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almostdeadguy

368 karmajoined 8 ปีที่แล้ว
carls junior developer

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almostdeadguy
·15 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
"Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights.

Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.
almostdeadguy
·25 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Guess a lot of these guys heard about Little Saint James from the news.
almostdeadguy
·26 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
To this point, I've never understood the supposed "alignment" between the EA/AI Safety crowd and Anthropic's mission that the author comments on. Be the stewards of the Machine God, but responsibly? I think the Manhattan project, which AI development is commonly analogized to, had a lot more intrinsic properties to gate against uncontrolled proliferation (which still happened to some extent). Also this is a company that is expected to go public this year, at which point there will be a slew of new voices pushing the company to increase its value, mission be damned.

People like Yud at least have a clear consistency in their advocacy that we shouldn't be developing this at all. Anyone who thinks they can reconcile Anthropic's work with the AI safety mission is in total fantasyland, if it's not just a public persona they've adopted strategically.
almostdeadguy
·29 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I don't think it's just a problem for kids! I think this is problem for many software engineers as well! Adults of all professions really.
almostdeadguy
·29 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
It's like saying you can learn so much about math from using SymPy to solve equations. Yes, you probably can. If you pay close attention to what is happening and can integrate the techniques being used into your knowledge.

But your learnings here are what, a handful of hacks? For most people it's like being shown the chain rule (which frankly, is more general than any of these learnings) without knowing what a derivative is. It's knowledge that comes context free. And even when it can be understood, I'm not sure I believe it gets integrated especially well when you did none of the work to understand it. If you are extremely diligent and self-aware about what your limitations are, and careful to be sure you have an understanding of this knowledge, sure I guess you can learn a lot.

And ultimately what do you think is more likely? People using the experience of using these tools to progress their knowledge or for them to rely on the answers uncritically? I think people with a rosy view about this are severely undercounting the problems associated with the trust relationship between a person and an LLM and what that means.
almostdeadguy
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
If you can vibe code it, you can vibe deploy it, and deal with the consequences.
almostdeadguy
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
Society would certainly be better without people who judge others by their market value.
almostdeadguy
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
I think its fascinating how many people in tech think there's a clearly defined and agreed upon "right way" of using this technology that everyone knows and abides by. Paul Graham, for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457

It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Linguists centuries from now are going to wonder why everyone suddenly started writing like Paul Graham.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Running your code once or even dozens of times is not proof of correctness, see decades of software engineering practices around testing.

I'm sorry, but all you guys pretending like you don't have to review code now are going to get seriously burned by this. I also have to ask: do you think you provide any value to your company?
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
People keep saying this like it’s some meaningful point, but the reality is many people in different projects have a shared need for that code to work correctly, and there is a social proof involved in used open source libraries. That is why people look at downloads and dependent projects as heuristics of stability and correctness. That is not the case with (and cannot be obtained with) code authored by generative AI.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.

I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I think the counter-intuitive examples of people who attend that you and others in the replies are pointing out are a demonstration of how many contradictions exist in these principals.

I am the type of person who thinks many, many things about the way the world currently exists need to change, but I am incredibly skeptical of the purported mission of the Burning Man Project to "extend the culture" of these principles to the wider world.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
These people in fact are some of the principal figures dictating the dominant culture and status quo.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Happy for everyone trying to invent SEO hacking for resumes.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
That the industrial revolutions use of steel to augment or replace labor was similar in every way to using LLMs to do the same? Seems on point to me.
almostdeadguy
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.
almostdeadguy
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
To me that’s a hallmark of a game that isn’t very interesting! If you can discover a dominant strategy in a handful of plays, the game probably isn’t worth your time IMO.
almostdeadguy
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I think there has been a shift in what kinds of games get published that privileges a slim set of experiences that are possible in board games and risks narrowing the range of what people think a board game is capable of. I agree there’s a vast range of different player types and psychological rewards people get out of playing games, but I personally find myself increasingly uninterested in new game designs, because the designs I like are harder to sell to impulsive buyers, players who don’t want to play a game repeatedly, or players who will have difficulty playing games again if anyone has a bad time (which I totally get! But it means designs that might prompt negative emotions are not sought by many publishers). I wouldn’t even say “heavy” games are the problem (I disagree with OP about high time commitment being a problem, there’s many games like that that deliver commensurate value to me).
almostdeadguy
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
If you are not yet a player of modern hobby board games and are interested to try some I recommend this method for picking some to try out:

https://boardgamegeek.com/search/boardgame?sort=rank&advsear...

These are the top ranked games on BGG from 1990 - 2007. Pick a few of these, try to pick games that are highly differentiated from each other by category and mechanisms on their BGG pages (also I recommend you pick ones with under ~2hrs expected play time to start). Read the rules for one, go to your local board game cafe with some friends and play it. Try to recruit friends willing to play a game more than once, even if they initially dislike it (hard ask, I know, but sometimes games only reveal themselves after repeated plays). If you are enjoying this, repeat this with a couple picks and try to determine what are the features of these games that you enjoy (may be shared mechanisms, but eventually I think you will come to a more philosophical understanding of what you enjoy about board games, if you enjoy them!). You may find out early in this, that you don't really enjoy games except for the social experience. That's extremely common.

I do not recommend looking at kickstarters or the current top ranked games on BGG, or looking at recent youtube reviews.