madrox

I am, mostly, aligned with the author here, though I don't think that talking to AI about how to not get caught for killing your wife is really going all the way in.

Going all the way in is talking to it about planning a mass shooting. Or producing a nuclear device or bioweapon. Sure, the knowledge itself isn't dangerous unless combined with other traditional behaviors like acquiring certain materials, but maybe there should be a line. Living free shouldn't be a suicide pact.

Especially when you have a passionate community willing to work for free to preserve things, am I right?

I had shoulder pain about ten years ago. Had an MRI. Found evidence of a tear. Was told I would need surgery and referred to a sports medicine doctor. He looked at my MRI and said the real problem was my shoulder was frozen, and he could do surgery but the PT after is what would actually be what helped me. Two radiologists and two doctors saw my MRI before this moment. Sure enough, with a little PT I got better.

I’ve had several more medical blunders since then, including a doctor telling me my problem is to lose weight 48 hours before going into emergency surgery.

What I have learned is to be weary of any time I feel like I’m in a “funnel.” Once you’re in the funnel, no one is thinking critically about your issue any more. One person said they found X. Next person reads that and assumes Y and recommends Z. And so on until the alpha is multiplied to hell. Lots of treatments that don’t hurt but don’t help and run up insurance.

I have since used AI the last couple years and it has either concurred with my doctors or given me enough ammo to challenge them. If I were the author, I would trust neither but use Claude to ask how to go back to that clinic and challenge the diagnosis.

The rhetoric around AI has been insane for years now. AI will kill us all. AI will take all our jobs. SaaS is dead. AI is too dangerous to even release.

It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.

But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.

I've never heard of the Doorman Fallacy before. I like it.

That said, not everything changes because some businessman wants to cut costs. Splitting bills has always been a pain, and while a lot of apps suck, at least it's consistent. I can't tell you how many times I got dirty looks from wait staff when asked to split a bill. In pretty much every story the author talks about I would rather fail forward than go backward.

If you think any attempt at a solve goes immediately to 11, sure, but I hope you believe in nuance or else we’re all lost.

That sounds like a great idea, but I think we should also try to solve human trafficking online.

I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."

I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.

I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.

My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.

This takes me back. In the 90s there wasn't exactly a lot of web app programming going on, and it was hard to find a web host willing to let you run scripts through CGI. This was my first introduction to perl and the idea of dynamically building web pages. I adapted WWWBoard into a web chat that was "real time" using html refresh tags. Really inspired the rest of my career. Was for lots of people.

Not sure how I feel about the author trying to use Matt's Script Archive's bugginess and popularity to make a point about vulnerabilities and vibe coding. The web was simply just a very different place back then. Even viruses were more about hackers showing off their skills than the industral malware complex we have today. Bots weren't scanning the whole web for wp-admin.php. No one was really entering credit cards on web pages. If your site got hacked, it got graffiti'd and it was embarrassing, but no one used it to hawk bitcoin.

Likening vibe apps to WWWBoard is simply ignoring the climate and times each are a part of.

I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."

The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.

It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.

And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."

I used the roundabout the game is modeled after the other day. This is at the freeway exit used to get to the Costco AND downtown in Kirkland. I've seen pileups here for no reason. It's insane.

To be fair, I'm not sure there's a good solution. The real problem is the volume of traffic and that it dumps onto two lane roads at the edges of this roundabout. To really fix things you need to give people other exits to use.

I was responsible for overseeing a Sierra AI implementation to replace our tier 1 support bot, which was not AI but a basic heuristic bot.

Containment from the bot alone shot up past 50%. Customer satisfaction with support went through the roof. And this was basic knowledge support with account awareness. We had not wired up any tools yet.

I wouldn't say so. Once upon a time, a PlayStation 2 was too powerful to export: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...

ChatGPT 2 was once too powerful to release.

AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.

This is a new form of Gell-Mann Amnesia: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

I tend to agree. My first reaction to this post was to check the date, because I would have assumed this had been published around 2014.

Google's moral compass was gone long before this man even joined. That doesn't make them particularly evil, but they have joined the ranks of ordinary, publicly traded corporations.

I'll give my own interpretation, which is different from the parent though maybe we arrive at the same place.

Blindsight dismantles a lot of noble myths about what it means to be human and human exceptionalism. The things you read and see in all kinds of stories. It makes you appreciate how easy and unconscious it is to settle for comfortable lies over truth about how smart or great you are. I think this is what freaks a lot of people out about whether AI is conscious, actually.

I think the hope comes in if you embrace the implications for yourself, because to be otherwise is to be unconscious.

No one has ever made me feel horror and despair like Peter Watts. His books stare directly into the abyss. I think it's what makes the hope you feel at the end seem earned.

If you haven't read his work but you spend time thinking about HCI, you should.

I suspect it'll go on the subscription plan once other providers have similar benchmarks.

As annoyed as I am about this move, I get it. Users flood the newest, best model whether they really need it or not, and are efficient at using their entire quota. They've had so much trouble reigning in subscription usage it makes sense.

I get the impression Apple designers don't actually use AI, and so have no idea what to build, since users don't know what they want from AI yet either.

I wish the Christians would hurry up and get here

Building a henge, are we?

They tried with OpenAI and that deal fell apart. My hunch is that they're considering their own device play given they brought Jony Ive on board.

Anthropic doesn't have the spare compute laying around to do this deal. Even they're buying compute from Google.

I don't think this was author-submitted. The last github commit was 10 months ago. It's ancient by AI standards.

Thanks. At this point, I believe it's what I will look back on as my legacy. Software is ephemeral, but the people you build it with are what shape how you reflect on it.

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Shoutout to the author. I don't think I've met you, but I'm proud of you. What you've done is not easy. Neither is talking about it.

I've not had nearly the adversity of the author, but I do know a little bit about what it's like to have an alternative background that makes companies not want to take a chance on you. It motivates you to take advantage of the chances you're given. The first time someone gave me a job, I felt so utterly grateful that I worked twice as hard as most and complained half as much. You could cynically call that exploitation, but I didn't see it that way.

When I came into a position to make my own hiring calls, I tried paying that forward, and I got some great employees from it. Arguably a couple duds as well, but I never regretted giving the chance.

Shout out to Hasura as well, btw. I've encountered their leadership team a couple times and everything about them has screamed integrity. It did not surprise me to hear that they are part of this story.

I think my favorite early story was when OpenAI launched deep research. I was going to an event that I was headlining, and I gave it a CSV of the attendees and asked it to give me a small background on each company they represented.

When people introduced themselves to me, I knew a little about their startup. Felt magical.

My issue with saying socializing is one of the primary goals is that schools leave kids to figure it out on their own. Hard to know how schools are performing at that goal when it is going unmeasured.

I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win.

I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.