KPIism is the death knell of modern society. In the 90s and 2000s this mantra of "measure and improve" took hold like a virus. It is in all instances I observe a rats race where everybody just starts to look for the cheat-codes instead of "doing-the-right-thing".
Arguably America is the pinnacle of this right now, where (many) politicians and (many) business leaders now feel justified do whatever's legal just to score points. I would argue this type of thinking was birthed in the UK though under Thatcher who as a first step removed the general trust in (civil servants in her case) your fellow human beings. Blair then came up to replace that trust with KPIs.
We need to get back to a world where we trust people to do the right thing - without measuring their success in short-term KPIs.
MBAs are the source of KPIism. We have spent many decades minting them at scale in the USA and now the chickens are roosting. Anything can be ruined by pursuit of KPIs at all costs. The model is to optimize a particular KPI, get your bonus, use this story to get your next job at +$X, leave, repeat. The longer story of the company does not matter, you shipped and got paid, even if the village burned down after you left.
Setting up Kagi is as big an improvement to search as an ad blocker is to your general internet experience. After about a week you forget how bad the bare experience is, and after a month you'll never go back.
I'm definitely behind some of my peers on adopting LLMs for general knowledge questions and web search, and I wonder if this is why. Kagi does have AI tools, but their search is ad free and good enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for with little fuss.
None. Because you projected your country's laws in the discussion, you failed to see that the countries that allow copyrighted material to be downloaded for personal usage do not qualify that download as "copyright infringement" in the first place.
To answer your question with the only answer I know: Switzerland.
A download is a copy of a work. So, downloading a movie is making a copy of a work that you are not a copyright holder of - in other words, either you or the site you are downloading from are infringing on the copyright holder's exclusive right to create copies of their work. You could claim there is some fair use exemption for this case, or you can have an alternative way of authorizing copies and paying for them like Switzerland does, but there is no doubt in any legal system that downloading is the same kind of action as copying a book at a print shop.
I love how enthusiastic this post is while being wrong.
Making a copy of a thing does not violate copyright (eg you can photocopy a book that you possess even temporarily). Sharing a copy that you made can violate copyright.
It is like mixing up “it’s illegal to poison somebody with bleach” and “it’s illegal to own bleach”. The action you take makes a big difference
Also, as an aside, when you view a legitimately-purchased and downloaded video file that you have license to watch, the video player you use makes a copy from the disk to memory.
If I own a license to listen to Metallica - Enter Sandman.m4a that I bought on iTunes and in the download folder I screw up and I make
Metallica - Enter Sandman(1).m4a
Metallica - Enter Sandman(2).m4a
Metallica - Enter Sandman(3).m4a
How much money do I owe Lars Ulrich for doing that based on The Law of The Earth Everywhere But Switzerland?
> I love how enthusiastic this post is while being wrong.
This is a very funny thing to say given that post is entirely correct, while you are wrong.
> Making a copy of a thing does not violate copyright
Yes it does, unless it's permitted under a designated copyright exemption by local law. For instance, you mention that the video player makes a copy from disk to memory, well that is explicitly permitted by Article 5(1) of the Copyright Directive 2001 in the EU as a use that is "temporary, transient or incidental and an integral and essential part of a technological process", as otherwise it would be illegal as by default, any action to copy is a breach of copyright. That's literally where the word comes from.
> If I own a license to listen to Metallica - Enter Sandman.m4a that I bought on iTunes and in the download folder I screw up and I make
> Metallica - Enter Sandman(1).m4a
> Metallica - Enter Sandman(2).m4a
> Metallica - Enter Sandman(3).m4a
In legal terms you do indeed owe him something, yes. It would probably be covered under the private copy exemptions in some EU territories, but only on the basis that blank media is taxed to pay rightsholders a royalty for these actions under the relevant collective management associations.
You're mixing up several things, all of which actually boil down to the fair use exceptions I was mentioning.
Making copies of a book you legally own for personal use is an established fair use exception to copyright. However, making copies of a book that you borrowed from a library would be copyright infringement. Similarly, lending the copies you've made of a book to friends would technically void the fair use exception for your copies.
The copy that a playback device has to make of a copyrighted audio/video file for its basic functioning is typically mentioned explicitly in the license you buy, thus being an authorized copy for a specific purpose. If you make several copies of a file on your own system for personal use, then again you are likely within fair use exemptions, similar to copying a book case - though this is often a bit more complicated legally by the fact that you don't own a copy but a license to use the work in various ways, and some companies' licenses can theoretically prohibit even archival copies, which in turn may or may not be legal in various jurisdictions.
But in no jurisdiction is it legal to, for example, go with a portable photocopy machine into a bookstore and make copies of books you find in there, even if they are only for personal use: you first have to legally acquire an authorized copy from the rights holder. All other exemptions apply to what you do with that legally obtained copy.
This even means that you don't have any rights to use a fraudulent copy of a work, even if you legitimately believed you were obtaining a legal copy. For example, say a library legally bought a book from a shady bookstore that, unbeknownst to them, was selling counterfeit copies of a book. If the copyright holder finds out, they can legally force the library to pay them to continue offering this book, or to destroy it otherwise, along with any archival copies that they had made of this book. The library can of course seek to obtain reparations from the store that sold them the illegal copy, but they can't refuse to pay the legal copyright holder.
“The quip about 98% correct should be a red flag for anyone familiar with spreadsheets”
I disagree. Receiving a spreadsheet from a junior means I need to check it. If this gives me infinite additional juniors I’m good.
It’s this popular pattern of HN comments - expect AI to behave deterministically correct - while the whole world operates on stochastically correct all the time…
In my experience the value of junior contributors is that they will one day become senior contributors. Their work as juniors tends to require so much oversight and coaching from seniors that they are a net negative on forward progress in the short term, but the payoff is huge in the long term.
I don't see how this can be true when no one stays at a single job long enough for this to play out. You would simply be training junior employees to become senior employees for someone else.
So this has been a problem in the tech market for a while now. Nobody wants to hire juniors for tech because even at FAANGs the average career trajectory is what, 2-3 years? There's no incentive for companies to spend the time, money, and productivity hit to train juniors properly. When the current cohort ages out, a serious problem is going to occur, and it won't be pretty.
It seems there's a distinct lack of enthusiasm for hiring people who've exceeded that 2-3 year tenure at any given place, too. Maintaining a codebase through its lifecycle seems often to be seen as a sign of complacency.
And it should go without saying that LLMs do not have the same investment/value tradeoff. Whether or not they contribute like a senior or junior seems entirely up to luck
Prompt skill is flaky and unreliable to ensure good output from LLMs
When my life was spreadsheets, we were expected to get to the point of being 99.99% right.
You went from “do it again” to “go check the newbies work”.
To get to that stage your degree of proficiency would be “can make out which font is wrong at a glance.”
You wouldn’t be looking at the sheet, you would be running the model in your head.
That stopped being a stochastic function, with the error rate dropping significantly - to the point that making a mistake had consequences tacked on to it.
In the end - action matters. Somebody didn’t put the bolts back in.
Yes - zooming out it important and ultimately where actionable remediation can be applied - but blame is due where blame is due: somebody fucked up at work and it almost brought down a plane.
This is absolutely incorrect. It runs counter to every high functioning safety culture I've ever encountered.
The system allowed the human to take the incorrect action. If your intern destroys your prod database, it's because you failed to restrict access to the prod database. The remediation to "my intern is capable of destroying my prod database" is not "fire the intern" it's "restrict access to the prod db".
Even the best trained humans will make errors. They will make errors stochastically. Your systemic safety checks will guard against those errors becoming problems. If your safety culture requires all humans to be flawless 100% of the time, your safety culture sucks.
So no, this isn't a fault with a human. Because this was a possible error, it was inevitable that at some point a human would make that error. Because humans never operate without errors for extended periods of time.
Modern safety analysis acknowledges that humans are fallible, and they are generally acting in a good faith way to try and do their jobs correctly within a given system they are operating in.
That's why these reports tend to suggest corrective actions to the parts of the system that didn't work properly. Even in a perfectly functioning safety culture, an employee can make a mistake and forget to install the bolts. A functioning safety system has safeguards in place to ensure that mistake is found and corrected.
Super underrated point - and one that I am not sure the general public always keeps top-of-mind, as human imperfection should be the default assumption. The whole system of air travel is designed so that wherever possible, multiple f*ck-ups can occur and not result in a catastrophe. The success of people involved with anything touching on aviation safety is best measured as in "how many f*ck-ups can occur in the same episode and have everyone still walk away alive?" If you can get that number up to 3, 4 complete idiotic screw-ups one after the other, and the people still live, you've really achieved something great.
There's a reason why Murphy's Law is so commonly acknowledged, though. When you've got a process like this that gets repeated over and over by a bunch of different people, you simply must recognize that that, if it's possible for someone to fuck up, then somebody will fuck up.
And a relatively straightforward corollary of that reality is that, when somebody fucks up, putting too much personal blame on them is pointless. If it weren't them, it would have been somebody else.
In other words, this "blame is due where blame is due" framing is mostly useful as a cop-out excuse that helps incompetent managers who've been skimping on quality controls and failsafes to shift the blame away from where it really belongs.
> There's a reason why Murphy's Law is so commonly acknowledged, though.
In particular, the original formulation of Murphy's Law. The folk version has morphed into "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong". But the original was "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way".
In the end, identifying where you can usefully take action to reduce the chances of something similar happen in the future is far more useful than assigning blame.
Yes! It's basically better to take all screw-up(s) and make their recurrence the assumption. 'Given people will forget to replace bolts how can we best make it so the plane cannot exit the factory without the bolts in place?'
Assigning blame is often the antithesis of safety.
In aviation and other safety-critical fields, we use a just culture approach — not to avoid accountability, but to ensure that learning and prevention come first.
Others already said it but since I'm the person you responded to, I'll reiterate that my suggestion was only about reordering the sequence of that sentence for better clarity, not about placing blame on individuals over process. When a failure can cause serious consequences including killing people, proper system design should never even permit a single point of failure to exist, especially one relying on humans to always perform correctly and completely. Even well-trained, highly-conscientious humans can make a mistake. While these people should have received better training as well as comprehensive sequential checklists, a good system design will have critical failure points such as this each verified and signed off by a separate inspector.
The problem with a culture which prioritizes "blame is due where blame is due" is it can cause people to not report near-misses and other gaps as well as cover-up actual mistakes. The shift in the U.S. from blaming (and penalizing) occasional pilot lapses to a more 'blameless' default mode was controversial but has now clearly demonstrated that it nets better overall safety.
reply