631–640 of 820 posts
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I think it's a good analogy in many ways, and personally I think car-centric society has a lot of flaws. I think the ease that AI brings to tasks may erode mental capabilities in the same way cars have eroded our collective physical health.* That said, it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues. I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses…
> it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology. Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elde…
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He is not writing his blog to convince people, his primary audience already agrees. That doesn't make him wrong.
> He is not writing his blog to convince people, his primary audience already agrees. He's selling a paid newsletter, so at least one of his motivations is to make money. His target subscribers are certainly people who lean towards his viewpoint but he still needs to do some convincing because the market of people who are open if not warm to his thesis is much bigger than the market of people who already share his th…
Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct .) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art. Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if…
I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative. There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times , they can be wild…
I'm not talking about the quantity of code produced, but about actual user needs that are now resolved that would not have been before.
The main productivity gain will not come from existing software engineer, but from people that couldn't code at all before but are now able to do things by themselves. We are still very early.
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So here's the thing. I am not generally an angry person. But Ed's writing really resonates with me, because for the last four years these people have been making a strategy of scaring the shit out of us while trying to ruin something I genuinely love (coding), while simultaneously fucking up the economy and multiple industries and turning the internet into slop. I very badly want more people to call these guys "chuck…
I want to be one data point seeing as this goes uncontested (the ones in the know don’t care anymore to be honest). They are not only useful it is obvious they are. If you don’t see it I really, really don’t know what to tell you. You can tell yourself I am bot or shill or whatever if that helps you sleep but .. just trying to help out another dev here. Wake the F up.
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> I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. I think it's more complicated than that too. He's pretty well versed in the stated capabilities of LLMs. The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point , because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so m…
I don’t get me wrong, I’m on Ed’s side and get where he’s coming from. I just think his arguments are normally taken to the extreme, making them less defensible, when he could make the same arguments from a more moderate stance and ultimately be more convincing. His arguments, albeit valid, can often sound like reductos ad absurdums the way he presents them.
One of the worst things about LLM writing is how it makes big promises of what it can prove in some piece of writing, and then never really follows up on that, or has specifics that go all the way towards the original, grandiose statement.
And frankly, Zitron is guilty of that pattern of writing too, or of relying on some unstated "baseline" knowledge which is clear from his other writing but not in the specific piece.
So, basically yeah, agreeing about the ad absurdum thing.
(I will note, the tone, the swearing, etc. really doesn't matter nearly as much as these problems, and everyone instead obsessing about the swearing and personality is really boring)
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US inflation is slightly under 4%, so by my maths receiving $3tn in 2030 would be worth about $2.5tn in 2026 dollars.
Currently slightly under 4%. I have a feeling that part of the solution here is going to end up being, what was the euphemism? Quantitative easing - also known as “printing money”. I would not be surprised if we end up seeing near double digit inflation in USD - it has also significantly lost its status as a global reserve currency, which makes this all the more likely. Tbh I think it’s already happening in real term…
Why though? This isn't a bank run situation. Sure, it's unwise to bet against "US President does something stupid", but the rationale is missing.
The oil situation remains very concerning, and you can't print oil.
Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct .) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art. Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if…
I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative. There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times , they can be wild…
Very little new or ground-breaking (I struggle to think of things AI has produced that aren't themselves just more AI), but various previously-stable sites and services breaking.
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But we know global GDP per capita (a proxy to wages)- the US represent about 25% of total global GDP (a metric which accounts for US wages being higher than average). I’m not being contrarian, I genuinely think the addressable market is the global market and not just the US (and by a wide margin) and as such thats the real potential of anthropic/openai/et al.
Globally available AI means cheap LLM pilots offshore means huge wage deflation in white collar jobs in the US. …assuming the AI pace of progress slows down enough that there are still meaningful white collar jobs to have.
(also I suspect the anti-globalization discourse will get even more pointed)