My attitude towards AI is one of balance not overly dependent, but not completely rejecting either. After all, AI is already playing an important role in many fields, and I believe the future will be a world where humans and AI coexist and collaborate. There are many things humans cannot do, but AI can help us achieve them. We provide the ideas, and AI can turn those ideas into actions, helping us accomplish tasks.
The Gentle Singularity
261–270 of 557 posts
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#262My attitude towards AI is one of balance not overly dependent, but not completely rejecting either. After all, AI is already playing an important role in many fields, and I believe the future will be a world where humans and AI coexist and collaborate. There are many things humans cannot do, but AI can help us achieve them. We provide the ideas, and AI can turn those ideas into actions, helping us accomplish tasks.
This is the correct take. It is technology, not a god or a demon.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…
On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right. Instead of a guard there's a scanner b…
Here in sweden it is not "the norm" by any definition of "norm". Also it's incredibly slower and not "one blip away".
And the scanner to exit is terrible for fire safety and accessibility. Also I've seen it break with the result that you had to trigger the alarm to leave.
It does not work smoothly at all, but perhaps you live in a different sweden than I.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…
Right. Jevons Paradox. The lower barrier to entry might mean the average quality of software goes WAY down. But this could be great if it means that there are 10x as many little apps that make one person happy by doing only as much as they need. The above is also consistent with the quantity of excellent software going way up as well (just slower than the below-average stuff).
What the android/apple appstores have taught me compared to the old symbian appstore is that we don't need more apps, we need decent ones. The current appstores have more.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on pa…
Your point is not wrong, but I'd clarify a couple things; The primary cost of a traditional plant is fuel. However a nuclear plant needs a tad more (qualified) oversight than a coal plant. In the same way that the navy has specialists for running nuclear propulsion systems versus crew needed for diesel engines. Not surprisingly nuclear engines cost "more than fuel". That cost may end up being insignificant in the lon…
There are some costs that a coal plant wouldn't have, but those aren't really variable costs. If the plant's capacity is 1000MW and the grid is only demanding 500 MW right now, you don't get to send home any nuclear engineers, so what's the point in pricing kWh to discourage anyone from using more? If you build a 5GW plant instead of a 500MW plant, you don't need 10 times as many engineers just because this one's pipes have a larger diameter, so it's more economical to build larger plants, but the only times it makes sense to charge per kWh are when demand exceeds capacity and then those times become rare.
Solar is on its way to do something incredibly disruptive because it's the same "too cheap to meter" but only when the sun is shining, and then you still need the independent capacity to supply power from something else when it isn't. So now instead of "you pay ~$0.12/kWh all the time" you have a situation where power during sunshine hours is basically free but power at other times costs dramatically more than it used to because the infrastructure to supply that power has to recover its costs over significantly less usage.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on pa…
> So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? That isn't negligible. ...I say that, but I do note that I live in a coastal city with a temperate climate near a mo…
> Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)?
These are fixed costs. They don't go down if people use less power, so the sensible way to pay for them is with some kind of fixed monthly connection charge (e.g. proportional to the size of your service) or via taxes. You're still not measuring how much power people use at any given time.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#267> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel;
It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted of downloading a Reddit comment dump and training an ML model on it to predict the next character for a given input. It was magical.
I always see LLMs as an evolution of that. Instead of the next character, it's now the next token. Instead of GBs of Reddit comments, it's now TBs of "everything". Instead of millions of parameters, it's now billions of parameters.
Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine". Maybe throwing more compute and data at it will at some point make it so great that it's worthy to be called "AGI" anyway? I don't know.
Well anyway, thanks for the nostalgia trip on my birthday! I don't entirely share the same optimism - but I guess optimism is a necessary trait for a CEO, isn't it?
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#268A lot of good software engineering is just tribal knowledge. The people who know know.
Things like when to create an ugly hack because the perfect solution may result in in your existing customers moving over to your competitor. When to remove some tech debt and when to add to tech debt.
When to do a soft delete vs when to do a purge. These things are learnt when a customer shouts at you and you realize that you may be most intelligent kid on the block but it wont really help the customer tonight as the code is already deployed and your production deployment means a maintenance window.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep saying we're the richest country in the history of the world. I think we have a responsibility to practice good old fashioned Christian compassion (with a side of soft power if that's more your thing.)
I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government col…
>Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries.
Soft power is of obvious immense benefit to citizens of the United States, however you've rejected that in other comments.
The argument otherwise reads like a stereotypical "Not with my tax dollars!" argument. It's always fascinated me, that. Inevitably it's always an impassioned argument, regardless of the funding subject.
In this particular case, a very conservative estimate might put the number of child deaths in the tens of thousands. Reality is probably closer to hundreds of thousands at this point.
I pay taxes, a lot of them. I don't get angry when my taxes are used by the government to keep disadvantaged children in hellish conditions alive.
If you were to express the total cost of USAID's former budget against your tax bill as a binary choice between that and a few hundred thousand kids dying, I suspect it'd be much harder to maintain your current position.
Moreover, consider that central to this issue is the abrupt dismantling of an agency which was critical to global aid flow, and amounted to a rug pull. There was no justification for that.
Hopefully Sam's ASI is more compassionate than people, which frankly isn't a high bar lately.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/05/28/g-s1-...
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#270> There are other self-reinforcing loops at play. The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems. And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off.
> If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.
It's really cool to hear a public figure seriously talk about self-replicating machines. To me this is the key to unlocking human potential and ending material scarcity.
If you owned a pair of robots that with sufficient spare parts could repair each other and do other useful work you could effectively do anything by using them to do all the things necessary to build copies of themselves.
Once we as a species have exponential growth on that we can do anything. Clean energy, Carbon sequestration, Von Neumann probes, asteroid mining, O'Neill Cylinders, it's all possible.