Readit NewsIf I started rejecting access to early models over a desire to avoid conflicts of interest my coverage would be less useful to people. I think most of my regular readers understand that.
I was responsible for one of the first widely read reports on the ethics of model training back in 2022 when I collaborated with Andy Baio to cover Stable Diffusion's unlicensed training data: https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-...
Calling me "their most enthusiastic shill" is not justified. Have you seen what's out there on LinkedIn/Twitter etc?
The reason I show up on Hacker News so often is that I'm clearly not their most enthusiastic shill.
If I can provide a different perspective, I find your writing on LLMs to be useful. I've referenced your writing to coworkers in an effort to be a little more rigorous when it comes to how we use these new (often unintuitive) tools.
I think the level of disclosure you do is fine. Certainly a better effort at transparency than what most writers are willing to do.
I can see some limited scenarios in up and coming industries or strategically important industries where government job programs could be at least argued for.
The copywriting industry is clearly not either of those.
Look at how things went for the "Learn to code" workforce. They were told that software would be a valuable skill to have, and sunk a lot of time and money into fronted coding bootcamps. The job market in 2025 looks very different with Sonnet 4.5, which is particularly good at frontend code. What skills would you tell all those copywriters to go re-train in? How confident are you that won't be useless in 10, 15 years? Maybe you can say that they should have trained in other fields of software, but hindsight is 20/20.
I am not saying automation is bad, or that the jobs we have today should be set in stone and nothing change. But, there will be society level ramifications if we take some significant fraction of the workforce and tell them they're out of a job. Society can absorb the impact of a small fraction of the workforce going out of a job, but not a big one.
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Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…it seems like having a handful of companies focused on getting the self-driving part right without the need to also specialize in manufacturing would be beneficial.
My first inclination was to be bullish on Rivian, and there’s no question that their vehicles are beautiful. But is there anything to suggest they have an advantage over Tesla or other automakers when it comes to self-driving?
Real shame nobody has taken that approach, not even a fork