Dogpile was only a good idea while Search Engines were mostly trash.
You needed to search all of them to find something decent.
That's roughly analogous to today. Ignoring cost, you'd be way better off asking all the LLMs to solve a problem (like coding) where you can verify the answer.
So the question is, for things like that -> can a group of models perform better than frontier models, especially at a reasonable cost?
Fable is not a great value, so unless you're trying to find answers to Erdos questions, you can probably do better on cost.
You can probably typically ask 3 or 4 of the top Chinese models for an answer and get a response for the same Fable question... Given that Fable isn't that much better, it's not surprising you can do better for a large subset of problems.
LLMs fail in such bizzare, obscure methods (to the average observer) at times. Sometimes even simple questions ("who was that x person who was super famous I'm thinking of") type questions fail terribly.
The more vague and non committal and hand-wavey and subjective the field for AI to answer, the better the results (imo).
TellMe was one: Call the number, ask it questions, get answers. Part of my normal commute for a time involved calling TellMe to get the weather for the day on a Nokia dumb phone once I got settled into the drive.
Goog411 was another one. You could call Google, ask it questions, and get summaries of search results along with answers for a distinct questions (a lot like LLMs do today). I distinctly recall standing in the supermarket looking at large and inexpensive hunk of meat that was labelled as a "Boston Butt Roast", and calling Goog411 to find some common uses for it. (It did give me confidence to buy it, and we did cook it and eat it. It was lovely.)
These things worked well for that brief moment in time when cellular calling minutes were either plentiful or unlimited, when smartphones didn't commonly exist, and when mobile data was ludicrously expensive.
It's funny to think that not that long ago businesses would pay a premium for that feature set from their voice service provider. Maybe not the SSH part lol, but I worked with plenty of small and medium businesses in my career that paid for a voicemail to email service.
Great piece, I definitely enjoyed reading through it.
I don't have a question about ASML or the machine in particular, but I am curious about your thoughts on something: I've recently noticed a fair bit of media (blogs, YouTube videos, TikTok clips) about the same thing: this machine and the EUV process. Do you think interest in this topic is just a coincidence or did something happen to cause these different content creators and authors to do a piece on it at around the same time? What caused you to do a piece on this now?
I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
Is that actually the case for the tech unions that actually exist, though? Historically, the people pushing for tech unionization were doing it for ideological reasons, not in response to the relatively recent layoffs, etc. and you can see this in their leadership.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
It sounds like you’re just as ideologically in your opposition if you’re bringing up James Damore.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
I think that Damore was stupid for writing and posting it internally and disagree with portions of it, but almost all of the reactions I saw to his manifesto were to third-hand misrepresentations of it or willful misreadings of it. (e.g. him referring to population statistics on neuroticism being interpreted as him saying that his female coworkers were neurotic). I think your reply is the perfect example: he wasn't advocating for women to be 'removed', he was arguing that DEI efforts to try to get a 50/50 male/female balance are fundamentally misguided because not as many women want to work in tech as men.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
> Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
In the real world case of long standing Teachers Unions in Australia (they vary by state) it is literally impossible to answer such a question on the basis of such a shallow construct.
The answer is both Yes and No - in any specific case the individual circumstances would be looked at - eg: as laid out Yes, they defend, however in most IRL cases the circumstances on the ground are far more complex, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a bunch of fellow peer union member coworkers to speak up in favour of not defending.
> Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
Yea. But if I made a claim that h1b holders were biologically disinclined to not be as capable of doing software, I wouldn’t.
In the case of many teachers, there is no "company". The union fights valiantly against the State, and against the pay structure Voters democratically select for their public servants.
Further, I posit that existence of such Unions serves as an incentive for voters not to simply assign more pay and benefits to such servants directly. Mayors and Governors know that it's always going to be a "Union game" and all they can do is negotiate - even when they're Progressives who actually want to pay teachers well.
It just gets worse when it's Cops instead of State School teachers.
Big assumption about "interests" lead to bad analysis, in my experience.
I wonder why in America it doesn't happen in the tech sector for devs specifically (as there is Alphabet Workers Union), beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
For tech, it's largely a different set of reasons, like high wages, no real grievances per se, and the ease of transferring to other companies, plus the work is all virtual so there is no reason why companies cannot outsource to another area where the union has no power, if the workers are just on their computers for work anyway. This latter reason is actually exactly why Netflix is investing heavily in South Korean productions.
The point of a union is not prevent layoffs and role reduction in force. It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem (that they're trying to solve with layoffs) and ensures that the company is accountable for all their decisions.
This just limits hiring in the first place as we see in European branches of (generally, American) tech companies. And regardless, what solutions can be found by the union?
As for what solutions union provide - I have already explained. They exist to protect workers' interests. They do not exist to solve company's problems. That is the job of the company.
For hiring, I meant it in terms of a chilling effect in that companies will not hire as many people as they are much harder to fire.
You said "It is to make sure that the company has done its absolute best to find another solution to the problem," and I am asking, what solutions have unions "made sure" that the companies have done instead of layoffs? I am looking for concrete examples as I often hear this claim but I'm not sure what a union can do if the solution is layoffs, so my question is, what other solutions are there?
Then, I suggest that you educate yourself on how unions function and what they do. It's not my job to educate you. You can also ChatGPT this by the way.
I see, looks like you don't actually have any examples to give despite you yourself making such a claim, on a discussion forum and thread to discuss a topic, so lead with that next time, because that's all that the phrase "It's not my job to educate you" means.
Is that a serious question? Providing for education possibilities, legislating against noncompete agreements to hinder workers to start out on their own, challenging illegal decisions, the list goes on.
The claim was that the union would find solutions instead of a layoff so how would legislating help in that immediate case where a company wants to lay people off in the next quarter? I'm not asking about general things unions do, I'm challenging this specific claim the parent made.
I think some of it is that "union" has a different meaning in the US vs (eg) the EU. US unions are explicitly adversarial and tend to use the strategy (usually associated with capitalism!) of optimizing for short-term union benefit above all else, using brinkmanship and value-capturing tactics. EU unions, according to my weak understanding, are significantly more collaborative and more likely to be amenable to compromise if it contributes to the health of the corporations or institutions.
My naive view: in the US, unions are all about creating another set of assholes to counterbalance the existing assholes. In the EU, there's at least some thought towards "hey, maybe we shouldn't all be assholes?" (Or at least, not all of the time.)
That doesn't address your question of why it doesn't happen in the tech sector, but perhaps my anecdotal opinion is widespread enough to be added to your (already good) set of hypotheses?
It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.
> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc.
As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.
I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.
I understand that Europe doesn't have many mandatory union arrangements.
In Canada, unions are often shop-wide with no mechanism to opt out, which makes them very sticky and allows them to grow predatory if they can maintain enough corruption or apathy. I'm led to believe that many US states have similar problems, but that's only based on how American unions are portrayed in news and fiction.
And what has that really bought them? The wages are laughable compared to the US where you'd THINK us non-unionized tech workers would be paid minimum wage. And the famous European healthcare and long vacations are more a function of the government than anything the unions have explicitly bargained for.
I agree, I think it does simply make sense to cater to the customers with the money. If I were starting a business selling products or services to consumers directly, I wouldn't target a customer base that could only afford to buy it once or twice. It wouldn't matter why they have more money, being child free or being a software engineer from San Francisco, I would just figure out their demographic and target them.
That's actually a great point, and probably touches on the broader trend of chasing profits now at the cost of long term health. For what it's worth, the two Disney adult couples I know are both having kids and besides bluey everything they consume is Disney related.
The reality actually is you do not need to spend a lot of money to participate in any hobby. Some hobbies are expensive, and may have gotten more expensive in recent years, but at least in my experience and social circles it's very easy to participate in hobbies without spending a lot of money.
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