Detached from a comment on Zvi's AI #80 because it's a hazy tangent: the idea of steering an AI early and deeply using synthetic data reminds me distinctly of the idea of steering a human early and deeply using culture-reinforcing mythology. Or, nowadays, children's television, I suppose.

Followup:

How so much artistry had been infused into the creation of Hogwarts was something that still awed Draco every time he thought about it. There must have been some way to do it all at once, no one could have detailed so much piece by piece, the castle changed and every new piece was like that.

Years later, Midjourney happened.

My favorite active use of those is differentially. Wiggling my nose can inspire visceral surprise.

Temporarily taking the post's theory as given, then speculating: managers a few levels above the bottom won't feel much dominance increase from hires at the bottom if they're too organizationally distant for it to register, I'd think; the feeling boost from Nth-level reports would drop sharply with increasing N due to less personal contact. They would then seek to manipulate their set of direct reports. Some would see internal underlings as a threat, want to get them out of the way, and not necessarily have another insider suitable to displace them with. Some would see outsiders with external status markers (intelligence, high-profile accomplishments) whom they can gain indirect status by hiring directly. Some might be obstructed directly from engaging internal promotions or get outcompeted for the internal pool.

… at least in the default light theme. (This is arguably a secondary reason not to overuse images.)

Observation of context drift: I was rereading some of HPMOR just now, and Harry's complaint of “The person who made this probably didn't speak Japanese and I don't speak any Hebrew, so it's not using their knowledge, and it's not using my knowledge”, regarding a magic item in chapter 6, hits… differently in the presence of the current generation of language models.

The Review Bot would be much less annoying if it weren't creating a continual stream of effective false positives on the “new comments on post X” indicators, which are currently the main way I keep up with new comments. I briefly looked for a way of suppressing these via its profile page and via the Site Settings screen but didn't see anything.

I haven't worked in an organization that uses microservices extensively, but what I hear from people who use them goes far beyond visibility constraints. As an example, allowing groups to perform deployment cycles without synchronizing seems to be a motivation that's harder to solve by having independently updated parts of a build-level monolith—not impossible, because you could set up to propagate full rebuilds somehow and so forth, but more awkward. Either way, as you probably know, “in theory, people could just … but” is a primary motivator behind all kinds of socially- or psychologically-centered design.

That said, getting into too much detail on microservices feels like it'd get off topic, because your central example of the Giga Press is in a domain where the object-level manufacturing issues of metal properties and such should have a lot more impact. But to circle around, now I'm wondering: does the ongoing “software eating the world” trend come along with a side of “software business culture eating into other business cultures”? In the specific case of Tesla, there's a more specific vector for this, because Elon Musk began his career during the original dot-com era and could have carried associated memes to Tesla. Are management and media associated with more physical industries being primed this way elsewhere? Or is this just, as they say, Elon Musk being Elon Musk, and (as I think you suggested in the original post) the media results more caused by the distortion of celebrity and PR than by subtler/deeper dysfunctions?

And microservices are mostly a solution to institutional/management problems, not technical ones.

So this is interesting in context, because management and coordination problems are problems! But they're problems where the distinction between “people think this is a good idea” and “this is actually a good idea” is more bidirectionally porous than the kinds of problems that have more clearly objective solutions. In fact the whole deal with “Worse is Better” is substantially based on observing that if people gravitate toward something, that tends to change the landscape to make it a better idea, even if it didn't look like that to start with, because there'll be a broader selection of support artifacts and it'll be easier to work with other people.

One might expect an engineering discipline to be more malleable to this when social factors are more constraining than impersonal physical/computational ones. In software engineering, I think this is true across large swaths of business software, but not necessarily in specialized areas. In mechanical engineering or manufacturing, closer to the primary focus of the original post, I would expect impersonal physical reality to push back much harder.

A separate result of this model would be that things become more fashion-based on average as humanity's aggregate power over impersonal constraints increases, much like positional goods becoming more relatively prominent as basic material needs become easier to meet.

Publishing “that ship has sailed” earlier than others actively drives the ship. I notice that this feels terrible, but I don't know where sensible lines are to draw in situations where there's no existing institution that can deliver a more coordinated stop/go signal for the ship. I relatedly notice that allowing speed to make things unstoppable means any beneficial decision-affecting processes that can't be or haven't been adapted to much lower latencies lose all their results to a never-ending stream of irrelevance timeouts. I have no idea what to do here, and that makes me sad.

Related but more specific: “Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade”