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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#441

Post by malfist »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #275
websap wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil. Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.

Something changed with Dario a year or so ago. I think he started out with good intentions, although really hard to tell. Maybe it was really all about power and control for him from day one. Certainly now he's a different person - appears totally corrupted by money and power. Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has do…

It's just the worst version of capitalist game theory. If I don't do the bad thing and get rich, then someone else will do the bad thing and I won't get rich.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#442

Post by phainopepla2 »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #406
prewett wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the wo…

The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot. If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.

This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#443

Post by naravara »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #307
naravara wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing about Steve Jobs is that he actually didn’t deliver a single home run until his return to Apple late in his career. The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition. The guy had somehow managed to make a successful caree…

Did you forget Pixar? Jobs transformed the company with his extremely bold bet on Toy Story. They were doomed to obscurity without this big bet and now all children's movies are made this way.

I covered this when I said “Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby.”

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#444

Post by recursive »

rognjen wrote: post #125

This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange. Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

Don't hate the player.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#445

Post by blowscum »

827a wrote: post #279
lnsru wrote: post #34

Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hard…

This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my fri…

> Many will not survive.

Thankfully the people responsible have already prepared a golden parachute to land safely to destroy something else.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#446

Post by blowscum »

liotier wrote: post #116
locopati wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also possible to walk away from tech. To stop chasing the demands of anything for a buck and focus on something real.

Yes - it is easier than ever thanks to AI !

Indeed, here’s a prompt snippet to help you afterwards”.

“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#447

Post by oxag3n »

Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.

Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.

Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#448

Post by 827a »

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #398
827a wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my fri…

In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my…

The situation is insane at the company my friend works at. There's no central oversight, because, as I understand it, someone in leadership had the idea that they didn't want to prescribe which AI tools their engineers should use. So they just let their engineers expensify any tools they want. Afaik he hasn't yet hit the upper-bound; last month he said he reimbursed a ~$500 anthropic bill. The same company also makes their engineers go to the Apple store to buy laptops, with their own money, then reimburse it. The credit card points must go crazy over there.

But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#449

Post by LogicFailsMe »

justin66 wrote: post #407
rvz wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. I don't know about mentioning that one.

He’s a seminal figure!

Now why'd you'd have to ejaculate that into the conversation?

Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

https://www.christopherkremmer.com/post/to-sir-with-love

https://web.archive.org/web/20240519113411/https://skepchick...

Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#450

Post by Aurornis »

oxag3n wrote: post #447

Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI. Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition…

> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology.

When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.

Back then changes happened more gradually.

It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.

> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.

Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.

AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.

Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.

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