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Thanks for sharing the quote, it's really great. I believe he is correct, but I am not sure I yet agree with your assertion that we know that LLMs are more like alarm clocks than battleships.

I think they are more like watercraft in general. Some are small, and they have their uses. Some are big, and they have their uses. But it is the nation with the most aircraft carriers that is truly sovereign.

If there is no international police, there is no international law.

Madness. This is what the death of liberalism looks like.

edit:

Thinking about this shakes me. If this statistic is accurate, that the majority of Americans think we should be nationalizing private assets like this, then I no longer know what to think of my fellow citizens. Safety nets and regulation, and the taxes to run these systems and the necessary machinery of state--this I understand. But just taking 50% of a private company-- of every company in the industry? That is nothing but the ignoble reaction of a madding crowd.

Life, liberty, property. It is the sole purpose of government to protect these natural rights. That is the foundation of the ideology that freed us from slavery, and the majority of Americans have forgotten it.

Everyone I know who has immigrated to America talks some version of this.

The lines that have these issues will be dwarfed by the hundreds that don't. It's scattershot for sure, but if it gets to the point where the rate of inbreeding is statistically significant to the total success of his genetic material, then he has likely already "won" the genetic game.

From an evolutionary fitness perspective, it makes sense as a kind of loophole for easily reproducing and distributing your genetic material in a way likely to lead to many successful family trees. This might actually be one of the best strategies.

Small-scale, artisan production of goods/services that you personally hand to your local customer and that have strong, local, cultural value. If you're serious about future-proofing your career, do this. If possible, run your own business or work in a partnership where you have voting rights over the capital.

He was 100% correct and continues to be so.

If they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.

Intuitively, and based on my studies of economics, I believe that we will create new jobs or jobs will transform in some way as AI rolls out. That is, mathematicians would take on some new role in the math pipeline, as described in the article. But it’s not immediately clear to me what those jobs or roles might be.

However, when I zoom in on the question, I see that it distills down to this problem: Is there something a human brain can infer that a computer cannot infer? The answer to this seems much clearer and less optimistic for those tied to their jobs.

Yes, you’re right. I was just quickly lumping any contractor whose job is to run tests from a test case sheet under the QA umbrella. I guess a more likely title is Product Market Analyst, or something like that. But I was mostly stating that I don’t find this weird at all. I definitely have looked at competitor’s API’s, for example, when designing my own. I would find it weird not to.

Close, but sadly Markov could not afford a car and Turing was more of a man’s man.

What’s even the story here? QA Engineers Perform Job?

This is really a great laugh! It’s like watching a germaphobe come to the realization that germs are everywhere. It reminds me a little bit of how the new left approaches consumption as an identity forming action. It’s really beautiful to behold.

Edit: we need a food-coop take on every digital product. The same shit in an unbleached-brown, compostable container with social justice catchphrases splashed on the label. Produced at the same publicly-traded factory as the old, unethical stuff.

So his plan is to just take what he wants from the people who built it? What the fuck. That’s not a plan. Why are these people incapable of making the world better on their own.

I too, long for the days of 5 years ago when people understood how systems were built. What a peachy time that was. People were so knowledgeable, curious, and engaged with the systems that defined their lives. I am glad you reminded me about those happier, erudite days, as I was almost struggling to believe that such a time ever existed.

Turing, McCarthy, Shannon, Minsky, Rosenblatt, Hinton, LeCunn, Sustkever, Markov, Shazeer, Vaswani, etc.

What do all these AI pioneers have in common?

I know multiple employed, functional people who do not own a cell phone. This is absolutely not a requirement. People have simply atrophied in the machine’s embrace.

And not being able to afford having someone cook for you and serve you is not equivalent to subsisting on gruel. I could not even conceive of a word in which my parents or grandparents casually paid people to cook for them. People whining about this just comes off as entitled and out of touch.

Unironically, yes. Look at photos of people today, and then photos of people a century ago. You can’t hide the sloth.

Should we perhaps look at the top 51% instead? Why pick one perspective over the other?

I’m not familiar with Dalio outside some weird pseudo-academic paper he wrote where he attempts to provide a new grand theory of economics based on “transactions”, but I would be interested to hear this perspective supported.

Edit: samiv above answered my question

Thank you for this; you are completely correct but this is not the narrative on the streets. He was a tyrant (in the original sense) and dictator who believed in absolute power of the executive, which paved the way for Trump. His federalization program wiped out the America that existed before. Like Trump, he ruled via mob passion. He was America’s Marius.

For real. Reading old comment threads makes me sad, because the level of discourse was so much higher in the past. Although this place is still deeply appreciated, it’s clear that its culture is going monotonically towards reddit.

Is there anywhere public anymore that isn’t being overrun by lobotomized p-zombies (partisan zombies)? Is it even possible to make such a public space? Ressentiment consumes all discourse.

Crypto and AI are deeply connected, and you see similar structures/problems in both. Shannon, the “Father (or whatever) of AI”, worked for the NSA and published many papers there that were later declassified.

Here is a banger quote on this by Shannon’s boy Warren Weaver, keeping in mind LLMs came from translation problems:

“One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Thanks for this! I have been reading through early information/automata theory lately, and hadn’t come across this one. If you have any more recommendations, please share.

It’s like The Machine Stops, except that ~10% of the population still understands how the machine works.

Yeah, I did not use Jira or other project management software. There was no need as the project could be implemented very fast with essentially one contributor.

However agents (not just LLMs) were definitely involved.

It’s possible I misunderstood your question.

It’s also worth considering that a lot of this software will never be marketed, compared to in the past. For example, since it is now trivial to build a tool, why sell it? It is now economical to build a lot tools in-house.

I used claude for a small project last weekend that will 100% create significant value in my workplace. It’s a non-tech setting. Going to be vague so as not to give out too much personal information.

Basically it allowed me to easily spin up a highly usable front-end as well as scrape together a large dataset to back it. The dataset is industry specific knowledge that does not exist in any public, single source. Part of this dataset creation was generating geolocation polygons based on legal documents that verbally defined physical territory. Absolute precision is not necessary for our purposes, but as far as we have confirmed so far the agent basically one-shotted the data with negligible errors and sufficient precision.

Humans were involved in the process, but there is zero chance this project would have happened without agents. The dataset alone would have taken weeks of full time effort. The front end would have been easier, but still time consuming.

I don’t really understand how people aren’t seeing the value in this.

Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.

The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.

I’m not sure you’ll read this because you made an obvious throwaway, but your action/comment is clearly not appropriate for a place like HN. And from the comments in general, it seems like maybe this article isn’t either.