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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

aphyr.com

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#171

Post by bluefirebrand »

aphyr wrote: post #83
barbazoo wrote: post #77

> I continue to write all of my words and software by hand, for the reasons I’ve discussed in this piece—but I am not confident I will hold out forever. There it is, an actual em-dash in the wild, written by hand.

I put... I'd guess around 60 hours into editing this piece, and had review from a dozen-odd friends, and I am still finding and fixing errors. I imagine that asking an LLM for a copyediting pass probably would have been helpful, but goshdarnit, I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand.

> I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand

For what it's worth I think it's pretty reasonably good prose, not merely somewhat passable

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#173

Post by ryandrake »

asdfman123 wrote: post #142

> I can imagine a future in which some or even most software is developed by witches, who construct elaborate summoning environments, repeat special incantations (“ALWAYS run the tests!”), and invoke LLM daemons who write software on their behalf. This sort of prompting is only necessary now because LLMs are janky and new. I might have written this in 2025, but now LLMs are capable of saying "wait, that approach clea…

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#174

Post by mrdependable »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #124

i respect the author of this post wayyyy too much to ever imply that i know more than them, or that i even have proprietary knowledge that they, themselves do not possess. i admire aphyr, and i aesthetically agree with many of the arguments offered forth. but this whole thing feels a bit cherry-picked— i’m not gonna go chapter-and-verse (cf. belt-and-suspenders) about it, but on some levels this comes across as a bit…

Care to provide any examples of what sort of content are in these conversations you had with AI?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#175

Post by philipallstar »

Aurornis wrote: post #14
greatpost wrote: post #5

Thank you for this aphyr. My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.

Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable. An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO afte…

> Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.

The endless re-rise of Marxism has made people assume that any punching is appropriate in the first place, and it's just a question of who. Saying "these are the people it's okay to punch" is dystopian.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#176

Post by jerf »

fny wrote: post #129
jerf wrote: post #37

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…

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Even after I explained the exact usage I was invoking, the attractive nuisance of all the science fiction that has gotten attached to the term still prevented you and Quarrelsome from reading my post as written.

I really wish the term hadn't been mangled so much. Though the originator of the term bears a non-trivial amount of the responsibility for it, having written some rather good science fiction on the topic himself. The original meaning from the paper is quite useful and nothing has stepped up to replace it.

All the singularity means as I explicitly used it here is you entirely lose the ability to predict the future. It is relative to who is using it... we are all well past the Caveman Singularity, where no (metaphorical) caveman could possibly predict anything about our world. If we stabilize where we are now I feel like I have at least a grasp on the next ten years. If we continue at this pace I don't. That doesn't mean I believe AI will inevitably do this or that... it means I can't predict anymore, which is really the exact opposite. AI doesn't have to get to "superintelligence" to wreck up predictions.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#177

Post by ath3nd »

chaps wrote: post #151
tossandthrow wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deflecting from what? Telling the company name so you can avoid it due to your incredibly curious nature?

Sigh. Look friend, I really hope you can realize how you sound in your post. You're extraordinarily confidently saying that you refactored some ambiguous endpoints in 30 minutes. Whenever I see someone act that confidently towards refactoring, thousands alarms go off in my head. I hope you see how it sounds to others. Like, at least spend longer than a lunch break on it with just a tad more diligence. Or hell, maybe…

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#178

Post by gilfaethwy »

fny wrote: post #129
jerf wrote: post #37

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…

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

We've had enough advancement to change the economy for many decades, but the powers that be have insisted that, despite the lack of need, we continue to toil doing completely unnecessary work, because that's what's required to extend their fiefdoms.

Not that the singularity has any relevance here, either - except maybe that the robots take over, and the billionaires have missed the boat? I don't know.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#179

Post by leptons »

faangguyindia wrote: post #80
sophacles wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You worship the AI?

I see AI has great utility and we'll figure out ways to better it. If I had any power, i would run Nuclear Power plants to run AI dafacenters and find other near infinite sources of energy to create deeper and deeper AIs. This level of ai tech is at its infancy, it's evidently clear. People are assuming it will stall soon, and won't go beyond a certain point. I don't believe this at all, I am believing it will go muc…

An LLM is never, ever going to find "other near infinite sources of energy". All it can do is predict the next word in an effort to make the user stop prompting it. That's all it does. It does not have the ability to find solutions to the worlds problems.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#180

Post by aphyr »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #171
aphyr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put... I'd guess around 60 hours into editing this piece, and had review from a dozen-odd friends, and I am still finding and fixing errors. I imagine that asking an LLM for a copyediting pass probably would have been helpful, but goshdarnit, I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand.

> I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand For what it's worth I think it's pretty reasonably good prose, not merely somewhat passable

Thank you <3
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