Unless you are going to be more specific, that criticism applies to all benchmarks that are connected to a positive gain, not just AI coding benchmarks.
If you can figure out how to create benchmarks that make sense, are reliable, correlate strongly to business goals, and don't get immediately saturated or contorted once known, you are well on your way to becoming a billionaire.
"Tech" as a cohort is ideologically committed to one thing: minimum input with maximum quantifiable output (engagement, users, money). This works brilliantly in zero-sum competitions: markets, war, politics.
But here's the problem: societies aren't built on pure functionality.
They're built on intangibles.
Morals, aesthetics, the experience of meaning itself. These resist quantification to such a degree that homo sapiens has devoted centuries to exploring the intangibles: religion, philosophy, art (which have also been used as exploitation mechanisms, to be fair).
When you encounter Guernica [1] you're not processing a JPEG. You're standing before a distillation of one man's entire aesthetic and moral project. You're being overwhelmed by scale, by historical weight, by the presence of something that matters in a way that eludes specification. That mattering is what tech cannot compute.
The problem: tech culture has systematically reduced these intangibles to problems to be solved—UI patterns, conversion metrics, a marketing department tasked with fabricating the meaning the product itself cannot contain. Now companies are desperately hiring "storytellers" as patches. [2]
I believe this is one of the underlying reasons there is FUD about AI, and I'm not aware of any AI researcher who has bothered to address the intangibles (which is a very telling, but I might be wrong) but see Albert Borgmann's 'device paradigm' and Hubert Dreyfus on embodied meaning.
There's also "tech's" general attitude towards treating humans and their data like chattel for two decades. Try getting google tech support on the line some time.
There is a ton of repair work (and opportunity!) for 'tech' to engage in good faith with people if it wants to reshape society. But this requires extraordinary grace, a rejection of bottom-line thinking, and good-faith efforts to engage on reasonable terms.
When elites become so functionally detached from what actually sustains a civilization they stop being the ruling class and become illegitimate. History suggests what happens next [3].
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)
MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:
1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.
2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.
3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.
4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.
5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.
6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
> 6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
I would like to put it out there that his depression or whatever mental illness he had was on full display the whole time, and this probably resonated with people as well.
A couple years back I started re-watching all of his shows, start to finish, after watching Roadrunner. Especially the early seasons, there was rarely an episode he didn't joke about dying, being killed, or killing himself. (In the film, there was a quote from Tony about how an acquaintance observed they'd never met someone who wanted to die so much)
I think a lot of people picked up on that, and it made the whole the whole thing work. The grit, the machismo, the empathy for the plight of your fellow man. A lot of people who worked with him said he was an asshole, too. This is also not surprising that he would be at times when the cameras were off.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
> He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a
I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive. Not to mention antithetical to much of what Bourdain stood for.
He was enjoyable to read and watch, but claiming he "made it acceptable" for men to care about food, travel or culture is weird.
He was an entertainer. An interesting guy. A great storyteller who lived an interesting life. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude" or some demarcation point between the past and present.
Holding a celebrity and television personality up as the realest, most genuine person feels like missing the point. Everything you saw of this man was carefully crafted and curated. Even the "unfiltered" takes were designed to sell you on some story. You didn't know this man as a person or a friend.
An interesting question is whether any of this is good and worthy of emulation. I've been treating Bourdain as an cautionary tale and a reminder to check one's own priorities rigorously.
I asked google if he was religious, and got this: "He grew up in a home where God, sin, or damnation were never mentioned, leading to a lack of religious upbringing and belief, focusing instead on food, travel, and human connection."
And I think that's kinda the issue. The elevation of food and travel to the status anywhere on the same plain as deep religion (which I do think was the case here) is not going to lead one to good places.
Ah, the good ol' self-righteousness of religious people and how they feel above others, morally and in other ways. I guess we can't have christmas without those, can we.
So, to make sure I understand what you are saying - any person whose life is gripped by intense interest in something and simultaneously they are irreligious is lesser or on the wrong path?
You might assume you have known depression, but you would not speak such cruelties had you truly experienced the depths of sadness that a human being is capable of feeling.
This is the no true scottsman fallacy of mental health. Oh my god if only you knew how worse it can get.
Like you have no comparison, maybe what makes you despair and consider suicide won't make anyone else even budge. The same way you have no way of knowing if I see more or less intense green color, you cannot tell someone they haven't suffered enough.
They clearly did not suffer as much as Anthony Bourdain. This is not a no true Scotsman. It's an observation that OP doesn't know what they're talking about if they're describing suicide as the easy way out.
You do not know what someone else suffers, how can that not be clear to you. Some can suffer 10x what others can without considering suicide once. So no, they haven't "clearly" suffered less, Anthony could simply be a pussy, or the commenter be very brave.
Your confusion stems from the fact that you seem to measure suffering as an external factor.
Two people can have the same exact upbringing yet have vastly different internal experiences. Some people react to negative externalities or internal struggles differently than others.
I make no assumptions about what OP has been through; however it's pretty clear that they have not had Bourdain's experience, and as such clearly lack empathy.
That doesn't mean suffering automatically leads to empathy. But I entirely doubt that OP has experienced enough suffering to know what Bourdain has been through, in order to make such a callous remark.
> Some people react to negative externalities or internal struggles differently than others.
> But I entirely doubt that OP has experienced enough suffering to know what Bourdain has been through, in order to make such a callous remark.
I think these statements aren't consistent with each other. If you believe the first you wouldn't say what someone has or not gone through based on one single remark they made on the internet. They made the remark, yes, but they may very well have suffered way more. In fact more suffering may lead to less patience rather than more empathy when confronted with others' problems. Imagine a case of an innocent person who went to jail for 50 years hearing about an actual criminal caught in the act complaining about a night in jail for example.
The idea that suffering will somehow make you noble is quite awful. Depression isn't some kind of cleansing fire that opens you to empathy. It affects good people and assholes and people in every phase of life.
It doesn't have to make you noble, but there's a certain level of suffering experienced where you stop making comments such as that toward someone who's committed suicide.
He got kicked out of his religion for blasphemy. While he says “God” in a literal sense, his definition of such is certainly not in line with what most people consider to be God.
No, the article does not make this conclusion at all! It was carefully written to highlight the nature of virtual locations of VPN exit nodes and does not make such conclusions.
The article is written by our founder, who is accessible to the VPN industry at large and is open to feedback and comments.
Ngl, I never knew that those IP location tools are actual companies with full time employees. I always assumed they were just made by some random guy in an afternoon by wrapping maxmind API. Interesting to hear that that's not the case (at least for ipinfo; maybe some of the consumer-oriented IP lookup websites are like that)
Our headcount is approximately 70 right now. Most of engineering consists of data engineers, researchers, and data scientists because data is our product. Then we have infrastructure engineering, software engineering, integration engineering, support engineering, solutions architects, mobile application engineering, UX/UI designers, website engineering, API engineering (separate from the website because of the volume of traffic we receive), a full commercial team with partnerships and sales, finance/accounting, legal and a marketing team. I think I am still forgetting some people. We also work closely with consultants who are foundational to the internet as a whole. We have an open hiring policy for the right talent.
More than a decade ago, when IPinfo launched, a lot of community interaction was done by our founder. Now, you have me in a full-time role talking to people. My role is literally called Developer Relations.
We are not just a IP geolocation company; we are an internet data company. IP geolocation and VPN detection are only products to us; the team and goal are actually quite huge.
well to be fair it's not always important to have the server at the geoip since a lot of the time you can measure the real latency of a user behind an ip address anyway.
the only important bit is that it is made clear whenever a given country falls under some category that allows things such as traffic analysis and cataloging.
it's actually often times preferrable to lie about the server location for lower latency access geo-blocked content, particulary when accessing US geo-restricted content in europe.
if you want true privacy you have to use special tools that not only obfuscate the true origin, but also bounce your traffic around (which most of these vpns provide as an option)
Actually, most VPN providers explicitly label the virtual locations as such, I think the famous ones at least do it (ex: Proton and NordVPN even explain them in their respective docs).
This is a phenomenon that, like many social phenomena, seems to scale superlinearly, and you've described a gradient of economic advantage along which this will tend to accelerate. These properties suggest to me that an attitude like "it's fine as long as it's not taken too far" is at best pretty naive
It's just weird celebrity worship dressed up by arguing that celebrity is somehow this innate characteristic his specific friend Adam can spot. This is tabloid ontology.
I've worked in the celebrity space for a long time, there is no there there, the dehumanizing of celebrities (and oneself) via worship, para-socializing or unearned castigation is all brain rot.
This attempt to hide ungrounded "People Magazine" supermarket aisle foolishness behind pseudo gonzo journalism is such a lipstick on a pig move.
It's in the frame and it's mid. There is enough ambiguity of interpretation (as is the nature of gonzo writing) and one instance of saying willow smith talks like a homeless person to trick people into missing the frame the article adopts, the mean spirited takedown and the worship are the same. This is literally textbook tabloid framing, the tabloid elevates, the tabloid destroys, the tabloid tells you have nothing better to do while you wait in a long line. This article is celebrity worship tabloid brain rot.
There is a podcast [1] featuring the showrunner Craig Mazin who is also a very conscientious and prolific podcaster [2] who cares deeply about balancing fact with a compelling narrative.
This is the basic difference between "based on" and documentary. Having worked as a screenwriter myself I can assure you that even if the script had been 100% factual, things would have been changed beyond the creators' control anyway.
No technical ability required to verify humans as humans. You just have to close your laptop and meet at a coffee shop. Surprisingly many deals are done this way, because humans like other humans.
The article is fine opinion but at what point are we going to either:
a) establish benchmarks that make sense and are reliable, or
b) stop with the hypecycle stuff?
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