titanomachy

Do Americans even believe that US policy is likely to steer development in a way that’s safe and beneficial for humanity? The rest of the world certainly doesn’t. The US currently seems to primarily use their superpower status to be the world’s number one shit disturber and geopolitical antagonist.

I don’t think China’s necessarily any better, but I’d rather have the most powerful models be open rather than under the exclusive control of the US executive.

I don’t think any of these examples represent _successful_ opposition, though. Except maybe the warming center for homeless people? I can’t tell if it got built or not.

These examples basically amount to “some people didn’t like this”, which doesn’t mean that the balance of public opinion wasn’t favourable. Unanimous support is too high a bar.

I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.

It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.

A park, a public recreation centre, an elementary school, a cute coffee shop…

You know, human stuff.

open models are inherently decelerationist

I’m struggling to understand this perspective. Is he using the words accelerationist/decelerationist in a sense other than the obvious one?

EDIT: I searched his twitter history and discovered that his argument is basically “if you drive down costs, then OpenAI will have less money to invest in development, slowing down the overall rate of AI progress.” IMO this take betrays an overwhelmingly stupid degree of exceptionalism, but I guess that’s what I’d expect from someone working at OpenAI.

“Pez dispenser for Armageddon” is incredible imagery

Maybe tech workers are going to evolve into a different species, immune to emotional arguments and no longer capable of mating with humans

I call them “Chinese models” without vitriol. I think they’re great. Although it’s good to remember that all models have ideological biases inherited from their creators.

Free association?

Just want to add another voice of empathy and encouragement. I have ADHD, I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety at various times, I’ve scored and subsequently been fired from some top-tier SWE jobs because of inconsistent productivity and poor communication.

I know how much it sucks, and how tempting it is to fall into a spiral of blaming yourself. It’s possible to learn to accept yourself and improve these attitudes and behaviors, but it takes time and work and it won’t be a straight line. Use your doctors as expert resources and listen to them, but they’re not all-knowing wizards, and the drugs aren’t magic. Take responsibility, read books, take your own actions. Now you have time to do the obvious things that everyone already knows they should do to be healthy: exercise, eat well, sleep at the same time each day, see your friends and family, help other people, don’t doomscroll or game all day, keep your apartment clean. Find little projects to work on to help build your sense of agency and self-esteem, maybe not software stuff to start with since you have a lot of complex negativity built up around that.

Oh also, on the specific point of thinking you write bad quality software… you graduated in 2024. You’re basically brand new at this. Most people write shit software when they start out, don’t beat yourself up over this.

Good luck.

most victims of a cloned-voice call never learn that a machine was involved at all. They believe, as Sharon Brightwell initially believed, that they spoke to their own child.

This doesn’t make any sense. At some point they will speak to their child and learn that the call wasn’t real.

I don’t think anyone imagines that it’s an ironclad steering method, but it seems to help, so why not?

It’s a pro for you (the user), but I’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.

Yes, this is the answer. It’s easy to forget if you live in a tech bubble, but there are probably billions of smartphone users who don’t even know how to type a url into a browser and navigate to it.

I’ve worked on projects where we ran this experiment, and the success rate of “install this app and click on it” is several times higher than “navigate to this webpage every time you want to use our tool”.

One small correction though, android has made it easier to add a “progressive web app” to the home screen now. You can prompt the user with a dialog asking if they want to install it. I think there was at least some period where Google was really encouraging PWAs. iOS still sucks. I’ve had very poor success rates in getting users to install our PWA using the iOS workflow (and our tool is something they need for their jobs, so they are highly motivated to install it).

I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.

Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.

The copy on your 200kb page is such incomprehensible AI slop that reading it feels like I’m having a stroke.

He means not exclusively British English

It’s also important to distinguish between an os thread and a userspace thread. The author said “thread” without qualification, so I don’t know which he meant. Userspace threads can be many times lighter than processes.

Yeah almost all code is just good enough to get the job done. Exceptions include (some) open-source codebases, a few key projects at leading tech companies, and probably the work of obscure geniuses at random companies that nobody else will ever see.

not a single thing apple has made has been in the luxury category

Well, maybe exactly ONE thing

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edit...

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Any dense, non-perishable store of value will be eventually used in this way.

I think most people when they hear "high-end watch" picture some sort of mechanical jewelry watch. When G-shocks, Garmins, and Apple Watches are a few hundred dollars and well-known luxury watch brands start at a few thousand, it's reasonable to consider the latter more "high end".

Personally I'm not interested in owning a luxury watch, I like the Garmin ones.

The larger point is that while AI coding tools make it easy to pump out lots of code, it’s really (still) the quality of the code that matters. Quantity, in other words, doesn’t necessarily equal quality.

They didn't provide any evidence for this point. They showed that the code is bad quality, but not that it matters that it's bad.

Adderall (amphetamine) is a very effective decongestant. And it helps you get more work done!

Cool! I'm guessing no traffic data in organic maps? I'd still install it to use as a backup.

I try not to context switch when doing agentic programming. Instead, I use a single agent thread (in pi) and pay extra for faster inference (GLM 5.2 from fireworks.ai, currently; around 100 tokens per second). I rarely spend more than $25 per working week, which is a fraction of a percent of my own fee (I’m a specialist consultant). I also keep an Anthropic subscription and use that for longer research and design tasks.

I’m sure many people produce more than me, but I retain my sanity as well as a high level of understanding of the code that I produce, which in my domain I feel is still important. I’ve tried ultracode-style subagent workflows and find that they rapidly produce reams of slop that I don’t have the patience or energy to properly review.

I also meditate quite a bit.

Yeah that’s a huge difference. I don’t think I want to interactively use any model with 18 tps.

I wasn't really telling them to shut up. I agree with most of their points, but there's a sense of helplessness in the writing that I don't like. I see some of my friends do this and it doesn't feel like purposeful, effective striving for a better world, but neurotic obsession over things that they are incredibly unlikely to affect.

I hope the complainers win, and I will join their fight in ways that make sense, but I'm also not going to spend my one short life doing the equivalent of being angry at the weather. I'm going to figure out how to live a good life within the world as it exists, and help out other people wherever I can.

Of course, I could be reading them incorrectly. Perhaps writing this like this fills them with purpose and holy fire, and this is how they live their best life.

Does it make people feel better to write articles like this? I feel like we all know this stuff already.

Figure out how to make more money, or how to be happy with less, or go live somewhere else. (I’ve done all three, at various points.) Writing AI-assisted screeds on how broken the system is doesn’t bring us closer to a functioning system, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you live a happy life.

I do hope that America manages to solve these problems. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it.