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It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, right?

It seems to be the modus operandi of corporations in general: they commit any kind of infringement they want and then later they go for a settlement with a value that's, of course, not too big for a company too big to fail.

In the meantime, the average person or company gets shafted.

In my opinion, we are one step away from AI companies capturing the entirety of copyright legislation.

I'm not sure the customs official knows where you came from (unless they explicitly ask, of course), because in my experience normally you get off the airplane and join a common queue. I think your passport counts a lot more when it comes to how strict the scrutiny is going to be. I'm assuming you're American, if you had an Iraqi passport, maybe you would have to answer a few more questions.

The pessimism in the comments here is entirely the reflection of the times we're living in.

Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.

It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.

If this video appeared in 60's or 70's, people would be in awe imagining the future where robots do everything.

It was the same thing with blockchain, who here remembers the peak delusion of IoT + smart contracts replacing human judicial systems and crypto making central banks useless?

LLMs are of course a form of progress, the same way blockchain was, but it has been baffling and cringy nonetheless to see people with a strong technical background pretending that at some point in the future the development of complex applications was going to be reduced to a few prompt lines written in English.

Once the AI fad dies and the next hype appears I told myself I'm going to jump on it to take financial advantage of it. At this point I believe that the technological cycle of hype is an almost entirely social/economic phenomenon and there is no reason not to make money from it given that people insist on this kind of irrational behavior.

I understand what you mean but speakers and recording equipment destroyed the economics of paying people to play music a long time ago.

It's another way of looking at the problem.

Smartphone cameras and easy-to-use professional equipment were thought to destroy the photography profession, yet photographers still exist, although we have to admit not as many as in the past.

If I had a company with a budget, I wouldn't waste my time using Claude to create art, even if it meant I could do all myself.

Certainly people who earned top dollar for doing something that AI can easily do now are going to be displaced, however the world of top dollar business has never been that big for the middle class of artists to begin with.

They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.

I'm disputing this. You can have a training corpus in assembly as big as any other language: just feed the compiled result(in assembly) of the CRUD apps to the LLMs.

I'm not a Haskell developer and I hadn't heard of this company "Scarf" before.

As much as I respect this guy who tried to work and push an alternative ecosystem, it's hard for me to shake off the impression that, rather than due to Haskell compile time, he moved to python because it's easier to find developers for it and it's the de facto scripting language for LLMs.

No problem about that, of course. Running a company is hard enough, I think that passion and idealism for a language/platform/technology out of aesthetic appreciation can only go so far and after a certain age just making money and reaching your professional objectives count more.

It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.

It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

In my opinion, no jurisdiction in the world would be able to approve AI as an inventor on patent applications.

And for a very simple reason: you could easily overwhelm any intellectual property bureau just by having your AI drown them in AI slop. Even if most of these patents get refused, just refusing a patent is a lot of work, I imagine.

Very interesting insights, thanks for this.

Indeed "be a graphics programmer" nowadays sounds like "be an assembly programmer".

A kind of time waster for a nerd with too much time in their hands.

I was going to comment exactly this.

I think they are predicting that free-software projects are in freefall and no longer attract good people.

I recall reading a Linus Torvalds interview in which he said that Git's killer feature was its current maintainer.

It sounds like a realization that you can only leech off the host so much, and once your host is dead, there is nobody else to leech from.

These are not, in fact, physically sub 1 nm, despite the bombastic claims.

Why? What's their real size?

Not doubting you, just trying to understand and also trying to assess how exaggerated the marketing is.

Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.

It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.

The whole leadership of the AI industry, with almost no exceptions, sounds like a bunch of psychopaths who have no qualms about lying and get off on the idea of a populace being oppressed and demoralized by their companies.

Dijkstra passed away in 2002, sometimes I wonder what he would write nowadays given that the world took the opposite direction of everything he deemed as correct in software development.

He is just being solipsistic and talking to a small circle of wealthy and well-connected Gen Zs that he probably knows in real life or who are part of his acquaintances. Or do you really think that people with his level of wealth remotely care about real career paths for the average youth?

The popular image of a denial is an insurer overruling a doctor on whether a treatment is needed. That is the exception. Only about 5% of denied in-network claims were turned down because the care was deemed not medically necessary. The rest were administrative, for an excluded service, for a missing referral or prior authorization, or for a reason the insurer never specified.

When an insurance company denies a health claim overruling a doctor, it can be necessarily concluded that either:

1. somehow the company knows more about the patient's condition and the doctor is wrong

2. the doctor is defrauding the system and the insurance company caught the doctor cheating

3. the company is defrauding its clients.

There is no middle ground honestly, and yet "5% of denied in-network claims were turned down because the care was deemed not medically necessary".

This is absolutely crazy and evil. I would expect a few thousand cases annually and probably for million of cases you get denied what you pay for because "we detected your doctor is wrong and we're not paying".

In fact the single largest category, 36% of denials, was an unexplained "other." A system that rejects tens of millions of claims a year and files more than 1/3 of those rejections under no stated reason is hard for an outsider, or a member, to audit.

I can't even imagine getting lifesaving care denied because of "other". I didn't know things were so grim in the USA and honestly now I'm kinda surprised that more people are not getting "Luigi'd".

At this point I honestly think this is a bit by design.

There is a crazy amount of land in the world, but either it's too expensive or you're not allowed to build over it, or a combination of both. Houses have been built for millennia but somehow in the most advanced period of humanity you're supposed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a roof over your head.

I think that low key the ruling class + landlords are not interested that housing be an affordable thing, so the whole system works to create artificial scarcity. How's the population going to be forced to work unpleasant and low paid jobs if not by controlling their access to housing? You have to be too naive if you think that a few minds in your country's parliament haven't thought of this.

If someday economic activity gets automated enough, and the majority of people are not needed anymore for regular jobs, and this populace gets violent with their ruling class, then I think a lot of housing will be built outside of cities, and the supply of houses will no longer be a problem.

As someone who lives in Europe, my impression is that the continent's first priority is how to keep paying the fat pensions it pays to its retired class, the second priority is how to keep paying the pensions followed by a distant third about how to keep paying the pensions.

For me it's remarkable how the continent lives looking at the past and not at the future. The older people I talk to show no concern about Europe's economic future, they're always dismissive about the problems Europe faces. They're stuck in the 70's, 80's or 90's it seems.

Honestly it's not surprising that AI provided answers that were flagged less often as "pedagogically harmful" if we take in account that somehow LLMs create an "average" of all knowledge they ingested.

I think the battle linux vs windows showcases how, in the long run, free software tends to win. In 50+ years, windows will be a footnote in the history of technology, in 100+ years, linux will still be going strong as a multi-generational human endeavor started by a young nerd in the early 90's.

I don't agree with this. Addictive, unless we're talking about a chemical substance or something like that, is a subjective thing. At some point, books, movies, comics, etc, etc might have been considered addictive.

Social networks in general should be banned for underage people, that's the thing. And the social network itself should be liable for verifying the age its users, like a nightclub is liable for people who enter it. No bullshit operating system age verification, that's, trust me, totally intended to protect kids and not to spy on you.

What kind of speculation exists over energy, water and space? I'm really curious to know.

I'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade.

When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.

As true as "It's free and always will be".

When a company hires for an entry level public facing position, they always mean a young individual with a welcoming smile instead of a bald middle aged man who has been unemployed for two years. That's something that everybody knows and even the most progressive HR department, overtly or tacitly, will try to enforce. Society is full of small hidden prejudices that people don't really see as harmful.

Global warming doesn't exist.

If it does, it's not that bad.

If it gets bad, it's not a big deal in reality.

If it becomes a big deal, it was not humanity's fault.

And if it was humanity's fault, at least the planet was saved from a global dictatorship run by scientists.

I am not trying to be snarky; I used to think that intelligence was intrinsically tied to or perhaps identical with language

I learned a long time ago that this wasn’t the case.

I can speak several languages, and many times when I remember something and want to search for it on Google or any other AI engine, I can’t recall which language I originally read it in.

So whatever mechanism the brain uses to store information, it’s certainly language‑agnostic. There are also many moments when you fully grasp a concept but forget the words to describe it, yet the concept itself remains clear in your mind.

It's very hard to think they wouldn't do something harmful to children again if the economic incentives aligned. For corporations it's just so easy to say sorry, and in the worst case they know an irrelevant fine will be placed in order not "to destroy the business".

Society is getting materialistic and cynical to toxic levels as the standards of living and the perspective of future further deteriorate.

People feel overworked, tired and out of money.

This general malaise spills on almost every type of social interaction, including friendships unfortunately.

A few years ago, the "tinfoil hat crowd" had this absurd claim that Ghislaine Maxwell was a reddit powermod:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/incoherent-conspiracy-sugges...

The article above is from 2020, and later the FBI itself used the user maxwellhill as evidence in Ghislaine's investigation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1qsf6y6/reddit_pos...