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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#231

Post by preg_match »

Aurornis wrote: post #21
A1kmm wrote: post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might…

To be completely fair, most software projects fail, AI or not, and we've known that since before the 2000s. I'm not saying everything post-2000s is bad, but just that the core is unchanged: most software projects fail, you should expect failure, and there is no magic silver-bullet process to either anticipate or prevent failure. Agile (big A) is certainly not that process.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#232

Post by cineticdaffodil »

inigyou wrote: post #111
cineticdaffodil wrote: post #86

I think AI is only part of the problem. The Multi-crisis ahead, makes it even less of a proposition to be in charge right now- and AI offers a "responsibility" cope out for already stressed to the limit human systems who have no solutions for the problems, because there often arent any. Take climate change- you have torrential rainfalls, sweping away whole city-parts in mountanous regions, in some enormous russian ro…

Does Europe even have burbs? Russian roulette was a good pun. I don't know if it was intended.

We have villages near cities, whos native populations get displaced due to the price hikes and then we have "settlements" which is roughly equivalent to suburbs for those who are more well todo - while the less wealthy are going into the old buildings the even less wealthy natives have vacated.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#233

Post by oblio »

inigyou wrote: post #110
zkmon wrote: post #18

You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of a…

The right question should be: How can I make money by exploiting other people's mania?

It's super hard to time the market. I would say the sanest approach is to have cash on hand, choose AI adjacent companies with solid fundamentals and buy their shares once the bubble pops. It's very hard to make money being an outright bear, but somewhat easier if you're an early phase/post recovery bull.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#234

Post by phatskat »

preg_match wrote: post #229
dehsge wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not going to go back to pre LLM times, it’s also not going to go to a generative ai utopia where we can turn off our brains and a model will understand every nuance of human existence without some from of defined guidance. Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same…

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might ma…

Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc.

Personally, I’d be knitting and crocheting things for other people with most of my day if I didn’t have to worry about money, or I’d help my neighbor with the website she wants for her business venture, or I’d teach kids how to code. These are things I’d like to do, that I can’t readily do while having the overhead of a full time job unless I run myself ragged and tbh, I’d rather not.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#236

Post by tim333 »

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

I think people think things will go faster than they do. The AI revolution will probably be a bit like the industrial revolution which took a couple of centuries to go from Newcomen's steam engine of 1712 to mass produced cars and the like. With AI, Turing came up with his test in 1950 and it's taken about 75 years to get to something that looks like passing. Give it time.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#237

Post by jazzyjackson »

rsync wrote: post #216
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…

"To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic ..." I've been "doing this" for over 30 years now and I consider these LLM results to be fantastic. If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications, these LLM tools are like being granted superpowers. In fact ... My next pro…

Umm, hate to break it to you, but by the time you load up an open weights model, the environmental externality has already happened

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#238

Post by DiscourseFan »

amalcon wrote: post #208
DiscourseFan wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because most people in say, California, which is very pro-tech, are perfectly fine with AI. But people in the Northeast are angry at it. It’s entirely cultural.

That observation[0] isn't particularly useful for arguing that it's a political allegiance thing. A lower fraction of voters in the pro-tech part of California (SFO, roughly) voted for Trump than, say, in NYC. Your observation cuts against the argument that political allegiance is the main driver, not in favor of it. [0]- Assuming it's true, which in my experience it isn't especially, but this isn't the best argument…

You have no idea, you must not know that they are afraid of Waymos out in the northeast, they think they are evil or something, I'm not even joking.

Anyway, I didn't say it was a political thing I said it was a cultural thing. The average liberal is not someone who thinks primarily in political terms, they are just going about their lives unreflectively and they genuinely believe in the moral weight of their feelings, which are their primary guide. Now, I'm not saying that human life is not generally composed of its daily concerns, which tend to rule us, but for the average liberal politics is no different from acting on basic urges; like a mouse chasing the next piece of cheese in a maze, they cannot see that no turn will ever lead to their escape; that so long as they continue to chase the very next thing, they are trapped in constraints that have been laid out for them in advance. Like the conservatives of the 80s, there is always one more moral panic, one more thing that you're supposed to be upset about, one more cause to fight for. There is no stopping to think why this is something that is supposed to upset me, why is this something that needs to change. They are not able to go just one step beyond common opinion and wonder why there are so few avenues for them in the first place, they are not able to question why the maximum content of their decisions is good or evil, just or unjust, left or right. Yes any decision is binary, but one must be able to choose that for themselves, be able to consider the decision to leave the maze, even if they are, in the end, no more powerful than all the other rats, and there might not be any cheese outside of it; and there might be no end to the maze, and even very far from what you thought was the exit lay the bodies of those who attempted to leave before.

But anyway this is what I mean by primarily cultural. Liberals "drink matcha," go to running clubs, obsess over "consent" (they now have a term "weaponized consent," how absurd! that they are just realizing now that consent is always given within certain relations of power...) Whatever politics they have is on the same plane, they are doing it because its something to be done. Someone who thinks primarily in terms of politics, that is, in terms of the social dynamics of power, would never call themselves a liberal.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#239

Post by neetle »

phatskat wrote: post #234
preg_match wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might ma…

Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc. Person…

I think the sentiment comes from people that just don’t find pleasure from working/mastery. The incentives have changed so much with llm-enabled development, but not which ones people respond to.

I miss the code mines

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#240

Post by annzabelle »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #223
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…

[flagged]

I mostly view AI as raising me up one more level of abstraction in coding. It still requires babysitting and verification if you want anything vaguely maintainable that's not pulling in a ton of irrelevant libraries, but now I am able to give a clear spec for a ~50-100 line task and it'll get it 90% right, and it's a small enough chunk I can validate it well.

Claude though is still slow enough that I think it works out to maybe a 50% improvement at my time to do a task, but sacrificing deep knowledge and learning. I worry that I'll never develop the same skills and intuition that senior engineers developed a decade ago because I'm outsourcing a lot of the planning and thinking.

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