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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This time is different

#211

Post by brudgers »

throw10920 wrote: post #182
esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

The first few paragraphs are all you need to see that the author is writing a propaganda piece. It's not meant to be truthful, it's meant to convince . I think this is what is meant by "bullshit".

“Bullshit” is:

+ statement of dubious correctness

+ and that serves the author’s interest

+ and which the author does not care whether or not it is believed.

When the author wants you to believe it, that’s horseshit.

Re: This time is different

#212

Post by [deleted] »

edent wrote: post #191
esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

OP here! Thanks for replying. To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology. People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because…

[deleted]

Re: This time is different

#213

Post by danny_codes »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #155
shruggedatlas wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your position on AI?

in a nutshell: AI - even if transformative and in the future a widely used general-purpose technology - is normal technology. I reject the technological determinism that is being fed to us, especially the idea that AI itself is an agent in defining its own future. I think adoption and the post-adoption spread will be slow & uncertain (relative to the current messaging) regardless of where it ultimately takes us. I th…

> especially the idea that AI itself is an agent in defining its own future

Why? I see no evidence that this won’t be the case.. or isn’t already

Re: This time is different

#214

Post by Retric »

dfabulich wrote: post #206
Retric wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a great deal of hype around the atom changing everything, but electricity was just too slow to see such breathless anticipation takeoff. 200 years ago the was some hype around how electricity caused mussel contractions in dead flesh, but unless you consider Frankenstein part of the hype cycle it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media etc etc. Public street lights long predated light bu…

> unless you consider Frankenstein part of the hype cycle It absolutely is. Frankenstein is a seminal work of science-fiction horror, and the mysterious power of electricity to change everything is what made it so chilling to its readers in the 19th century. > it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media The media is considerably different now from in 1818, thanks, in significant part, to the power…

> It absolutely is.

It was published as Fiction. The vast majority of people didn’t think it was anymore realistic than Interstellar etc.

There’s plenty of stories where we cure cancer, but the 50% improvement in cancer treatments over the last 40 years just doesn’t get much hype because it’s so slow. It’s hard to get excited about the idea cancer may be gone in 200 years because while that will be awesome for people alive then it doesn’t do anything for the people I know.

> electric telegraph came online people where hyped.

Objectively it got way more of a meh reaction than you’d think simply based on the timelines involved.

France was happy to continue using its network of optical telegraphs long after the electrical telegraph became a practical thing. Transatlantic telegraphs got hyped up somewhat, but again the technology took so long from the first serious attempt to a practical working system people understood the limitations inherent to having such limited bandwidth between the contents.

Obviously new technology gets attention because it’s a net improvement, being able to send messages across the US much faster was useful. But hype is different, it’s focused on second order effects not what it does but what will change. The original iPhone isn’t just another cellphone that also takes pictures, it’s “the internet in your pocket.”

Re: This time is different

#215

Post by arduanika »

lxgr wrote: post #29

This just sounds like the "nothing ever happens" theorem slightly rephrased, of which Scott Alexander did a great refutation here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...

That's not a refutation. It's a list of silly cartoons designed to make the reader feel smart, thrown together by one of the leaders of the AI cult. Do you people know any other writers?

Re: This time is different

#216

Post by prescriptivist »

parliament32 wrote: post #123

When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…

This is a funny point that you're making (for me, anyway), because prior to early December, probably 5% of the lines of code I wrote in a week were AI-generated by cursor. Then I started using Claude Code. Fast forward to today, I would say 98% of the code that I've shipped in the last three weeks has been written completely by Claude Code.

Prior to three weeks ago, I had used speech-to-text to do accomplish approximately 0% of the work I've done in my 20 years of coding. In the last three weeks, well over half of the direction that I've given to Claude Code has been done with speech-to-text.

Re: This time is different

#217

Post by johnfn »

parliament32 wrote: post #210
johnfn wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My statement is that if your only hallucinations are type errors, that can be solved by simply wrapping the LLM in a harness that says "Please continue working until `yarn run tsc` is clean". Yes, the LLM still hallucinates, but it doesn't affect me, because by the time I see the code, the hallucinations are gone. This is something I do every day; to be quite honest, it's a fairly mundane use of AI and I don't unders…

Well of course it'll eventually work, just a random text generator will eventually produce code that passes your tests if you run it hard enough. The problem is it's devouring your tokens as it does so. While you're on a subsidized plan that seems like a non-issue, but once the providers start charging you actual costs for usage.. yeah, the hallucinations will be a showstopper for you.

If you can point me to any "random text generator" that scores a 76.8 on SWEBench, after any number of iterations, or in fact is competitive on any benchmark at all, I'll happily switch to it. Until then, I don't think that analogy will lead to particularly productive conversation. There are many engineers using a similar harness on LLMs today. No one uses a random text generator to generate code because you are not making a real suggestion.

> The problem is it's devouring your tokens as it does so. While you're on a subsidized plan that seems like a non-issue, but once the providers start charging you actual costs for usage.. yeah, the hallucinations will be a showstopper for you.

The discussion, and your original post, was about whether hallucinations are a meaningful issue today - not in some hypothetical future.

Re: This time is different

#218

Post by jamilton »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #192
parliament32 wrote: post #123

When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…

I'd say speech to text is unsolvable for a more fundamental reason that it's hard to actually speak out an entire document flawlessly in one take. Spoken language is very different to written language, which is why for example you can easily tell when an article is transcribing a spoken interview.

Yes, it's a UX thing. You'd still have to edit it by typing afterwards as well.

Similarly, raw LLM/chat interfaces are usually not the best option.

Re: This time is different

#219

Post by massysett »

esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing!

This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useless” fear is as old as, say, electricity, and even older than cheap computing. It hasn’t happened.

Re: This time is different

#220

Post by Nevermark »

What do these lasting success stories have in common?

• Self-reinforcing chemical metabolisms

• DNA as a template for reproduction

• Multi-cell cooperation

• Multi-cell specialization

• Nerve cells

• Neural ganglia

• Nervous systems

• Brains

• Self-awareness

• Language

• Written language

• Books

• Printing press

• Wireless communication

• Transistors

• Digital memory

• Computer processors

• Networking

• Internet

• AI

Answer: They all introduced dramatic qualitative and quantitative improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, interaction, speed, reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and application of information.

AI is on its way to being self-designed. It is already assisting in its own design, speeding up work, by doing "mundane" things that would otherwise take people more time to do.

Intelligence has not been an S-curve technology.

AI, the systematic automation, manufacturing and increasingly recursive improvement of intelligence, is not an S-curve technology.

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