Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

kottke.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#31

Post by pjc50 »

ramon156 wrote: post #28
rhubarbtree wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there is an unspoken factor here, which is that business leaders are not impressed by the WFH silent quitting attitude of junior staff, they’re happy to replace them with AI, and they don’t have sympathy because “yet another thing is hard.” I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. O…

OTOOOH its very naive to think that "quitting social media" is the solution. The earth is rotting from us leeching from it, there is no future for these juniors, and we're on the verge of more war and destruction, fascism, et cetera. There is nothing for them to build towards, other than the typical House, wife and kids, which will be in the same boat. Knowing this, if someone comes up to you and says "yeah, well, yo…

Also, it's not enough to quit on your own: all the voters and CEOs around you will still be on social media, making decisions it influences. Just like quitting alcohol won't prevent you being killed by a drunk driver.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#32

Post by jstummbillig »

Contrary to the chorus, I find this mad episode in our history has been going surprisingly well. I mean, it's a lot to process and the speed is ludicrous. What did we expect? What is the baseline? 80% approval in face of unprecedented uncertainty?

We are adjusting, we talk about things. I hope we will keep doing that.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#33

Post by hydra-f »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #21

AI slop farms are churning out anti-AI data center memes on Facebook https://www.fastcompany.com/91544842/ai-slop-facebook-conten...

Anything can be ground for opportunism and the world has no lack of that. It seems clear to me that whatever the direction may be, it's a shitty direction nonetheless

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#34

Post by arjie »

camillomiller wrote: post #7

Wait a minute, the Future of Truth is a book by Werner Herzog... Did this guy published a book with the same title? Why?

This is not uncommon. Indeed, one should find it surprising if book names were routinely globally unique. Some famous dupes are Twilight, and Foundation, and Invisible Man.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#35

Post by paganel »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #14

I was surprised to find out how much hate there is for AI in art. An artist, Yuumei, is the perfect candidate to use AI– drawing by hand since early 2000s, wrist injury precluding heavy work. People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment. But she wants to use it to be able to produce the work she wants, including comics with lots of art and such. Given that…

> People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment.

Yes, we, humans, generally believe that.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#36

Post by keybored »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #11
devsda wrote: post #10

The commencement/graduating speeches including AI in the video at the end are infuriating. The message from people giving those speeches is literally "deal with it" and how tone deaf do they have to be to patronize those booing students with "I understand your fear". The graduation episode where the AI readout missing some student names and then the college saying "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We…

I suspect there is an unspoken factor here, which is that business leaders are not impressed by the WFH silent quitting attitude of junior staff, they’re happy to replace them with AI, and they don’t have sympathy because “yet another thing is hard.” I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. O…

I think Silent Quitting is some chattering class concoction feels-wrapping the observation that most workers have the incentive to work as little as possible.[1] Just like employers have the incentive squeeze as much productivity from their commodities (labor).

What was the first instinct of the venerable business leaders (spoken a bit too publicly)? Great, we can get rid of labor. Do they need any excuse or reason beyond maximizing profit? They don’t. It’s just incentives.

[1] And some workers can genuinely benefit from doing more than that, even as wage workers. “Some people have jobs; others have careers” as Chris Rock paraphrasedly said.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#37

Post by sevenzero »

ashfTq6 wrote: post #29
apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #14

I was surprised to find out how much hate there is for AI in art. An artist, Yuumei, is the perfect candidate to use AI– drawing by hand since early 2000s, wrist injury precluding heavy work. People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment. But she wants to use it to be able to produce the work she wants, including comics with lots of art and such. Given that…

Bringing up Neuralink or medical use of LLMs is not an argument for allowing the theft. Anthropic etc. are free to start a prosthetics company and scrap their regular offerings. You are then allowed to use AI with a prescription.

This. As an artist I wouldnt have an issue with AI if it wouldnt be just generative generating full, fleshed out pieces. If AI is used allowing actual artists to use a brush or pen again and actually allows them expressing themselves through their own work, it would be great.

People seem to think generating art from stolen pieces by typing 4 sentences in a prompt window is equal to this. It isn't. It is not true expression as it takes humanity out of the piece.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#38

Post by dandanua »

bronlund wrote: post #4

I will argue that we are going forward - for better or for worse. In my humble opinion, taking into account the sad state of the world today, any change is welcomed.

Dude, try not eating for a week and then publish your humble opinion on how good any change is.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#39

Post by dotancohen »

vkou wrote: post #22
JSR_FDED wrote: post #3

It’s crazy. Literally the only valid thing you can say about LLM use is “in the hands of an experienced person LLMs can be a force multiplier”. But no, we have to replace entire companies with it. All the problems of LLMs stem from inexperienced people using it (by inexperienced I mean not skilled in the domain in which the LLM is being applied).

That's not the problem. There are two[1] problems. One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale. The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs. These users were producing good to passable work for years before LLM slop started flooding the world. It's bec…

  > One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.
You might want to read about the history of the term sabotage then. This actually is precedented.

  > The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs ... bosses can't tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage.
The bosses usually can. However, there is no quick, objective way to do that. The boss would likely literally have to do the work over from scratch to know if the current result is adequate.

I'm familiar with a firm that does government required safety inspections for clients - big factories and the like. There is a huge push inside the company to use AI to write the reports. I don't want to tell you how many times the LLM fills in the report with the most common string "everything is fine" even though the specific future report checkbox has been left unchecked. Only a single engineer is fighting this within the company, and fears for her job because of it.

Re: There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

#40

Post by hydra-f »

bronlund wrote: post #4

I will argue that we are going forward - for better or for worse. In my humble opinion, taking into account the sad state of the world today, any change is welcomed.

You're saying the world is in a sad state today, but there never was a time more prosperous than today on a global stage. Almost everything reeks of prosperity

If there's anything to blame, it's the various cultural revolutions, but even them are byproducts of the theater produced by the 8.3 BILLION (United States: 348,920,101; https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/world-popu...) people currently inhabiting the planet

Post reply on HN