161–170 of 467 posts
> To think that with enough compute we can code consciousness is like thinking that with enough rainbows one of them will have a pot of gold at its end. What does consciousness have to do with AGI or the point(s) the article is trying to make? This is a distraction imo.
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I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.
Why would you wait for dust to settle down? Just curious. Productivity gains are real in current form of LLMs. Guardrails and best practices can be learnt and self imposed.
I haven't found that to be true
I'm of the opinion that anyone who is impressed by the code these things produce is a hack
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Under this definition, could any tool at all be considered to produce more value?
no - this is a lesson an engineer learns early on. The time spent making the tool may still dwarf the time savings you gain from the tool. I may make tools for problems that only ever occurred or will occur once. That single incident may have occurred before I made the tool. This also makes it harder to prioritize work in an organization. If work is perceived as "cheap" then it's easy to demand teams prioritize featu…
We prioritize now based on time complexity and omg, it changes everything: if we have 10 easy bugfixes and one giant feature to do (random bad faith example), we do 5 bugfixes and half the feature within a month and have an enormous satisfaction output from the users who would never have accepted to do it that way in the first place . If we had listened, we would have done 75% of the features and zero bug fixes and have angry users/clients whining that we did nothing all month...
The time spent on dev stuff absolutely matters, and churning quick stuff quickly provides more joy to the people who pay us. It's a delicate balance.
As for AI, for now, it just wastes our time. Always craps out half correct stuff so we optimized our time by refusing to use it, and beat teams who do that way.
>I’m more than open to being wrong;
Doubtful.
>That’s quite a contradiction. A datacenter takes years to construct. How will today’s plans ever enable a company like OpenAI to catch up with what they already claim is a computational deficit that demands more datacenters?
Its difficult to steelman such a weird argument. If a deficit cant be remedied immediately, it should never be remedied?
This is literally how capex works. You purchase capacity now, based on receiving it, and the rewards of having it, in the future.
>And yet, these deals are made. There’s a logic hole here that’s easily filled by the possibility that AI is a fitting front for consolidation of resources and power.
No you just made some stuff up, and then suggested that your own self inflicted confusion might be better explained with some other stuff you made up.
>Globalism eroded borders by crossing them, this new thing — this Privatism — erodes them from within.
What? Its called Capitalism. You dont need a new word for it every 12 months. Emotive words like "erosion" say nothing but are just targeted at like, stirring people up. Demonstrate the erosion.
>Remember, datacenters are built on large pieces of land, drawing more heavily from existing infrastructure and natural resources than they give back to the immediately surrounding community
How did you calculate this. Show your work. Pretty sure if someone made EQ SY1 SY2 and SY3 disappear, the local community, the distant community, communities all over the planet would be negatively affected.
>When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style
To take the overwrought disproportionate emotive language out of this.
"How are private entities allowed to build big things I dont like, including power sources I dont like"
The answer is that many people are allowed to do things you don't approve of. This is normal. This is society. Not everything needs the approval of the blogerati. Such a world would be horrific.
>when the infrastructure that powers AI becomes more valuable than the AI itself, when the people who control that infrastructure hold more sway over policy and resources than elected governments.
Show your working. How are the infrastructure providers going to run the government? I believe historically big infrastructure projects tend to die, require some government inducements and then go away. People had similar misgivings about the railroads in the US, in fact it was a big bugbear for henry george I believe. Is Amtrak secretly pulling the strings of the US Deep State? If the US Government is weak to private interests, thats up to the good burghers of yankistan to correct at the polls. If electoral politics dont work, then other means seppos find scary might be required. Freaking out about AI investment seems like a weird place to suddenly be concerned about this.
See Also: AT&T Long Lines, Hydro Electric Dams, Nuclear Energy, Submarine Cable Infrastructure. If Political power comes from owning infrastructure we should be more worried about like, Hurricane Electric. Its demonstrable that people who build big infra dont run the planet. Heck Richest Man and Weird Person Darling Elon Musk doesn't honestly command much infrastructure, he mostly just lives on hype and speculation.
>but I’m really just following the money and the power to their logical conclusion.
The more you need to invoke "Logical conclusion" the less geniune and logical the piece reads.
>Maybe AI will do everything humans do. Maybe it will usher in a new society defined by something other than the balancing of labor units and wealth units. Maybe AGI — these days defined as a general intelligence that exceeds human kind in all contexts — will emerge and “justify” all of this. Maybe.
Probably things will continue on as they always have, but the planet will have more datacenter capacity. Likely, if the AI bubble does burst, datacenter capacity will be cheaper.
>The market concentration and incestuous investment shell game is real.
Yes? And that will probably explode and we will see AI investors jumping out of buildings. nVidia is in a position right now to underwrite big AI Datacentre loans, which could completely offset the huge gains they have made. What about it. Again, you demonstrate nothing.
>The infrastructure is real. The land deals are real.
Yes. Remember to put 2 truths before your lie.
>The resulting shifts in power are real.
So far they exist in your mind.
>we will find ourselves citizens of a very new kind of place that no longer feels like home.
Reminds me of an old argument that a raving white supremacist used to push on me. That "justice" as he defined it, was that society not change so old people wont be scared by it. That having a new (possibly browner) person running the local store was tantamount to and justification for genocide.
Change is a constant. That change making you sad is not in and of itself a bad thing. Please adjust accordingly.
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> Fly to distant galaxies Unless AI can change the laws of physics, extremely unlikely.
I see, Fly was perhaps the wrong word to use here. Phase-Shift to new galaxies is probably the right term. Where you change your entire system's resonant frequency, to match what exists in the distant galaxy. Less of transportation, and more of a change of focus. Like the way we can daydream about a galaxy, then snap-back to work. It's the same mechanism, but with enhanced focus you go from not just visualising > fee…
> Where you change your entire system's resonant frequency, to match what exists in the distant galaxy.
This collection of words does not describe a physical reality.
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I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.
Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books. I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follo…
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Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.
Google translate worked great long before LLMs.
I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies). We are a decade or two in to having massive video coverage, such that you are probably on someone's camera much of your day in the world, and video feeds that are increasingly cloud hosted. But nobody could possibly watch all that video. Even cameras specifically controlled by the police, i…
We lost that fight when literally no one fought back against LPR. LPR cameras were later enabled for facial rec. That data is actually super easy to trace. No LLMs necessary.
Funny story, in my city, when we moved to ticketless public transport, a few people were worried about surveilance. "Police wont have access to the data" they said. The first request for data from the police came Now if you have no understanding of history or politics, this might not shock you. But I find it hard to imagine a popular uprising, even a peaceable one, being effective in this environment.
Actually LLMs introducing a compounding 3% error in reviewing and collating this data might be the best thing to ever happen.
What about surveillance? Lately I've been feeling that is what it's really for. Because our data can be queried in a much more powerful way when it has all been used to train LLMs.
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I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps devel…
> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.
So where are they?
We're not asking to evaluate LLM's for code. We're asking to evaluate them as product generators or improvers.