81–90 of 139 posts
> Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI. Reminds me of a politician in India who would ask elders in his family to slap him hard before he starts out on the election campaigns. He says that the slaps are meant to keep him alert and honest.
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And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences? The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done. Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just t…
This is a good time to point out that slippery slope is a fallacy. Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods." That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.
This is the particular problem with deciding a position, it's all shades of grey.
200 years ago a good number of humans thought that owning other humans was a-ok. Today that's mostly not true. In 200 years it's likely the vast majority of humanity will look at eating meat and owning pets at the same level of horror. Which is the extreme position? Which is the moderate?
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> evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.
Thank goodness it was only one bacteria doing all that evolving! Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours. /Pedantry crisis averted.
Fun math!
[0]Crockford et al. (2023) estimate about 10^30 cells exist today, and between 10^39 and 10^40 cells have ever existed on Earth.
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No matter how much you don't believe there is a tiger behind the bush. The tiger really believes you are going to be tasty.
So you build a machine that kills all tigers and now you don't have to worry about belief. The problem with objective reality is 1. it changes. 2. it can be different for different people in different places. If I live in rural India, there is probably not a tiger behind the bush. If I live in downtown Chicago there is almost certainly not a tiger behind the bush. This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic think…
I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…
I think the mistake there was the 5 hour session specing the app. It's so hard to know what you want before you see it, so optimize towards seeing it as soon as possible. That's what I thought the article was going to be about based off the title. Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if…
Same story as building a house. There’s so many unknowns.
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I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity. It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes. But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you. This sit…
> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me
"I should run my purchase decisions past an AI in the future."
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I think the mistake there was the 5 hour session specing the app. It's so hard to know what you want before you see it, so optimize towards seeing it as soon as possible. That's what I thought the article was going to be about based off the title. Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if…
One of the most foundational insights I’ve ever had in IT is clients don’t know what they want until you shove it in their face. And only then do they say no, no, no, change this, this and that. Same story as building a house. There’s so many unknowns.
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It seems like an absolute dream for corporate execs who don't know anything about development, see a taped-together prototype built in a day, and think to themselves "Wow, we're 90% done... we could almost ship that!!"
Well, from my experience, if the AI dev is ill intended, he can just say nothing then the exec will go "we can ship now as it is!"
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And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences? The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done. Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just t…
> evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.
The only thing that changed is the scale.