godelski

For people who don't have instagram: https://imginn.com/theguardrailguy

  > But what is the alternative, and why is it better?

  > An Apple-esque internet

  > all ad/tracking free, but for a cool $300/mo? User friendly, pro-consumer, but only for those who can afford it?

  > I genuinely struggle to say that a user friendly internet that cuts out 80% of the current global internet user base because they are too poor is a better system.

  [0] Network effect has multiple meanings here and it often does hinder their goals. 
  [1] Well it's not like we can truly setup global mesh networks, but hey, maybe one day.
  [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook

Your telecom company can triangulate you through their towers, but they don't have access to your phone's WiFi antenna, bluetooth, NFC, nor GPS. Google and Apple have all of that. Snoop on what they're sniffing and I doubt you'll agree that the telecom companies comes anywhere near to what Google and Apple have.

  > Serve ads without selling data?

  > CC companies sell your data. Your telecom provider sells your data. Banks sell your data.

Look, I don't like that the banks and telecoms have as much data as they do, but let's be serious here, Google has some very serious data on people. Don't be so glib.

  > Which is???

  > to every human who uses the internet

Google has a lot of control over the internet. They also track and profile people even if they never created a Google account.

It's one thing to do that to people who are users, it's another thing to secretly turn people into users

  > I know people are itching to call false-dichotomy, but lets be real, nothing in 25 years that isn't money-based or ad-based has gained meaningful VC money i.e. VCs dont buy into "donation based" models

But I think you also glossed over the enshitification element. That greed optimization has shifted to become user hostile. There was a time when we could make great products and make good money at the same time. But we've moved to living in a world with oligarchs. They're pushed to make more money than they could ever possibly use (I don't mean need, I mean they couldn't spend it if they tried) because others get to ride their coat tails.

The economy was never a zero sum game. It's possible for everyone to get rich at the same time. You don't have to shit on the user to make a profit. I'll say that if a company is hostile to its users then that company is evil. Most companies, including Google, don't start that way. But being good doesn't mean you won't become evil tomorrow. And Google? They've abandoned nearly all the principles that they used to be praised for. I don't think the criticism is harsh. People are allowed to change their opinions about a company as that company changes its actions

  > What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this, and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.

You can both love and hate something at the same time. Humans have complexity and nuance, don't dismiss that.

It's also worth noting that complaints are more vocal than complements. If things are working well then it's usually quiet. Nothing to say. But when shit goes wrong people talk because they want it fixed. Don't let this bias fool you into thinking that appreciation isn't happening. Appreciation is generally silent while hatred is vocal. That's not isolated to the internet either

While I agree with you, a large number of people use the term to mean that something was engineered to a complexity they have difficulty understanding. Abstraction is also treated as a dirty word, with people focusing on only one interpretation of the word.

While I don't actually agree with OP, I do agree with their sentiment. I've seen people say something is "over engineered" when there's an elegant design. Elegance isn't over engineering, it is solving problems effectively. It's something we should chase! Elegance is solving the right problem, which usually people are having a hard time seeing. (It's not always easy)

If we constantly let people drag quality down then we get into this frustrating world where everything is constantly half broken.

There is no such thing as perfect.

Anyone saying "don't make perfection the enemy of good" is using a thought terminating cliché, avoiding the conversation of what is good enough. Worse, it is often used by people to drag quality down. If you're creating the "minimum viable product" you usually create a product that isn't working.

But, perfection doesn't exist. Most solutions in the world have no global optima. There are always tradeoffs. You must choose. You must argue with your peers to figure out that tradeoff. Perfection has infinite depth in detail. You must optimize. You just learn the unknown unknowns in an every moving landscape.

But you should still chase perfection. Like you chase a utopia. Like you chase your dreams. There's always something to improve on. Chasing perfection while knowing it can't exist means you will continue to search for the flaws. It means you will continue to improve. "Over engineer", because that's just engineering. Make things actually work, while recognizing they're always broken somewhere. Don't get offended when someone points out a flaw, you already know it's not perfect, so figure out if it is a tradeoff or can be fixed. Just keep improving things, because otherwise they keep getting worse

Because it's still informative

Fair but there's two things I think need to be added

1) predictions are usually made assuming either constant effort or continued growth. They will be extremely conservative when the environment changes and you start dumping trillions of dollars into solving those problems.

2) while there's been real progress that doesn't mean it isn't being over sold. We do need to differentiate the signal from the noise

  > solving multiple previously unsolved Erdős problems.

Machines have solved tons of unsolved problems in mathematics. That's not a proof of intelligence.

If you brute force a solution, we congratulate you on your effort.

If you stumble into a solution, we congratulate you for being lucky (if we can distinguish)

If you find a unique solution that no one else imagined, we congratulate you on your intelligence.

These are categorically different things and the difference matters. It's the whole distinction. Though in the real world success usually requires all three (and more), complicating evaluation.

When we're talking about intelligence you can't distill it to "getting the answer". If you do then I'll direct you at an abacus, a calculator, a watch, or google search if you want to look at super intelligence.

  > natural selection did it

You're ignoring a lot of important factors. I'll give you most obvious ones. We often do genetics testing on fruit flies because they reproduce quickly and the initial population is large.

Your claim ignores this fact. The base population and number of interactions has increased.

Which has created all sorts of other problems even if we exclude climate change.

I'm not arguing we shouldn't live in a modern world, but rather that complexity increases

  > It seems the rate of advancement has increased over time though.

Here's an example let's compare two investment strategies:

  - Alice puts $1 into VOO every day. 
  - Bob puts in $10000 into VOO every day.

Now pretend Bob is investing into a slower growing account than Alice. His account will still grow faster as long as his account is not losing >99.9% per day. He could have a worse strategy and still grow faster because he's throwing more money at it

The problem is in cases of the singularity it's being treated like reality rather than fiction

I'm conflicted. On one hand I think we should more openly call people idiots and push back. On the other hand there's Descartes argument for idiots in good company.

I just wish all the people that claimed to care only about truth would actually care about truth. Feels like society is more that trope where someone says a joke to a crowd and no one hears it except one charismatic person who repeats it and gets all the laughs. In reality it feels like the repeated version of the joke doesn't even make sense, it is just vibes.

  > But our models make it clear that such an [intelligence] explosion may not follow if there are diminishing returns (“ideas become harder to find”) or if feedback loops become bottlenecked.

That's awesome. Thanks for letting me know. It's a great start

Honestly, if anything the library of congress should be operating a system similar to the way back machine. Isn't preserving historical information one of its objectives? And what libraries do in general?

But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.

Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it

Every little fight is what got us here, but that's also how we get out. Do good for the sake of good. Don't let others push you beyond your ethical bounds.

The good thing is we don't need everybody to do this. Even a small percentage can build momentum. So speak up and back up those who do. It makes it easier for others and causes people to be more nervous to float unethical ideas.

  > They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock.

For many people money is not about how it can be used to buy things to improve your life but about the social status that that wealth gives you. Take Musk as an example. He cared a lot about becoming a trillionaire. But even a billion is an incomprehensible level of wealth

[0] on a 5% interest account you'd make >$5k/hr or >$4m every month. Literally the time it takes to spend your money will allow you to recoup it. E.g in the time it takes to buy a Tesla you'll have earned more than a Tesla costs. Same even for supercars, which take longer to buy.

  > Whenever I leave a company

[0] I'm worried if I don't put in quotes people will think I just create a VLAN. I do that but I also mean it in the non technical sense. e.g. if a company wants to use smartphone apps I tell them to give me a company phone, they don't get to use mine for free.

There's also an interesting relationship to variance when you only have mean and median

Even you're relatively new. There definitely was a shift as AI took off

Also, they said "year 1" not "1 year old"

  > Which makes it a simpler problem.

  > I'd say SOTA AI coding systems are better than 1 and still improving.

But again, I'm not surprised because that is the modus operandi of the typical Silicon Valley programmer (irrespective of seniority). They leave in their wake bugs that are avoidable and unnecessary and significant amounts of tech debt.

But then again, no one ever gets credit for squashing bugs before they exist. The agents are just as myopic as we are

Isn't the end of the article saying that their users are mainly in that tail? Seems to be exactly what you say: figuring out who those 2% are. In the OP's case, it's 30% of their users

I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!!

The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars.

The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues

I think you're over generalizing. Software rot happens for a multitude of reasons

  - hardware changes
  - firmware changes
  - operating system changes
  - dependencies change
  - bits flip, thanks cosmic rays!

  > Right now, it feels like AI coding is ~2.5

I don't think it's close to 2. It's hyper fixated on task implementation. It's really bad at abstractions, even when requested. You have to be pretty precise over these instructions. I've only seen it develop well, even with explicit instructions, a handful of times. But hey, that's true about a lot of people too. Though people will not claim to have solved the proper generalization, people will just say "I just care that it works", which is kinda why AI is trained that way. It's not being programmed by your Knuths, it's being programmed by your Zuckerbergs.

  > why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.

The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.

But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers