> Another issue with looking at code, is that it's very hard to manually change things anyway. I can't just change a variable from 10 to 20, because I don't know where it is used.
This should be a giant flashing red light. If you can't figure this out, either 1) you're too junior to be effective using AI, or 2) the AI is doing a truly awful job organizing the codebase. In either case, it's a sign to slow things down and understand what's happening before proceeding.
Is that that variable might be used in tests, UI, docs, agenr markdown files, other related projects too.
The design spec could say "always use 10px margin", then in code we have a const with value 10 used everywhere. If we update 10 manually in code to 20, then the design spec is now outdated.
> Private property and being able to run your firm on your own terms applies to everyone.
In theory, maybe. In reality, this is a privilege for a very small number of rich people.
> Anything that erodes the rights of companies erodes your rights.
How absurd. Food safety regulations don't erode my rights one bit, but they do erode the rights of companies to negligently poison me. I guess I'm losing the right to start a food company that poisons people, but I'm happy to forfeit that right in exchange for not being poisoned. We could extend this list of reasonable tradeoffs in which we all exchange the right to treat people poorly for the right not be treated poorly, and we all would benefit.
Except the people who want to sell poisoned food, those people will be worse off. I am okay with that.
I'm not arguing that the government's actions towards Anthropic are fair, but you're making the argument that no government should ever be allowed to designate any company as a supply chain risk, and that's ludicrous.
> In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
This is a very strong argument that no organization should be allowed to get that big.
I get the sentiment, but this is the reason we have airplanes, MRI machines, and computers that fit in our pockets. Advanced technology simply isn't possible in an economy of only ~100 person organizations. And I say this as someone with a deep sense of unease with modernity and all of the diseases of civilization. We somehow have managed to create systems that support literally billions of humans and allow many of them to have a quality of life undreamed of even a few hundred years ago. I dislike big orgs as much as they next guy but we need to understand why they exist if we want to criticize and reform them.
Big organizations don't enable greater technological progress, which is why companies do 98% of their innovation before they get huge, and get bad at innovating once they are.
Big organizations enable scaling and associated economies of scale, so it's possible for Apple to sell millions of iPhones cheaper than if they were a smaller company. I don't think that tradeoff is worth it for any individual consumer (pay a little less to be much more abused by the company), and I don't think it's worth it for society.
Most of the big corporations in America aren't providing things as useful as MRI machines, they're providing net negative garbage like social media and advertising. Big corporations like United Healthcare Group are inflating the cost of medical care rather than providing economies of scale and reduced cost for their clients.
The US desperately needs to bring back antitrust and start breaking these massive companies into much smaller pieces.
You can build everything in the world with organizations at that size cooperating, but a society that values profit extraction will never organize itself in this manner. The problem isn't org size, it's profit motive.
Ironically, those same systems that enabled high QoL are also the ones involved in killing us, whether that's carcinogens everywhere, climate change, resistant bacteria, or even just plain old nukes (or soon drone swarms).
I wouldn't be alive if not for advanced medicine, but if the structures that saved my life are the same ones that constitute our own Great Filter, my life was most definitely not worth the trade. There are too many other people I love to think that.
Yes, economists famously do, and they also lack intelligence and knowledge given that their theories keep being proven wrong by reality but they never update them.
Economists have effectively become a priestly class, dressing up the ruling ideology in "science-y" robes so as to communicate authority. All social sciences are at risk of doing so, but they fall right into this hole the instant that they don't perceive the world as it exists.
A trained economist either sells out to the Overlords or he gets a job as a barkeep. Or he ends up as some crank in a half-forgotten nonprofit somewhere. There's no middle ground.
Human intelligence is a remarkable adaptation, but "tendency towards delusion" might be the decidedly maladaptive trait that comes with it.
This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.
In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.
> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.
except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting
It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.
It's not "creative" in the sense of incorporating a drum track or photograph into a composition you're developing, it's "creative" in the sense of asking for a vague style and getting it, which is pretty much exactly the tool doing the entire activity. The author explains in detail that it's not their vision, its just a list of styles returned when asked for a list of styles, and they don't actually know what the Memphis Group even is...
Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.
You can do that exact thing with Ableton if you want. If you want to put in low effort you can do that. You can find beats labeled “1980’s pop” and use presets from other people. You can put in high effort using AI tools and fine tune every aspect of the result if you want. It’s just another tool. You are conflating effort with the tool.
The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.
Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"
And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.
> when it does the entire activity for you.
This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.
AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.
Not to mention the local cafe owner probably paid some money (not much, but some) to a random designer to get a menu, which is often 10x worst than the AI generated version.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years.
Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
> The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy
How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
Because all the important ones have been true since 2022 and will be true forever, because they have nothing to do with LLM capabilities and instead are focused on LLM nature.
Because bad behavior tends to scale with company size, not because smaller companies are more virtuous, but because they just have less power to do harm than bigger companies.
Imagine that there were only two companies, and they each had 50% market share in every market that exists. Would you expect either to be well behaved?
This should be a giant flashing red light. If you can't figure this out, either 1) you're too junior to be effective using AI, or 2) the AI is doing a truly awful job organizing the codebase. In either case, it's a sign to slow things down and understand what's happening before proceeding.
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