291–300 of 370 posts
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Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
The bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to six Hiroshimas - I think we can safely say that Gaza has been destroyed. https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...
Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context. The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works. > I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring. For almost every product/service ever offe…
I’m a systems person too, and I don’t see mediocrity as inevitable. The slop problem isn’t just model quality. It’s incentives and decision making at inference time. That’s why I’m working on an open source tool for governance and validation during inference, rather than trying to solve everything in pre training. Better systems can produce better outcomes, even with the same models.
I agree completely, and I’m doing the same thing. Good tools that help produce better outcomes will have a multiplicative impact as models improve. What are you building?
It runs at inference time rather than training time and is model agnostic. The goal is to make disagreement explicit and costly instead of implicit and ignored, especially in high stakes or autonomous workflows.
Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context. The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works. > I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring. For almost every product/service ever offe…
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work. > For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many. For many reasons. It means that a good product can be outcom…
> That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts).
Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use.
> It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ...
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps.
> Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry.
I don't see any reason to expect significant change.
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LLMs aren't AGI and maybe aren't a path to AGI, but step back and look at the way the world is changing. Hard disks were invented by IBM in 1953 and now less than a hundred years later there's an estimated million terabytes a year of hard disks made and sold, and a total sold of Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta ... 1.36 Zettabytes. In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often recorded to dictaphone tapes,…
I mean, what you're describing is technological advancement. It's great! I'm fully in favor of it, and I fully believe in it. It's not the singularity. The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI, and the AGI will then self-improve at an exponential rate allowing it to become infinitely more advanced and powerful (much moreso than we could ever have made it), and it will then also invent loads of ne…
That is one version of it, but not the only one. "John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress.[14][15] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue""[1]. A time when people before it, would be unable to predict what came after it because it was so different. (And which I argue in another comment[2] is not a specific cutoff time, but a trend over history of the future being increasingly hard to predict over shorter and shorter timeframes).
Apart from AGI, or Von Neuman accelerationism, I also understand it as augmenting human intelligence: "once we become cyborgs and enhance our abilities, nobody can predict what comes next"; or artificial 'life' - "if we make self-replicating nano-machines (that can have Darwinian natural selection?), all bets about the future are off"; or "once we can simulate human brains in a machine, even if we can't understand how they work, we can run tons of them at high speeds".
> and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
Arguably, we have built weakly-superhuman entities, in the form of companies. Collectively they can solve problems that individual humans can't, live longer than humans, deploy and exploit more resources over larger areas and longer timelines than humans, and have shown a tendency to burn through workers and ruin the environment that keeps us alive even while supposedly guided by human intelligence. I don't have very much hope that a non-human AGI would be more aligned with our interests than companies made up of us are.
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> We haven't got more battery life 15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here). Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago. And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our ma…
Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges. Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
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It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex. Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products. It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoe…
You are overlooking debt / credit.
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It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.
Populism can be a non-violent way out, not is the non-violent way out. As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
And you don't even have to go back 100 years for an example. About a year will do it.
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We can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do something in order to recieve money, even if the something is begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the answer.
What if you have to dig holes and fill them back in to get the money? And some more people can do the useless work of tracking who filled and dug how many holes.
Why is it useless to track who dug which hole?
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We can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do something in order to recieve money, even if the something is begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the answer.
> People need to do something in order to recieve money Why? What purpose does this serve? Why should people have to prove their worthiness to be allowed to continue living?