That's so interesting! I find that the white text on a black background produces a weird, edgy blur around the edges that feels like anti-aliasing from gaming... Have you been diagnosed?
Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.
It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.
> Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs.
I like this. I was trying to think of some way to allow layoffs for struggling companies but not reward layoffs for companies that are making a profit, who just want to make more. My idea was more around the executive team being unable to take a salary or having to fire the CEO or something, nothing which as I worked through in my head seemed workable.
It's going to be great, between this and the Adobe totally-not-using-any-decompiled-code-wink clones: people are going to get sued into the ground and LLM code is going to become radioactive to corporate lawyers. Especially when they find out that they also routinely spit out GPL code verbatim.
I'm fairly pessimistic about LLMs, but I do find they're a good research tool. If I can accelerate finding answers amid the slurry of Confluence, Slack, assorted other intranet places and the web, I can get back to thinking about the design and programming.
I have a user CLAUDE.md that tells it not to presume to modify any files, and a bunch of internal MCPs for our logging and monitoring tools, documents, git repositories and such, and I've been dabbling with writing skill files so it can access some other internal things.
So I can basically say "this thing isn't working because x, and it's probably related to y not having z" and it'll go off and find info buried in the corporate abyss.
Then other people yeet wildly awful LLM generated PRs over the fence and I lose my sanity from basically having fight a constant battle against a slow rot of software quality that will bite us later.
* Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
* Less junior hiring and suppressed wages
* Culture of uncertainty and fear
* Computers are really expensive now
* Some people now live with diesel generators and gas turbines making their neighborhood hazardous to their health
Totally agree. IMO it's mostly behind the scenes stuff though.
I think some of the most impressive stuff to show someone from 2016 might be LLMs doing a summary of complex topics, followed by self-driving (actually) cars and intricate robots... but other than that there is no "future magic" touching the lives of every day people going on.
Actually I'm pretty sure if you showed someone the latest and greatest from these big AI companies, these AI companions that can book flights, people would go "Oh, so its like a smarter Siri" and proceed to not care at all lol.
> Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
Gosh, this has been my entire experience with AI, and I’ve never seen it this well articulated. Thank you!
Less junior hiring is a reflection of a) the maturity of the software business b) current expectations of the future
I have no doubt startups in particular are able to get away with using LLMs to produce sloppy code and ship. But this trend was on-going and sped up due to the infiltration of LLMs and marketing.
You do realise markets are highly imperfect in reality? That nonsense in econ books is fantasy.
And the LLMs exist to further those problems. People can't afford houses? Well, now they won't be able to own computers either. That's a feature, not a side effect. Once the K-shaped economy progresses enough, you won't even be allowed to use the LLMs. They'll exist only to be a tool for the new feudal class who owns you.
Luckily, the AI bubble will destroy a decent chunk of their wealth.
The Gartner Hype Cycle [0] is real, and ubiquitous. We are teetering somewhere near the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations, about to plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment. A lot of very rich people are about to lose a lot of money, and we can only hope that they don't get bailed out (again).
Then, once the bubble and hype is over, the long, slow work of actually doing useful things with this new tech starts. That's when we'll see it affect everything else.
yeah, predicting timing on the peak is tricky. Same for all the other tech cycle peaks. If you could reliably predict them then you could reliably make a fortune.
I, personally, think that choosing to move away from hyped tech is probably a mistake. The trick (imho) is to accept that it is hyped and will collapse, and use it while it makes sense to use it. Just don't bet everything on it. Have a backup ready.
> We are teetering somewhere near the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations
I've been hearing this for a year and a half now. That word, "ubiquitous", is getting real mighty challenged. I have tried to insulate myself as best as I could and it just never happens and every other day I wonder if my foil hat needs adjusting. Does yours?
> Luckily, the AI bubble will destroy a decent chunk of their wealth.
Even if all this is true (personally I doubt it), it assumes the bubble won’t burst before they’ve shifted the money from all our 401ks, IRAs and index funds into their own pockets.
You don't need a back room filled with cigar smoke where supervillains coordinate their plans while twirling their mustaches when good ol' class interest does the same job.
The problem isn't that it fails to unwind, the problem is what the unwind looks like. Last time it meant global upheaval and world wide capital incineration -- mostly metaphorical in the case of the US but very literal in the case of Europe and Asia. The poor suffer more in real terms but capital suffers more in nominal terms and that unwinds inequality and the burden of furnishing runaway capital with the runaway returns it demands in excess of economic growth.
I'm sure the same "strategy" will work again, but this time around everyone has nukes and drone swarms and AI-equipped bio labs so shit's gonna be lit.
Ok, if you like big intervals, 50 years, all nonwasting assets: returns were 10% in an economy growing 2%. The excess is so excessive that diddling the knobs gets you nowhere.
Capital isn't immune to supply and demand, but we do not live in the just and good universe where this leads to a Kuznets Curve. The Kuznets Curve fails because capital is in control of the economy and the politics and once it tastes high returns it fights like hell to keep them. Fights and wins. Every wise lever to pump r gets pulled, and then the unwise levers get pulled, and then the evil ones get pulled, and then the evil and stupid ones get pulled. Which brings us back to my claim, the one that answered yours earlier but you subsequently ignored:
> The problem isn't that r>g fails to unwind, the problem is what the unwind looks like.
Last time it looked like WWI/WWII. What do you think it will look like next time?
Once capabilities catch up with the demand (~which is in few years - it just takes time to build!) average person will have much better access to higher quality and cheaper hardware. It's literally how it has always worked, I don't understand why would it be different this time. There's zero substance in your comment, just repeating tired tropes from twitter.
A market requires scarcity, because scarcity is what neccesitates trade.
You can't invoke market mechanisms to defend a post-scarcity scenario.
Why would the ai owners make things cheaper or even available at all once their abundance machines give them everything they want?
What would they get out of if it? What could ordinary people trade for it that their abundance machine can't give them already and that would be worth giving up their monopoly on productive force?
You can't argue "this will change everything" and "this is how it's always worked" simultaneously, and yet AI accelerationists bring out both to defend their ideology.
> You can't argue "this will change everything" and "this is how it's always worked" simultaneously, and yet AI accelerationists bring out both to defend their ideology.
Luckily I did not, you are arguing against points I did not make at all.
Either way though, what's more interesting than what you specifically said is that AI boosters have no answer to this structural argument about the reality of post-scarcity. Tellingly, you didn't address that part of my comment at all, either.
> Either way though, what's more interesting than what you specifically said is that AI boosters have no answer to this structural argument about the reality of post-scarcity. Tellingly, you didn't address that part of my comment at all, either.
You've fished a comment from completely different discussion, where a point was that if AI were to displace workers, it would be different than previous waves of automation (and there meeting these capabilities was assumed, not put forward by me). But in this thread it's more down to earth discussion about manufacturing capabilities if there is no ASI. But sure, I'll bite - yes, capitalism won't work in post-scarcity society. But we are not leaving in post-scarcity society and in our current situation capitalism is amazing system. If capitalism would get us to post-scarcity society then well, you'd have to admin that capitalism is amazingly effective. Your assumption about AI-rulers (I presume altman and amodei, not governments) having abundance machines and not sharing the abundance with anyone else is really without any merit. For this scenario to work we would need to meet few conditions that are so unlikely that it's not really worth entertaining them seriousl: 1) powerless government 2) actual ASI that's abundance machine 3) ASI that's perfectly aligned towards serving altman and amodei and none else 4) altman and amodei deciding that everyone should be poor.
And also as someone who I guess you'd call AI booster (so a person that's not deluded about AI capabilities and sees how powerful they are and how current concerns with AI such as water use are overblown) I can tell you how I address this - you can't stop progress. It never worked and never will. I think world would be better if we would've stopped developing AI. But it's impossible so you might just embrace it.
> If capitalism would get us to post-scarcity society then well, you'd have to admin that capitalism is amazingly effective
I will freely admit that. But that's not the critique. Effective at what? Cancer is effective. Effectiveness for its own sake is not an inherent good. Capitalism is amazingly effective at centralizing power in a few oligarchs.
> Your assumption about AI-rulers (I presume altman and amodei, not governments) having abundance machines and not sharing the abundance with anyone else is really without any merit.
It's not an assumption. It is a structural argument. You have not addressed any of my points - why would they share?
> 1) powerless government
The government doesn't need to be powerless. It just needs to be aligned with the oligarchy. I would posit that is already the case - see basically anything the regime does.
> 2) actual ASI that's abundance machine
Yeah I agree with you there, I'm not sure that one's gonna happen, but what if it does? Under current ownership structures, it would be a bad thing.
> 3) ASI that's perfectly aligned towards serving altman and amodei and none else
Maybe Musk. Maybe Zuckerberg. Probably also Trump, as per 1).
> 4) altman and amodei deciding that everyone should be poor.
Their fellow oligarch Musk literally cut USAID which was providing for the poorest, most vulnerable people on Earth, while he was the richest man on Earth. You do not become a billionaire by caring about the poor.
> you can't stop progress. It never worked and never will
Of course you can. Some examples: Civilian Supersonic Flight, Genetics under Lysenko, Firearms in the Tokugawa shogunate.
Companies have been trying to figure out how to get people to rent pcs for a while. Unfortunately the AI boom has shown them how, buy out all the capacity of the ram manufacturers, pay them enough consistently and the manufacturers have no reason to expand their capacity. No cheap ram means companies and then home users will have no choice but to come to you and rent their pc.
That is not very many cases considering there are millions of stalkers in the US alone. That is like saying police shouldn't have cars since they sometimes kill people in car accidents.
Police should have a higher expectation of safety with motor vehicles because if they kill someone, they're not getting punished like you or me.
It's the same way with guns. If a random dude brandishes a gun, that's bad. If a police officer accidentally shoots someone, probably nobody goes to jail. So, because of that, we should encourage the police to be more careful. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
The reason people are so concerned about police using Flock for nefarious uses is because, if anyone can get away with it, it's the police. That's what makes it scary.
To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
That mitigates one specific problem with Flock, and not entirely. Firstly, as long as any jackass can fill out a form and set a "hit," they can still target and stalk people.
And ALPR is only one method that Flock uses. Their pan-tilt-zoom offerings are specifically meant to target pedestrians. They have facial recognition (and I've heard gait as well) and sniff for Bluetooth and other things to try to fingerprint devices.
It needs to be illegal to collect video for later facial recognition analysis as well.
The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.
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