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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

aphyr.com

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#821

Post by keeda »

simoncion wrote: post #820
keeda wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. Several of them come from experienced software engineers who use LLMs professionally in their work. So, not from personal experience. And we don't know which examples came from which users or what they used them for. We get enough hearsay on HN and again, there's nothing in this series that has not been discussed here. There is however, a ton of other hearsay missing in the series, which is the utility so many peo…

> So, not from personal experience. No, the rest of the quote you snipped that from talks about how some of the reports are from personal experience and some are second-hand reports from trusted, knowledgeable people. But -as the kids say- you go off, queen.

> No, the rest of the quote you snipped that from talks about how some of the reports are from personal experience...

And those were "dabbling" as I mentioned above, which is why there is no insight.

Concrete example: the most detailed of his personal experiences reported is about generating and modifying 3D renderings of a bathroom. There is barely enough detail to comment on his approach, but this is an active area of research that people are publishing papers on, eg: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17459 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17048 -- these are non-trivial and often involve custom models, so that Gemini got even partial results is making the opposite point of what he intended.

But if he expected good results in a few hours, that's just dabbling. It's almost as if he expected a silver bullet...

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#822

Post by tmoertel »

tmoertel wrote: post #530
sillysaurusx wrote: post #518

Question: The author makes this article available on the web as a series of posts, a PDF ( https://aphyr.com/data/posts/411/the-future-of-everything-is... ) and an EPUB. What do you suppose their tooling looks like? Is there a single "document containing all the words," and it updates the website, pdf, and epub whenever you change it? What struck me was that the presentation is beautiful. It seems worth emulating. Bu…

I am not the author of the site in question, but I suspect that your guess is right, and that Pandoc is the hub between the spokes. For my blog, I write posts in Markdown. Then the build process uses Pandoc to convert the posts into web pages and, for certain pages, PDF files typeset with TeX. For example, here is a post in both web and PDF versions: (Web) https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql..…

ADDED 2026-04-21: Confirmed that it’s Pandoc doing the typesetting. The end of the author’s typeset version of the blog posts includes this colophon:

> This piece, like most all my words and software, was written by hand—mainly in Vim. I composed a Markdown outline in a mix of headers, bullet points, and prose, then reorganized it in a few passes. With the structure laid out, I rewrote the outline as prose, typeset with Pandoc. I went back to make substantial edits as I wrote, then made two full edit passes on typeset PDFs. For the first I used an iPad and stylus, for the second, the traditional pen and paper, read aloud.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#823

Post by zshrdlu »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #416
121789 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski

Neither Ted Kaczynski nor Senator McCarthy were wrong, even if we can criticize their ways and means.

Ted Kaczynski specifically was advocating for primitivity, no?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#824

Post by 23j423j423hj »

xienze wrote: post #513
23j423j423hj wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way I've ever heard it described is that in a car-dominant society, every new neighbor in your neighborhood is somebody in your way, taking up your spot, making you late in your commute. The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.

And in a public transport-dominant society every neighbor is also someone in your way, taking up a spot at the restaurant you walk to, filling up the subway train and therefore making you late in your commute… There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.

In a much less visceral way. You can always let one more person on the subway.

Being stuck in traffic is a daily physical reminder of the zero-sum nature of car-dominated societies.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#825

Post by mywittyname »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #152
ernst_klim wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

People have this misconception that first it was one way, and then , and they'll wake up and suddenly it is another. It's a slow creep. 10 years ago there were 5 of us on a team each responsible for something specific. Now I can do all of that. Teams and companies will downsize. How do you see AI creating more jobs? (I need some hope right now lol).

> How do you see AI creating more jobs? (I need some hope right now lol).

More armies of one. That single team of five now becomes 30 teams of one or two each.

Which largely how automation resulted in more jobs - the cost decrease induced demand. Think about how cheap cameras, laptops & internet up-ended traditional media. We went from 3-4 channels on TV in the 60s, to 3-400 channels on cable by the 90s, to 115 million channels on YouTube right now. Because anyone with a basic phone can record and edit content, which used to require millions of dollars in equipment and took years to learn to do. And people are happy to do so for a fraction of the revenue a TV station would require.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#826

Post by Animats »

Eisenstein wrote: post #740
intended wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope. For solving all things complex, there must be a plan.

Have humans ever had a grand plan for society and succeeded in carrying it out such that the desired goal was reached? I'm not talking about something like the Marshall plan, which was a reaction to previous failed attempts and was created during an urgent need for such action, but a plan where a group of people figured out the best course of action, despite humanity existing in a different paradigm, and then enacted…

The U.S. constitution?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#827

Post by dehrmann »

leonidasv wrote: post #661
brotchie wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight. Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding. Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again. This effor…

What strikes me is that AI can also be the best teacher in the world: your Makefile is not working, you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax, you ask for more details, you learn more, you ask about other Makefile syntax gotchas, etc. This is the most efficient deliberate practice possible: you can learn in minutes what would take hours of Googling, tinkering and scouring docs. You have a…

> AI can also be the best teacher in the world

I just ran this for just that purpose.

curl http://:11434/api/generate -d "$(jq -n --arg hist "$(history)" '{ "model": "qwen3.5:35b-a3b-q4_K_M", "stream": false, "prompt": "The following is my bash shell history. Are there any bad patterns I should fix or commands I should learn or master? \($hist)" }')"

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#828

Post by engeljohnb »

warkdarrior wrote: post #471
engeljohnb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Therefore, you can dismiss whatwever claim is being made. That's the reason to ask for the source: so you can judge whether it's reliable.

> That's the reason to ask for the source: so you can judge whether it's reliable. So the solution to checking whether an article is reliable is to check whether its sources are reliable? How far back do you go? Or do you disregard immediately any article that does not cite only sources you already trust?

You find a primary source.

If I want to know "Did Christopher Columbus believe the earth is flat?" I could read modern day articles about it, but I'm going to ignore any that don't include direct quotes from either him or people that knew him. And then I'll double check those quotes to make sure they're authentic.

If I want to know "does more resistance or more volume lead to better muscle growth?" I can find a million fitness blogs about it, but I'll only trust the ones that name specific studies, and even then I'll probably ditch the article and read the study itself.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#829

Post by engeljohnb »

munificent wrote: post #479
engeljohnb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Therefore, you can dismiss whatwever claim is being made. That's the reason to ask for the source: so you can judge whether it's reliable.

Great, I dismissed it. Unfortunately, the several million other people who live in the same voting unit as me didn't and ended up electing an asshat anyway.

Yes, I wish there was less trust in non-primary sources of information anymore. It's such a cliche, but critical thinking should be taught in schools.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#830

Post by parasubvert »

solatic wrote: post #664
parasubvert wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Drucker identified this phenomenon as the rise of knowledge work as "the means of production" in the 1950s and 1960s. Management (of people, tasks, responsibilities, and disciplines) and knowledge work were the two sides to organizational performance. Drucker felt that "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw a…

> "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw at a problem, if you can't retain people that know what you're doing, you won't get far. This leads to the reformulation of knowledge workers as "human capital", and it's hardly post-capitalist. A capitalist society is one where people assemble different forms of capital to…

Well it is 'post-capitalism' rather than 'anti-capitalism' or 'non-capitalism' the same way 'post-punk' relates to 'punk'. Human capital is something of a conceptual misnomer as the knowledge itself is owned by the individual and can only be licensed or contracted by investors and management, not traded on capital markets.

> A capitalist society is one where people assemble different forms of capital to produce capital returns that are larger than the sum of the capital inputs, where the possibilities available to you depend on the amount and quality of capital that you have access to.

The reason we live in post-capitalism is that capital is largely abundant these days, although many regional and cultural barriers remain due to bias, prejudice and risk aversion. But is no longer the determining factor of economic growth - necessary but not sufficient.

> This is all still very relevant when discussing human capital - access to human capital is determined by the quality of your professional networks, whether you decide to be present in geographic talent clusters (i.e. cities as centers of industry), and whether you have sufficient financial capital available in trade.

I feel this is a stretch. In a non-capitalist economic system, for example, the wealth of the collective is arguably also bounded by the scarcity of knowledge in that collective. Knowledge does not have the same properties of capital accumulation that Marx described.

> AI will not transition us to a post-capitalist society. Its promise is solely the ability to replace human capital with other forms: chips and electricity. It does not spell the death of human labor any more than computers and spreadsheets did for accountants.

Spoken like someone who didn't even read my parent comment. We are already living in a post-capitalist society, and have been for several decades.

"Chips and electricity" is reductio ad absurdum, and ignores a vast number of other input factors. AI will not eliminate labor or human capital, that's just marketing. It certainly will transform it as other tools have.

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