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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

aphyr.com

201–210 of 247 posts

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

#201
Every time I hear of a hallucinogenic AI event, I am reminded of what happens often with synthesizers, as in the musical variant - an instrument, set up for musicality, creativity, and exploration which - in a mere glance of a finger tip upon a delicately balanced knob - can turn immediately into ear-splitting terror and calamity, if one is .. you know .. not too careful.

We have to remember that the results of our prompting is a synthesis, formed on the mass psychosis of a humanity which is simultaneously capable of being completely and utterly heinous to each other, and gloriously noble and kind as well - with nought but a stray new word and a thousand old forgotten to keep us all together or not.

In any case, all culture is a lie, which only persists in the re-telling. The past is a lie, too, somehow, someday, forgotten the day nobody remembers it. Hope you make some tunes into the winds and they echo on forever. And by you, I mean, not an AI/ML-based entity, but rather, the source of all lies, the human soul itself.

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

#203
> Machine learning seems likely to further consolidate wealth and power in the hands of large tech companies

Only if you let it. You can own the means of production. I self host my daily driver LLMs in hardware in my garage.

Never given money to an LLM provider and never will. I only do work with tools I own.

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

#204
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yikes. Have a good one.

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

#205
post #203

> Machine learning seems likely to further consolidate wealth and power in the hands of large tech companies Only if you let it. You can own the means of production. I self host my daily driver LLMs in hardware in my garage. Never given money to an LLM provider and never will. I only do work with tools I own.

Who produced the hardware though?

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

#206
post #129
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.

Because it's happening no matter how much you'd rather ignore it or scoff at it.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No war but class war” rings as true in 2026 as it did 40 years ago

Sure, although the obsession with "CEOs and billionaires" does have the ring of the 300k HHI software-engineer class hoping to play class enemies above and below them against each other.

Software engineers are in the same class as the people below them - the working class. The entire concept of "middle class" originates from a time when the middle class were non-nobility who were, nonetheless, sufficiently powerful that they needn't worry about things like "keeping their jobs", whether because they were their own employees (as were nearly all doctors, lawyers, etc.) or because they had sufficient social capital not to worry about such trivial things as paid labor.

I want to be clear here: Eton boys were (and are) predominantly middle class, not upper class. In the US, we allowed the idea to be perverted, perhaps because we do not have nobility, and so there is no true "upper class". Given this, the reality is that we are bifurcated into a working class and an owning or capitalist class - though, many would argue (correctly, in my view) that we are in a feudal regime now, rather than a capitalist regime.

To put perhaps too fine a point on it, software engineers are house slaves, and, yes, CEOs and billionaires have done a good job of convincing the field slaves that the house slaves are their enemies, and of convincing house slaves that the field slaves are inferior and just want to take what the house slaves have without working for it.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, the ruling class seems quite happy to punch the poor - and this is not dystopian? Let's not get into the tolerance paradox here, because if someone is already getting punched, and the puncher refuses to stop... well, yes, it's okay to punch the puncher.

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

#209

> 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…

I'm concerned that developing better metacognition is really just throwing more finite resources at the problem. We surely don't have unlimited compute, or unlimited (V)RAM, and so there must be a wall here. If it could be demonstrated that this improved metacognition was coming without associated increases in resource utilization, I would find these improvements to be much more convincing... but as things stand, we're very much not there.

(There may be an argument here re: the move from dense to MoE models, but all research I am aware of suggests that MoE models are not dramatically more efficient than dense models - i.e., active parameter count is not the overriding factor, and total parameter count is still extremely important, though it does seem to roughly follow a power law.)

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

#210
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.

> regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, AI isn't one thing though. Really its kind of a natural evolution of 'higher order life'. I think that something like a 'organization', (corps, governments, etc) once large enough is at least as alive as a tardigrade. And for the people who are its cells, it is as comprehensible as the tardigrade is to any…

> AI isn't one thing though.

What's the single in "singularity" doing then?

My issue is I feel like some people treat intelligence as an integer value and make the crass assumption that "perfect intelligence" beats all other intelligences and just think that's quite a thick way to think about it. A fool can beat an expert over the course of towards infinite hands because they happen to do something unexpected. Everything is a trade off and there's no such thing as perfect, every player has to take risk.

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