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A portentous reunion

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: A portentous reunion

#21

Post by trebligdivad »

XorNot wrote: post #17
trebligdivad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the uncertainty is more to do with the public being able to see this new tech; think what's happened in those 30 years, some of which you as a techie would have been well aware of but most people were clueless about. Those of us using PDAs at the time, most of the public didn't imagine constant wireless connectivity and powerful computers in their pockets. Networked games, neat tricks bunches of geeks ran at…

AI is absurdly, massively centralized though. You don't own it. You can't own it. Access can be removed at any time. This situation may not persist but it's not like traditional pillars of society have demonstrated any incentive or even a perception of obligation to act in the public interest lately.

you mean just like the Document editors or email systems these days? (or cloudflare etc etc)

Re: A portentous reunion

#22

Post by boston_clone »

chubot wrote: post #8

I liked this story, thanks for sharing I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's) As background, I am a simple man, and I like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a d…

The folks who pour those very beers you order usually know a fair amount about how they’re made and what differences exist, especially if you’re at a brewery (not e.g., a dive bar). Chat ‘em up!

Re: A portentous reunion

#23

Post by colechristensen »

fasterik wrote: post #13

Re: the anxiety of parents about the future: the people who best handle rapidly changing circumstances are the ones who are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I think it's far less important to teach young people specific skills in technology X, and far more important to teach them how to regulate their emotions, how to make plans and effectively execute on them, and how to be objective about their own stren…

Emotional intelligence about yourself and others is important, sure. But you're confusing acquisition of facts and education. Many people are effectively illiterate for all but the most simple communication. Likewise so many people are innumerate and without basic reason or understanding of basic rhetoric both making and evaluating arguments and information.

Teaching math, history, and language isn't about remembering facts or specific skills, they're proxies for teaching you to think and reason and operate in the world.

Re: A portentous reunion

#24

Post by atoav »

fasterik wrote: post #13

Re: the anxiety of parents about the future: the people who best handle rapidly changing circumstances are the ones who are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I think it's far less important to teach young people specific skills in technology X, and far more important to teach them how to regulate their emotions, how to make plans and effectively execute on them, and how to be objective about their own stren…

Additionally: the most important not is that you teach kids to face risks themselves. If you constantly hover around kids from the baby age onwards and jump in at the tiniest risk, what you teach them is that the world is a dangerous place that they are not equipped to deal with.

The cardinal mistake many inexperienced parents make is to think you can chose what your kid learns. So they will yell at their kid that it needs to be calm, something they fail at in this very moment. Kids care much more about how you live than what you say. You can tell your kid to respect nature, but what drives it home is if you show respect of nature without even mentioning it on a day to day basis.

Handling risk and uncertainty is one of those things. You can't tell your kid to be able to deal with uncertainty without fear, you will have to show to them (1) that you are also able to deal with it and (2) that you trust them to do it too. Sure they should ask their parents if something seems off or a bit too much to them, but there are so many parents who appear to trust their kid with next to nothing.

Re: A portentous reunion

#25

Post by dash2 »

Yeah I mean people are talking about 'the eternal Sloptember' but the other side of that is - you know how everyone is nostalgic for 90s/early 2000s websites and all the silliness and creativity? Well that is happening now in programs and apps. Any fool can make a terribly-architected game/app to scratch his itch. Most of them are bad, and most won't last, but there's also a lot of fun.

Re: A portentous reunion

#26

Post by jcgrillo »

bcantrill wrote: post #2

I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the futu…

I'm curious whether you have any insights into why high quality LLM-assisted (or enabled?) projects seem so relatively rare? Instead it seems like the preponderant contribution is a deluge of low quality slop.

You didn't share yours and Adam's prompts in the post, so I'm left wondering how much of the success of this project is attributable to your collective ability and experience (both with this particular project and software in general) vs the capability of the model and harness itself? On that note, do you anticipate releasing LLMs at Oxide[1] (linked from RFD 0576)?

Personally I find credible success stories like yours interesting, if a little jarring. If they were commonplace, shouldn't software be generally getting a lot better?

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/meta/tree/master/engineerin...

Re: A portentous reunion

#27

Post by eichin »

sanderjd wrote: post #12
keybored wrote: post #5

> I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids. Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO. The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figur…

> Why use Claude then? I don't understand this question in response to the quote preceding it. He just explained why Claude was useful in this instance.

I read the point as: if it's an existential threat that you've got principled objections to - why would it even matter that it's useful?

Re: A portentous reunion

#28

Post by keybored »

sanderjd wrote: post #12
keybored wrote: post #5

> I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids. Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO. The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figur…

> Why use Claude then? I don't understand this question in response to the quote preceding it. He just explained why Claude was useful in this instance.

It isn’t clear from all the quoatage but it was meant to follow my own thoughts on the progression of the piece. (1) There is concern for the future because of AI (2) so anyway we used AI for fun and giggles... No wait, stop. Why enable the training and the development for such a non-essential little thing? If AI is so concerning?

Apparently because the concern is not evenly distributed.

Re: A portentous reunion

#29

Post by stereolambda »

lorecore wrote: post #9

I feel like the last 30 years are significantly less distinctive than the prior 30 (actually 70+) years. The 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all had iconic and partitioned cultures that are instantly recognizable. I feel like that started to fade a bit in the 90s (what I call the Pottery Barn decade). The 2000s have felt more "alive" to me than the 90s but they're also significantly more post-modern and less dis…

With time I am starting to think that "decades" are defined with around 10 year delay. When you are inside them or a little later, you see too much of nuance and are too much in your everyday concerns away from the culture. For example, to the common young consumer today the 1980s may be about synth and maybe hair metal in music, where it was infinitely more happening. They also probably have an exaggerated view of importance of tech for an average person back then. The 1960s are often seen through the culture of teens to maybe 30 year olds, while also there was much separate adult culture and concerns.

By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.

I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.

[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.

Re: A portentous reunion

#30

Post by RugnirViking »

throw0101a wrote: post #6
bcantrill wrote: post #2

I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the futu…

> […] but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas ? * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume... * https://en.wi…

it is really very long. I was trying to read it on monday evening and an eyebrow was raised when, after some time, I saw CHAPTER ONE and realised that up until that point I had been reading the foreword!
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