.
It's not a bad thing to read though, but more in terms of understanding what your competition is reading and tools they're potentially weaponizing (lots of copies have been sold). Just like I recommended my sister at least skim The Game when she was frustrated by her post-divorce dating experiences, which based on her description were at least partially being influenced by assholes having read it.
I feel like you might be unfairly judging the book by its cover (or title?). I'd be happy to be proven wrong if you can cite some examples of what you claim. I'd like myself to cite some passages where manipulation is explicitly frowned upon:
> Of course flattery seldom works with discerning people. It is shallow, selfish and insincere. It ought to fail and it usually does.
> Looking at the other person’s point of view and arousing in him an eager want for something is not to be construed as manipulating that person so that he will do something that is only for your benefit and his detriment. Each party should gain from the negotiation.
> The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.
> If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way.
> If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return - if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.
> So let’s obey the Golden Rule, and give unto others what we would have others give unto us, How? When? Where? The answer is: All the time, everywhere.
> Be honest, Look for areas where you can admit error and
say so. Apologize for your mistakes.
> Promise to think over your opponents’ ideas and study
them carefully. And mean it. Your opponents may be right.
I think the main message of the book is to "put yourself in the shoes of others". And that definitely does not create dishonest, manipulative, self-centered pricks.
Empathy is an important part in understanding how to manipulate others. Without being able to put yourself into their perspective it's difficult to determine what actions will have which effects.
People over/misuse the word empathy, often conflating it with sympathy and/or compassion, when they're very different things.
A book can teach empathy while guiding people to be manipulative or exploitive of others. Just because you're able to see things from another's perspective (empathy) doesn't mean you'll give a damn about them or feel what they're feeling (sympathy).
Learning to separate empathy from sympathy with a conscious choice is part of adulting, a facet of establishing and enforcing (emotional) boundaries.
Those who lack that ability are quite vulnerable, it's one of the most rampantly exploited human flaws. "Bleeding Hearts" are a hugely exploited demographic, where people largely experience reactionary emotional sympathy and effectively lack empathy as a distinct observation they may then deliberate on what response is appropriate.
The psychopaths are the ones who either after deliberation never care, or can't even bother to deliberate on what they're seeing, which to the observer is tough if not impossible to disambiguate from a lack of empathy. Psychopathy is a pretty blurry thing though IMHO.
I found it kind of bad. Like, really bad. 50% 'oh my, this is common sense' and 50% 'so that's where the cliche of Americans thinking that we Germans are honest, direct and potentially abrasive come from.'
I mean, I don't want to discourage anyone from reading it, but I found it very lacking and when taken literally, a bit absurd.
I ignored it for years and things are still great.
Still running with simple Bootstrap themes, jQuery and mostly server side rendering and have thousands of users on my side project and lots of paying ones too.
Confident I could scale this to hundreds of thousands of users with no issue.
The article is good but it’s missing a big point that equity in startups is tied to risk taken not to contributions.
Many people, including myself, make this mistake the first round at startups. The mistake of believing if you work hard the outcome will be good. I wrote an article a little while back on how this relationship works and how it follows a logarithmic and exponential relationship, risk and equity, and how human minds are terrible at understanding those scales.
Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course.
As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.
As of November last year (let alone anything since re: distribution), US governmental agencies paid $2.5 billion to Moderna to develop the vaccine and buy doses (and there already had been work done by Moderna on mRNA vaccines).
As of July last year (again, let alone anything since), US governmental agencies had paid Pfizer $1.95 billion.
So, basically, the government spent billions for something they then distributed 'for free' to the taxpayers.
That's an interesting example to pick for 'capitalism'.
The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set.
Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism?
Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country.
Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got paid to make it, and yet others got paid to distribute it (pharmacies etc).
Really? I would have expected something a bit higher than $20-$25 a dose, given the limited supply (it was pure research at the time), and COVID was decimating the country (so extremely high demand). I mean, a single dose of insulin, requiring no research, and no protective IP, and costing cents to produce, will run you or an insurance company hundreds of dollars. Given the huge demand, and the non-existent supply at that time, there is -nothing- in the market that would have capped the price for the vaccine at $20-25, except either human good will (which is not a market factor; again, see insulin), or the very real threat of government action.
>> At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country
And voting Republican is what Democracy means to plenty of people living in the US. If we actually go to what the dictionary definition of socialism is, rather than a particular interpretation or lived experience of something called it, it's "(a political system wherein) the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole".
The governmental decision to offer something for free to everyone is a socialist one; the use of government regulation as an implicit threat to pay what is reasonable to offset cost, rather than what the market could dictate, also speaks to socialism. Yes, it was a private company that produced it, but both the exchange and the bulk of its distribution are very much being carried out by government, and even where not, are being very tightly regulated by government. All of that in response to community need and desire, not merely the strictures of the market (which otherwise would have seen a major profit opportunity).
Appreciate your comment, it’s good learning for me to hear a different opinion.
I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist system too far.
But the main point still stands I think, the response to the above comment and the fact that it is very much those strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to do something or pure good will that lead to these results.
That I can agree with. Ensuring people can reap some benefit to their efforts is important. The problems with capitalism that I personally have tend to be around places that people are able to reap benefit from other people's efforts unduly (i.e., billionaires), or from other people's needs unduly (i.e., shareholders making bank from healthcare).
> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year.
You realize Cuba also produced a vaccine within one year. So did China; though some people consider Dengism a kind of capitalism, so who knows, good for you, maybe.
> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
Most vaccine development occurs in academic research institutions, even if the large-scale manufacturing is then taken up by the capitalists. For example, the Covid vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca was created by and innovated upon by a vaccine research group in Oxford University, who are obviously not in it for making vast wads of cash. And in general, it's the state who funds vaccine development, and the state who buys the vaccines.
On the broader subject of medicine, capitalism also gives us harsh enforcement of supposed 'intellectual property rights', stymieing the availability of medicines in developing countries. Fortunately, it looks like this will be waived for Covid vaccines, thanks to some government intervention. But it shouldn't have to be this way. Jonas Salk had the right idea when he released his polio vaccine freely to the world, to benefit all, without profit motive.
I know a lot of people make their money on here from these companies. Heck, I interviewed at one of them twice. But my gut says these two are no longer good companies to work for. If you need the money desperately then do what you need to do, but if you can afford to take a role somewhere else you should. Anywhere else is better than these two right now.
I also recognize that they didn’t start the way they are now. Back when they started they represented the very best of our industry and they lured in young ambitious people with the promise of changing the world for the better. They did do that for a little while. The engineering capabilities were and still are world class, they are beacons our industry for that.
But unfortunately a lot has changed. They are absolutely monopolies now, everything in those slides is true. I know because I worked at a startup that relied on both of those companies for its growth. They abused us in the beginning, threatened us with bans and gave us strikes for arbitrary reasons, and then treated us like gold as we spent a lot more with them. On top of how they treat “partners” they now do far more damage to the fabric of society than they add value to it. Again, I recognize that at some point it wasn’t that way and without them tech wouldn’t be what it is now, but they are no longer that and we should all see it for what it is.
I don’t have a solution on how to fix this. I think it’s the business model that’s acidic and broken. I think only disruption can fix this but it’s unclear when and if that will come.
I feel kind of ridiculous for having this view point, but I have co workers who keep advocating for using facebook open source stuff. I kind of want to push back on these suggestions, not really for anything technical, I just no longer think facebook or google are even neutral companies. Something just doesn't really feel right about continuing to use facebook open source stuff. Maybe if it was developed by facebook but run by some neutral organization now would be fine. But having the company all over it doesn't feel right.
I think a lot of people are just into solving tech problems without considering much else.
There's a large part of open source that seems to just exist for large corporations and solving corporate problems for free.
> advocating for using facebook open source stuff.
IMO truly Open Source software that comes out of FB and GOOG are the silver lining - the output from them that you should consume guilt-free.
For a while IIRC FB had some onerous terms levied on their Open Source repos, I'm not sure if that's changed. But if they have sane licenses, we should embrace this work (while still rejecting their misdeeds).
I think there's potential for consequences just blindly using the stuff they give away. Its advertising for them. "The best and most innovative work here, look what they do!". Now Facebook is in all of our web frontends now with react, google is in all of our data centers with Kubernetes. Can you even be innovative and get traction anymore without corporate backing? I'm skeptical a project like Linux could take off in our current computing world. Sorry a little ranty but I don't see why we need to keep giving these companies even more share of the tech world, even if they give it away for free.
That's sort of a ridiculous standard. What counts as "corporate backing?" The Intel/AMD chips in your servers? AWS/GCP/Azure that hosts them? The cable companies that own the fiber your data moves over? Businesses don't, and never have, existed in a vacuum. Why draw the line at frameworks like React?
IDK why you think im drawing the line at frameworks? I'm just highlighting it in this situation. I cant rant about everything negative thing corporations do, Ill never be done. But those examples aren't remotely the same. Intel and AMD is a healthy rivalry to have, for awhile AMD wasn't even competitive. Those companies arent trying to reach into every segment of the world. Cable company monopolies have been beat to death, and are an obvious problem so Im unsure why your even bringing it up? But comcast isn't even comparable to the reach google or facebook has. Something like 1/3 of the world in on facebook, you really want to compare that to American cable companies?
And amazingly it is self inflicted by peer pressure, because it’s absolutely possible to build great things without React or Kubernetes. I don’t care because I have my own company now (and yet it’s an everyday to educate both clients and junior devs), but if I were still mainly a dev I would seriously hurt my resume. I don’t know if it’s conscious or not on their part, but the tech marketing achievement is both impressive and disappointing.
pg has a great article on AirBnB bootstrapping their business by doing things that don't scale. He says that they would go door to door and early on would take pictures of the rooms so that their on-boarding was easier. What I have come to realize is that all businesses do things that don't scale, and not just during the bootstrap process.
Open Source software scales perfectly, and therefore is worthless.
The naive public view of Google is that they are a Search company. The HN take is that Google is not a Search company, they are what they make their money in, which is Advertising. My claim in this comment is a company is whatever they do that doesn't scale. Google is a tracking company. They use that tracking to produce better search results, which they monetize by selling advertising.
It's the tracking that doesn't scale well. And Google knows this, and that's why their Search results punish slow loading pages. They want their tracker(which loads slowly) to be the only tracker. If all sites puts 25 different trackers all with their different stacks on a website, they would lose their 'doesn't scale' property. They then push this even further, by taking control of your browser with Chrome and your device with Android, which also doesn't scale. The market will never allow 100 browsers or 100 mobile operating systems. Developers Developers Developers after all.
So we can see that every company is what the things they do that don't scale. Once they have that, they constrain it and hold it within their walled garden, and from there they can bring in Open Source software. In essence Open Source Software allows the area of the garden to grow. Once OSS grows to being able to do anything that it can possibly do, we will still be constrained to the things that don't scale. These things will allow the companies to enforce monopoly rents within their walled gardens.
Facebook and Google contribute heavily to the Linux kernel. Much of the security work in the kernel is a direct result of them paying people to work on it. Good code should not be rejected because evil companies happened to be one of the financial backers.
To be clear, I hate both companies and avoid their proprietary offerings at almost all costs but when they happen to do something not evil, even for selfish reasons like good PR, I take it. I will also still be sure and remind everyone they are still evil every chance I get.
I hate Microsoft too but if I was in a poor country with malaria I would be thankful for the help from their founder.
"I kind of want to push back on these suggestions..."
What about programming languages? Go is open source and has benefitted enormously from support and funding from Google. That association has helped the language grow and attract developers. In fact, new(ish) languages with large corporate benefactors generally thrive compared to open source languages that have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources.
I think the popularity of some programming languages is buoyed by corporate sponsorship or the association with a company. This is not a bad thing, it just means the promise in other languages is harder to discern because they do not enjoy the same financial support, and thus struggle to attract new developers.
I'm in a similar position. There are several Google and FB open source projects that not only some of my co workers have advocated for, but that I would myself actually like to make some use of.
On the one hand, I think consuming their truly open source projects is a little bit of sticking it to the man -- you're getting for free something they spent money and time on.
But on the other hand, mindshare is a thing, and by using their products, even if truly open source, I am helping increase it.
For my own purposes, I have not used the Google or FB heritage of a given open source project to be an automatic disqualifier, but it is definitely a negative. If there are technically-comparable alternatives, I tend to lean towards those.
Another route is to lobby those projects to adopt an open governance model. This effectively puts the management of the project at arm's length from the corporate parent. It's a trade-off for them to get more engagement vs rescinding control. There are a number of hosting organisations that take this kind of thing on: Linux Foundation, Linaro, Eclipse.
"Anywhere else is better than these two right now."
Even SEO.
I used to think companies like DoubleClick and later SEO people like this Twitter author were the underbelly of the web. Then Google acquired DoubleClick. In case anyone had doubts about Google.
But what of SEO.
Seems to me they are just an unpleasant side effect.
This is a racket that will end one day. And not a day too soon.
> If you need the money desperately then do what you need to do, but if you can afford to take a role somewhere else you should.
I would never work for Google or Facebook (and they wouldn't hire me), but it's not fair to expect normal people to choose between their financial needs and an abstract notion of the greater good.
I find this idea puts the pressure on the individual for systemic problems. I am not responsible for what my employer does outside of my own output, and if I had a family to feed I would say: all my financial needs are desperate, fix your own damn world.
Upper middle class people from high GDP countries do have the choice. There are many opportunities where a talented individual will make more than enough.
But what about people from countries like India? Talented people will jump in in a heartbeat. And I have never ever known any person who has turned down Google or Facebook's offer with US/EU posting. Even people coming from _very_ privileged families.
Anything you do contributes to what your employer does, other wise what are you doing at work. Especially in a tech company. We absolutely should put pressure on these employees of companies. People working at google, facebook etc are not barely getting by. Theyre people fought over, being paid enormous amount of money.
We're not talking about people who have no other choice here, we're talking about software engineers. We are the most in-demand, remote friendly profession on the planet right now. The choice isn't between Facebook and starvation for us, the choice is between netting $250,000/yr at a very questionable company or $100,000/yr anywhere else.
If working for Facebook or Google is an option for you, you are not at risk of not meeting your financial needs.
> I find this idea puts the pressure on the individual for systemic problems.
Systemic problems don’t exist: they are the problems of individuals and their interactions observed at scale. Your next sentence highlights why systemic problems exist at all: deferral of responsibility.
I also recognize that they didn’t start the way they are
now. Back when they started they represented the very
best of our industry and they lured in young ambitious
people with the promise of changing the world for the
better.
[zip]
But unfortunately a lot has changed.
So what do we learn from this? Maybe we should learn that tech should be judged on the basis of what it can be used for, including nefarious uses, and not only for past or current intents of the developers.
I would like to see past work history at either of these companies (Facebook and Google) be something that is critiqued and questioned during hiring. Being a past employee of Google or Facebook should make it harder for you to find another job, unless you can justify your participation in a monopolistic, damaging-to-society company. "The money was good" should not be a valid justification unless you were seriously pressed for money and other opportunities.
Alternatively, you could view as a positive signal their decision to leave and find new less ethically compromised opportunities at their own pace. I don't really understand how people choose to go work at these companies, but I appreciate when those who are already there realise they don't understand either.
Any time I take issue with someone's past employment at a company, I never hold that against them without an opportunity for them to address it. Their tenure at these companies is also a major factor in how I view it. Someone that started in the late 2010's and only stayed for a few months is going to mostly get a pass. Someone that joined in 2011 and stayed around for 7 years is going to get a lot more than a cursory glance.
That is, if you worked at Google or FB before, I will definitely ask about your time there, and what led you to leave. This is not necessarily something I would do for some other XYZ Software Co. on your resume.
"The money is good" isn't an excuse in any case because Google is no longer paying top of market, and Facebook is getting outbid by several other companies with better reputations on privacy and security.
Choosing to take less money by working at Google is an ego play. It's not the only place with scaling challenges, good working environment and high pay. There are dozens of others.
"Being a past employee of Google or Facebook should make it harder for you to find another job, unless you can justify your participation in a monopolistic, damaging-to-society company."
That would be lovely, but unfortunately 99% of people probably don't care.. especially if they themselves are owners of capitalist corporations (who are probably advertising their own products and services on Google and Facebook).
This Twitter thread is all about why you shouldn't spend your marketing dollars on Google and Facebook. And yet here you are railing against people working at Google and Facebook. Why?
If engineers at Facebook or Google decide to work somewhere else, they'll just hire more. There's an endless supply of people who want to make a buck. But if the marketing dollars disappear, these companies go under.
So why are you railing on the people working at these companies, instead of all the entrepreneurs around here sending ad dollars their way?
Why not attack from both ends? It isn’t mutually exclusive and talented software engineers are vacuumed up by these mega corps so having the cream of the crop devs leave will pressure mega Corp to fix things and make it a place these employees are demanding it be for them to stay.
You think Google is gonna start hiring mediocre talent rather than bend over backwards to stop hemorrhaging their loss of world class talent.
This is an effective strategy in forcing the hand of a mega Corp at scale.
This is just never going to happen. Only the tiniest most vocal percentage of people will act against their own self interest, in the benefit of society. Asking that of people will only ever backfire.
I think people are just taking out their aggressions on individuals. Individuals who they don't know, and who may have special circumstances. Or who might be doing good from within.
It's analogous to (though not as extreme as) railing on individual soldiers for the crimes of the military. It's mean, thoughtless, immature, and perhaps most importantly to you it's ineffective.
Edit: as a single data point... I work at Google. I'm just a regular person who wants respectable pay and a good work environment. I don't work on ads, and I'm not really convinced of whether Google as a whole is bad for the world. I'm interested in the arguments... they just don't seem very convincing to me. The vitriol seems way out of proportion compared to any harm from Google. I especially don't understand singling out Google, compared to other areas where harm seems a lot more egregious.
I also don't understand why people lump Google and Facebook together. They're incredibly different companies. I wouldn't work at Facebook unless I really had to, because it's obvious and clear how Facebook has been a disaster for society. The arguments against Google aren't nearly as strong or convincing.
I'm also not rich, despite being at Google for a number of years, and if I didn't work for Google my family and I would be forced to move.
They've always been ad machines, but once upon a time Google was the good guy of the ad world.
Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders. Google with its dainty little text-only ads neatly on the side of search results was a real breath of fresh air, and we all cheered when Chrome came along and started blocking many of the most annoying ad tactics.
"Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders."
Commercial sites were. But there was a time before corporations started treating the internet like the Gold Rush. Before that the internet was actually not full of ads, much less all the spyware the likes of Google and Facebook brought.
But Google and Facebook are just two big worms in an internet that's been rotten by corporate influence.
True. The internet was already ad-infested by the time Google came around. AltaVista, which was the dominant search engine before Google overthrew them was full of ads, and (ironically) Google's value proposition at the time was that it was ad-free and a lot faster than AltaVista (which was slowed down by all their ads).
It isn't just these companies. It's most of them. The number of "good" companies is minuscule. Leaving one of these companies for another slightly less evil (or maybe more evil - just less powerful) one won't result in any good being done. Modern capitalism is crooked, and these individuals can't "fix" the problem. Play the game, but work to fix it. Until it's fixed, your life depends on playing it.
It's a level of negativity bias which seems to be overwhelmingly widespread nowadays. Things are either pure or else evil.
I think it comes from taking the upsides for granted. So the downsides are seen as seen as unnecessary and resulting from some kind of conspiracy or luck (e.g., network effects), rather than a trade-off where a company earned its success by providing benefits people wanted in return.
Nearly every system in nature has some slack baked into it.
Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we burn goes to power the brain, in children it’s closer to 50-60%. Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, 24/7, we use it’s power, maybe once in a while if we’re lucky. We can’t remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, it’s not, it’s a feature.
The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can literally remember every single thing that happens to them their whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they could detail every aspect of a story but couldn’t summarize it, and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our chips at 100% capacity 24/7?
We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality this has the opposite of the intended effects.
This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I recently wrote about the same topic but it’s not as good as this article but still if you are interested:
I have been doing a lot of writing lately, short and longer essays. I have also written on-and-off for the last ten years.
Writing well is not easy.
I used to think I wrote well until I started reading better writers. The whole idea that we will just slap together a bunch of text using some “AI” and it will resonate with people is crazy to me. As an engineer whose dabbled with some AI and ML, and has even seen what GPT3 can do, we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun. Not saying it will never happen just that nothing we are building right now will be able to do that.
Good writing factors in human culture, sparks emotions in people, tells stories that resonate. I will keep going to sleep at night safely assuming that no AI will out-write humans anytime soon and you should too.
Most news articles don’t seem to be even proofread anymore! At least AI spells perfectly. It will at least likely soon replace the uncreative who/what/where/when news writing.
But if you write such an article, you need to convery specific information - about the "who/what/where/when" of the news story. This is information that was not available to GPT-3 at the time of training (e.g. it doesn't know that Biden is the PotUS now) so someone will have to sit down and craft a prompt that contains this information and such that it causes GPT-3 to generate a piece that repeats this information. To do all that sounds like a lot more work than just writing the article by hand.
we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun.
Harlequin Romances, though, those little soft-core porn pamphlets for women found at supermarket checkouts, could probably be generated. There are about 4,000 of them, and they're written to a set formula - “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl on page 56, and, by page 180, the book would end with a marriage proposal.” Load up the training set and profit.
But that’s not good writing, it’s just junk remixed, what would be the point? And that could be procedurally be generated.
In general I don’t see utility of having AI write stuff for us to read, it’s not like we are running out of things to read. What I’m more interested in is getting an computer to memorize facts, understand the context and then subleties of a convetsarion to the extent that you could ask back questions and infer answers from that ingested knowledge we fed it. And I think we’re far from it though we’re making fast strides towards a different direction.
AI is pretty far away from those, too. The "window" mechanism that GPT-3 and similar methods use basically prevents it from staying on-topic over the course of a few paragraphs.
Well, it's not just women, I have read and enjoyed such writing. But you are correct, writing that lacks substance intended for people who expect nothing more. Sex is easy to write about. It doesn't take much to turn people on.
I used to read a lot of junk paperbacks - mostly horrors, but also stories about truck drivers, detectives and western stories. They were schematic to the extreme. Looking back, it was the same story over and over and over. I liked them back then. I used to read also a lot of repetitive sci-fi: those small start trek books.
I never read Harlequin, but it being repetitive is not something special. Back when people read a lot of books, we did not read James Joyce and Charles Dickens exclusively. I mean, spiderman comics, ninja turtles comics, they were all the same story repeated again and again too.
>I used to read a lot of junk paperbacks - mostly horrors, but also stories about truck drivers, detectives and western stories. They were schematic to the extreme.
He, ditto in Spain. In most cases the (same) authors would rehash a detective story as some sci-fi based short novel by just changing some devices and lore and call it done.
Well, in the end cyberpunk it's just futuristic noir.
GPT-3 (and everything like it) is the perfect tool for SEO spam and filling out college papers with blather if you're confident no person is actually reading it.
It's impressive. No, really, it's an incredible simulacrum. But it's also just a slightly more practical version of the infinite monkeys with typewriters thought experiment.
Computer generated text have tens of millions of people they can put out of a job, manipulate into emotions, phish for scams, etc. without needing to produce text like James Joyce.
I almost feel like the obscure to most effects of joyce may be easier for gpt3 to generate than other things an only joycian scholars of which there are few would be able to tell
> we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun
We might be as far away from both. But our velocity approaching those goals could not be more different.
In the last 10 years we've made tremendous progress in terms of writing. GPT-3 is leaps and bounds better than GPT-2. I'm not convinced a GPT-7 couldn't be mostly responsible for a best seller.
It's simple : GPT-3 doesn't have anything it wants to communicate. If you've taken some message from the comment, it's either written directly by a human, or some human has looked through god knows how many GPT-3 outputs until they found one that actually sounds like their message.
1) “How to win friends and influence people”
2) “Never split the difference”
The first one will teach you how to work with people. The second will teach you how to negotiate salaries, raises, and promotions among other things.
I don’t recommend many technical books because engineers can find all of that on the internet and are much more at risk of being bad at people stuff.