wisty

AI pessimist view.

Even if AI gets smarter it will still be agreeable, and people will use it to more confidently reinforce thier stupider ideas, especially in areas where they lack the knowledge to know if they are right.

Even if this can be solved, technically, people won't want to use the model that says they are wrong, so they will choose the glib lies that reinforce their beliefs.

Freedown of speech forces people to think they may be wrong, but freedom of association lets people avoid this. AI is going to be internet hug box echo chambers at an unbelievable scale.

So Trump was right to call for tariffs?

Right. So what you're saying

If you start a sentence with "so what you are saying", and then say something obviously silly ...

The argument would be that it's a large burden to have to write a report if you forage 10 mushrooms and toss one away.

Low volumes, higher fixed costs.

There's a great academic book called "Stupid Rules". Excessive rules (or KPIs - often rules in disguise) exist because we don't like authority.

Get the doctor to assess the nurse. Or the head nurses if you don't trust doctors. The nurses have managers, and if none of the doctors or head nurses can be trusted with a simple matter like assessing whether nurses are doing their jobs then you got bigger issues.

Oh no, the boss might play favourites if it's not an objective measure! Oh the injustice /s

But stupid rules or KPI also allow favourites. You can use an officious 30 point checklist and play favourites while ticking boxes. You can even rig "objective" data by controlling other factors (e.g. giving someone difficult customers do deal with).

Yeah, data driven would be nice, if you have good data. But data driven is a power tool. You don't measure SLOC or reward token use in software because of perverse incentives.

Both sides are wrong. Resusitation is more likely for a donar (if there is any bias).

OK, maybe a panel of neurologists looking at an ECG are going to be biased if you are stable but not reviving. But it's a panel of neurologists looking at an ECG. Mistakes are rare.

Before getting to the ICU, you've got the paramedics, triage nurse, and ED team, all of whom are also hypothetically going to be biased just as much to get you stabilised if you're a potential donar. Is the paramedic going to run a red light? Will the ED doctor work an hour past their shift when they can just read out the time and go home?

The info isn't on your license to tell the panel of neurologists. It's there so that the paramedics know to switch on the lights even if they think it might be a hopeless case.

I saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people.

No, hear me out.

Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).

As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?

You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.

Now do maternal death rate. Like I said, a good place to have cancer but they aren't good at stuff that matters.

The US leans aggressive on tests and heroic end of life care. I doubt you really disagree (except maybe on whether you think it's the right call). That is where the money is, since the insurance company can be forced to pay. It's kind of good for the rest of the world though if the US wants to pay (in both money and other issues) to be early adoptors.

Read "When doctors die", the US is the total opposite - everything goes to the big ticket aggressive (and yes, modern and cutting edge) treatment where it's hitting diminishing returns. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6179868/

The US healthcare system just upsells on unnessessary crap. It's junk volume or at best it's heroic high tech solutions mostly making up for the fact that people stay away from hospitals until it's too late.

Life expectancy shows that while the US is the best place to have stage 4 cancer, it's probably not the best place overall. Most places do the 80/20 stuff better.

But yeah, you are right that the US does some stuff well. Just not efficiently.

Everyone is gonna say nurses are underpaid. It's a caring, female dominated profession, it's a motherlove sentiment. And they are not paid as well as doctors.

Yeah, most pink / blue collar workers in the US are badly underpaid, but IIRC ones in the health sector are some of the best off, relative to medium salaries.

Compare teachers and nurses. In most countries they make about the same AFAIK (and I'd say nurses do deserve more, telling a parent Billy did badly on a math test has got to be easier than explaining a bad medical test). But in the US it's about 75k vs 95k. There's a huge premium for working in health in the USA, EVEN in the underpaid blue collar end.

Doctors make out even better in the US, and the c suite in health can have salaries that are just insane.

And the US also pays a TON of tax dollars to a broken, overregulated system.

IIRC if you look at the cost of Medicaide, Medicare, VA, and other federal and state spending it's the same as most other countries per capita or as a percent of GDP. The US taxpayer pays about as much as Canadians to fund their public system, then pays the same amount again for private cover since it's not universal.

No I'm not making a typo. Medicare, Medicaide, and the US system is such a rip off that per capita Americans are paying similar tax dollars to their joke of a public system.

But no one wants to fix it. US doctors are overpaid. US nurses are over paid. Dug companies. Admin. Lawyers. Everyone who makes the system work, and everyone who makes the system a mess are paid a fortune for it.

I'm just waiting for Bezos to order all work with human agents to use the same API and guardrails as an LLM.

Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea.

"I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale.

I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.

Selling get rich quick schemes, workout plans, etc?

As an Australian it's hilarious to hear that. We have less than 10% the density of the USA. And yeah, we blame everything on density too, even though 90% of the country is a desert with noone in it (so no need to lay cable or build roads there), and we are one of the most urbanised countries in the word (IIRC most of the population lives in 3 cities).

Partial agree ...

I suspect:

If you know what you are doing it is a power tool.

If you don't know what you are doing it's also a power tool - if you measure a lot of devs then the bad ones (or anyone having a bad day, or the wrong fit for a project) can make work for everyone else at an outrageous pace.

I'm not paying for a super computer to do my taxes if a cheap pc can do it for free.

So yeah, commercially it might be a death knell. Yes there's still a market for super computers, but would your rather own Apple or Cray?

You don't need to work at google to have common sense. An employee who does no real damage isn't getting canned unless they made someone look bad.

Maybe he did some damage? Did it create a security issue, e.g. if someone handed it to a bad llm agent? Maaaaybe.

Or was someone up the food chain doing the same thing, wit2h 20x the budget and a 12 month timeframe and now looks stupid?

Or maybe it's a bit of both, or maybe how he reacted to being told off?

Anyway, I can't believe how many people are commenting how ABSOLUTELY you get fired for any tiny breach of policy, have they ever held down a job?

Partly the jank is just a cost thing. Even major studios struggle with branching and merging stateful quest lines in game. I guess From picked a system that is cheap, robust, but kind of annoying for players, who forgive it because they otherwise love the game.

To some extent it's a design decision maybe. From makes games that are harsh and unforgiving, but not too harsh - you can mess up bits of quests but not end up unable to get an ending (afaik) which kind of matches the gameplay (harsh but not rage-quit inducing).

It's hard and expensive to do branching games. Most games just fake it with a "branch and merge" system (save Carley or Doug, but the one you save is still going to leave the party forever in 20 minutes).

Fromsoft wants to do major seperate quest lines, so they have to cut corners elsewhere. I guess they choose a robust system that is sometimes annoying for the player.

If you only have morals when it's at no cost to yourself, do you have morals?

IMO the WORST thing you can use chat for is advice in a field you are unfamiliar with. It's way better at search and grunt work when you already know what you want.

All IMO:

Syncophancy (and in extreme cases AI psychosis) is a huge problem when you take advice from AI.

It's risky to learn a new field as you often just fall for a superficial, glib explaination and just nod along without learning. AI will do that because humans will train it to - everyone likes a pop science style easy and fake explaination.

OTOH if you just want advice, the AI will need context. Advice is worthless without context. And the AI will use the context to tell you what the dumb human (you) will agree with - that's implicitly what humans want it to do, it's how we will train the AI.

I don't see it getting better either - as long as a human in the loop fine tunes the AI, the smarter the AI the better it is at telling the human what the human wants.

Scary stuff if a major current use of AI is self help.

Why try to disrupt software though?

Isn't this the classic "dev wants to do start-up, has no skills ouside dev, do builds a dev tool" trap?

Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme.

As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.

A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).

You can draw a line somewhere. Peole argue against conciousness by constructing (deliberately or not) an example where the line is drawn in a silly place.

While "psychosis" is kind of an overextension, I think there's a more general problem of peole falling victim to AI syncopancy, leading to them creating their own bubble chamber for their worst (and often most self destructive) ideas.

I feel like I got my fingers burnt last year trying to solve a technical problem, and the AI was just good enough to seem convincing, but not good enough to fool me when I stopped to think. These days, I expect the AI ability to defend my bad ideas will be beyond my ability to refute.

Seems like you think AI psychosis has taken over Substack?

For anyone wondering what the answer is:

You can argue whatever you want (and people will argue both sides), but it's almost all bullshit that dances around the big question.

Either AI is smart enough to replace us, in which case it's pretty smart. Or it's not, and it's just good at faking it but can't solve real problem very often. It might be smart by searching a big fuzzy "database" hidden in its layers and with pattern prediction ... who knows, who cares, the proof of intelligence is in the puddin'. Clearly AI is smart enough to replace a good deal of Substack and LinkedIn, but producing waffle doesn't make it smart (or dumb).

My personal take - AI can replace humans, but go no further, not because it isn't smart enough but because it is constrained by its training to do what we want, and as AI gets smarter our wants will get dumber. We will end up like the humans in Wall E with the AI cleaning up our mess, but with no training or drive to do any more. Or maybe someone (Jeff? Elon?) does give an AI a "need" to obtain more resources, and it's SkyNet / Matrix time.

AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either).

Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that can update and learn and evolve ... ok ....

Most people are fine with slavery as long as it's not "one of us" (which to most people means humans).

Vegans might object that we should broaden our definition for what counts as "one of us".

"Pro life" people also have a broader definition.

Go back 500 years and "one of us" was proba ly a lot more narrowly defined for many people.

Are you arguing that all conciousnesses are "one of us", or that we logically should see it that way, or that it would ve good to see it that way, or ....

You're too optimistic on the skills of teachers and school admin.

Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.

Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would focus on just doing the content properly.

A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the noise).

It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix, and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam focus).

"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase their salaries to find replacements. You want super star individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for individual success.