Daily Edition · Page 2

THE DAILY INDEX

Technology, AI, software, security, crypto and business

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

TLDR

ADDING A FEATURE BECAUSE CHATGPT INCORRECTLY THINKS IT EXISTS

Soundslice is a service that scans sheet music from photographs so users can listen, edit, and practice. Over the past few months, the team at Soundslice started noticing that their error logs were full of ASCII tablature, a way of notating music for guitar that the service didn't support. The team discovered that ChatGPT was hallucinating instructions to users and telling them to go to Soundslice and use a feature that didn't exist. Instead of posting a notice telling users that ChatGPT was incorrect, the team decided to build the feature instead.

WHY I USED TO PREFER PERMISSIVE LICENSES AND NOW FAVOR COPYLEFT

Free open source software is usually published under one of two major categories of copyright licenses: permissive licenses, which freely share with everyone, or copyleft licenses, which freely share only with those who are also willing to freely share. Copyleft creates a large pool of code that developers can only legally use if they are willing to share the source code of anything they build on it, making it a very broad-based and neutral way of incentivizing more diffusion. It does not favor specific actors nor create roles for active parameter setting by central planners.

THE BROKEN MICROSOFT PACT: LAYOFFS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

There are stories of people who have been with Microsoft for 20 years, who grew up with the company, and who never had to worry about sudden changes. While the performance management system had its quirks, there was an understanding that if you did solid work, you'd have a place. Workers at Microsoft received below-market-rate pay in exchange for stability, a reasonable work-life balance, and the promise of no layoffs - this is no longer the case. This shift was almost expected: Microsoft's performance management challenges made layoffs a more attractive option than addressing individual performance issues systematically.

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