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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

aphyr.com

761–770 of 830 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#761
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the cl…

The upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are enormous . I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!

You can go wherever you want whenever you want... until everyone does this and now you are stalled in traffic with no end in sight.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#762
post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E.P. Thompson, „The Making of the English Working Class“. It is admittedly a specific cherry picked point in time at which this was true, but useful to illustrate the issue.

I had a look out of curiosity. The book has: >“In the summer of 1812 there were no fewer than 12,000 troops in the disturbed counties, a greater force than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsula.” But for that year Wikipedia has >Wellington's 48,500-man army... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamanca

If I remember correctly it was true for a short time when it was compared to a small expeditionary force, that quickly grew. That is why its cherry picked.

The point being made by use of colorful anecdote is however that industrialisation led to internal unrest which required considerable force to manage, and whose ultimate outcome (unprecedented rise in living standards) is much preferable to it being stopped in its tracks. A story that repeats itself again and again, check the American longshoremen union for an especially crass recent example of it.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight. Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding. Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again. This effor…

What strikes me is that AI can also be the best teacher in the world: your Makefile is not working, you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax, you ask for more details, you learn more, you ask about other Makefile syntax gotchas, etc. This is the most efficient deliberate practice possible: you can learn in minutes what would take hours of Googling, tinkering and scouring docs. You have a…

You're not learning, though. So much of learning is going down the wrong path, realizing it's wrong, and retaining what you learned from that wrong path and realizing its applicability in the future. Being able to immediately find the correct answer doesn't teach you anything, it allows you to memorize the correct answer for this situation. It expands the depth of your knowledge graph (assuming you remember the answer) but you don't expand the breadth.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#764
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like a failure of imagination. I see it as the opposite. Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. I think what is far more likely is that as these tools proliferate, we continue on the path we've always done, some discomfort, probably negatively impacting some, but ultimately a better life when me…

> Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. It's not "doomerism" because there is a call to action, impractical as it may seem. TFA is stating one possible, if flawed course of action. There may be others. Doomerism just cries "the comet is coming, end your lives now!". Also, if you're honest, there is some ar…

I just object to your reasoning on so many levels. I regard it as the current zeitgeist of anti-capitalism. Just lazy blame.

We are objectively living in the best times of human history, ever. The global median person in the world is much better off than their predecessors.

Is wealth inequality growing? Yes! This makes people angry. Does that automatically extrapolate to billionaires will murder people (actively or inactively) simply because they can?

A resounding, emphatic, NO. It doesn't extrapolate to that.

What will almost certainly happen is the same as every other time. The technology will disrupt, cause short term pain for some, but ultimately become just another commodity and push up the standard of living for the median person. Billionaires will continue to be billionaires, normal people will adjust, we'll find out ways to put human productivity to use, life will go on.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you said, it is a failure of imagination. When someone says, "the billionaires and trillionaires won't need anyone else," the dystopian scenerio is not neccesarily "therefore other people won't exist or will eventually become extinct or killed" it's that other people will be straight out enslaved. With all the torture and suffering that entails. You know, the dystopian scenario that is more in line with centurie…

Why on earth would billionaires want to do this?! It is complete dystopian fantasy.

They don't just wake up one day and want to do this. They fear losing their power and want and try to maintain it at considerable cost to others due to that fear. The dynamics of society become such that the power imbalance and wealth inequality continues to increase, until eventually the threshold to something that is indistinguishable from slavery is passed.

Edit: By the way, just the other day the Trump admin trotted out a Doordash grandma in front of the cameras and asked her what she thought of trans women in sports. This grandma is doing doordash to pay off the medical debt of the cancer treatment of her dead husband because the US of A does not provide the minimum healthcare befitting of the richest country on Earth. We are already living in a dystopian fantasy.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#766
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. It's not "doomerism" because there is a call to action, impractical as it may seem. TFA is stating one possible, if flawed course of action. There may be others. Doomerism just cries "the comet is coming, end your lives now!". Also, if you're honest, there is some ar…

I just object to your reasoning on so many levels. I regard it as the current zeitgeist of anti-capitalism. Just lazy blame. We are objectively living in the best times of human history, ever. The global median person in the world is much better off than their predecessors. Is wealth inequality growing? Yes! This makes people angry. Does that automatically extrapolate to billionaires will murder people (actively or i…

[dead]

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#767
post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[0] is a throwaway paragraph that handwaves at second-hand accounts of generic things LLMs can do, with no further discussion, apparently because he (surprisingly!) has almost no first-hand experience with them. Then there are 10 pages of negativity with dozens of links to stuff that has been discussed to death here and in media. The "negative spaces" he's filling are already overflowing. His lack of personal experie…

> His lack of personal experience with LLMs... You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them, it seems. Go re-read Section 1.5 "Models are Idiots". Make sure to read the footnotes. They're sure to address most of the counterarguments you might make. > Is that "breathless boosterism?" How you phrased it? Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" s…

> You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them...

Not really, those are exactly the things said by people who dabble with LLMs a little and turn to "breathless naysaying" without any effort to really figure out this new technology. I mean, the series literally ends with "maybe I'll try to code with it."

> Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few.

Not really, I did say "Is it good or bad? I don't know!" and literally mentioned the infinite nuances. I did not want this to become a tangent about those nuances (that's what I hoped would be in TFA) but I do know that being able to write or rewrite entire projects single-handedly is tremendous utility.

> Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one.

Not really, just that I've already discussed all the points in that piece in past comments with way more studies on "empirical evidence on LLM coding impact" with way more nuance. If you want to follow the threads in the comment I linked, you'll come across some of those comments.

> You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature.

Not really, the repeated message in all the latest reports like DORA and DX and CircleCI (which your link mentions but glosses over) very clearly indicates that using LLMs with strong software development fundamentals (what I called "discipline") is a huge force multiplier. See point 3 of this link as a representative example: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/blog/generative-... For these teams, productivity will literally be proportional to their tokens rather than their devs, because each dev is so highly leveraged.

> If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.

Yes, but at this point it's unlikely to be a silver bullet, and I never claimed it would be. What I am saying is that it is a huge accelerant, but needs steering by skilled operators, engineers who know the discipline but also understand how to work with AI.

And in my experience it takes a surprising amount of time and practice to learn how to leverage AI effectively.

Which aphyr clearly has not done. Which is why this series is such a disappointment.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.

Robustly advocating for your opinions is not an act of oppression. The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment. I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.

And at some point, maybe it makes sense to ask why, instead of blindly accepting and propagating the hive-mind party line exhibited in threads such as this one.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#769

I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" an…

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

> Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.

There are many studies concluding that for some tasks, experts make decisions that are no better than a dice roll, sometimes worse. So the game here is not to make good decisions, but to make a convincing argument. And it is something LLMs are really good at.

And it is ironic because it matches the job of a CEO pretty well. CEOs often make decisions with high uncertainty, the kind where it is hard to beat random, and they are expected to communicate with authority.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#770
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You could always join the union at a unionized shop. It’s not like they’re the doctors guild that purposefully restricts the number of new doctors per year.

Unions protect existing members at the expense of people breaking in. You can look at teacher's unions to see how this plays out. Older tenured teachers cannot be fired, new teachers have to fight for the few open positions for a fraction of the pay, and are allowed to be laid off.

This is not unique to the teacher's union.

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