smaudet

A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted.

Like the previous poster mentioned, I'm not sure that's really such a quality of life improvement.

First of all, food. I don't know where you shop, but the cost has definitely doubled, even tripled.

Second of all, the idea that it's some "good" that these things are "cheap" relative to wages - before they may have been expensive, but they were also investments. It doesn't really matter that much, because you can save to obtain them, and don't need to worry about re-obtaining them. Being in a situation where durable goods are cheap, but cost of living is high, means that you are disproportionately struggling - you can't save anything, any good that these products provide is outweighed by it being too expensive to live...

What crack was the YTber on?

Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value...

Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

Products tend to be someone else's tool.

Like you hint at, though, a tool is useful immediately and without end (at a particular task - windows operating systems remain useful despite whatever current version is being sold), the product is often an attempt to continuously derive value from the tool (attach a time limited license, offer "upgrades", new features, etc.).

A service is more like a product than a tool - selling data is not something that a tool can (by itself) provide (unless you accept virtual or test data).

Attaching a product mindset to a tool then becomes a matter of complication/value reduction, vs a product mindset to a consumable, like a game, or dataset, where the value is at least constant, if not growing over time.

I.e., I'm not sure I agree that the "enshittification cycle" is the variable here - even in the age of AI the value e.g. of a stock image service is constant or growing, even if the LLM generation process dilutes the market.

You are correct about growth, but speed is also a resource - kinetic energy is still energy, which comes from somewhere, and unless you have 100% perfect energy usage, there is thermodynamic loss, contributing to entropy, which itself is another resource. Temperature is a physical resource all lifeforms and machine processes share in a gravity well, and all processes breakdown after a melting point (unable to maintain their own required entropy levels)

Once we've met our basic material needs

The concern is not goods produced, those are not "resources", except perhaps in the very limited sense that food is a "produce".

Energy, materials, those are resources.

It's not a zero sum game.

Resources are, though. The planet cannot support a race of digital super-people, and us, and an continually growing economy.

It's the height of folly to think that, as things are going, we are going anywhere "good".

The mistake was not claiming features rather browser client versions...

JS devs were kinda able to patch around the nonsense because they were able to feature-detect - part of the reason this stuck around was because no legitimate user or dev cared (or should care). But the header was mostly (useless) noise, and the people spoofing were dealing with the couple bad apples of the time.

Of course, defining features is easier said than done, and a standards body is a challenging environment to define these in...

I get why people are fingerprinting bots and others are working around it, but neither are "legitimate" applications - if your content is public, it's public, end of story. And working around these controls to sell botnet access to sites is equally illegitimate - nobody has a right to resell content they do not own...

I'd prefer a mode where you fail the word, but can continue to the next word.

Perhaps it is intentionally part of the design, but being a bit of a perfectionist, I failed a couple of times, and found that actually the longer words were (often) easier than the shorter ones...

"The only solution is to lock every LLM query in the entire stack behind the same deterministic role-based access controls that determine resources available to the current user."

Exactly. The sooner people stop trying to replace code with LLMs, the better. The technology is fundamentally untrustworthy, and given that we do not understand it, impossible to secure.

Only extremely simple code audited by multiple human authors, with actual proof of functionality (not just testing) can be considered secure.

The SW industry

Partly the issue is, it was never the right model.

If you write/wrote code, you were a manager. Probably a better one than your "people manager" ever was, but that is/was arguably a different skill. What you managed was extremely technical, more akin to a line manager or an operations manager than a people manager.

Which, yes, everyone could not be the manager. Everyone who was not the manager could be quality control (QC), and handle the parts that "only a human" could handle.

The problem is, AI fits in nowhere in this equation, rather it throws it out. AI can manage, like any manager it can short circuit it's QC, in pursuit of an arbitrary metric. Even the idea of "human in the loop" is fundamentally flawed - if the human is not at some level the one directing (managing), there is no reason to stop incuding the human, less and less, in the work.

AI is not useful to us.

Because arms race.

The irony is, they are building their own competitor...

Yeah, we get that nobody can trust China/Russia/USA/Shady cabal of too-rich-people, but we stopped the atom bomb because it was MAD (mutually assured destruction).

We need a similar treaty to ban any use of AI in this fashion, because all that will happen is creation of weapons that are inevitably turned on their owners.

And then, yes, as a coalition, declare war on any country that violates this.

I hate to be a proponent for war, but one's coming either way. I'd prefer a relatively peaceful resolution to some of our problems, not a "oh my god the robots have rebelled, and we are losing" scenario.

Keyword is conjectured.

Infinities of random sequences exist that can be shown not to contain all data, 0-8 (base 10) is one such random sequence that is trivially proven to never contain 9...

There are no known patterns to pi, but, (I am legitimately curious about this), are there any known sequences e.g. of 1 million 0s and a single other digit within the decimal sequence of pi?

Given how it (pi) looks, I'm of the strong suspicion is that the answer is "no". But of course, proving that requires that some property of the randomness is provable. Which it does feel as if, given there are different infinities, there are also different randomnesses, hence the conjecture is ill-formed and probably incorrect...

I don't think you understand the goal of a hackathon. They aren't (or weren't) VC pitch sessions.

You don't run marathons to be usane bolt, you don't go to hackathons to land VC deals.

24 hours of non stop AI usage doesn't sound fun. It sounds hateful and demotivating, you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do.

Again, infinity is illustrative.

Put another way, you do not deny a proof by inference because it "leads to large numbers".

We don't need to speculate, we can see many, many examples today of more and less intelligent species, and also what happens to the less intelligent ones, even taking humans out of the equation.

I'd argue, even a machine intelligence that merely managed to be mildly smarter than us would be a threat. AGI merely has the potential to be infinitely smarter than us, but that's somewhat irrelevant given we might not even be smart enough to realize how much smarter they are (a cat will likely not appreciate the difference in intelligence between a dog, an elephant, or a dolphin, despite all those animals being generally smarter).

Infinity is....subtle.

They are more characterized by how they grow and when they stop than by their "physical reality". Proof of this is in that different infinities exist - characterized precisely by how fast they grow, i.e., one "infinity" is "larger" than the other.

My point is, getting hung up on "infinity" as being unrealistic is not the point. It is the tool with which to understand how thing behave. The same as any calculus problem - you take the limit to the infinity to understand how the function behaves.

For all its talk of inoculation, this is a terribly written essay. They do not make a point, nor even arguments, instead, opting to ramble in hopes that you forget whatever it was you were thinking.

The issue is simple. Just like us (who are arguably complex, look at what we're building over here, this AI computer stuff!), entities have simple core needs (like food, water, power, etc.).

An infinitely smart AGI has the potential, nay, likely cause, to require infinite resources. We're already seeing the effect in the computing sector on e.g. chips, there's no reason to think this trend won't continue...

Lets circle back to the hydrogen argument, will we blow ourselves up. Real concern, abated by hard numbers. Different atmosphere, different concentrations, different pressure, different possible outcomes.

Today, we don't have those numbers. We don't have those calculations. I don't disagree with the point at the end "about how people can exploit other people, or through carelessness introduce immoral behavior into automated systems". These are issues, too. But saying there are other issues, don't worry about this big issue over here, is the absolute worse argument possible.

That's hand waving.

Actually, the only secure default is to deny everything...how do you know that innocent command is actually innocent?

While this is an informative comment, did HN start deleting comments? These comments you mention do not seem to exist...

Yeah, this (the OPs) reads like a confused teenagers post, who has just started to explore the intracacies of logic. The whole post disproves itself...

Fuzzy logic is fine, I suspect they saw something like this and got confused. I would recommend they think harder about how very pertinent boolean logic is to everything they are doing before dismissing it...

Eh? Not sure what you mean by that...

Oh, don't worry, the way it's going other countries will be fast motivated to defend themselves from said foreign policy...or perish.

If anything, this is more illustration of how llms are not useful to us...

They will do their own thing, don't need us. In fact, we will be in the way...

We can choose to study them and their output, but they don't make us better mathematicians...

What is bot logic exactly?

Ill thought out logic like your own. I think you are likely a bot at this point.

It's not likely, because that's not something that people are likely to do. Only a bot like yourself with a poor model of the world will do this type of thing. It will be amusing to see the AI bots trying to run the scam you are describing and then nobody will contribute to the fake projects... except other fake AI contributors.

This feels like bot logic, lol.

Unless the contributors don't care about the repos they contribute to, this is not a likely scenario. AI doesn't care. We do.

Agreed, PoW is an especially poor solution here.

We really need to solve SPAM itself here, I think there may be a way to do it. I.e., the problem of spam is NtoN scaling connections. The network has never been able to solve that problem (exponential is the hardest). Limiting communication in terms of mesh networking may be the ultimate solution - bots can't get to you because they can't reach you.

What needs to be invented is a bridging protocol - some way to establish "legitimate" lines of communication over a network, while preserving (to some degree) privacy and decentralization. AI can only enter this network by being explicitly added to the channel, and thereby explicitly and easily blocked (and also solving the general SPAM issue once and for all).

Which is not chrome and still has ads...(Ironically).

The issue here is the core model is broken (misaligned incentives). That's not something you are going to fix with a github "downstream". A token system could help but it's easy to imagine ways that could be gamed, if not implemented well.

and for some reason tons of independent developers

Cowboy coders got a virtual cowgirl coder and sold it to everyone, hmm, maybe... (respected or not, solo devs don't always have the requisite skills to not be a cowboy, either due to lack of experience or lack of innate skill)

I don't know that I completely buy this narrative, though. There has been a strong, top-down push for this since the "beginning".

I don't think that is a (very realistic) concern. AI is slop, the problem is not that the real contributors are struggling to get PRs merged.

The bigger issue being, raising the bar to students who may have otherwise had productive careers (but education is a general issue, where the students don't even yet recognize they are being scammed).

Agreed... However there's not a good IsThisAnAI() test at present. So unfortunately, we will have to use anti-spammer techniques (because that is exactly what AI is, high(er) quality spam).

You kind of did that to yourself if you let the new person get away with it.

In theory, sure, but in practice, to echo the others, you often don't have a choice, because of power dynamics/politics.

Its easy to say "its management's fault", but the principle is the same - these guys are spammers and quacks (and deserve nothing less than to be confined to the level of hell reserved for spammers), they just have to spam long enough and something will get through (volume over quality). And after their "success" i.e. fraud, they can ditch the company and move onto the next. I've seen multiple "seniors" like this, not actually very good at the work, but great at pushing half-baked slop.