The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
The entirety of "agents" and tool calls is a process of combining LLMs to get better results. Is it the same LLM in many cases? Yes. But it doesn't have to be.
It's the natural move that happened after people realized you couldn't throw away half a century of AI research.
Most of these focus on costs. But it is simply the case that the one-shot output did not scale for harder problems on workflows.
John Adams wrote that as a reason why the United States is not a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. It's a consistent theme throughout the Federalist Papers.
Individual States and localities have elements of democracy, but the US—built upon knowledge of Rome—is not.
The United States of America is the second iteration of American government, after the one that failed in 1787. The arguments leading up to the 1789 Constitution are quite explicit around why democracies don't work. America is a nation of nations, which is why "these United States" as a plural term was used frequently until after the Civil War, when having it be a singular concept once-and-for-all was of paramount importance.
That said, this is ban is clearly a restriction on freedom of expression, and highly un-American.
Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to distance themselves from the term. Most democratic nations today are presidential or parliamentary republics, just like you, or something that can be approximated to one of them. I'm doubtful that the US founders didn't recognize they were founding a democratic nation, just a specific subcategory - but ultimately still a state that should hopefully answer to the people.
Neither does federalism relate to the form of government - you could have a federal or distributed direct democracy if you wanted to. They're just different categories of things, the way you choose how to best represent the will of a group of people is a different question from how you subdivide these groups into self-governing blocks.
But Adams was specifically arguing not against democracy in the broad term, but specifically, unconstrained direct democracy, so this is not relevant to this discussion.
Is it interesting that all these "democracies" around the world have persistent speech bans? When someone says something they don't like?
I seem to have a recollection of flipping through HN for a decade or so and people talking about all the meanie-pants who want people to be able to speak freely, even if it hurts people's feelings and might not be endorsed by the elected government.
> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people
No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America.
Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running continuous constitutional government in history (America)?
I presume you're referring to the various systems of democracy introduced in different ancient Greek city-states, as opposed to the Roman Republic. Of course, they're different. But it doesn't run counter to what I said - being descendant from the ideas of democracy doesn't promise you that any aspect of the government will be in any way similar, only that the power will ultimately originate from the people in some way. You don't even have to go ancient for this - there are dozens of different takes on democracy in the modern world.
To emphasize - I'm not arguing against the distinctions or the new ideas that were made during the founding of the US, or that some of these ideas weren't novel. I'm arguing against the school of thought that seemingly arose long after that happened, which tried to categorize the US into a bespoke category of government that included it and excluded other nations, modern and historical - despite them all definitionally being ruled by the people and often even having similar ways of organizing their governments. Let's review the terms.
An autocracy is a state where power descends from a single person, the autocrat. An absolute monarchy is a subset of autocracy, where that person is a monarch, usually with religion tying into their perceived legitimacy. An aristocracy is a state where power descends from an upper elite class. In anarchy, the power descends from no one in particular. Democracy is the class that is opposed to these other forms, it's a system of rule by many where power descends from lots of people. It includes many flavors and forms that result in different types of government - direct, indirect/representative (you are here), as well as many sub-variants that define the exact way of how power moves from the ruled to the rulers or other characteristics.
Therefore, republics are a strict subset of the broad term of democracy. There are lots of republics in the modern world, all of which are democratic states, just as there are constitutional democracies. If you want to distance the US from these other states, you would need to prove why it was not envisioned as a power-from-the-people state and what exactly would place it in a different category that no one else occupies. The US may have been the first, but it's not that unique in the modern landscape of governments.
Great point about what Adams is actually arguing! Of course, I know the country was founded as/is a Constitutional Republic, but it's always interesting to see how much our modern (American) understanding of democracy differs from how the founders understood it – and also how they shaped the fact that most of us now equate Constitutional Republic with the best form of democracy.
If us means humans living in democracies, I would say that parliamentary democracy has more supporters and constitutional republics.
And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
> And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
That's a very dim view of your fellow Americans. I don't have such a dim view myself; there are certainly people who don't care and didn't pay attention in their high school civics classes, but I've found that most people do care and do pay attention. I wonder if your opinion is colored by recent events, and whether you'd have thought the same in 2008?
One day, AI will be able to provide midwit analyses like this.
Until that day, we can just say what we all know: 1) AI will absolutely decimate white-collar office jobs in the future, 2) composition of the workplace will change (more women will elect not to participate), and 3) we're in a capital boom where both successful and incompetent spending on AI occurred.
I suspect the reason people are hesitant to admit the obviousness of the future reality of white collar job loss (or replacement at the very least) is ego.
And I suspect that will be the last thing to finally implode, with interesting and positive social consequences.
"Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year."
Setting aside OP's right wing nonsense, I (as a lefty woman) can see it but from another perspective: as white collar work becomes harder to get, that will drive wages down and make work conditions worse. (supply and demand). So if/when they have children, the odds of them making enough to cover daycare will go down.
Additionally, as working becomes worse and worse, anyone who has an exit path will take it. We'll see an uptick in the lumpenproletariat in the Marxist sense of the term (I'm not a Marxist, but the term is useful) as well. Straight and bisexual women have more of an ability to opt out of capitalism directly than straight and bisexual men do in broad generalities.
Additionally, a lot of the resistance to a more traditional family setup on the women's part is because it places us in a precarious situation where, if the person you depend on financially is abusive, you're screwed. If work gets to a point where most employment involves abusive conditions, it's a better deal to chain yourself to a potentially abusive husband than a potentially abusive employer. The legal system is greatly biased towards an employer and the odds of help or redress are low. If you have to pick an abusive situation, pick the one where it's concentrated in one person and you can poison him if you need out. Your husband can have a 'heart attack'. Much harder to pull that off against a megacorp.
In short: the opt out/traditional path is likely to become a better deal, and selfishness will always win.
> It is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in.
It is, in fact, possible.
Do you not remember 2022-2023 when the air was singing with the sounds of young engineers in San Francisco elated they were creating an AI god?
And now a couple years later we're supposed to pretend they're competent?
Sorry. I've been in the tech industry a long time. There's a lot of incompetence. The margins provided by software allow a level of endemic incompetence that would simply not be possible in other industries.
Agreed. Specs are more important than ever. Constraints: types, contracts, protocols, schemas, APIs and such are what ground the boundaries of systems.
Without them, code drift is a guarantee.
Does anyone trust that a set of human sentences typed into a box is more reliable and precise than objectively exact descriptions of data?
This is not to diminish the utility of these code factories. But surely, if anything provides resistance to drift, it's codebase consistency, standards, and things which must objectively be true for the software to function.
I suspect bailouts will be off the table. Simply because the people who support OpenAI and the tech industry are on the same side of the political aisle as the people protesting data centers.
"Big Tech" as a pejorative started on the Right. That never changed.
Remember the hubbub about companies having "free speech" while they deplatformed and censored critics? That never sat well with a certain group of people. And they're the kind of people with long memories, that might have guests entertained as a visible sign of submission, and not as friends.
The more interesting revelation will be if certain persons can psychologically come to admit the people they are against are politically aligned with them, and their opponents are more intelligent than they are willing to let on.
"But what about criminals?! What about terrorists?! Won't someone please think of the children?!!!"
Every argument against open source AI is moot. Outside of totalitarianism, you cannot control people building algorithms with math and software.
And even that won't work in the long run. People are not going to stop their AI printing presses because the Church of Venture Capital needs regulatory scarcity to command valuations.
Would it be the ones that tried to backdoor SSL and encryption in the 90s?
Would it be the ones who argued for censoring speech on social platforms?
Do those individuals in both cases share the same political ideology as the Bay Area?
I'll provide a counter thought experiment. What if, a certain politician whose campaign was derailed by people who censored him and kicked him off every tech platform simultaneously... thought it would be very funny to "commoditize his complement"?
The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.