yedava

AI products will be speed running the last few decades of tech - make a compelling product, then add ads based on the prompt, then store prompts from each user and build psychological profiles, and finally manipulate AI output to maximize user susceptibility to part with their hard earned money. Bonus points if they can get the user addicted to their product.

The article times bubble sort, which is just nested loops. And python is dead slow. Granted nobody uses bubble sort, but loops show up in all kinds of places in programming. With python, you always have to make a decision on whether to use python loops or let something like numpy or torch or pandas do the loop.

I use python because I have to, but not because I want to. I have to think twice about using something as basic as a loop, whereas in another language I don't have to.

The history of disability rights, or any rights for that matter, has been more of raising the cost of ignoring them rather than just being "nice". If they were "nice", nothing would have ever changed.

The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.

The framing around productivity misses a huge area - productivity of life. The less time that is wasted in office, the more time is available to do things that make life worth living. Any argument for return to office should justify why people are expected to waste away their lives.

The primary "innovation" of Uber is political, not technological. They've managed to circumvent labor protections and at the same time position themselves as the middleman between drivers and riders.

In another Universe, a technology company would develop software that taxi companies can use to provide the same services that Uber does. But that wouldn't be as profitable as there wouldn't be scope for labor exploitation.

A good rule of thumb for shopping an Amazon - avoid anything that you can ingest, apply on your skin, and anything electrical.

These are better to buy in a brick and mortar store where a human verifies that the product has indeed come from supplier who is verified in some way. Of course this doesn't make brick and mortar products automatically safe, but they are far better than Amazon where quality control is offloaded onto the customers.

Sure, they are children and said children do a lot of things at school that they hide from parents. This isn't new. As long as the children are not hurting others, why should the schools care?

Musk is presumably is speaking for SpaceX families and moving to Texas can endanger their lives. If Musk said this wasn't about families, but only about his political ideology, it would be different.

If a student wants to come out as gay and doesn't want to tell their parents, do schools inform the parents? Why should there be separate rules for identifying as transgender?

Also, given Texas's draconian laws around reproductive health, how is moving to Texas any better?

It's interesting to see Thiel and Zuckerberg be so oblivious to the problems of millennials. Boomers are a problem because they control capital and have lobbying power. The same kind of capital and political power now rests with the tech billionaires. People like Thiel are the new boomers who are destroying the younger generation.

Up next - evolution is just a "theory", like intelligent design.

It's the other way around with apps. It's like I want to hire a contractor and every contractor says they have to smoke inside my house.

The tech world does not give you the choice of letting you pay for privacy or pay by invading your privacy. Now, you can nitpick that you can build your own service or host your service, but then the question becomes why is programming/sysadmin knowledge a prerequisite for using your phone?

I can let in a contractor in my house and also ask them not to smoke. They of course have the right to refuse that request and decline my money, but in the real world, contractors usually comply with such requests as smoking is known to harm health. I don't see why the digital world has to be any different. Just because laws and awareness are lagging behind, tech world's toxic practices don't need to get a pass.

We need to think bigger. Having an app on your phone is like having a stranger in your house. The same legal protections that apply to property should apply inside the software that runs on your phone. An app should be at the mercy of the user and should provide easy (and automated) ways to turn off manipulative and surveillance features.

Technology cannot solve privacy invasion. A face is only one data point. Skin tone, clothes, your gait etc... all can give away who you are.

What we need is a political framework that will go after privacy thieves. The thieves should face the same kind of consequences as someone who breaks into a billionaire's home.

If all the kids in the peer group have no cell phones, solving the mental health crisis would be easy. As long as some kids have access, the others will feel like they are being deprived of something fundamental, will resent their parents and will look for any opportunity to get on social media.

A technological solution is to have complete control over the computing devices we "own". But that goes against the interests of trillion dollar corporations and so we can't have that.

Like I was figuring out if there is a way to let my kid use Youtube with a select set of channels, but no. Youtube needs to keep showing suggestions on what to watch next. I would gladly pay for the ability to control what content my kid sees, but Youtube stands to make more profit by getting the kid addicted to their app.

The kid's mental health improved when she gave up her phone. So there is that and also some research that justifies the causation [1].

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

I want to say this article describes me, but then I realized that it's just my confirmation bias. Who doesn't like to think that they are the smartest ones around and it's everyone else who is stupid and clueless?

Science ultimately is a collective effort. The collaboration doesn't need to happen in real time, in the same physical place. Ideas can be spread out across time and geographies and finally one person puts them together and given our bias for hero worship, we call that one person a genius and go on a wild goose chase of how can we create more geniuses instead of asking how can we foster a environment for ideas, an environment which sometimes needs to last for decades in order to bear fruit.

First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price). I am very proud that we’ve made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that.

This would believable if OpenAI charged what it actually costs to run the service instead of using the standard predatory model of subsiding the service, monopolizing market share and then monetizing their monopoly power.

No tech firm should get the benefit of doubt that they are in this to help people. They're in it for money and power at our cost.

the Rubik’s cube world record currently stands at 3.13 seconds, set in July 2023.

However, the record-holder, 23 year-old Max Park, didn’t discover the insights that allowed him to solve the Rubik’s cube. His success was built atop a foundation of accumulated knowledge that mathematicians and puzzle enthusiasts derived—mental algorithms that enable “cubers” to solve the puzzle with lightning speed.

Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual. We tend to build cults of personalities around certain smart people, but if you displace those smart people onto a different time or place, they would have achieved nothing. They owe their success to so many other people.

Having a genius on your team is less important than fostering an environment where a group of people feed off each other's ideas and produce intelligence.

A McKinsey consultant got there through meritocracy, but they will likely be working on something that makes life miserable for people, whereas someone working on an FOSS project will likely make life better for people. As a measure of usefulness to society, meritocracy, as determined by test scores, or career achievements is useless.

Then let's try something simpler. What were the test scores of Linus Torvalds? Which gatekeeper certified that he was qualified enough to do engineering at the level he has done?

I wonder what test scores the people who invented steel had.

But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes?

It won't and that's the point. We should stop wasting our childhoods chasing meaningless standardized tests because the rationale for the tests is built on a lie. You can randomly pick people to run corporations and we won't be any worse off.

There seems to be quite a bit of outrage against the idea that merit doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite.

So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.

I think this hypothesis quickly falls apart when you consider other places other than the US and China. To take India for example, the northern parts rely more on wheat and the southern parts on rice. One could easily make up an argument that the rice dominant south is more individualistic as it produces more economic output.

Presumably those who get to own the Moon will have people here on Earth who they love or care about. Following the "this is just how it is" logic, what's stopping a barrel of gun from being pointed at those people?