I am legit curious though: what changed specifically in your information gathering process that revealed these things?
For example pretty much everything happening now has been well described by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn specifically about American politics since the 1960s. I mean similarly for the entire black community and don’t forget Martin Luther King was killed because he was trying to organize sanitation workers.
Chris Hedges has been reporting about the state of things daily for two decades now. Similarly for Jacobin magazine.
Ron Paul (whatever you think of him) was talking explicitly about this corruption in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the bail out of the banking market in 2008.
Ross Perot famously described how Nafta was a big sellout to the multinational corporations and would devastate US industry - on stage at the 1992(?) presidential debate and everybody just made fun of him because he was short and had slightly larger ears because he was an older guy.
Well a lot of this is simply published. Like, from reading a bill, agency rules, memos, whatever. Most of it is not hidden, except by...boredom? Like you had to be interested for whatever reason to go looking for it. Or embedded somehow in one of the institutions where you can see what the people at the bottom of the institution can see, without wanting to make a career out of it. Since if you decide that, then there's no incentive to notice.
The US president sells early access to his official tweets at $100k per month. Things have definitely gotten worse even if they were shit to begin with.
LLM's are already transformative. I get thinking it isn't going to solve all the world problems, but, companies throughout the entire world are already using it at enormous numbers. Transformative means it changes the world, it already has. It does not mean it changes your life.
By this metric then leaded gasoline and the Deep water horizon oil spill, and Reagan era deregulations were also transformative, so was the Apollo mission, the SETI program and even Eurovision. Arguably Alchemy was also transformative even though it was unsuccessful, because the scientific funding that went into various attempts led into many vital discoveries.
If this the criteria we are using form something being transformative, then being transformative is truly unremarkable in this context, to the point of being a distraction.
If LLMs are "only" transformative in the sense of leaded gasoline or the Apollo mission, that's a massive change all by itself.
If LLMs are "transformative" in the same sense as counting "alchemy because of the scientific funding that went into various attempts led into many vital discoveries", what's going to be our version of "actually we can turn lead into gold now, we just have better things to do with the capability"?
We do have the means today to turn literal lead into literal gold.
The energy is better spent on almost anything else and the gold is radioactive afterwards, but we can do it.
The closest analogy I'd have for vibecoding is combustion engines. Historical antecedent was a toy, early industrial ones took a lot of fuel and were only useful to pump water out of the coal mines that supplied that fuel, but kept getting improved until they made a critical quality leap that took them from "slightly worse than a horse" to "marginally better than a horse" and then there were suddenly a lot of unemployed farriers.
But literal-lead-to-gold took a while longer than that, and a different set of inventions behind it.
Humans have assisted each other medically, supported injured and disabled tribe members, and sought out medicinal herbs since long before history was written. I'm not sure how you'd delineate between modern health care and when humans never had some notion of health care and/or support when bodies enter failure modes. We don't survive well without a lot of assistance and care, and living long lives required plenty of bodily maintenance regardless of how fortunate and healthy we were.
I think, if you add clarity, such as how aspirin alone is a wonder, how iodine to clean wounds is a life saver, how soap is a miracle, and all the parasites we don't have, yet all this we take for granted.
We are certainly much healthier, with the little trinkets we keep in our houses.
Willow bark was used like aspirin.
Soap is a old concept (ash is desinfectant as is vinegar ). Alcohol for cleaning wounds is a very old concept alike. As was jumping into clean water every day (also in winter).
Yes, and all of those solutions are suboptimal compared to the modern variants, were not always available, and making alcohol required technology (just as fire usage was technology).
The real point here, is a lot of people today don't realize how supported they are, with medicine and the trappings of modern life. The simple things I've listed are quite literally a wonder, but to the modern human, often it's not even considered a big deal.
Even in a rural remote areas of Canada or the US, you can just get in your vehicle, drive for half an hour, and then suddenly be surrounded by tens of thousands of products to make you healthier. A city dweller can walk for five minutes, and have the same.
"The real point here, is a lot of people today don't realize how supported they are, with medicine and the trappings of modern life. "
No doubt. But I like to spend time in remote wilderness, so I do know what I have and do not have there. I definitely feel healthier if I am outside more often and can take care of various injuries myself, but if I would really need one, I surely would call for a modern medical helicopter and not go find some plants.
One of the problems with modern life is that we've forgotten how many things will try to kill you given half a chance. So we grow up complacent with normalcy bias and end up inventing imaginary personal threats - like being scared of vaccines - instead of dealing with real collective threats like climate catastrophe.
The entire species is designed to deal with 'far off' threats and ignore them. Think of any animal, let's take a squirrel. It has to be afraid of cats, canines, bird of prey, and at the same time leave the burrow every day, and all day long look for food.
If the predator is not breathing down your neck? You are watchful but ignore it.
Similarly, our ancestors and ourselves? We are social animals. We live in a pack. We share defense with our tribe. You and your neighbour will stand back to back, to fight off barbarians. Meanwhile, in parallel, we need to defend ourselves from members of our tribe. The very person who fights back to back with you, to save your community, may be your tribal competitor. Whether for dominance or breeding, we fight amongst ourselves. We know there is risk of our neighbour, our fellow community member attacking and killing us, meanwhile? We lay our head down and sleep.
We're designed to take low probability threats, and cast them off, and nothing is more low-probability than 'it will happen in the mysterious future'.
Global warming is as 'far off' thing. You may say "But this and this is happening!", and I agree! But I still live in my house, I still have grass and trees, I still have food, and so for most people "far off in the mysterious future" is a valid response.
If you can't see the enemy before you, it is easy to shrug away. If you cannot see the threat as impending, it is easy to ignore.
It's in our very nature. It's a requirement to sleep soundly at night.
I think there are a lot of situations unaccounted for here
- people writing in a non native language
- people insecure in their writing
- people not used to writing in industry terms
- people with the curse of knowledge that are aware that they can’t write for a general audience well
Surely others too. None of those mean you have to read it, but I have gotten immense value from reading some things people have had ai write (and I’ve seen a ton of junk as well)
> people writing in a non native language
This category of people are going to be most betrayed by LLM output: 1) the receiver loses the signal that the sender might need to be queried to find their real intent and 2) the sender doesn't have the ability to determine if what they are sending is what they mean
> people insecure in their writing
These people can grow up, I don't care. Not a good enough reason to send a slop grenade.
>people not used to writing in industry terms
Similar to the non-native speakers, but slightly less in magnitude. They can educate themselves though.
- people with the curse of knowledge that are aware that they can’t write for a general audience well
These people probably can get some value out of it but they should take care
The world turned millenia ago and will turn millenia later.
The problem statement is of applications using up expensive RAM. Incidentally, expensive RAM is just one of the problems we face in the computing space. Forced obsolescence is another, when running hardware needs to be replaced because software is built for only newer CPUs.
> The problem statement is of applications using up expensive RAM. Incidentally, expensive RAM is just one of the problems we face in the computing space.
You need to stop and think about the problem. Nowadays RAM is expensive because many people now want to max out their computers with RAM to run LLMs and AI coding assistants. Today's software is still the same software that ran perfectly well half a dozen years ago. Cloudflare happens to operate a large global computer infrastructure, and it's scale is such that 1% gains are lauded as fantastic cost savers. But that's the bean counter's perspective, pointing out that they saved a bean.
> Nowadays RAM is expensive because many people now want to max out their computers with RAM to run LLMs and AI coding assistants.
Source? I imagine the amount of people trying to run local LLMs is miniscule. RAM is expensive because a handful of companies have spent billions buying all of the compute.
> Today's software is still the same software that ran perfectly well half a dozen years ago.
This statement is quite honestly not true at all. Just take the two largest OS from 6 years ago and compare resource usage between them and you will find you are incorrect, never mind the software running on it.
You are right, but it reads (to me, could be just me) you mean newer specs which used to be true when I shipped software in the 70-90s; you mean faster machines / more memory right? Like installing a new version of software or OS and suddenly all memory is used, system is swapping and you did not ask for that but some obscure feature you didn't need needed to be shipped fast.
That statement can be used to justify anything, to the point it is utterly useless.
— Humanity has been on the decline. People are hateful towards each other, striking their fellow man and poisoning the environment. Despots eventually launched nukes which killed everyone but the cockroaches.
On the contrary. Industrial developing countries saw bigger % increases in their economic growth in the last couple of decades than the fully developed "old" western ones. Mostly due to "the rich" shipping western jobs there to cut costs and increase their margins.
For example the likes of Poland, China, India and Vietnam were and still are growing like crazy when you compare to the likes of UK or Germany.
People in many South American countries should be highly motivated to use crypto because fiat is usually damn shit.
I was motivated because cash machines were extremely crappy for a tourist (when you could find an ATM that even had any money in its cassettes). Argentina was a USD8 withdrawal fee plus the super shitty official exchange rate and half the time you could only withdraw maybe USD30 maximum so you maybe needed to do multiple transactions. I also had NZD bank fees and poor exchange rates from my own NZ bank added.
It was a total shitshow trying to use crypto. I would honestly have been better wandering around with gold in my pockets.
Crypto was high risk: dangerously unsafe. Also mostly unavailable unless you were really lucky. Complex. Massively taxed for recipients if they used anything that officially supported crypto. Arbolitos (street money changers) would take a 10-15% cut and it always felt super effing dodgy (felt like a risk of getting kidnapped).
I can't recommend it. There was no way to learn how to do crypto transactions safely, even though I have conversational Spanish.
Scary as all fuck. My kind of holiday, but I couldn't recommend anyone take those risks unless they're as stupid an idiot as me.
I'm mostly relaxed about countries taking advantage of me (or other tourists), but South America was so OTT that I mostly wouldn't go back. That said, I loved Brazil even though I can't speak a word of Portuguese. That's the only place I would make an effort to return to from my 3 months travelling in South America.
So don't pay with it in unsafe settings. For them, crypto still can absolutely be a very valid means of saving money. When the local currency is inflationary and the banks restrict dollars, crypto saves the day wrt holdings. Transfer to bank account in local currency as needed.
And you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist. It is never acceptable, and it happens because of relaxed dotards who don't fight or prevent it. As a tourist, being taken advantage in dollars is what I consider scary.
You are suggesting that people should illegally hide their crypto from their government and taxation.
I assume if you live in say Argentina, then you really have little other choice.
But they don't have the knowledge to be safe, even though they strongly understand the need for security. I prefer not to advise other people to perform risky actions.
> you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist
And you should never tell other people what to do.
I am actually pretty okay with being generous and paying "too much". I've traveled to places where I'm relatively a fucking rich bastard. I don't see that I should be a selfish arsehole towards people that earn cents compared to me.
I hate foreign governments ripping me off because I know the money isn't going towards anything useful.
But I attempt to be thoughtfully generous towards individuals.
Although I avoid tipping culture (as a New Zealander it feels prostitutionally sleazy to me).
I remember some Germans telling me I was ruining it for other tourists by not haggling enough. Fuck those tight wankers.
Being generous is completely different from getting scammed. For example, one can be generous by not bargaining it the price is within affluent standards. One can however be scammed by being taken for a useless long taxi ride. The point is to reward the good and prevent the bad. It depends on whether you see yourself as a force for good in this world or not.
Tipping culture is a distortion of what tipping should be. Tipping should be a reward for "unexpectedly extraordinary" service - this by definition is a rare occurrence.
The government doesn't ask me when it prints money to pay the interest on its debt. It applies this inflation tax regardless of how much income tax one pays, which compounds hugely over the years. It is in this way the biggest scammer, and I believe I already declared my lack of support for scammers.
I dislike scammers, and when travelling I practice my skills at recognising them. I'm okay at avoiding getting targeted (using a variety of techniques).
If scammers are feeding their families, and relatively rich tourists are sufficiently incautious, then I don't have huge sympathy for the tourists. The rules of the street are everywhere in the world.
I don't support drug users in my home town either.
Of course I've run into many selfish arsehole scammers including ones with their police on thier side.
Options against bent cops in foreign countries are more limited.
But yes, my government always wants to increase taxation, and they are rather deceptive about everything.
But I pay my taxes and I'm mostly okay with what it is used for. Without our social and legal infrastructure, I wouldn't have got anything.
Classic example of victim blaming. Not the company generating the ad, not the company approving it, but the person who is trying to block it, and then ACTUALLY did stop using Adsense.
One of my early programming jobs was bringing a print newspaper to the web. I was actually going through some of my emails from that time yesterday, which brought back a lot of memories. I was largely despised by most of the staff. Some told me the internet was a fad, others assumed I thought I was better than them. The editor kept insecurely saying “I know you think I’m a dinosaur and don’t want to hear what I have to say but…” the thing is… I didn’t think they were dinosaurs at all. I had enormous respect for them (it’s why I applied!), I knew the internet was inevitable and wanted to salvage as much as I could of what I loved.
The internet did change their industry and the world. Many of them did lose their jobs. That is what technology does. Efficiencies mean someone somewhere is no longer needed. That was hard for me to accept for a long time, but if you have programmed professionally long enough you have almost definitely indirectly contributed to some job loss. (And new jobs as well! But… to the people who do lose their jobs, there is little comfort in that)
I think what is worth keeping in mind though is 1) wishing something away wont make it so, so it is best to do your best to avoid putting your head in the sand, and 2) while many many people will be completely uprooted (sometimes in miserable ways) that is not at all a statement about them. The journalists of before were and are still incredible people, the brick layers too. Us doing work that wasn’t automatable before did not make us better than them, or even more creative than them.
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