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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

aphyr.com

121–130 of 247 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#121
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I'm always down for learning something new. But I hope what I learn includes the name of the company I'd like to avoid.

Your tone is in conflict with the statement that you are curious.

It's because you're deflecting. :)

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#122
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not offering legal advice, and neither am I stating an opinion. I'm simply quoting Ofcom, the regulatory body responsible for overseeing this law.

> I'm simply quoting Ofcom no, you are doing more than that. you are saying that everyone who has a different interpretation of the parts you are quoting is misinformed. that is an opinion, which you are stating as fact, as someone unaffected by the outcome.

A valid point, and maybe I should have phrased it differently. I've deleted the comment which used the word "misinformed", so as not to cause any confusion.

My point is simply that the Ofcom quote clearly states that user comments on an article are not subject to the Online Safety Act. I assume this is a fact, as it's from the horse's mouth.

Some people appear to be basing their opinions on the assumption that the OSA does apply to such comments (hence my use of the offending word).

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#123
post #81

Everyday I sit down to build a product for my clients. I am a one man shop _now_. Before I had people helping me. My mental state is not good. A very odd thing happens when claude or codex complete code fast, I begin to think of all the other things that are needed to make AI Agent work better. I begin to worry about problems that other people use to help me with and think "Can I do those too?". Problems like product…

you can always course-correct and find your sweeter spot.

For course correction, I began with trying to think a bit more about solving problems for my clients by talking to them more often. That helps to some extent because I feel happy talking to them for understanding how to solve their problems.

What I do feel the issue is with I just having to do everything to keep costs down because hiring another dev vs doing it with AI consideration is real and it has collateral damage: I spend more time trying to build AI agents to do the work and there is 1 or 2 fewer jobs I create.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#124
i respect the author of this post wayyyy too much to ever imply that i know more than them, or that i even have proprietary knowledge that they, themselves do not possess. i admire aphyr, and i aesthetically agree with many of the arguments offered forth. but this whole thing feels a bit cherry-picked— i’m not gonna go chapter-and-verse (cf. belt-and-suspenders) about it, but on some levels this comes across as a bit superficial. i think the general thrust— that ai is a sort of Narcissus’s pond— is completely a reasonable and well-considered take. but i would be shocked if someone with the intellectual powers of someone like Aphyr has never had an interaction with an ai in which they did not feel like they were interacting with the deep recesses of their mind in a way both profound and, more importantly, productive. and yeah, there’s plenty of pyrite in them thar hills. but, it does have this almost Lord of the Rings The One Ring -esque pull when you get into a certain “embedding space” (/ thought space) in a certain thread conversing with ai. it genuinely is a profound transformation of cognition, and working superlinearly productively with it is a matter of “when”, not “if”. i share all the same aeathetic concerns, and all the deeper ones. but there have been sessions that i have had with ai that made me blankly stare up at the heavens as well, and i don’t think i’m anywhere near the only one.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#125
post #79

Another interesting one from 'aphyr -- I think the points around the Ironies of Automation deserve deeper focus, possibly even a separate follow-up post. I would encourage folks to look at the following industries: nuclear safety, commercial aviation, remote surgery. These industries have dealt with the issues of automation for much longer than we have as programmers. In the research I've done, these industries went…

Thank you for this! I really wanted to go deeper on human factors, and I think there's a lot to be said about CRM and sociotechnical systems design, especially when ML gets used for decision support. Ultimately wound up truncating that section (along with more of the economic critique) because the piece was already far too long.

There’s a paper out there, on designing IT systems from god knows when. It is incredibly dry, except for a line in it that stood out: All IT systems are political systems, because they decide how information and decisions flow.

I can only guess as to how much content you would have to explore on that axis.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#126
> One of her key lessons is that automation tends to de-skill operators

I recently discovered an example of this phenomenon in a completely unrelated area: navigation. About a week ago, I realized that I couldn't remember the exact turns to reach a certain place I started driving to recently, even after having driven there about 3-4 times over a period of a month. Each time I had used Google Maps. When I used to drive pre-Google-Maps, I would typically develop a good spatial model of a route on my third drive. This skill seems to have atrophied now. Even when I explicitly decide to drive without Google Maps, and make mental notes of the turns, my retention of new routes is now much weaker than it used to be. Thankfully, routes I retained before becoming Google Maps dependent, are still there.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#127
post #37

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…

I model this as "stacked sigmoid curves". I have no reason to believe that any specific technological implementation will be exponential in impact vs sigmoidal.

However if we throw enough money and smart people at the problems and get enough value from the early sigmoid curves, the effective impact of a large number of stacked sigmoids could theoretically average to a linear impact, but if the sigmoids stay of a similar magnitude (on average) and appear at a higher velocity over time, you end up with an exponential made up of sigmoids*

* To be fair, it has been so long since I have done math that this may be completely incorrect mathematically - I'm not sure how to model it. However I think in practice more and more sigmoids coming faster and faster with a similar median amplitude is gonna feel very fast to humans very soon - whether or not it's a true exponential.

I'm honestly having a very hard time thinking through the likely implications of what's currently happening over the next 2-10 years. Anyone who has the answers, please do share. I'm assuming from Cynafin that it's a peturbated complex adaptive system so I can just OODA or experiment, sense and respond to what happens - not what I think might happen.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#128
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the collateral damage? In ensuring that a bunch of endpoints use the same structure using LLMs?

Let's not debate that it's possible to make very large very safe changes. It is possible that you did that. This is about "slop bias". I'd wager that empowering everyone, especially power-positions to ship 50x more code will produce more code that is slop than not. You strongly oppose this because it's possible for you to update an API? I'm stuck on the power-position thing because I'm living it. I'm pro-AI but there…

> Maybe AI will address everything at every level.

I think this is the idea you need to entertain / ponder more on.

I largely agree with you, what I don't agree with is the weighting about the individual elements.

My point was that I could do a 30 minutes cleanup in order to streamline hundreds of endpoints. Without AI I would not have been able to justify this migration due to business reasons.

We get to move faster, also because we can shorten deprication tails and generally keep code bases more fit more easily.

In particular, we have dropped the external backoffice tool, so we have a single mono repo.

An Ai does tasks all the way from the infrastructure (setting policies to resources) and all the way to the frontends.

Equally, if resources are not addressed in our codebase, we know at a 100% it is not in use, and can be cleaned up.

Unused code audits are being done on a weekly schedule. Like our sec audits, robustness audits, etc.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#129
post #37

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#130
post #37

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…

We aren’t anywhere near AGI. They’ve consumed the entirety of human knowledge and poisoned the well, and it still can’t help but tell you to walk to the car wash. A peasant villager was sentient without a single book, film or song. You don’t need this much data to be sentient. They’re using a stupid method, and a better one will be discovered some day.

Sentience isn't intelligence.
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