Having spent the last month staring into the abyss and Eldrich-level dread that is a pure, materialistic, reductionist universe, I wouldn’t wish that belief on anyone. There’s a deep, grasping of “there’s got to be more”, “this can’t all be chance”, “evolutionary hackery and garbage seems a poor explanation for love, compassion, empathy, and many other self-sacrificial practices we have”.
There’s only a few reasons that are slowly pulling me from that hell; but I cannot imagine that “most” people live here, even “deep down”.
I have never understood that, what exactly is hellish about that situation. You just are, why does there need to be anything else, make up your own story if it’s that important to you. There obviously isn’t anything else unless you believe in a god or some other story. All those basic human behaviors can be explained by evolution easily. This is how I’ve always thought of the world even as a kid I must not be neurotypical or something.
Namely, these and monopolies are the end-stage of unregulated Capitalism. The big guy becomes evil and makes it so no small guy can ever enter the stage again.
It’s a major part of why we have anti-trust law, because the country knew where it would all go.
> The big guy becomes evil and makes it so no small guy can ever enter the stage again.
If you look at the top 10 companies by market cap every decade, you'll see the churn in them. The lineup in 1910:
• United States Steel Corporation
• Standard Oil Company
• American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T)
• Union Pacific Railroad / Pennsylvania Railroad
• International Mercantile Marine Co.
• American Tobacco Company
• U.S. Rubber Co.
• Central Leather Company
• Amalgamated Copper Mining Company
And today:
1. Nvidia – ~$4.57 trillion
2. Apple Inc. (AAPL) – ~$4.04 trillion
3. Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL / GOOG) – ~$3.79 trillion
4. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) – ~$3.63 trillion
5. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) – ~$2.70 trillion
6. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC / 2330.TW) – ~$2.14 trillion
7. Meta Platforms Inc. (META) – ~$1.81 trillion
8. Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) – ~$1.57 trillion
9. Tesla Inc. (TSLA) – ~$1.40 trillion
10. Eli Lilly and Co. (LLY) – ~$1.18 trillion
Take woodworking. For some people, the act and meditative work of building it piece by piece is the part that they strive for. For others, it’s the planning phase and the “how will all these pieces go together” phase. For even others, it’s the staining phase. Some people like every part, others like just one part and work through all that extra just to get the chance to do that next part. For some, while they may not enjoy the preface to the work they want, they appreciate it because they feel that blitzing past it cheapens the stage they love.
Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
> Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
That's a great point. I don't have experience with woodworking, but when I see a piece of good antique furniture with precise dove-tail joints that someone made hundreds of years ago, that brings me joy.
As a writer, and as a reader, I really value human-crafted insights, like many of the comments I see every day on HN. As many people have stated elsewhere, writing forces you to organize your thoughts.
But I also recognize that there is a place for machine-generated content, whether it's the weather report on my phone or the factory-produced chair I'm sitting on now.
I don't think the story of artificial intelligence is "humans will stop creating." AIs are powerful tools, but they shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive with people who like to create things. Some will create in old ways. Some will create in new ways. Others will move onto new ways of creating.
That factory produced chair is way more likely to end up as landfill than a hand-made one. The AI-generated slopware generates the landfill (ie pollution and the jobkilling) before it's delivered to you.
You can completely clone board games and steal from their original makers OR you can make something new that didn’t exist before because there’s tools to facilitate your work that you didn’t have until now
Will that be allowed in any multi-person-near-each-other track day? Exhaust that pushes must be very dangerous to be behind if you’re drafting and waiting for the next passing lane.
I recall attending a top fuel drag racing event. One was pop-popping up to the start line. Then the tree turned green, and the driver hit it.
Unfortunately, he had the silly thing in reverse. It launched backwards maybe a hundred feet. The drivers reflexes to shut off the engine were outstanding. If it had gone much further, it would have climbed up one of the full grandstands.
I never stand behind a drag car with the engine running, or in front, or in the plane of rotation of the engine. (I've seen a few engine blowups, and parts often go out sideways.)
Fine but I'm also not complaining if a director comes out and says "I'm making this movie without CGI" and i may in fact appreciate the result a bit more for knowing it. It's impressive when someone can do all their effects and lighting in-camera.
I've never seen AI writing be totally undetectable or on its own particularly good, but if it someday gets good enough that AI writing is indistinguishable, I'd still appreciate when someone goes out of their way not to use it.
Expectation of usage. An iPad designer assumes it will be taken all around, leave the house, put in a book bag, etc.
While an old iPad being used as an entertainment management surface won’t, that’s not the prime use case intended for iPad.
Apple decided to focus on products whose primary purpose is a stationary device, like a speaker or a TV-attached device. Sure, you can move them place to place, but most won’t.
A big difference between the safety of "next > next > next > finish" and "curl | bash" is one of them is dynamically loaded from an external source that could change between runs, and the other can be fully downloaded and vetted in a single check, and then once it's safe, it's probably safe 10 years from now.
Which is why we have sha1, md5 and sha256 hashes on display, so you can validate with a very high level of certainty, especially for sha256 at least for now, that the file is the same one.
We have existing paradigms for this.
Additionally, installers are signed with certificates on Windows.
All of these are strictly more trustworthy than curl | bashing.
The nice thing about hashes is you can just put them into Google or wherever and see if they’ve been independently validated and how many times. Repositories like Chocolatey and even just Virus Total or message boards often have a history of “someone has seen it as this hash in the past”.
Perfect? No; but “time with this hash” and “what others have seen and for how long” does increase trust, at least for me
Having spent the last month staring into the abyss and Eldrich-level dread that is a pure, materialistic, reductionist universe, I wouldn’t wish that belief on anyone. There’s a deep, grasping of “there’s got to be more”, “this can’t all be chance”, “evolutionary hackery and garbage seems a poor explanation for love, compassion, empathy, and many other self-sacrificial practices we have”.
There’s only a few reasons that are slowly pulling me from that hell; but I cannot imagine that “most” people live here, even “deep down”.
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