371–380 of 467 posts
The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
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The printing press may have started by moving things away from the existing power base, but it very quickly got used by the existing power base, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_the_Vatican_Pr... And printing presses themselves ended up being licensed by the state, e.g. this in England: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
Not to come down on either side, but I am begging commenters to refrain from using a Eurocentric lens when discussing a technology that wasn't even invented in Europe.
Summary of above: cool and useful!
Example based on the above: cool and insightful!
Slamming someone for using a european example because that's what they know: not cool, not insightful, not useful.
The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…
What do you have to say about the circular trillions of dollars going around 7 companies and building huge data centers and expecting all smaller players to just subsidize them?
Sure, you can elide the argument by saying, "actually that doesn't matter because I am really smart and understood what the author really was talking about, let me reframe it properly".
I don't really have a response to that. You're free to do what you please. To me, something feels very wrong with that and this behavior in general plagues the modern Internet.
“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…
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Online gambling, most of which is about good ol’ money laundering, and thepiratebay seems to not censor their ads at all, so you may get all kinds of scams and malware spread via ads.
I get finance scam ads all day on Instagram and Youtube, so it seems like a wash to me. If anything I have more sympathy for that mafia.
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> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.
I think the point remains, if someone armed with Claude Code could whip out a feature complete clone of Microsoft Office over the weekend (and by all accounts, even a novice programmer could do this, because of the magnificent greatness of Claude), then why don't they just go ahead and do it? Maybe do a bunch of them: release one under GPL, one under MIT, one under BSD, and a few more sold as proprietary software. Wo…
I could see it being doable by forking LibreOffice or Calligra Suite as a starting point, although even with AI assistance I'd imagine that it might take anyone not intimately familiar with both LibreOffice (or Calligra) and MS Office longer than a weekend to determine the full scope of the delta between them, much less implement that delta.
But you'd still need someone with sufficient skill (not a novice), maybe several hundred or thousand dollars to burn, and nothing better to do for some amount of time that's probably longer than a weekend. And then that person would need some sort of motivation or incentive to go through with the project. It's plausible, but not a given that this will happen just because useful agentic coding tools exist.
The safety regulations for every new technology are written in blood. Every time. AI won’t be any different, we’ll push it as hard & fast as our tolerance for human suffering allows.
And it's not "we" who'll push, unless you're an AI investor, of course.
I had a thought about AI - suppose they are successful at making software engineers obsolete - not totally but enough that the field becomes another moderately paying shitty job only done by people who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do or who are very passionate about some obscure thing for some reason - like geology for example, instead of a meal ticket to the upper middle class and a well-paying career. Th…
Fundamentally I think the job of engineer is to translate a business or real life scenario into logic. This is true for any kind of engineer, and is not restricted to software. I held and continue to hold that software engineer shouldn't be constrained to any specific language. And extrapolate to the entire engineering field, the engineering profession will continue to exist because to first translate a business or r…
I'm hoping that AI programming pushes more people toward the engineering side and as it takes over the rote work side. There will be people far to the programmer side that might be put out of a job, but the creative, innovative, inventive engineering positions will persist.
Bubble aside, this could be the most destructive effect of AI. I would add to this that it is also destroying creativity, because when you don't know whether that "amazing video clip" was actually created by a human or an AI, then it's no longer that amazing. (To use a trivial example, a video of a cat and dog interacting in a way that is truly funny if it were real, and goes viral, but that means nothing if was AI-generated.)
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I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge. For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how…
>A human who spent a year dedicating himself to consuming freely accessible information, who was then warped back into the past, could send humanity forward by tens of thousands of years - all by himself. Only recently in my life have I developed an appreciation for fiction, because it contains deep insights into human behavior. I often fantasize about traveling back to the past, and explaining to folks that we've be…