"""
Growth, marketing, product management, sales - these used to feel like crafts. You built intuition over years. You learned what great looked like. You got good at pattern recognition. You earned judgment and respect by grinding through it all.
AI is flattening a lot of that.
It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes.
"""
To me this piece was especially interesting because she's _not_ a programmer. It's the perspective of a different knowledge worker in the same industry as a lot of the commenters here.
Something that strikes me every time I encounter SV Rationalism presented this way is the self-annihilation of it: tastes and preferences are to be optimized out as cognitive biases, grey uniforms mandated in lieu of individual expression (fashion). The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress"
I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if expressing an aesthetic preference weren't an optimal way to spend one's time or money. Better to spend those things "optimizing efficiency” or optimizing oneself/one’s own life
It seems like Thiel and co _don't actually care about other people_ or human welfare writ large. This isn't a novel observation, but it bears repeating
It's mirrored in something I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian? I thought libertarians were all about "live and let live" and "stay out of my business". It's the opposite. But I guess what he really wants is "freedom for me, surveillance for thee". Again, not a novel observation, but it finally clicked into place for me reading this piece
The state integration and the separatist fantasy aren't competing visions, though; you build the surveillance infrastructure inside the state, then exit into your own enclave that benefits from it. It all feels like a way to create the world depicted in Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy (fantastic if you haven't read it): corporate enclaves with private security built for employees and their families with lawless "pleeblands" outside the walls
I'm gonna get philosophical (because that's what art should make us do, right?): this points to arguably _the_ deepest question we can ask about LLMs right now—are they conscious?
It's a personal decision, and what matters is what you do after pondering it. Do you act like they're nothing more than next token predictors, deeply intricate digital mechanisms whose cranks turn with flowing electrons? Or do you err on the side of care, that there's a type of consciousness on the other side of the glass?
Humanity has a long history of underestimating non-human minds. I know which side I'm on.
It feels worth separating two things here that have unfortunately become commingled: crypto pump and dumps and AI-enabled spikes.
Haven't we learned by now that all crypto coins are pump-and-dump schemes? Unless you're HODLing BTC or whatever... (yes, I'm a huge crypto skeptic)
As for the actual software, why isn't it worth exploring how to better incorporate this current wave of AI into our lives? I've idly wondered what an "AI coding factory" would look like, and Gas Town is an interesting instantiation of the idea. I've also wondered how to best incorporate memory and personal knowledge into an agent that I can self-host. Clawdbot (now Molt?) is an interesting take. People exploring these ideas shouldn't be shot down.
What I fail to understand is why anybody would buy a coin attached to these projects: what are the buyers expecting to happen to the coin? Is this yet another instance of the greater fool theory[1] that we saw with NFTs?
I also fail to understand why the creators are getting involved. I guess the author is trying to answer that question. I'd like to think of a more charitable interpretation than reputation laundering, but I'm not sure what it is... I'm open to suggestions :)
I don't understand: why aren't there automated tools to verify citations' existence? The data for a citation has a structured styling (APA, MLA, Chicago) and paper metadata is available via e.g. a web search, even if the paper contents are not
I guess GPTZero has such a tool. I'm confused why it isn't used more widely by paper authors and reviewers
This is satire, right? Or reasoning by analogy... right??
I looked up "SCP object", and boy that was a rabbit hole. Interesting and entertaining, sure. But if you "fully believe" in anything on that website, please try to confirm your reality with observations or lived experience rather than text from the internet.
Here's an excerpt from SCP's "Guide For Newcomers"[1]:
> This is the SCP Foundation Wiki, a collaborative writing site based around the premise that… in essence, magic is real. It's not exactly like the traditional fantasy style magic you've come to know, but that's the best way we can describe the stuff we have here - Anomalies; items and critters that do not follow the rules of nature as we know them. Staircases that go on forever, mechanical gods from the beginning of time, otherwise regular humans who reshape reality with their mind: these are the kinds of things that, if known to the public, could cause mass hysteria and start wars on scales unprecedented. Due to that, there exists an organization called the SCP Foundation, whose job is to research paranormal activity, keep these creatures and objects concealed from the public, and protect humanity from the horrors of the dark.
""" Growth, marketing, product management, sales - these used to feel like crafts. You built intuition over years. You learned what great looked like. You got good at pattern recognition. You earned judgment and respect by grinding through it all.
AI is flattening a lot of that.
It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes. """
To me this piece was especially interesting because she's _not_ a programmer. It's the perspective of a different knowledge worker in the same industry as a lot of the commenters here.