taurath

Yes it is

They are going after everything, everywhere because their leadership is sociopathic and believes the means are justified by anything they can get away with.

Mark had that aha moment that people would just freely give him their data, and had no idea how it could be used against them. He built his entire empire on being able to get away with things that if anyone actually looks at is morally reprehensible, extractive and manipulative. Now the promise of AI is they will control and rule over the productivity and power structure of the whole world via the internet if they can get away with it.

That doesn't explain the observation of things that used to work breaking though, without any new features!

Its not you, it has gone up marketly. Microsoft and Google products are both subjectively far more prone to showstopping errors. There is no quantitative data for this so some will never be satisfied with this answer (or ANY answer unless it has some hand-picked statistics that look official and unbiased enough to trick them).

Well because you said that, we're going to add public investment in crypto too, everyone gets an NFT with their taxes this year.

Cambridge MS will open doors that will never open for you otherwise. Amazon will be there in 2 years, you won’t have control over your destiny, and things can go much more wrong there with toxic people and no recourse.

How is the token-cost-be-damned part in the latter example?

I do find that both porting and translation projects have a much higher signal given the ease of mapping to tokens, when there is a proven working source to refer to - the source itself provides the validation. In a new project, you don’t have that validation.

It has a lot of the properties of magic. You can put on quite a magic show with a trillion dollars.

Yeah I think its possible that for many folks its the first time they're coming up on these concepts, and it troubles them in the same way that the concept of death troubles them (and me, to be clear!).

For me its as simple as watching how people talk, and seeing how in every single case whatever the next thing is, if you believe It, there is only ever justification of doubling down, doing more, going deeper, reducing any doubt. These are not scientists, they're business people and salespeople, and a few optimists having recently on paper solved all their worldly financial needs.

Even if one throws that aside, spending time exploring and building with the most state of the art LLMs is just as instructive. I'm watching the implementation - whats working is ML models trained on specific domains (not much different than 5+ years ago), and whats not working is a general model that humanity can let go to work on its own. Sit in front and observe ideas turn to the samey intellectual, high-syllable mush. Its productive, but not in any way that's promised.

This is religious fervor folks, as AI 2027 was.

I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification.

Yall, with your incredible wealth and resources you could do real good in this world and make society better, healthier, better educated, and the whole world more equal, just, and reduce the desperation and suffering. Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective". You can change a person's whole life in a moment.

shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people

... recently, as in the last 10 years?

This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you show up or not, enjoy your retirement.

I demand that does technological experiments involving children be supervised by someone who understands the ethical and moral effects it can have. Its not like a YouTube video.

We don’t move fast and break things when the things are kids, you maniacs

What would be some requirements to be comfortable with it?

I’d have to know less than I do about what capabilities LLMs have and don’t have.

It was amusing for a moment watching all these logical technical people act like religious fundamentalists about AI, fitting problems to the predetermined solution, but now it’s just upsetting how much the people with no empathy or understanding have decided they should run the world

your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having those growing up

None of the AI stuff has been proven to be safe or effective for kids going thru an extremely important growth time for personality development and relational attachment. Your experience of having bad teachers doesn’t negate that the best way we know to enrich kids lives is to have effective and empathetic human teachers.

There’s no choice here, and often the companies are profitable, but if there is any stickiness to the product the customer gets the privilege of having a company they built trust with turn around and betray them with massively increased fees.

I made an educated guess that John Deere is roughly the size of Monsanto so in the tens of billions category, which is usually enough revenue to play really dirty with senators, regulators, lobbyists, and customers.

And how much they gave to behave is directly related to how much they donate to the election fund, because that is literally the world we are living in now, as every single tech CEO all know and behave as.

Deere must pay $1 million collectively to the five states for antitrust enforcement costs and will be subject to strict compliance oversight for the next 10 years.

$1 million fine for probably $10 billion in profit. I know what lesson I'd learn if my only personal value was maximizing shareholder value. The compliance part can be dealt with later.

It’s 2026 what the customer wants is probably an indication of what not to do if you’re a hyperscaler.

Whoever ends up actually winning after the crash will be the ones who figure out the needs of users, not the needs of the financial machinations of the companies trying to grab land.

I'm not arguing against the improvements to the average person in the last 100 years, but I am saying the system that exists TODAY produces poverty, desperation and homelessness on the bottom end, and massive wealth to the top, and a hollowing out of the center, and that we should do something about it. Its easy to argue that it was the worker protections and safety that enabled the economy and the middle class. Since 1979 worker productivity and wages have diverged, and all the resources have funneled to the top.

Instead of letting people become the best they can be, they will languish in average or low because the safety net allows them to just sit

We're not concerned with people being the best we can be. Else education wouldn't be on a shoestring budget, housing costs wouldn't force two parents to work with no pre-k childcare, our colleges wouldn't cost 10x that of other countries many of which are free, we'd provide healthcare not tied to employers so that people could take risks, we'd mandate maternity and paternity leave for parents so that they can bond with their children instead of leaving them with attachment disorders.

People are undeveloped for those reasons - it costs a lot of money and society is filled with middlemen maximizing the profit of every single human need. Our birth rate is horrible because its expensive, there is little hope for a better future, and there is no support within the country to have kids. We have a massive child poverty problem, and we can't even fund school lunches.

If you cared about people being the best, you'd care about that, not making sure that everyone gets punished. The system benefits business owners and investors, and everyone else serves them.

I am not advocating for cutting protections for disabled people

Yet protections and programs continue to be cut!

And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff.

Wanting my tax dollars to go to children who can’t access food is not begging for a handout - you’re repeating middle school Republican propaganda at this point.

I’m a success story, but unlike you I’ve developed some empathy for the very real cycle of poverty I myself got out of, instead of the jingoistic “just create value”.

They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world.

This is exactly how I feel about your ideology - that if only people would stop being a victim and think outside the box instead of complaining then they would see a better world. You’ve never dealt with disability or not being able bodied, you don’t see the value in anything other than what makes money.

There’s a spec of truth in it - some people turn their minds off and think of themselves as victims. I think of myself as a survivor, and a lucky one at that. I’ve overcome a lot and I can see where if many things outside of my control went the other way I could be dead right now. Wanting the path to be more clear for the next person is exactly the “see the world shine” that you advocate for.

We have the highest concentration of wealth ever in this country, because that’s what this system produces right now. Has it improved the world for the average person or made it worse?

“Just think differently” but the answer starts with have a pile of money

You must not have ever worked for a company owned by one. The statement is not what I’ve heard, it’s what I’ve experienced, and it matches the experience of others in my large developer network.

It’s great for concentrating ownership and mass applying ruthless management tactics at scale, and for using IP as leverage to hollow out a company.

My mindset in the workplace is not about these facts, its more about what I present to people to help their worldview and advocate for a world where we don't just hold qualitative data (those who are doing well are likely to meet others who are doing well, people who vacation on a Yacht do not interact with people who don't take vacations), but also the trend and to advocate for policies that address the growing grotesque inequality and opportunity gap. Its hard to make people empathetic for others who they don't see, which is why I try to draw a line to the homeless population.

Everyone, everywhere, tries to optimize their local situation as best as they can with the skills and knowledge they have available. The further one gets into understanding how mental health works, the more one realizes that mindset is a result of experiences usually more than it is of willpower. People in poverty are exerting willpower to the maximum every single day. People are anxious for a reason, and depressed for a reason - these do not pop up like some contagious airborne virus, they're a result of the setting and society and their place in it.

I find it to not be acceptable if AI's trend is to degrade performance of both AI and humans at the same time, that's kinda not the goal, right? Why are we spending money to make us dumber?

I don't understand the logic here - a methodology to increase efficiency by 90% in training doesn't exist until it does - could you explain what you mean by "I don't see why it won't exist"? Are you seeing consistent gains by some process?

"I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills, can't you understand that?? What the hell is wrong with you people!?"

Sure and thats fair, there's probably many things that are good enough that I miss, but I'm talking about the most obvious possible websites being used regularly as sources in web search. Identifying poor sourcing or misinformation on the internet and what is a credible source has been a lifelong skill I've had to build from the early days of the web, and in the AI boom its only gotten more necessary to be able to not get taken by hucksters with billion dollar budgets.