111–120 of 247 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I’ve seen this article posted every day for the past week or so
No you haven’t, because it was published today. What you’ve seen are past articles from the same author on the subject that all share the same "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess:" prefix.
In the case of UBI, how would we differentiate between a previously highly paid professional (SWE, lawyer, author) and a pauper (janitor, car washer, unemployed). It’s only fair that they would receive the same amount. But then how can the former category continue to fulfill their obligations?
They can't. Just like the steel workers who lost their jobs in the 1970's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done, PG was fond of saying "It has decades to run. Social changes take longer than technical changes." I think we're at a similar point with LLMs. The technical stuff is largely "done" - LLMs have closer to 10% than 10x headroom in how much they will technologically improve, we'll find ways to make them more efficient and burn fewer GPU cycle…
> Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done Literally who wondered that? Drives me nuts when people start off an argument with an obvious strawman. I remember the time period of 2005-2007 very well, and I don't remember a single person, at least in tech, thinking the Internet was done. I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web te…
There is, of course, the Paul Krugman quote from 1998 that by 2005 the Internet would be no more important than a fax machine. [1]
Here's Wired in 2007 saying, in reference to Facebook, "no company in its right mind would give it a $15 billion valuation". [2]
I remember, being at Google in ~2011, we used to laugh at the Wall Street analysts because they would focus on CPC numbers to forecast a valuation, which is important only if the number of clicks is remaining constant. We knew, of course that total Internet usage was still growing quite rapidly and that queries had increased by roughly 4x over the 2009-2013 timeframe.
And a lot of people will say "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?", and I'll point out that many people who assumed the Internet had lots of room to grow in 2005-2007 did end up very rich. Google stock has increased roughly 20x since 2007 (and 40x from its 2009 lows). Meta is now worth $1.6T, a 100x increase over the $15B valuation that everyone thought was insane in 2007. Amazon is also up about 100x. It would not be possible to take the other side of the trade and make these kind of profits if the majority of people did not think the Internet was largely over.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can the mods please remove a lot of these comments? Too many bot replies
Do you have proof the person you are replying to is a bot or are you just going on vibes?
My fault for reading this article half asleep and wanting to thank Aphyr for their writing. I should have instead written 5 paragraphs pedantically criticizing minor aspects of their post while completely missing the point. Or maybe I should be offering my expert legal advice (I watched Suits once) on the UK Online Safety Act.
(And before anyone brings pitch forks out, this is what they wrote in a previous article:
> “Cool it already with the semicolons, Kyle.” No. I cut my teeth on Samuel Johnson and you can pry the chandelierious intricacy of nested lists from my phthisic, mouldering hands. I have a professional editor, and she is not here right now, and I am taking this opportunity to revel in unhinged grammatical squalor.
My life was made poorer for knowing that semicolons are apparently a sin, but richer for the rebellion.
The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…
Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done, PG was fond of saying "It has decades to run. Social changes take longer than technical changes." I think we're at a similar point with LLMs. The technical stuff is largely "done" - LLMs have closer to 10% than 10x headroom in how much they will technologically improve, we'll find ways to make them more efficient and burn fewer GPU cycle…
>followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off.
These will be rare boutique affairs. Based on how mass production and cheap shipping played out, most people value price over quality. The economy will rearrange itself around those savings, making boutique products and services expensive.
>mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit.
We have this today. And that's not a "same as it ever was" dismissal. Today, there are a lot of terminally online people posting the equivalent of propaganda (and actual propaganda). Social media pushes hot takes in audiences' faces, a portion of them reshare it, and it spreads exponentially. The only limitation to propaganda today is how much time the audience spends staring at the "correct" content provider.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One point: yes, you're speaking from the power position. God-mode over a fleet of minions has always been an engineer's wet-dream. That's not even bad per-say. It's the collateral damage down stream that's at issue. Maybe you don't see any damage, but that's largely the point. Is it really up to you to say?
What is the collateral damage? In ensuring that a bunch of endpoints use the same structure using LLMs?
This is about "slop bias". I'd wager that empowering everyone, especially power-positions to ship 50x more code will produce more code that is slop than not. You strongly oppose this because it's possible for you to update an API?
I'm stuck on the power-position thing because I'm living it. I'm pro-AI but there are AI-transformation waves coming in and mandating top-down. From their green-field position it's undeniable crush-mode killin' it. Maintenance of all kinds is separate and the leaders and implementors don't pay this cost. Maybe AI will address everything at every level. But those imposing this world assume that to be true, while it's the line-engineers and sales and customer service reps that will bear the reality.