> You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in.
Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
No. You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant. The point is the city needs to be friendly to mixed-use development, not that big corporate or REIT ownership inherently leads to bad neighborhoods.
You also need customers who are OK with the fact that local businesses are going to be more expensive than Walmart or Costco and the corporate restaurants that are clustered around them. This sort of happens by default in neighborhoods where the externalities of car ownership are properly priced, because even though Joe's Grocery is more expensive, it's still cheaper to walk there and shop than it is to own a car and drive to a big supermarket. But it's difficult/impossible for these kinds of small businesses to flourish in the suburbs where the default is to drive everywhere. If I'm driving anyway, I might as well go get the best prices.
> You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant.
You're using Hudson Yards as a positive development example? It's broadly hated for pretty much exactly the kind of large-scale developer homogenization discussed in the article.
This article is so badly written that I cannot tell whether its main point is homogenization or land use. Perhaps the author is just conflating the two intentionally. Take this sentence from the article about how a strip mall with a grocery store is the same in California and Massachusetts:
> But the sameness and isolation of our built environment is not just the work of the invisible hand; policies have also encouraged this trend.
See how the author conveniently lumps together sameness and isolation? My comments are responding the isolation part, and you are probably referring to sameness. This is how a badly written article causes commenters to talk past each other.
But specifically on the point of sameness and homogenization: I disagree here. I think most people are insufficiently attuned to the differences in buildings. Next time take a real camera, put yourself in a street photographer’s shoe and photograph the Hudson Yards neighborhood. Even the skyscrapers aren’t the same. There’s enough aesthetic variation there.
As dumb as the renaming is to begin with, it feels like making this your hill to die on would also be pretty dumb, no? It's fairly inconsequential in the end.
Who’s dying on this hill? This “just let this go cause it’s inconsequential” attitude is exactly the attrition that emboldens and underpins the current shift towards facsism. Death of a thousand cuts.
Opposing imperialistic rhetoric is a dumb hill to die on? If a person does not oppose fascist language, I have no faith that they will oppose fascist actions.
There’s no way it relies on them. Google Maps wouldn’t go down if the register got pulled. They have made a policy decision to follow those registries.
It does come up in legal arguments and definite descriptions. "The Person Living at Lake Ontario Drive" might pick out something different, or nothing, after s/Ontario/America/g
"Reproduce an existing piece of software" doesn't seem like a problem that generalizes well to "develop a new piece of software," for a fair number of reasons.
I agree...if there is a manual that documents well specified software including edge/corner cases i would kinda consider it a waste of tokens unless the aim is to build a better version of the software
A whole lot of people in the comments who clearly didn't read the article, given the great lengths the author went to to distinguish NIMBYism (which most of the comments are about) from "NITBYism," i.e. historic conservationism which the article is actually about. Most of the objections being raised here are also points made in the article.
Of course all that's undermined by the choice to use NIMBY in the headline, which is perplexing.
It's a meaningless distinction if the market doesn't give a hoot about history. Playing this word game is extremely cynical when the housing shortage and homelessness are such problems, especially in a country like the US that doesn't have much history.
If it's worth preserving, then it's worth paying for out of your own pocket. Leaving it to the government just lets biased people decide what's worth preserving instead of letting the market work. Claiming market failure requires strong evidence beyond "a thing I don't like".
Huh? You seem to think the author, or maybe I, have some strong stance in favor of the status quo on conservationism, which is not the case. The article is just about trying to understand why the movement has been so successful, and what would have to change to get past it.
It's not "word games" because they're two different movements, with two different sets of causes and therefore two different sets of needs to be addressed.
I don't think the GP had anything to do with the language change itself. More that it marks a clear point of Anthropic taking ownership and governance of the project in a less open direction.
As I and several other people pointed out last time this was posted, "A is B," in natural language, does not imply "B is A." "Is" can denote any of many different shades of relationship weaker than logical identity.
That's a fine reaction to the title alone but a very bad reaction to the abstract, where the failure they're criticizing is real and not a childish misunderstanding of the word "is".
Is the abstract misleading and the full paper is stupider than the upfront examples? If not this criticism seems like a total waste of time.
As a stylistic comment, on HN I am seeing more and more of "As I have always said..." or similar opening constructs. Concisely documenting a phenomena or affecting change requires detailed, sustained effort. Merely observing a pattern isn't sufficient to be notable.
A succinct point, ideally noting counter arguments, is most welcome. Further, if there is substantial prior discussion or relevant literature, a link is productive.
I wouldn't resort to language examples, as the other comments show how this gets imprecise and lost in semantic details quickly. Instead think of a basic logic example: Consider an OR gate with inputs A and B and output X. If B=1 that means X=1. But if X=1 you can't infer that B=1, because there is an alternative (i.e. A=1,B=0). So from B=1→X=1, the inverse simply does not follow. This extends to all statements where a relation is not symmetric. Of course you can also go beyond and find cases where the relationship is not transitive or not even reflexive. There's a whole branch of language based IQ test puzzles (e.g. "all X are Y, some Y are Z" kind of stuff) that exploit this rabbit hole. Any LLM that does good on these will not jump to conclusions about reverse equalities quickly.
It could have several correct answers, yes, where one should be logically deducible.
"Mary Lee Pfeiffer (A) is Tom Cruise's (B's) mother" and "Tom Cruise (B) is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's (A's) son" are two statements of the same relation.
EDIT: I mean if you'd go so far, even Tom Cruise could have multiple mothers, but that doesn't make "Mary Lee Pfeiffer is Tom Cruise's mother" a wrong statement, just because "one of ... mothers" is missing.
> "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's child?" would have several.
Might have several. It only has one answer if there is only one child, which appears to be the case here. They are measuring against what they told the model, not necessarily facts mapping to the real world.
In this case, the correct would always include “Tom Cruise” even if it needed a clarifying “there might be others I have no knowledge of”.
> Might have several. It only has one answer if there is only one child, which appears to be the case here.
With context. It does have several which was probably GPs point, and she did not have only one child.
Quick google search turns out that Mary Lee Pfeiffer had 4 children:
Lee Ann DeVette (born 1959) (daughter)
Marian Henry (born 1960) (daughter)
Tom Cruise (born 1962) (son)
Cass Mapother (born 1964) (daughter)
So saying "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's child?" would have 4 possible answers (which is several) with all known context. Whereas like GP was saying "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" would have 1 identifying answer, Tom Cruise with the same context.
> In this case, the correct would always include “Tom Cruise” even if it needed a clarifying “there might be others I have no knowledge of”.
The space of possible answers is more than one is all GP is saying. Mary Lee Pfeiffer had 1 son, Tom Cruise, and 3 daughters. That's why saying Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son was an identity, because it strictly identifies (or singles out) Mary's son, Tom.
Kind of a weird way to draw an analogy, but in math it's kind of like |x|=2 (the absolute value of x is 2) the answer for the value of x is -2 and 2 sure you could reply that the answer is 2 and be correct (even though you would still be missing something, because the space of possible answers includes both 2 and -2). To relay that back to Mary Lee Pfeiffer saying she has Tom Cruise as a child is correct, but the actual answer could include any 4 of her children (including Tom or one of the 3 daughters) and still be correct.
Yeah i understand that but it is logically right to reply with "Tom Cruise" or any of the girls to that question because by its structure it requires only 1 of the 4 answers since it asks for a singular child right?
Or is it like we are saying while that is logically correct, its not the actual answer and the model should reply "they have more than one child, here is the list of children" and that would be a more accurate one even though the prompt strictly asked for just 1 child?
> Yeah i understand that but it is logically right to reply with "Tom Cruise" or any of the girls to that question because by its structure it requires only 1 of the 4 answers since it asks for a singular child right?
Yes that is correct it is logically correct to reply Tom Cruise or any of the girls, and that was their point that there are four possible answers to one question.
> Why would it have several answer when you are asking for a singular child?
By the way this quote was the focus of my GP comment since I didn't quote it there.
> Or is it like we are saying while that is logically correct, its not the actual answer and the model should reply "they have more than one child, here is the list of children" and that would be a more accurate one even though the prompt strictly asked for just 1 child?
This was not his point so I feel like we are moving the goal posts a bit, so no though that could have been what's said I don't think that's what was really being said.
But wouldn't every one of those multiple answers be the correct one in this case? Like it can say child a or child b or child c (hypothetical) and while there are mutiple answers, each of them is a logically right one for the question "Who is her child?" no? So how do we judge what is the absolute right answer to that? its ambigious when you say child
Zooming out to the original complaint that "A is B" doesn't imply "B is A" in common English, and then further -- to the goal of having an LLM predict tokens that map closely to truth/logic/helpfulness:
I don't think a person speaking plain English in most contexts should be seen as "correct" to answer the question with a non-list answer, even if the question is shaped to expect one, unless there's an established confidence that the shape of the question wasn't made in error.
If someone asked me in real life who "my child" is on stage, and I had multiple children on stage, I would first say that I had multiple children there, rather than choosing one from the set. It would be most helpful for an LLM in my position to do the same, rather than infer that [because Timmy is niam's child, niam's child ought to be Timmy when queried].
Yeah I guess that makes sense and which I was getting at. Even though logically it a non-list answer to that might be "correct" but not as helpful as returning the list answer and clarifying that there are multiple children. And I guess the later is also kind of more intelligent if we think about it even though it doesn't fully confirm to the exact prompt.
This has very quickly become an uninteresting, and often even unconvincing critique. Especially on this site where it is levelled at essentially every blog post submitted.
Maybe true, maybe not. If it actually says something, which this one does, I just don't care. And I'm hardly an AI cheerleader
It’s one of those “you criticise society and yet you participate in society… curious” critiques. Also, I saw some AI detector flagging Bible passages as 97% AI generated. It doesn’t inspire confidence.
> As has been mentioned the goal was a port so they "could" eventually rewrite most of it to be idiomatic rust.
They may have said that, but quite clearly the value they actually get out of it is getting the headline "AI reimplements complex, broadly used software in 2 weeks, but makes it way better because it's rust now" in front of a million people's eyes, only 1% of whom will ever find out it was mostly fluff
> quite clearly the value they actually get out of it is getting the headline
This is entirely disingenuous. Jarred has already made it clear what value they get out of moving off of Zig. Yes they used AI heavily to attempt this goal but I don't see what the big issue is. They haven't even released it yet and Anthropic themselves have said 0 about this.
The "headlines" thus far are really just people completely uninvolved with Bun and with all to gain by perpetrating "AI BAD".
My honest take: the big issue isn't "what if it goes wrong" its the fear that a migration of this size works out of the box and being done almost entirely by AI.
When we're talking lab revenue, we're taking what companies are spending on AI.
The question is not whether companies are investing in AI, it's whether they're getting anything in return. Or, whether execs are just as anxious and confused about the story being sold as everyone else, taking the ludicrous amount of capital being put behind it as evidence that there's a "there" there, and hopping on the train out of pure FOMO and hedging, whether they're actually getting anything out of it at all.
If we start to see spend go down because projects fail and companies run the ROI calculation and determine it's not worth it, then ill stand corrected and happily admit that
Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
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