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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

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

#191

Post by lamasery »

nostrademons wrote: post #116
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias. 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…

> If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias.

Didn't we only pass 50% of households having a home PC in like... '00 or '01 or something? And I mean just in the US, which was way ahead of the curve.

> 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 actually think that's correct... if the smartphone hadn't taken off right after that. The "consumer" Internet and computing, the attention economy, et c., functionally is the smartphone. A desktop computer and even a laptop aren't in use when driving, at the store, at the park, every moment on vacation, et c. It'd still only be nerds lugging computers everywhere if nobody'd managed to make a smartphone that's capable-enough and pleasant-enough-to-use to expand the market beyond the set of folks who might have had a beeper in earlier years (the part of the market Blackberry was addressing). A gigantic proportion of the "GDP of the Internet", if you will, exists because smartphones exist.

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

#192

Post by skeeter2020 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #84
nostrademons wrote: post #74

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…

You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why? In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base. It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost. Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, deb…

>> Works flawlessly, debt principal down.

I don't doubt it completed the initial coding work in a short time, but the fact that you've equated that with flawless execution is on the concerning-scary spectrum. I can only assume you're talking "compiles-runs-ship it"

The danger is not generating obvious slop, it's accepting decent and convincing outputs as complete and absolving ourselves of responsibility.

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

#193

Post by tossandthrow »

apsurd wrote: post #147
tossandthrow wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe AI will address everything at every level. I think this is the idea you need to entertain / ponder more on. I largely agree with you, what I don't agree with is the weighting about the individual elements. My point was that I could do a 30 minutes cleanup in order to streamline hundreds of endpoints. Without AI I would not have been able to justify this migration due to business reasons. We get to move faster…

Yeah, the more I debate the AI-lovers the more I can empathize with the possibility it may very well turn out to be everything is an Agent. Encodable. I'm not a doomer either, but I do think this arc is a human arc: there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. To your point, Agents with good stewardship can also implement hygiene and security practices. It's important we surface potential counter metrics and unint…

I definitely don't identify as an AI lover. For me year 0 of Ai was February 6th 2026 and the release of Opus 4.6.

Until that day we had roughly zero Ai code in the code base (additions or subtractions). So in all reasonable terms I am a late adopter.

For code bases Ai does not concern me. We have for quite some time worked with systems that are too complex for single people to comprehend, so this is a natural extension of abstraction.

On the other hand, am super concerned about Ai and the society. The impact of human well being from "easy" Ai relations over difficult human connection. The continued human alienation and relational violation (I think the "woke" discourse will go on steroids).

I think society is going to be much less tolerant. And that frightens me.

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

#194

Post by tim333 »

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.

>Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity?

I don't think most are - it tends to regarded as rather cranky stuff, and a lot of people who use the term are a bit cranky.

Even so AI maybe overtaking human intelligence is an interesting thing in human history.

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

#195

Post by tossandthrow »

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…

I definitely did not say anything about ambiguous endpoints.

The migration was relatively straight forward and could likely have been implemented as automatic code transforms.

What I did say was that it was complex.

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

#196

Post by simoncion »

enraged_camel wrote: post #156
simoncion wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you don't fire a table saw because it doesn't know when to stop cutting, right? If I purchased a table saw and that table saw irregularly and unpredictably jumped past its safeties -as we've plenty of evidence that LLMs [0] do-, then I would [1] immediately stop using that saw, return it for a refund, alert the store that they're selling wildly unsafe equipment, and the relevant regulators that a manufacturer i…

But that's the thing: the table saw has safeties . Someone put them there. Without those safeties, it, too, would jump unpredictably. Scary scenarios like AIs deleting home directories are the result of the developers explicitly bypassing those safeties.

> But that's the thing: the table saw has safeties. Someone put them there.

You noticed that I mentioned that this hypothetical table saw has poorly-designed, entirely inadequate safeties? Things like Opus treating the data it presents to the user as commands that it should execute [0] is definitely [1] a sign of solid, well-designed safety mechanisms.

You might choose to retort "Well, that's because the user isn't running the tool in the mode that makes it wait for confirmation before doing anything of consequence!". In reply, I would point in the general direction of the half-squillion studies indicating that a system whose safety requires an operator to remain vigilant when presented with a large volume of irregularly-presented decision points (nearly all of which can be safely answered with a "Yes, do it.") does not make for a safe system. [2] It -in fact- makes for a system that's designed [3] to be unsafe.

You might also choose to retort "That's never happened to me, or anyone that I know about.". Intermittent failures of built-in safeties that happen under unpredictable circumstances are far, far worse than predictable failures that happen under known ones. I hope you understand why.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1sex28q/opus_46...>

[1] ...not...

[2] I would also -somewhat wryly- note that "An AI Agent that does all of your scutwork, but whose every decision you have to carefully scrutinize, because it will irregularly plan to do something irreversibly destructive to something you care about." is not at all the picture that "AI" boosters paint of these tools.

[3] ...whether intentionally or not...

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

#197

Post by tossandthrow »

bluecheese452 wrote: post #164
tossandthrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why? In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base. It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost. Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, deb…

Ironically the post saying it is not slop sounds exactly like ai slop.

Too. Many spelling errors for that to be slop...

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

#198

Post by afthonos »

tim333 wrote: post #194
fny wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? I don't think most are - it tends to regarded as rather cranky stuff, and a lot of people who use the term are a bit cranky. Even so AI maybe overtaking human intelligence is an interesting thing in human history.

An interesting thing in AI history. For human history, it’s epochal.

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

#199

Post by keeda »

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…

I've said it before, but it would be a mistake to just focus on the models, and ignore everything else that is changing in the ecosystem -- tools, harnesses, agents, skills, availability of compute, etc. -- things are changing very quickly overall.

The thing that is changing most rapidly, however, is the understanding of how to harness this insanely powerful, versatile, and unpredictable new technology.

Like, those who experimented deeply with LLMs could tell that even if all model development completely froze in 2024, humanity had decades worth of unrealized applications and optimizations to explore. Even with AI recursively accelerating this process of exploration. As a trivial example, way back in 2023 anyone who got broken code from ChatGPT, fed it the error message, and got back working code, knew agents were going to wreck things up very quickly. It wasn't clear that this would look like MD files, Claude Code, skills, GasTown, and YOLO vibe-coding, but those were "mere implementation details."

I'm half-convinced an ulterior goal of these AI companies (other than the lack of a better business model) to give away so many cheap tokens is to encourage experimentation and overcome this "capability overhang."

Given all this, it's very hard to judge where we are on the curve, because there isn't just one curve, there are actually multiple inter-playing curves.

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

#200

Post by tim333 »

jerf wrote: post #176
fny wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hims…

>the originator of the term ... rather good science fiction

I guess you are thinking of Vernor Vinge but the term first came up with John von Neumann in the 1950s:

>...on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue

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