541–550 of 800 posts
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Wow only 6 times in 30 years! Surely a unique and world shattering once in a lifetime experience!
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…
I call your Frank Herbert machine dystopia and raise you the Ian Banks machine utopia...
I just realized the inverse of Pascal’s wager applies to negative AI hype. - If you believe it and it’s wrong, you lose. - If you believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in a panic. - If you don’t believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in blissful ignorance. - If you don’t believe it and it’s wrong, you can go on living.
Of course this is subject to a similar rebuttal to Pascal's Wager (Consider a universe in which the deity punishes all believers): What if a capricious super-intelligence takes over that punishes everyone who didn't buy into the hype?
"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance. I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market. * We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs…
> The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750? There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn. Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?
There probably isn't one. Sure you can be bold and try to short something, but the market can be irrationel longer than you can stay solvent.
Also the big tech stocks are inflated. But they have been for years and unlike dotcom there is some tangible value behind them.
I think maybe the sane thing to do is reduce tech stocks exposure and go into index funds. But that's always the answer, so that's cheating :)
This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…
Just say it simply, 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade. 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the cas…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I call your Frank Herbert machine dystopia and raise you the Ian Banks machine utopia...
I'm gonna call that raise: How does one get to the anarchist Culture when all the machines are being built by profit-hungry capitalists?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not n…
> what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine The only thing you could do in a "digital space" (a.k.a. on a computer) is a simulation. Simulations are extremely useful and help significantly with designing and choosing experiments, but they cannot _replace_ real experiments. > Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash. And my…
Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop. Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator g…
> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarl…
With frontier LLM agents, the digital loop is happening now to an extent (on inference code, harnesses, etc), and that extent probably grows larger (research automation) soon.
Pertinent to your point, however, is the physical feedback loop of robots making better robots/factories/compute/energy. This is an aspect of singularity scenarios like ai-2027.
In these scenarios, these robots will be the control mechanism that the digital uses to bootstrap itself faster, through experimentation and exploration. The usual constraints of physical law still apply, but it feels "unbounded" relative to normal human constraints and timescales.
A separate point: there's also deductive exploration (pure math) as distinct from empirical exploration (physics), which is not bounded by any physical constraints except for those that bound computation itself.