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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

#221

Post by fragmede »

lamasery wrote: post #191
nostrademons wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm reminded of the quote that ATMs didn't unemploy bank tellers, smartphones did. While not owning a laptop may seem inconceivable to us here, smartphones exist as the only connection to the Internet for many.

The interesting question is without Apple and the iPhone, would RIM/Blackberry have "figured it out"? Would we be on 2-way "pagers" with keyboards and stupidly expensive data plans that you have to order separately? Because while the original iphone was a marvel in terms of hardware, I think the bidet contribution was the integration with AT&T for the cellphone plan, which only Steve Jobs had the clout to pull off.

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

#222

Post by fragmede »

tra3 wrote: post #157
macrocosmos wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That catastrophe is entirely on Bonin the bonehead.

I read through the link. The other pilot and the captain are complicit by the virtue of being there. Autopilot disengages at 2:10 and they crash at 2:14. Terrible. My other immediate thought -- Tesla's autopilot. I've never used it so I'm not sure I'm fully correct here, but apparently it requires you to be vigilant and take over in certain situations? Wonder how well that works out in practice.

In practice, there's a camera in the Tesla that looks at the driver to make sure they're paying attention. If they're not, perhaps fiddling with their phone or looking at something in the passenger's seat, then the system gives a warning and then a strike. Get five strikes and you can't use FSD for the next week or two. So drivers are directly incentivized to keep their eyes on the road because if they don't, they can't actually use the system which would suck for a long road trip.

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

#223

Post by fragmede »

omega3 wrote: post #150

The answer has always been the same: self-regulated profession and trade unions. Instead the ever efficient software engineers have efficiently dug their own grave. The regulated professions aren't going to be affected by the AI because their members understand that preservation of job security[0], their pay and QOL is more important than automating themselves out of existence. [0] https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opi…

Which regulated professions? Trade unions still require work for their members to do. If there's a recession and say a construction slump, it doesn't matter how high or low the union's regulations are for their members, if there's no work, there's no work.

Medical doctors are a special case, but eg iron workers theres the official list people get called up from, but you're not getting called up from that list if there's no work. You get work through knowing the right person aka networking. Which is where software engineers find themselves today.

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

#224

Post by HappMacDonald »

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 don't think the kind of exponential you are looking for (and especially not "the singularity") can manifest until the product (AI) is at a point where it can meaningfully take over the task of improving itself directly.

I would say we have certainly seen a bottleneck in the ability of LLMs to handle any kind of broad abstractions or master the architecture of coding. That is the hinge of why "vibe coding" is as trashy of an approach as it is: the LLM can't cut the mustard on any actual software design.

So they have nothing close to the deep understanding required to improve their own substrate.

They can be exceptionally good at understanding what humans mean when they say things, far better than poking keywords into a google search for example, especially when said keywords are noisy and overloaded. And they can be a very good encyclopedic store of concepts (the more general the idea the less likely they hallucinate it, while the details and citations are far more frequently made up on the spot). But they suck at volition, and at state representation (thanks to those limited context windows) which cuts them off at the knees if they ever have to tenaciously search for anything including performing creative problem solving.

We do have AI models which can get somewhere on theorem proving or protein folding or high level competitive game playing, but those only sometimes even glancingly involve LLMs, and are primarily custom-built amalgams of different kinds of neural networks each trained on specific tasks in their fields.

None of that can directly move the needle on actual AI research yet.

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

#225

Post by bit-anarchist »

coldtea wrote: post #95
ctoth wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a cofounder of a company that builds screen reader equivalents for maps. What's the mechanism by which my role as executive harms humanity?

The mechanism of making it a for-profit product for the blind people who can pay for it, as opposed as giving it at cost, or even better, having it treated as a basic right of blind people, built and provided by a welfare state to any of them that need it for free.

How is selling products at a profit harmful? If the only reason is that you could provide it for "free" (*insert no free lunch*), then there's no actual harm. No one is entitled to labor/property of others.

On the contrary, however, a welfare state actively rellies on harm (through ~steali~, I mean taxes) to provide said "free" goods.

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

#226

Post by lrvick »

ares623 wrote: post #205
lrvick wrote: 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?

AMD, mostly. But with fully open drivers etc which means it has equivalent freedom to my desktop workstation.

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

#227

Post by moritzwarhier »

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…

How would you label the y axis?

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

#228

Post by neutronicus »

gilfaethwy wrote: post #207
neutronicus wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soc…

That is an, uh, unfortunate choice of metaphor. Would recommend leaving that club in the bag the next time this comes up.

Anyhow. Software engineers, like, hire nannies when their kids are young. Have cleaning services. Accumulate nice little slices of the S&P500. Generally own houses.

Minor nobility is a better comp than anything to do with chattel slavery.

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

#229

Post by vermilingua »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #159
aphyr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am, oddly enough, the chief executive officer of two (trivially small) tech companies.

Btw why am i as a brit, blocked via my traditional routing because of the OSA? What possible features do you have on that site to make that relevant?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757803

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

#230

Post by hliyan »

ofjcihen wrote: post #146
acoard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato on how reading and writing make us more forgetful as we rely on this new technology: > And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longe…

I see this copy-pastad everywhere these days but it misses a huge point which is that written things don’t read or understand themselves.

Agreed. Past, unfounded worries about proliferation of new mental labour saving inventions is a real thing, but it's wrong to indiscrimately use the analogy every time a concern about such inventions come up. It reminds me of a certain type of developer who blurts out "premature optimization is the root of all evil" every time someone raises a performance concern at design time (I usually ask such people to complete the second part of that Knuth quote or shut up).
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