throwaway13337

Certainly, I agree that using AI to dehumanize - generally what companies seem to be doing with it - is super bad. And it's also what is being sold to existing companies right now.

But that same AI could cause those companies to no longer exist.

The AI I'm happy about allows people without much tech knowledge create small apps to do exactly what they want. And, for those that know just a little more, use it to help them extend open source software for their niche use case.

This makes computing more personal and gives back agency to the computer operator.

Mix that with the rise of much more competition in much more custom software, and you'll see that a future can exist, if we want it, where software becomes more personal and humane.

The software vendor will capture less value, though - the margins will be thinner. Instead that value will be captured (in non-money terms) by the end users.

That also means that software companies, unable to capture so much value, must shrink and become more boutique. The software that contributes to our centralized world would lose a lot of power.

That's the future I can see. The only way it doesn't happen is if a cynical narrative wins out and manages to lock it out through regulatory capture so that only licensed operators can use or provide AI. The anti-AI narrative helps the cynics.

What these complaints always boil down to is autonomy and control. The more centralized an organization, the more it relies on metrics to understand and exert control over its employees and customers.

People started hating tech right around the time metrics became popular. I don't think it's a coincidence. AI just accelerates the trend.

The problem is the misidentification of AI as the issue. As long as we don't understand the real issue, we won't solve it. AI is just a tool. It's being used in a way that denies human agency.

Our cultural values need to shift away from safetism that demands centralization. And shift toward valuing human agency. That starts with talking about the core issue.

Are there any reasonable analyses of the practicality of data centers in space?

I know Dwarkesh Patel was interviewing Elon and brought up the fact that power cost for data centers is only 20%. The number I could find is 7-18%? GPUs are the majority of the cost. I don't think Elon responded directly to that.

There's the argument that licensing to build these things is cheaper in space. But earth has a lot of space in the middle of nowhere that no one would object to. That seems cheaper than space.

And the heat dissipation argument against it seems like a good one but I don't know if it's actually just a small engineering problem that can be solved cheaply or more fundamental.

On the plus side, you could say there is better connectivity in orbit. But if you're running inference, you'd probably want to talk to the same server that has your context cached. As it whips around earth, your latency would vary a lot, right?

I'd love it if someone could point me to a better analysis. It's an interesting question in general. Not just because one of the highest valued companies in the world is based entirely on its feasibility.

This is both true and not.

It's true that in a project, a novel idea undeclared as such will be shaved off quietly by an llm. You really need to be explicit about wanting to keep it.

You will get pushed into the mean.

However, I'd say 90% of making something (that is useful) is repeating the old thing. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Or at least we should. Getting there can be difficult for most of us.

I say this as someone who chronically re-invents things. I then later get stuck and find someone already thought through my problem and solved it better.

I don't believe being unique in all the ways is useful. You need to be unique in the important ways and not unique in the other places.

There's also a cultural coherence angle that (my) unique things often fail at. Stuff has to look like other stuff enough for people to understand intuitively what it is and how it works. Here the mean is your friend.

I am able to explore more unique spaces because I no longer deal with the minutia of getting the things that should be the same correct. So paradoxically, this has made my output more unique.

This can be to generalized to map versus territory.

People have a particular lens they see things through. And they forget that there is detail there that matters.

The last 15 years of metrics driven decisions has hollowed out what made most things good.

It’s a fundamental problem of scale. Decision makers that have a large amount of power can only see the map.

The solution is to decentralize power. The more successful organization would either be smaller or allow more control for smaller participants.

This is good because humans also tend to be happier when they have more localized control.

As long as I've been an adult, hardware was a commodity, and software was where the value was. Software could capture most of the value that was in the total supply chain.

Now, with AI, software becomes less able to demand the margins it once did.

Meanwhile, the history of low margins of hardware have created a situation where there are so few players able to demand now software-style high margins.

Hardware has always been valuable but was unable to capture it's value. Those days might be over.

I hope this encourages people who would build software companies to look to hardware. A lot of fun challenges there. Deeply technical, interesting ones. And now solutions will pay.

Like all good regulation, it would only kick in after a company has a large reach. So as to not snuff out startups and cause regulatory capture problems that are already so common.

Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.

Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.

Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.

The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.

Engagement metrics fed into recommendations algorithms are the paperclip maximizers that feed humanity's collective poison.

Europe should do the one thing it knows how to do: regulate. For once, it is the answer. Do it only there. The rest of the dominos will fall.

Making a european branded humanity poisoner is not the answer.

Specifically, regulating against silent signals like watch time and comment count. Upvotes/likes can serve a purpose and would not cause the situation we're in now.

We need to get specific about the real issue.

I feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here.

There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.

To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.

With my own tiny company, I used to answer questions about my code to support. Supporting the support. I remember doing that when working at big companies too.

Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.

Maybe we've had different experiences.

You're correct that it doesn't answer the why.

But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.

So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.

Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think.

What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard.

Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it.

Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value.

I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.

So there are two competing narratives:

1. Mythos uniquely is able to find vulnerabilities that other LLMs cannot practically.

2. All LLMs could already do this but no one tried the way anthropic did.

The truth is one of these. And it comes down whether the comparison is apples to apples. Since we don't know the exact specifics of how either tests were performed, we lack a way of knowing absolutely.

So I guess, like so many things today, we can to pick the truth we find most comfortable personally.

LLMs aren't nukes.

They're more like printing presses or engines. A great potential for production and destruction.

At their invention, I'm sure some people wanted to ensure only their friends got that kind of power too.

I wonder the world we would live in if they got their way.

I really wanted to like anthropic. They seem the most moral, for real.

But at the core of anthropic seems to be the idea that they must protect humans from themselves.

They advocate government regulations of private open model use. They want to centralize the holding of this power and ban those that aren't in the club from use.

They, like most tech companies, seem to lack the idea that individual self-determination is important. Maybe the most important thing.

The skill of shooting down ideas has never been more valuable, actually.

LLM's are an endless source of bad code ideas. Being able to sift through them and find the gems is the exhausting way to be productive.

I agree with the general premise that it is easy to shoot down ideas without thinking. But it's also easy to propose ideas without thinking.

Both are disrespectful if disproportionate to the effort of the other.

The core is not idea generation versus critique. It's the effort spent on each.

So where are they?

It's been something like 3 years since people have been talking about this being a very big deal.

LLMs are widely used. Claude code is run by most people with dangerously skip permissions.

I just haven't seen the armageddon. Surely it should be here by now.

Where are the horror stories?

They're trying for the vertical integration monopoly.

The times it works, it works well for the company at great cost to society.

Imagine the world we'd have if comcast got to control your web browsing experience.

If ISPs got started today, they'd sell the open web at API prices that no one can afford. Then sell the ISP's lock-in 'internet' for a low monthly fee.

My question is why people who don't want comcast's internet think other vertical integrated lock-in is fine.

Our markets game only works for the benefit of society if we have fair markets.

VC-backed loss-leader dumping to starve competition model breaks the game.

The stars are probably legitimate.

It's weird that most people in these comments are speculating fraud.

Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? Why do the other metrics - issues and pull requests - match up with its popularity? Why would the bots starring the repo mean that those same bots are not popular? Those bots are controlled by their users.

The project is extremely active because this is what everyone being able to customize their computing looks like. A mess.

But it's a good mess.

Github was the old code sharing model clearly not designed for this. I'm sure a new model for code sharing will come to fix the growing pains.

A ton of people who would have never been able to customize their computing experience are finally able to. And it is magical for them.

This means that those same people will finally value having access to source and use of open protocols.

It was always valuable to us because we had the power to make it matter. It never mattered to them because they did not. Now they do.

The last era of computing was defined by dumbing down computing for the masses. Less information, less customizable, and more metric driven. Control in the hands of the companies.

This new era will look more free/libre, more personal, and less enshitified. Control in the hands of the users.

This is a very positive development.

I agree. A mechanism to voluntarily attach a certificate metadata about the media record from the device seems like a better idea. That still can be spoofed, though.

In the end, society has always existed on human chains of trust. Community. As long as there are human societies, we need human reputation.

These sorts of tools will only be able to positively identify a subset of genAI content. But I suspect that people will use it to 'prove' something is not genAI.

In a sense, the identifier company can be an arbiter of the truth. Powerful.

Training people on a half-solution like this might do more harm than good.

The unix commandline tools being the most efficient way to use an LLM has been a surprise.

I wonder the reason.

Maybe 'do one thing well'? The piping? The fact that the tools have been around so long so there are so many examples in the training data? Simplicity? All of it?

The success of this project depends on the answer.

Even so, I suspect that something like this will be a far too leaky abstraction.

But Vercel must try because they see the writing on the wall.

No one needs expensive cloud platforms anymore.

These sorts of doom articles are interesting in that they are from the perspective of tech company valuations. Why is this the important perspective?

For the humanity perspective, this doom is very optimistic. It says that these LLMs currently disrupting the platforms cannot themselves be the next platforms.

Maybe no one will have 'the ability to make people do something that they don't want to do' sort of power with this next stage in computing.

Sounds good to me.

I was hoping 'respectify' could mean respect for the users.

This is a very important problem space. Maybe the most important today - we desprately need a digital third place that isn't awful. But I think these attempts are misled.

The core issue seems to be that we want our communities to be infinite. Why? Well, because there is currently no way to solve the community discoverability problem without being the massive thing. But that is the issue to solve.

We need a lot of Dunbar's number sized communities. Those communities allow for 'skin in the game' where reputation matters. And maybe a fractal sort of way for those communities to share between them.

The problem is in the discoverability and in a gate keeping that is porous enough to give people a chance.

Solve that, and you solve the the third place problem we have currently. I don't have a solution but I wish I did.

Infinite communities are fundamentally what causes the tribalism (ironically), the loneliness, and the promotion of rage.

No one wants to be forced to argue correctly. Forcing people into a way to think via software is fundamentally authoritarian and sad.

I think we're after the same goal but have a different view of mechanism.

Regulation enforcement against the anti-market behaviors would bring a lot of good.

Putting too much power in any centralized authority - company or government - seems to lead to oppression and unhealthy culture.

Fair markets are the neatest trick we have. They put the freedom of choice in the hands of the individual and allow organic collaboration.

The framing should not be government vs company. But distributed vs centralized power. For both governance and commerce.

The entire world right now suffers from too much centralized power. That comes in the form of both corporate and government. Power tends to consolidate until the bureaucracy of the approach becomes too inefficient and collapses under its own weight. That process is painful, and it's not something I enjoy living through.

If you see through that lens, it has explaining power for the problems of both the EU countries and the US.

That's a feature, not a bug.

It means normies will finally see value in open source beyond just being free. They'll choose it over closed source alternatives.

This, too, makes a brighter future.

I see this happening, too.

We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed.

The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device.

It's no wonder everyone hates technology.

A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership.

The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.

I'm quite optimistic for this future.

These companies are engaged in a sort of AI dumping. Cheap inference below cost.

Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance.

It's the big tech playbook.

I don't think it's going to work this time.

Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly.

LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs.

Telecom tech killed telecom dominance.

With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.

It's a good thing that there are so many LLM choices out there, then.

Maybe the fundamental disagreement is whether LLMs will be a commodity product or not.

I think they will be since there hasn't been an indicator that secret sauce lasts more than a few months. The open weight models are, at most, a year behind.

We're in a different environment. The last tech rules of e.g. network effect cannot be directly applied.

That's right. And don't forget that the chips it runs on are manufactured by companies I might not agree with. Nor the mining companies that got the metal. Nor the energy company that powers it.

The wonderful thing about markets that work is that you can swap things out without being under their boot.

I worry about a LLM duopology. But as long as open weight models are nipping at their heels, it is the consumer that stands to benefit.

The train we're on means a lot of tech companies will feel a creative destruction sort of pain. They might want to stop it but are forced by the market to participate.

Remember that Google sat on their AI tech before being forced to productize it by OpenAI.

In a working market, companies are forced to give consumers what they want.