521–530 of 783 posts
As tech become available to help reduce your costs and drive up your profit, the same tech also reduces your competitor's costs and perhaps lets more competitors into the market. This drives down your product prices and reduces your profit.
So you invest but see no increase in productivity, but if you don't do it - you're toast.
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How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.
Best product should be picked according to requirements by LLM without bullshit advertising.
- Which products get included in the candidate list? Every product in existence which claims use? - how many results can it return? And in what order? - which attributes or description of the product is provided to the llm? Who provides it? - how are the claims in those descriptions verified? - what if my business believes the claims or description of our product is false? - how will the llm change its relative valuations based on demand?
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Yeah, guy states that in multiple places, and yet here we are, with an impression that most people referencing the book apparently didn't read it.
An odd tendency I’ve noticed about Graeber is that the more someone apparently dislikes his work, the more it will seem like they’re talking about totally different books from the ones I read.
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This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…
> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high… I keep seeing this statement in threads about AI, and maybe it’s just from you, but high SNR is a good thing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio I think the rest of your post is very valid. It’s the mental equivalent of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088
Two inverses do make a right, it seems.
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This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…
> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high… I keep seeing this statement in threads about AI, and maybe it’s just from you, but high SNR is a good thing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio I think the rest of your post is very valid. It’s the mental equivalent of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088
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How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.
The parts that are only done to maintain status quo with a competitor aren’t productive, and that’s quite a bit of it. Two (or more) sides spend money, nothing changes. No good is produced. The whole exercise is basically an accident. Like when a competing country builds their tenth battleship, so you commission another one to match them. The world would have been better if neither had been build. Money changed hands…
Is it a waste of effort when two companies try to make the best electric car?
If it is wasteful what does aw orld look like where nobody ever spends resources on a goal which overlaps with someone else?
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It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'? 4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'. The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it…
So we're suddenly going back into measuring lines of code as a useful metric? Just because people are shitting out endless slop code that they never bothered to throw a 2nd glance at doesn't mean it's good or that it's leading to better projects or tools, it literally just means people are pushing code out haphazardly . If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a R…
>If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing
1. Well you can't do that
2. Something like that won't register as Claude Code (or any other AI tool) usage anyway
3. Something like that won't come anywhere near 4%
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Not necessarily. You could have 100 FTE on reports instead of 300 FTE in a large company like a bank. That means 200 people who'd normally go into reporting jobs over the next decade, will go into something else, producing something else ontop of the reports that continue to be produced. The sum of this is more production. Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot less employment needed, freeing up peo…
Looking at job numbers That is a wild take given the recession we're basically in from bad US policy like tariffs.
Wild take to cite a recession when last quarter growth was 4.4%.
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and how do you know it is not going to be an inverted j-curve ?
I think the hardest part to figure out will be delineating the illusion of productivity from actual productivity.
In the other hand - we do have empirical research (from the economist in this article) even from 2023 showing LLMs ability to offer real productivity in certain tasks : https://www.nber.org/papers/w31161. And the models have become much more better since then.
So it’s probably a question of if we can use them for what they are good for without being lulled by the sirens song of fake productivity.