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Feeling Sad about AI

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Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#251

Post by notpachet »

willchis wrote: post #248
notpachet wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but pointing out a couple of problems in your analysis: First, arctic temperatures: this is a widely misunderstood point. Notice that in the graph, the non-summer months are noticeably warmer. The summer months are going to be effectively capped at around 0 degrees until all the ice is gone, so holding up this graph and saying "look, the temperature never got above freezing!" is misleading, because th…

This is why we're so screwed. People can't even read graphs. They'll stand outside in smoke-filled scorching summer heat and say "but Joe Rogan says the earth is in a cooling cycle".

"My dosimeter only reads 3.6 roentgen / hour!"

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#252

Post by willchis »

mike_hearn wrote: post #249
willchis wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also just look at the first months of 2026 in the link you shared - the average temperatures are up to 15C higher in March!

But they were almost exactly average in February. You're reading far too much into noise. The idea of a climate crisis is built on arguments about trends that span hundreds of years, not two weeks.

"They were nearly the same average for exactly one day in February" says the guy lecturing me on reading noise.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#253

Post by Xenoamorphous »

I see two groups of optimistic people about all this.

First, the “OMG I’ve always been a builder, I’m having so much fun”. Yeah, building hobby projects. They’re called a hobby for a reason, they are not means to sustain yourself or your loved ones, particularly when the guy next to you can spin up an AI agent and ask “build me this”.

Then the “coding was never the hard part/where I spent most of my time, engineering is still hard”. Yeah, maybe it still is, but for how long? 2 years? 3?

Both strike me as naive and myopic, but I really wish I’m the one who’s wrong.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#254

Post by asdfman123 »

GolfPopper wrote: post #154
asdfman123 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in denial for a long time too. Now I see it everywhere, among very smart people, too. They say "AI just hallucinates" or "your fear is overblown" or they have a general sour grapes attitude towards it. But I don't think they're prepared for what's coming.

It's been coming "soon" for years now. On the one hand, I confess that the "AI skeptic" position (which is where I place myself) seems a lot like "Global Warming skeptic". On the other hand, every instinct I have is telling me "this is an epic scam" and the wheels will come off, and it will crash and burn. The only question is when.

I felt this way too. But I think it's because we've lived through so many hype cycles (3D printing, IoT, crypto, etc.) which have either been modest improvements or busts.

However, game changing technology DOES come along from time to time. I think AI falls into that category, perhaps more than any other.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#255

Post by hbn »

jamesjyu wrote: post #105
hbn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also makes it a more difficult to make it a career than ever. There's simply too many games releasing. Steam is absolutely FLOODED with new games releasing, and it's very hard to stand out. https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

There's nothing new under the sun. The quality of your ideas and execution will still matter in this flood, as it always has been.

Fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of those games in that deluge are legitimately quite good but no one will play them because 99% of gamers aren't looking for more games to play.

Just the ones they hear about by worth of mouth, or recurring entries in their favorite series, or from their favorite developers are already too much to keep up with. I'm certainly in that boat. My backlog only grows, and I have quite a bit of free time relative to some people.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#256

Post by palmotea »

simonw wrote: post #242
palmotea wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now ( https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio ...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have. Very, because you missed my point entirely. I said built not used . Analogies could be made to social media and tobacco, which have also been very popular.

You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend? I think it's being built to solve problems they have. OpenAI shut down GPT-4o because it leaned too hard into getting people addicted to it.

> You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend?

No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily replaceable ways (which my intuition says are the numerical bulk of users), many people use it because they're required to, and a relatively small fraction use it to build things or replace human labor in their employ, etc.

But to restate my point: AI systems like ChatGPT weren't built to solve any kind of problem most people actually have. Few people, if anyone, had a ChatGPT-shaped hole in their life in 2021. It was built because it could be built, and it continue to be built because some other people have a "problem" that they have to pay a lot of money to workers and they hope to do less of that in the future. And causing societal harm or damage doesn't seem to any kind of deterrent to many of them, if they think about it at all.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#257

Post by aogaili »

I griefed a bit myself for the effort I put to learn programming, I do enjoy the concepts and theories, it was playground for my mind.

But the way I see it, is that I got a matching partner, that is also very good at programming. And there is a strange sense of excitement when I watch the LLMs struggle were I used to struggle and excel in many other areas I'm poor at.

But I got into coding to build products/software that I can share with others, and this has accelerated, so that is also exciting, I decided to put the money and fear aside and do what I love..build things.

"And if you can do it, people think you're clever, and respect you." - that is the main issue here..personally, in where I come from the work was never respected and also never paid well, so I always did it because I like to create/build and keep my mind engaged.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#258

Post by Seattle3503 »

HEmanZ wrote: post #217
simonw wrote: post #66

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…

The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops. The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai. I…

Yeah, some people are is saying "Oh coding is solved, but we still need people to guide the architecture."

But coding was "solved" by self-play against "small" problems. Is there any reason training couldn't be scaled up to even longer horizon tasks like evolving an architecture in a growing business? The increasing load from a growing business, both in terms of usage and product accretion, can be entirely simulated in a data-center, and therefore trained against.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#259

Post by asdfman123 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #159
fidotron wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.

I don't have any trust that the people left standing will ever be motivated enough to figure out a solution that doesn't involve letting the rest of us starve or actively having us killed

What people don't understand is that dictators don't kill everyone because they're just monsters.

Well, they are monsters, but the reason they do it is because it's kill or be killed for them. You have to eliminate threats before they eliminate you.

And believe me, LOTS of people will want to depose a world dictator.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#260

Post by simonw »

palmotea wrote: post #256
simonw wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend? I think it's being built to solve problems they have. OpenAI shut down GPT-4o because it leaned too hard into getting people addicted to it.

> You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend? No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily repla…

Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now.

I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be.

Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans.

Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.

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