> The best minds of my generation
I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.
On that specific quote -
I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."
Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.
The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?
0. I want third-party advertising eliminated entirely and self-sdvertising advertising on one's own property more regulated than it currently is.
Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.
I think that'd be far less prolific than third party advertising currently is. And it'd be worth it to get rid of the big pile of perverse incentives, manipulation, and surveillance that is the current ad industry.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you.
I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect pharmaceutical is physically addictive. It is isomorphic to narcotics trafficking.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect medical system keeps you sick.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect food product induces constant cravings.
There’s arguments to be made that all of these things are true, but what we’re talking about is not essential to the activities themselves but the profit motive that underlies them. Profit motive in and of itself is not sufficient to cause this kind of behavior; it requires a disregard for the consequences that your actions will have upon others. A lot of marketers fall into this category, but I’m not convinced that marketing in and of itself can be reduced to this spherical-cow in a vacuum.
This is a good point. You could equally well argue that the spherical cow “ideal” 100% marketing shows you exactly the right product right as you need it. And then shuts the hell up!
Yea but "we waste the greatest minds of our generation on global economic information symmetry" just doesn't scratch the same itch
Ideal for whom?
Right.
Except when a company buys an ad it's to sell Their product , not just A product.
Sure. But there are different ways of selling. I've been lucky to avoid sales, but…
I think I could tolerate selling a product I truly believed was useful, and would improve the situation of those buying it, and where I felt free to recommend alternatives in situations where my product was a bad fit.
I couldn't tolerate selling a product where I had to trick people into buying it, knowing that there was a better alternative and a good chance they would regret the choice.
Running an ad to entice or trick people into buying your product in a massive avalanche of sales that ultimately leaves a bad taste is a strategy. Running an ad to accurately target people who would genuinely benefit from your product, and attempting to build credibility and trust over years is also a strategy. Of course, it's always somewhere between the two, but it's not clear which end the 100% spherical cow lives on :-)
100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.
That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.
I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
In the past few decades, hedge funds have had a significantly negative impact upon the following industries:
- Manufacturing - Retail - Local Journalism/Media - Private Prisons & Detention - For-Profit Education - Healthcare Services - Veterinary/Pet grooming Clinics - Mortuary/Funeral Homes - Pharmaceuticals - Housing/Real Estate, - Toll Roads - Hospitality - Restaurants - Addiction Treatment Centers - Daycares - Hospice
What's next?
Doh, I keep forgetting that this site doesn't do markdown.
I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-
But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.
In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.
I'm actually convinced that "marketing", as such, can be completely orthogonal to profit altogether. Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner, but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
> Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner
Yeah, that was what I was getting at. I believe it in theory, but in practice I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
> but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
That’s an excellent counter-point. I’ve had the same experience.
I think the motivation is important. Many FOSS projects are sharing something the author considers useful to the world, as a way of making it better in a way that they know how. Its a lovely gift and I'm happy to know about it.
Others are there to promote lock in to some cloud service, or increase the authors rep as a 10x hacker and those are skeevy because the author is skeevy and did not have joy in their hearts.
All corporate ads ate the second kind.
> I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
Unfortunately, it's a useful thing that people have used to prey on our inquisitive simian brains.
Personally, I'm in favor of doing things like banning billboards &c, but it's hard to draw a line on banning advertising in general.
I think I'd be willing to extend it to all forms paid advertising that you are forced to see in the course of doing something else.
Marketing is so rarely for a "novel" thing. The biggest spender is CocaCola, how much do we still need to know about them?
Did you know the invented modern santa branding? Prior to that he was more a vagabond/homeless type and much much less jolly.
Snopes has a classic extensive article on that
I wasn't trying to say the contents of the ads aren't novel- just that what they're selling very often isn't.
Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'
I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.
Rarely by dollar amount or by volume? Because I assume, by volume, it must be mostly novel things.
Volume of ads I see, or companies buying ads?
Volume of ads I see is proportional to dollar amount imo. Outside of movie trailers I don't think I've ever seen an ad and been happy to know about whatever it was.
Without ads there's no craving to be filled. Without food I still die of hunger. Without pharmaceuticals I still die of sickness.
The difference is all those other things you listed - food, drugs, etc provide value. An ad provides none.
I’m in a group chat for a language I am studying. It gets targeted for event flyers due to the group’s subject. These sorts of flyers are allowed where other advertising is not because they add value to the group, even though most of them are for-profit.
Ads provide information. An event you might be interested in is happening. A food you might like is available. A thing that will totally improve your life can be yours. etc
The information in most ads is things like: "Skinny beautiful people are worthy of love and use this brand of makeup". Or "good parents who love their children go to Disney World". Or "it's a rugged and cool type of person that buys a Jeep".
The type of ads that do what you're taking about are sought out. People willingly watch Nintendo Directs.
If that is all they were they wouldn't be a problem but this is obviously an over simplification.
> but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..
The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
> The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
Or, it's an invitation to plug us into the Entertainment-Marketting-Hyperstimulus-Feed that is eminently personalized and replace all our human culture with persuasive slop, until we cease to be of use, bankrupt husks with no friends and no avocations other than those that provide a reliable revenue return. Quite possibly with individualized radical ideologies because whatever hits your dopamine button, the Algorithm pumps more into you (See Neal Stephenson's "Dodge").
Yea, I think this is more likely the case for AI as we have it now or will have it, imo.
If somehow AI is better than all humans at everything idk if we get communism or what but I don't think I can really think about it but it sounds meaningless and bad and not going to happen anyways.
I'm willing to go along with this hypothesis. So first step is to end capitalism, then we can see if we still hate ads?
You don't need to "First, we end capitalism" to recognize a problem that has already gone out of bounds and promises to go further.
Hawaii bans billboards, and has, since 1927. Look into that. They manage to do so without some kind of slippery slope that ends in authoritarian oppression, or some kind of guillotine wielding anti-corporate mob. There are lots of ways to limit the harm without trying to completely erase our political economy.
We used to ban gambling. Gambling was regarded as slightly harmful. Now we have legalized gambling, and we've plugged it into modern marketting, and the harm has expanded to the point that some of us regret the entire idea; The gambling industry is in the process of consuming all of sports entertainment. "Decriminalization" of small gambling concerns and an almost total ban on paid advertising is probably, it turns out, a better outcome.
I agree we should do all that right now- but I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.
One thing that convinced me is that we don't need to get rid of markets even- just make it so that its not a extremely small pool of unelected shareholders making all the major decisions affecting our lives.
> I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.
I totally agree. I would prefer harnessing capitalism for our means and regulating it heavily, but I understand if you don't think our democracy could survive the conflict (or if you think that it isn't surviving the conflict already). I'm just very aware of all of the ways solutions to this problem have gone wrong in the past.
I disagree. The spherical cow of marketing is a system that connects consumers with EXACTLY what they are looking for. What you are describing is the capitalist spherical cow.
Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.
How many marketing professionals do you know that work for non-profit providers of goods and services? I'm sure they exist, but I imagine not many.
Marketing isn't just about connecting consumers to products, it's also about creating demand.
Along these lines, "it" most fundamentally refers to unrestrained capitalism.
(Or perhaps computing.)
Won’t argue with it being overdone, but it’s in reference to Ginsberg. Not necessarily complimentary. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
Gingsberg stole it from Yeats — “the best lack all conviction…” / “the best minds of my generation…” — many similar verses, e.g., “what rough beast…” / “what sphinx of cement…”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
Those aren't nearly close enough to be considered stolen. Possibly allusions (which is not stealing), but even then, the only similarity of the bests is "The best" usage. Nothing about the rest of the lines, or before, are similar enough to be "stolen" (potentially the Ginsberg troping Yeat's "full of passionate intensity" of the worst into his best's "madness, starving hysterical", but that too is allusion, not stealing).
The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.
vs
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, // dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
How is this stealing in any form?
He stole the concept of poetry from Yeats?
Having been in IT for close to 15 years now, a lot of good minds work in IT a lot of good minds don't.
But I've encountered a lot of stupid (for lack of a better word) people in IT who were convinced they are good at _everything_ just because they grokked algorithms and data structures. Not sure it's a phenomenon unique to IT, but what DOGE is doing is exactly what I mean.
Can confirm, this isn't just an IT thing. Physicians are a prime example—people tend to put doctors on a pedestal, and some doctors start believing they know everything about everything, even when it's clearly outside their wheelhouse. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in another, but it’s easy for everyone involved to forget that.
I’m a CFO that used to work in healthcare. Have had many cases where a doctor tries to explain to me how accounting “should work” and I have to tell them we have this little thing call revenue recognition or GAAP or how accruals work, etc. basically the stuff covered in accounting 101.
I’m used to fielding questions about numbers from all types but only doctors will immediately jump to telling you it’s wrong without asking questions and adamantly insisting they know the right way to do things is what I’ve noticed as a personality quirk generalization.
I like it when they explain to you how hard they work and how it’s unlike how anyone else works and they are super special because of it.
> how accruals work
Slightly off-topic but I worked at a UK research organisation that was a privatised entity recently spun-off from a civil-service organisation. The new CEO (who came from a finance background) got a tour of each department. He apparently listened to all of the tech evangelism from the department directors and then asked them how their department's accruals were doing. Those department directors who asked him to clarify what he meant by accruals didn't stay in post very long. Allegedly.
Us lowly engineers just kept our heads down.
This is a bit extreme. I've worked in many industries where the word 'accrual' is kind of internal to the finance/accounting department. I'd estimate over 70% of very good functional department heads I've worked with in the past would ask for clarification too. If they were still confused after further clarification or weren't able to comeback with an answer, then there is a bigger problem potentially with their ability to own a budget/manage spend.
This is kind of like punishing someone for not knowing your preferred buzzword. I've seen dozens of times that when a new high ranking person joins, their language quickly starts to become the defacto language of the org. If they like the "headwind" "tailwind" terminology, then it becomes what people everywhere start writing in the slides and how they discuss items of risk. You shouldn't be punishing people for asking for clarification (and there certainly a whole group of people that like to ask versus sitting silently then looking it up later). Hopefully there was more too it.
Oh nice. A culture where asking questions is punished. If this was a problem don't fire people. Train them. Make sure everyone does required training. If they refuse then you may have a case for PIP.
Otherwise it is just landmine driven performance
Rant not at comment! But the situation of the comment. Hope it worked out for you!
I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist; you are correct about this illusion that physicians often labor under. But it's worth noting that when medical topics are posted here, the responses from non-physicians are sometimes so nonsensical that I for one laugh out loud reading them. In fact, I look forward to these discussions for this very reason.
The worst thing is, most doctors aren't even smart in their own domain. They are nothing more but trained monkeys who follow a flow chart that has drug sales at the end.
This is called "engineer's disease".
You can regularly find it on this very site :)
I mean, there are probably only a few places on the internet with more people who believe their insights into other disciplines are profound simply because they understand how computers work than the HN comment section. So we should all be able to relate.
> I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
It's the other way around. It's not just, or primarily, about run of the mill software devs. It's also about the would-be top mathematicians and physicists and psychologists and others - best minds in various domains, that in a better world would be busy solving real problems, but due to quirk of the economy end up working on ruining lives of other people, at scale, because adtech pays well while almost all useful work pays a pittance.
I remember this quote not as judging or categorizing people by smartness, but as lamenting a world which mismanages humanity's potential so badly, by literally directing our best problem solvers to work on creating problems for everyone.
I think the argument is more about whether someone involved in hostile behavior deserves to be called a "best mind" compared to someone worse at math but better at empathy.
Fwiw I kinda agree with both of you. Don't really know how to square it
I'd say it's something like "a squandering of potential"
I think it’s more nuances, it’s saying that our definition of potential, best, etc, doesn’t weigh empathy for our fellow humans heavily enough. It’s an argument to flip that instead of our brightest minds being spent on ads, to instead say we are not rewarding our brightest minds at all but our most mercenary ones.
I read it as: best in terms of problem-solving power. On the ethical and empathic side, whether they're good/best or worst depends on whether you put more blame on systemic pressures (here mostly economic) vs. on individual agency.
Yeah, that's what the original quote means, and I agree with it. The comment tho is trying to argue that unqualified 'best' should not implicitly mean 'best at problem solving' which is a kinda interesting social/linguistic take.
From context, we can infer that "best minds" means "smart people who make new things." I feel it's fair to lament that, while these people could put their intelligence towards the betterment of everybody, they are often instead working on shit like ad tech.
Probably ‘capable’ should be used instead of ‘best’. The latter might lead the reader astray with notions of ethics.
The best tech stack I have ever worked on was in an adtech company. The code was beautiful and the utility functions to interface with various AWS services were really really neat. I built a near real time estimator using Theta Sketches.
While job searching, I have tried to use techs like Sketches in my filters but it mostly draws up a blank. Would love to work on genuinely interesting stuff like that again.
It honestly did leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I thought what the end goal of it all was.
I think it's a reference to Allen Ginsberg's the Howl, which chronicles Ginsberg watching brilliant people of his generation die in war or become drug casualties, their potential squandered either by evil men or navel-gazing.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"
I'm not sure what Ginsberg meant when he used the term but I imagine it wasn't the same type of mind.
I think "best" in this case stands for highest performance and not necessarily moral values - with this definition, unfortunately, making a computer go brrr does qualify for a best mind, if the brrr is especially impressive.
This reminds me of Bret Devereaux's series on Alexander III of Macedon and the meaning of "greatness" [0]:
> Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?
"Great" and "best" are both just words, words whose definition is defined by us who use them.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2024/05/17/collections-on-the-reign-of-al...
It is curious to me that so many revered as “great” by culture often end up treating those close to them in abhorrent ways. Many worship Moloch not overtly but in the lack of accountability they require of high status individuals. It seems that once someone gets past a certain thermocline of status then accusations of character become less likely to stick. I’ve come to believe this is seen as a feature and not a bug by many people. Not everyone, but many.
Ultimately we get what we incentivize and reward as a society. Recent events are a painful reminder of that.
I treat this expression as Ayenbite of Inwit. When I use it (because I'm super pretentious) I don't mean the book itself or the saner English version of the title "Remorse of Conscience". I mean it as a parody of the later. Like, when someone comes up with a contrived blame for wrongdoing that either didn't happen or was so minor that it doesn't warrant the discussion.
I don't think author means "best minds" literally. I think they mean it ironically, more like "those who are most eager to perform the task assigned to them".
But maybe I'm saying the obvious. Irony is admittedly hard to translate into writing.
I've always considered references to "the best minds" to mean those glorified because they make others large sums of money. "The best minds" are never the ones profiting from their ideas.
"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."
I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.
We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.
Except our superior ability to collaborate is arguably our strongest asset.
Of course! Nothing I said precludes this. Lots of collaboration is used for selfish means.
Is collaboration at its most useful/powerful when it's done selfishly?
I don't think that's how it's meant to be read, if you consider it in the context of the original quote, it's about good and empathetic minds going to waste because of the demands of society. We put so much social and economic capital into tech that it's better to push five lines of code for Facebook than be a doctor, which are the "good minds going to waste".
You reminded me of one of my favorite piece of media in gaming (HZD). It feels especially relevant in the current times, with how war and AI is progressing in tandem with geopolitical unrest.
Its an old recording that the main character listens to in the end cutscene while visiting Elisabet's grave, and (spoilers) the main character was created as a clone of Elisabet. It's very hard hitting after the whole experience.
> GAIA: Query: What did she say?
Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, "Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don't make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death."
GAIA: You often tell stories of your mother. But you are childless.
Elisabet Sobeck: I never had time. I guess it was for the best.
GAIA: If you had had a child, Elisabet, what would you have wished for him or her?
Elisabet Sobeck: I guess... I would have wanted her to be... curious. And willful - unstoppable, even... but with enough compassion to... heal the world... just a little bit.
> I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
A person may be all of those things, but they still need to pay bills and eat. That requires a job, and jobs depend on the bourgeoise, that's none of those things.
The best song that starts off with that quote: https://youtu.be/UryTypo2qeU?si=CdTPe0ufnktLB_6i “ I Should Be Allowed to Think” by They Might Be Giants Change a couple words here and there and it’s talking about social media
I think the point is that people with the capacity to be both smart and empathetic have lost their way.
The more subtle point is that many empathetic people have bullshit jobs: they too work in service of it for simply their livelihood.
The point of that quote is not at all that those minds are so smart, but rather that their industry is sad and detrimental.
That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.
I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?
I don't think best minds ever implied empathy or even should.
Best, to me, means people who are the top of their specialty, whether it be mathematics, astrophysics, rocketry, economics, business, politics, pedagogy, archeology, etc. People with unnerving dedication and pursuit of knowledge to advance whatever their specialty is. It could be the marketing most of us loathe but it can also be any of the above and more and only a few pursuits only tangentially imply empathy.
Probably we should keep the distinction between "best hearts" and "best minds" but otherwise agreed, a good heart is preferable to a good mind.
There is one trait common to nearly everyone participating in the computing industry: overweening pride in one's own intelligence.
People in the industry like to reduce 'intelligence' to a single dimension. You can see this phenomenon directly in the current AI wave in which "intelligence" has been reduced to "does well at 'knowledge worker' tasks and passes arbitrary benchmarks we have defined".
Compared to the population at large, how does their definition do? Compared to philosophers and neuroscientists, it is lacking, no doubt. But that's the top 1% of the population in being able to define intelligence. So where does this view of intelligence rank compared on a more global sense? It seems better than those who just go with a "I know it when I see it" gut check (especially given how often that gut check is now letting newer models pass as long as they don't know it is an AI model). Or the "humans, because humans are clearly better" view that assigns mythical status to the human brain. Is it in the top 5%? Top 2%?
For a group to come up with a good enough definition that still ranks among the top and which is suited for the specific tasks at hand, seems like a show of intelligence. It isn't perfect, but to what extent is that avoiding premature optimization? Once the definition has issues, it'll be refined more. No need to waste time refining it if we never build tools that hit the limits of the current definition.
I had always supposed that one was supposed to recognize a borrowing from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
(Not that I'd automatically accept Ginsberg's evaluation of best minds.)
I came here to say exactly this. I can't tell if it's because I'm not a traditional "tech" person, but 90% of the best minds I've seen are nowhere near tech in general.
Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithetical to what a "best mind of a generation" would truly be.
It's wasted talent with few redeeming qualities for society and a lack of innovation/creativity around using your talents to improve the world.
A "best mind of the generation" would find a way to be successful without riding such a lazy conveyor belt of life.
Thank you, it’s unfortunate that the average person doesn’t seem to understand this.
Thank you. They act as if the “best minds” need not read or reason beyond logic and math. Having a “best mind” requires a lifelong dedication to understanding other people, ideas, and history above all else.
Agree - but don't think there is a "best mind(s)". We're creatures of repetition and thus specialization, and so our minds can get really good at very specific things, but ultimately we're all dumb apes trying to survive as best we can.
Case in point: how many of the best minds left OpenAI when it restructured?
There were several people who indeed quit.
The fact that your tired of that line is the point here. We're tired of it. It does this, copies common content and style.
This is from Allen Ginsberg's Howl. A must read.
Thank you person. You have improved my day.
Im tired of the line "computer go brr". Is that the best you can explain yourself?
Why is being empathetic a trait of a "great mind"? Wouldn't it also be possible that "great minds" don't consider things like empathy as useful? Looking back at human history, its usually people that aren't empathetic who end up being successful. At least in a way that people consider "successful". Humanity has long outlived the usefulness of empathy.
How do you go from "successful" to "useful"?
There seems to be no logical connection from "shitty people are successful" to "empathy is not useful to society."
Because empathy isn't useful to society. One only lives once so you better make sure you'll be successful. Having empathy will actively hurt your own life
> empathy isn't useful to society ... Having empathy will actively hurt your own life
Even if I accepted the second statement (which to be clear, I absolutely do not), it doesn't follow that empathy isn't useful to society. Society is not benefited by everyone running about chasing their own personal success to the exclusion of all others: that kind of world isn't even called a society. We have other names for that and they're less positive.
I am aware people have trouble building this mental model of an unempathetic society. I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation. There is no reason to have empathy.
> building this mental model of an unempathetic society
No, it's not about mental models, it's that what you're describing is, at the limit, no longer a society at all. You need a different word for the kind of Randian endgame you're advocating for. Using "society" for it is just confusing things for everyone involved.
You think that's what you've witnessed, but perhaps you're confirming a distorted prejudice and not a reality - because that's exactly what someone who lacks empathy would see.
People who can't see green are evidence of a genetic defect, not evidence that green doesn't exist.
>I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation
Old people can be wrong, and in this case, they are.
>There is no reason to have empathy.
This is a category mistake. You reason that empathy is superfluous if people are the cause of their misfortune. However, whether people are the cause of their misfortunes is utterly irrelevant to whether there is a reason to have empathy.
So far, none of your arguments have had any discernible logic behind them. If you are so convinced that empathy is needless, why can you not articulate a coherent argument for your position?
You not seeing arguments doesn't invalidate them. You arent the judge on this.
Do you think this response will convince anyone that you are correct? You still fail to provide an argument; you're just being unpleasant. To what end?
Is that what not having empathy in a society feels like? People just talking at each other without any particular goal in mind other than being unpleasant to each other?
> will convince anyone
Are you sure that would be the poster's attempt.
> you're just being
He seems to be discussing, to some of us.
>Are you sure that would be the poster's attempt.
What do you suspect he is attempting to do?
There is a chance he is just seeing whether discussing brings some benefit - as he likes to say. Which is a good thing. Better than the opposite.
There's no discussion happening, though! They're just repeating themselves over and over and ignoring the contents of any replies.
Because the replies ignore the contents of my replies, weird isnt it
Counter perspective: you deflect instead of answering direct questions, which is more like talking at people instead of having dialogue.
This is false. I quoted you and made counterpoints. You repeatedly ignored what I said and instead chose to say peculiar things like, "you arent (sic) the judge on this."
Anyone can read this thread and see this for themselves.
What do I gain from convincing people on the internet about something? Its entertainment for me. Simply showing people how I think is fun. People always act so shocked.
I'm not shocked, but it's not surprising that you don't understand other people's emotions—or your own. You don't just lack empathy; you also lack introspection. I feel strongly that it would be beneficial for you to work on that.
>99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation.
This seems to be a flawed mental model in itself.
At the very least, you should elaborate on your definition of empathy. Do you think cognitive empathy is bad? If so, you’re ignoring that social interactions impact outcomes.
> mental model of an unempathetic society
You mean, like, a pack of wild dogs?
"My confirmation bias has proven me right 99% of the time!"
> useful to society
On the contrary, the "respect" towards others is a condition to societies. Otherwise, all you'd had would be "accomplices". And also since Edward Bunker told us that actually, "dog eat dog",
> will actively hurt your own life
in a pool of free rogues you'll be at severe disadvantage as opposed to a society.
> One only lives once so you better make sure
you will achieve what you should. That includes¹ being something good, not just having some fleeting goods.
--
¹Edit: I wrote 'includes', but that's rhetoric - I meant "mostly is".
Society already is full of rogues and guess who is winning in this game? The super rich already buying themselves out of society, punishment usually only hurts the ones who already barely own anything. Whats the benefit of a "society"?
There are other societies than the American one and I recommend you look at them before you make such sweeping statements
I am not American, and the same thing is happening in every country.
Generally, high-trust societies work better than low-trust societies.
> and guess who is winning
Again that is your perspective on "winning", which remains subjective (and normally faulty). Others call psychopathic achievers simply "contemptible".
> Whats the benefit of a "society"?
That would be the whole work of Thomas Hobbes, for example: avoiding the nightmare of perpetual conflict. It is very linear to see the benefit of being able to trust your neighbour.
Trusting your neighbor already is a mistake. Well people like me benefit from society as I can benefit from people being naive.
>Well people like me benefit from society as I can benefit from people being naive
Then, you acknowledge that you benefit from empathy. But only so long as people do not detect that you are not participating in mutual understanding and reciprocation. Once they notice your lack of genuine engagement, your previously gained benefits will disappear.
On the other hand, people who exhibit empathy towards others will continue to benefit.
Do you see that, by your own logic, empathy is beneficial to society?
> already is a mistake
No. Very clearly I meant "to be able to trust your neighbour is an asset; not being able to trust your neighbour is a liability", which is a plain analytic basic reply to your question. The statement you replied with has nothing to do with what I have written. If there was a misunderstanding, instead of just bad communication, it may reveal why you see things in a twisted way - but then know it is really a faulty perspective, not the state of things.
Of course you can be """benefiting""" from the lack of society, the "frontier anarchy" in which you implicitly declare are in: were it a society, you would have received since a very early age a credible absolute threat of violence, or shunning, which would have destroyed an advantage of profiting inappropriately.
> Well people like me benefit from society as I can benefit from people being naive.
So you’re a leech on society, got it.
I even contribute, by paying taxes. Weird leech
Because you want to or because you are too much of a coward not to?
Something tells me you’d be face down in a ditch somewhere if the world actually reflected your ideal instead of the comfy one we live in where you get to take advantage of the “naive”.
Taxes in my country get automatically paid before I even see the money, so I dont rlly have a choice
> …I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
– Captain G. M. Gilbert, Psychologist at Nuremberg Trials
That implies there is evil, who's the judge on good vs evil?
People who have developed judgement. The blind are not judges on visible colours, those with good eyesight are.
Easy: evil lacks empathy. All it takes to not be evil is... empathy.
Pretty sure the Nazis leaned towards evil, my dude.
And for OP's benefit because they presumably missed the attribution of the quote, these were the Nuremberg trials:
Studies show that the primary predictor for happiness is personal relationships. Make of that what you will.
What kind of people is the study based on? Does it include people with mental disorders? I dont value personal relationships.
Then, you should acknowledge that your experience is not representative of most other people and that basing general arguments like "empathy is useless" on your personal feelings is deeply flawed.
(But also, you come across as unhappy and angry, so maybe you're wrong about whether you need personal relationships to be happy. Many people are bad at understanding what makes them happy and end up unhappy because they mistakenly pursue things like wealth.)
Did you confuse society with yourself?
> Because empathy isn't useful to society.
things that lack empathy: corporations, machines, AI, psychopaths things that are problematic to society: corporations, machines, AI, psychopaths
> end up being successful
And """success""" is not a value. Taken in those ways, it is the mark of the psychopath.
Of course they did, because it is easier to achieve goals if you cut corners. In a gaming framework, it amounts to cheating.
Success is a value if the only thing that matters in my life is my own life. Tell me, how do I benefit from having empathy?
That you see trampling as a value does not mean it is; if you have to move the point to the value you attribute to your own life the issue is with your perspective over your life.
It is correct to see that you have that one life, so you have to use it wisely. The issue will remain about what is "wisely".
> how do I benefit from having
Did anybody tell you you should? You should develop adequate understanding instead - and that will also put the rest into the right perspective.
Why would I put in the effort if I dont benefit from it though?
There will not be any greater benefit from understanding - it is the general condition to achievement. So: you do benefit from it, and you may want to put effort in it. It will have side effects, such as moral behaviour.
Again, how do I benefit from moral behavior? You do not seem to understand that I do not value these things.
No: you are showing difficulties in understanding that your lack of valuing those things has nothing to do with the reply.
Just re-read the statement: you were not told that you would benefit from moral behaviour, you were told that you will benefit from understanding. You then were informed that understanding also has side effects.
If empathy isn't a social value you get a violent race to the bottom and the complete breakdown of mutually supportive social structures of all kinds.
And after all that, the odds that you'll be the top psychopath are extremely poor.
Because we are inherently social creatures. It’s arguably what allowed us to move to the top of the animal hierarchy.
Consider this: if you were to ask a parent “would you rather your child grow up to be wildly intelligent but have sociopathy to the point of being utterly alone, or frankly average (or even dull) intellectually but have a rich social life with meaningful relationships, which would you choose?” I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to take the former.
I never benefited from "meaningful" relationships so the choice is pretty easy actually.
Do you have children? That was a prerequisite for the question. If you do, it implies you don’t consider the relationship with your children either meaningful or beneficial, which says…a lot.
If I asked a tiger if murder is wrong i would get a different answer as opposed to a human. What kind of argument are you making.
Transformational experience colors the way we see the world because it literally changes our psychology. If you haven’t gone through a particular transformational experience, you are just speculating.
It’s like asking, “could you be happy if you were a double amputee?” I trust the answer of an actual amputee than someone just guessing.
The tiger thing is just a weird digression, considering this conversation started with the premise that humans are an innately social species. Let’s keep the discussion on point with humans.
You wouldn't get an answer from a tiger. Sorry, my lack of empathy for you is making me woefully obtuse.
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.Let me guess your age.
The younger generations do seem to be embracing AI more, but mainly because it can do their homework for them without requiring them to learn anything. For now at least, until curriculums have time to adjust to this new reality.
I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of doing that. I only learned how to structure my programs, because they became hard to change. I only learned testing and refactoring, because I noticed I was faster when the code was better and more tested, even if the upfront cost was slightly higher.
If I was 14-15 around this time, when I first picked up programming, but had an LLM on my side, I'm not sure what the outcome would be, to be honest. I'd use them, that's for sure, but once I got a working application out of them, would I be curious enough to understand as much as I understand now, if it wasn't required? Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
> Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow.
The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.
> would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
Would even that have some downsides in the long-term, since the process of banging one's head could be crucial to rewiring your brain to understand new concepts.
Yeah, I'm guessing that most of my valuable knowledge comes from sessions like this, where something is hard, and eventually you solve it. If I was in the same situation today, I'd probably keep throwing stuff at the LLM until it got it right, and not really learn anything.
But then on the other hand, the point was never to learn, but to create. I'm still not sure if I'd be better or worse at actually creating things if I had LLMs in the beginning or not.
I think the argument made is, if there's no added value by understanding something deeper when it will inevitably do better than now, the only reason to dig deeper is for one's curiosity.
All that digging now translates to expertise that is critical and potentially lucrative. But if it's only going to get better then for how long will this be true?
Its like computing gave us the most powerful paintbrush of all time and we said, "nah, you do the painting".
> all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
thanks for this lil' dose of copium, so at least it qualifies as character buildup what a relief
AI is just another abstraction. It's not like a senior Java dev can implement LocalDate.now() or CompletableFuture.await()
I don't know if it's "embracing" it, it's just a fact of life.
I remember in an interview with Marc Andreessen he spoke about introducing his 8 year old to chat gpt. He described the moment as monumental, likening it to "bringing fire down from the mountains." However, his son was unimpressed by the technology, responding, "It's a computer. Of course you ask it questions and it gives you answers. What else is it for?"
I compare it to something like PEDs or even painkillers. These too are a fact of life, but going down that road makes a lot of decisions for you.
AI in certain hands will be fine. In other hands it will be a disaster for the person that uses it, because they will not perform the reps they need to really be able to think. Believing a computer is a magic box that gives answers is not great, it's adjacent to "believe and do what the computer tells you".
I am old. But when I was young I could not comprehend why they wouldn't not let us use calculators for stupid calculation task that humans have a hard time to compute.
It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because most - if not all - students just upload the sheets to an llm and copy the output. Group projects used to be really intense and interesting here - now my partners in the group-projects ask me to explain their code to them. It's not an ivy-league university here but it used to be that I had a lot of fun working hard with other students to work on the projects and we learned a lot doing this - this is completely gone. It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.
I'm suffering from quite a bit of ADHD symptoms - for the past 20 years - I already got an diagnosis and I can survive even if it's a shitty thing to have - but it feels like now everyone around me shares the same fate and people seem to forgot how to work or study or worse - never learned it. I've used to be an outlier, sharing my fate with 2 or 3 other people in the class back when doing the bachelors - we failed in spectacular ways in some areas while outshining everyone else in other areas but it was a honest struggle. I'm okay with that - I'm not made to be a researcher or writing a PhD in computer science or math. But I can work in my area of expertise - however what is happening with all these graduates?
Is this the fault of AI? Not really but society isn't really prepared for what is happening now. People correcting the exercises tell me it's impossible to proof LLM usage and 90% of the results are just ChatGPT - funnily enough this was a machine learning 101 class.
Another thing I've noticed that often when looking at LLMs prompts from other students and their application of the results that they kind of don't help them to really learn and improve yourself - you are stuck on your level of knowledge and so are your prompts and the quality of questions you ask and the way you handle the answers which results in very weird effects. So you are talking with your group member to load some binary serialized arrays for a computer vision projects and use numpy to do some calculations. Next meeting you have some code that does something but it's using another dataset and completely different code, runs 100x slower and solves a slightly different problem. All you get is a shrug. I'm better off watching Youtube or working than staying in university. It's not the fault of the teachers but I've came back because of human interaction and because I don't want to learn alone. This is almost gone here.
All of this - even if it sucks - would be somehow okay but the thing I'm scared of the most lately is the blatant dishonesty and lying I've been seeing in other students about their usage of AI - it's creating a kind of person that only pretends to be able to understand what it's doing but fails reliable to actually understand what LLMs tell them. I'm not made to deal with this and I'm getting angry. Tell me you've used an llm and you are not sure about the results, we can talk about it, work through it and improve upon it. Then it's actually a great thing to have LLMs - but I'm not seeing it.
This will be interesting - not in the good way.
> It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.
This is a funny post because this was my experience 20 years ago in college. Nothing new from LLMs here. My big takeaway from my experience in different universities (I attended several different ones) is that the content in all the universities is largely the same - the main difference is that you are picking the caliber of your classmates. My classmates in one technical, well-regarded university were MILES beyond the classmates in a local second-tier state university in terms of intelligence, passion, and drive; and those classmates were more attentive and intelligent than the ones in a third-rate community college.
Fair point. Very different people from very different background here in the masters in comparison to the bachelors. Also 15 years between both experiences. Maybe I'm just getting old and start to yell at imaginary clouds. Thanks for the heads-up! Still sucks for everyone involved there that is motivated through.
That's what happens when the entire education system is optimized for grades instead of the use and acquisition of knowledge. In this case, LLMs are just laying bare our failings as a society.
I'll bite.
I received my PhD in Computer Science focused on NLP and creative text generation last year and I think the hype around LLMs is ridiculous (academics are no better than industry on chasing hype). They're trained to predict the next token given a context, and that's exactly what they're good at.
How old do you think I am?
A transistor is just a way of connecting some wires, and that's exactly what it's good for. It's reducing a phenomenon into some core essence and pretending like there's not a bigger picture.
Doesn’t that feel a little bit like saying that the hype around transistor-based logic gates is ridiculous because they’re designed to execute Boolean logic, and that’s exactly what they’re good at? The simple mechanism isn’t what’s exciting. The exciting part is composing that into a symphony of functionality, running fast and cheap, to better our lives.
no, because before transistors we had vacuum tubes so the functionality of a transistor was well understood and the breakthrough was in size and power consumption.
the analogy would be more apt if tomorrow I could run ChatGPT 4o, the hosted model, on my wrist watch, and run it indefinitely for pennies.
3.5 turbo?
I was in my 20s when crypto was "it" and I was definitely on the last group about it, so it's definitely not just about age, even thought there's probably some correlation.
> "is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it."
Does this not explain why you just got your PhD in this? ("This" being broad, but "NLP and creative text generation" sounds like it's in the same ballpark as LLMs.)
Nope. I did it purely due to long-term intellectual curiosity.
I first pursued "AI" in undergrad during the last AI winter. For example, the only professor who taught neural networks at Purdue was in the EE dept, not CS, and was retiring the semester I was first qualified to study it. There weren't enough seats in the class, and since it was graduate level, I wasn't allowed to take it as an undergrad.
I really tried every avenue I could think of at the time to pursue AI — taking part in Robocup, taking classical AI (also from the EE dept), etc. None of what I was exposed to seemed like it was pushing the the intellectual boundaries, so I instead got into video game AI as a way to pursue AI (a number of famous ML researchers like Demis Hassabis got their start in video games).
When I started my PhD a very tiny group of researchers were looking at text generation, let alone for creative text. The idea was very niche.
Note, I only pursued a PhD after I got an interview at OpenAI in 2017 that made me realize a PhD was likely necessary to pursue research.
Thanks. Sometimes I feel like I'm going insane attempting to ŕeason with people who think the opposite. That these are oracles imbued with human level intellect and creativity.
Now, sure, these models can be impressive - but it's a warped lens of humanities own impressive (selected) corpuses.
I'm in my mid-forties and I think the LLM revolution is amazing.
It reminds me of the dotcom era in many ways: a genuinely transformative technology which is currently no more than maybe 20% of the way into realising its potential; a technology for which expectations have been hyped up to maybe 200% of potential; and a technology around which a stockmarket bubble has formed.
I'll leave the rest of the LLM story to the reader's imagination, but to see this slightly fragmented and ossified mind it's extremely obvious what happens next, and then what happens after that, and then after that (which is when we get to the really good bit). So no, I'm not bored, and I'm not tired. I'm as happy to be working in technology now as when I was a younger man. Happier in some ways, even.
I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams, but there is a reason he was (best known as) a comedy writer and not, for example, a sociologist. Trotting this out adds nothing to the conversation and just comes across as vaguely ageist.
Call it ageist, but this aligns with the conversation about "it" at my job. The cutoff is around 42, but there is a significant split by age group of engineers on the value of "it".
There is some truth to it, but it also isn’t exactly accurate. #2 isn’t true for me in its generality. Some new things were exciting and revolutionary, but by no means all. Regarding #3, some new things still excite me today, and many more could excite me, but nobody is making them. Even #1 isn’t accurate. What’s true is that “excitability” goes down over time the more one is aware of the flaws and trade-offs.
I don't think it has to do with age but more than active years of work experience in the field. There is some strong correlation but, I'm 44 and with 3 years of experience I have integrated AI tools in my workflow because they're just tools right now and it would be silly not to leverage it.
I added them, because they are a plug-in like anything else, but rarely find a use for them. They are best at helping me remember syntax for single statements, nothing more. Like autocorrect but vaguer.
I found the parent comment humorous as it cites a lighthearted quote from Douglas Adams. it is relevant to the conversation in a similar way an xkcd is, when called relevant.
Based on those rules your guess would be wrong :)
This is not about age really: "NFTs"/"web3.0"/"Blockchain technologies" for instance were hyped by every age group.
"Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."
Terry Pratchett
This can be taken as an instance of the Shifting Baseline phenomenon [1]. The fact that we can only perceive certain changes over large timescales doesn't mean we can safely ignore them. It's harmful to ignore experienced perspectives.
I do think this is true. I'm 46 and I find myself wondering when things are going to "return to normal". But I can't really define what that is besides saying "2019". I'm not even sure what I'm referring to other than I hate short form video. I don't know how I feel about AI. It does seem like something that has a lot of promise though if we can figure out the context issues.
I'm against calculators in schools due to their detriment on learning.
What's my age?
This was written at a time when people had lived through inventions like the internet, personal computers, refrigerators, microwave ovens, jet liners, vaccines, television, etc. While all of those inventions had negative externalities, their primary function overall improved people's lives.
Generative AI is all negative externalities.
Well, if you have ADHD, you are always fifteen. Novelty-seeking is built in, part of physiology, cannot be ignored. I am 42, and LLMs still provide a lot of excitement to me.
As much as I like Douglas Adams' work, I think that quote describes what, for lack of a better term, and in no way trying to be derogatory, I'd call a "normal person"'s reaction to technologies.
I mean obviously the age boundaries may change a bit but otherwise he's spot on. Also, I'd say it's not just technology as I've seen a similar attitude towards other things (e.g, how a dress code is not that common any more, or how you can walk up to a store or even go to a hospital and be greeted by someone with tattoos and green hair "is against the natural order of things").
And to stress again that I'm not being derogatory, I've got close people who have those reactions and I love them even if I disagree with them.
But for people not in that "normal" group my experience is nothing like that. I've seen: - People being amazed at how exciting something that existed when they were born is, to the point of building emulators and even physical replicas of it. - People way after 35 who go deep in on very new things that drastically change the way they work (the example I'm thinking of here is the old musicians I know who've embraced modelers and DAWs, things that only got good enough to be used by professionals in, what, the last 20 years? - In that same line though, I know young kids who use portastudios and hate DAWs. Some release cassettes too. One has to guess their target audience never wasted life untangling tape and rewinding with a ball pen ...
Still, I think your last line is most likely spot on as far as the author goes. Probably going through some mid-life crisis (lest this come across as ageist, I'm way past half my country's life expectancy).
Also, "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."
That's just the author going to the wrong pubs! Like the Jonathan Richman song says:
"Well the first bar things were alright But in this bar, things were Friday night."
> Someone said something cool once hence it's valid ad vitam aeternam and can be used as an argument in a discussion.
Mass automatised eugenics robots ? Well if you don't like it you must be a boomer.
Brain implants that are controlled by your employer and can literally kill you on the push of a button if you don't follow the rules ? What ? you don't like it ? You dumb luddite
Between that and the "TeChNoLoGy iS JuSt a ToOl, a HaMmEr Is NeItHeR gOoD nOr BaD" people...
How is the moral dilemma of employer-controlled brain implants or eugenics equal to AI? The reason the quote can be applied is because it is a genuinely useful technology to lots of people. That's not the case for eugenics robots.
Did you grow up watching Data (Star Trek), C3PO (Star Wars), KITT (Knight Rider) thinking "Who comes up with these violent sadistic ideas"?
> How is the moral dilemma of employer-controlled brain implants or eugenics equal to AI?
Well it's just a technology, don't you love technology ? Technology is progress and progress is good!
> it is a genuinely useful technology to lots of people. That's not the case for eugenics robots.
Eugenics would objectively solve a lot of suffering though, your AI might even come to that conclusion
> Did you grow up watching Data (Star Trek), C3PO (Star Wars), KITT (Knight Rider) thinking "Who comes up with these violent sadistic ideas"?
That's how 80% of ai "enthusiasts" sound to me, "AI is good because these sci-fi AIs were cool when I was a kid"
Are you being obtuse on purpose?
His purse is empty already, all’s golden words are spent.
– William Shakespeare
Those rules do not work for me.
I hate AI.
well i dont know who in the world Douglas is, probably some geriatric weirdo but he is completely wrong.
am in the second group and ur comment just feels like ragebait, sure there are enough “hip and trendy” teenagers to twenty, thirty something people who like influence more than technology and are on their “vibe code” grind and idk, fucking their AI every night with their claude wrapped fleshlight but I for one am not one of them.
Remember, being terminally online is a choice. There's nothing to be bored of you don't choose to be constantly confronted by it. The current thing is only the current thing if you choose to surround yourself by people who deeply care about the current thing.
It's hard to take refuge from it when you are working in the tech industry, I hear something about "let's try to use AI for this" at least twice a week for the past year at my work.
I do use LLMs for some specific tasks, they can be quite good at some stuff but the general hype of it by non-technical folks trying to fit it into every single use-case under the sun is absolutely tiring... Having to explain for the n-th time why what we are trying to do is not a good fit for AI™ is exhausting, not because I have to explain it again but because I know I will have to do it again next week, at least another couple of times.
AI is being viewed in this hype as almost literal magic, it can do anything, we just have to wish for AI to do it (whatever the fuck AI means by now, it's just an umbrella for magical thinking).
I'm tired, and definitely bored.
Yes, but people (like this writer) want a better community. A person can abstain from the internet entirely, but they still have to live in a terminally online world.
This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.
Normally I would agree that you can just choose not to engage with the [current thing], but AI is so pervasive that you will be confronted by the consequences of this technology whether you like it or not. These annoying hype cycles don't usually raise the internets noise floor permanently, or DDoS random sites while trying to strip mine their data, or break core assumptions about being able to trust what you see and hear.
My software working group has spent much of the quarter discussing whether or not it’s made us more productive. They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.
I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.
> They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.
That sounds... Good?
Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry.
At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive, compared to the vast majority of the ecosystem.
> At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive
At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering if it is more or less productive, but rather are using that time to convince themselves that their position is the right one, even when it isn't.
> At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering
I mean, if you take that not as an exaggeration but at face value, it's 200 days of 5 hours of discussions per day. I'm fairly sure the specific number is an exaggeration, but if it isn't, I'd probably agree with you :)
To be fair, it was said to be the sum of all developer hours. If we assume 100 developers involved, that would only be 10 hours total. But even 10 hours "debating" something shows that you're no longer considering, just trying to justify something to yourself.
It would be great if they’d actually collect data instead of merely speculating, that’s what I’m getting at.
Software developers and management rarely have the statistics chops to create actually good metrics and data collection.
Just writing everything down isn't data. You have to have a standardized methodology and low-ambiguity signals. You should have systems of blinding.
What's your proposed metric for "productivity" for software developers? You could probably get a management prize for it.
So you are at a similar level of productivity and have 1000s of hours of free time?
This is insane. We have created the greatest tool in human history and people are complaining. I can use it to help me code, fix modeling issues as I learn CAD, help me troubleshoot the issues in my two-stroke leafblower engine and can consistently walk me through complex leetcode algorithms. It literally knows everything and people still complain.
It isn’t even close to being the greatest tool in human history. This type of misunderstanding and hyperbole is exactly why people are tired/bored/frustrated of it.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the world’s greatest con man. The tools and hype around them have created an environment where AI is incredibly effective at fooling people into thinking it is knowledgeable and helpful, even when it isn’t. And the people it is fooling aren’t knowledgeable enough in the topics being described to realize they’re being conned, and even when they realize they’ve been conned, they’re too proud to admit it.
This is exactly why you see people that are deeply knowledgeable in certain areas pointing out that AI is fallible, meanwhile you have people like CEOs that lack the actual technical depth in topics praising AI. They know just enough to think they know what “good” looks like, but not enough to realize when the “good” output is just lipstick on a pig.
What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion?
I think it's too early to call whether AI is the answer to that question, but I think it could be. Yes, LLMs are terrible in all kinds of ways, but there's clearly something there that's of great value. I use it all day every day as a staff-level engineer, and it's making me much better and faster. I can see glimmers of intelligence there, and if we're on a road that delivers human-level intelligence in the next decade, it's difficult to see what else would qualify as the greatest tool humanity has ever invented.
> What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion?
Language, fire, writing; in that order.
Even AI mostly agrees with you! ChatGPT suggests:
Language, Writing, and the Scientific Method.
It’s not hype when it’s released and used for concrete tasks. Some are hyping future potential sure. But GP is hyped about how he can use it NOW. Which I agree is very cool.
The human still needs to think, of course. But, I can get to my answer or my primary source using a tool faster than a typical search engine. That's a super power, when used right!
The jump in productivity we had with the world wide web and search engines was several orders of magnitude higher than what you have right now with LLMs, yet I don't remember a single person back in the 2000s calling Google "the greatest tool in human history".
Almost sixty years after ELIZA, chatbots seem to still produce a very strong emotional reaction to some folks.
People saying things like "It literally knows everything..." unironically is half the reason some of us are bored of it.
People want to remain valuable and this tool takes that away. As long as you still find meaningful ways to contribute, all is good. But this says nothing about all the skills mastered that have been rendered effectively useless. And in time, as this tool gets better, it could rob you of the agency to change your environment.
I’d like to hear an explanation of what mastered skills are useless?
"Computer" used to be a job title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
It literally knows nothing.
It is incapable of knowledge.
I’m bored of it.
Maybe the tool knows nothing. But it allows me to learn niche things often much faster than via a web browser. So it has to value for me.
I think there’s lot of dangers and problems with it and frankly I’d probably be happier if it was never invented. But even then I can still see the value it has
Neither does Wikipedia. But it’s still awesome.
No one says, “Wikipedia knows everything.”
A tool that constantly generates incorrect information, lacks any real awareness or internal state, and doesn’t even recognize its own mistakes, even when you explicitly point them out is, frankly, pretty useless.
Ever had this conversation with ChatGPT?
- ChatGPT: Here's my solution!
- You: This is wrong, you need to do X.
- ChatGPT: You're right! My solution was wrong because [repeats what you said]. Here’s my revised answer!
- You: This is still wrong. I said do X.
- ChatGPT: Understood! This clarifies: [still gets it wrong].
Or worse, you can trick it:
- ChatGPT: X + Y = Z (which is actually correct)
- You: No, X + Y = Q (which is false)
- ChatGPT: You're right, X + Y = Q is correct because...
I guess it's useful for generating boilerplate code or text, but even then, it often makes mistakes.
This. Precise text auto-completer. Without reasoning or cognitive processes whatsoever, just a very marketable illusion of it. Despite the lies, a great tool.
As any tool, it takes knowledge and responsibility. Just lile the unix chainsaw.
The cases you're showing here are things that can also be accomplished by looking in books. You're describing Google if it actually worked
> and people are complaining.
Not about the tool, though, but about people (who, granted, have some connection to the tool, even if indirectly).
We've had people for hundreds of thousands of years, so fair to say that they have become quite boring.
> the greatest tool in human history
So would the greatest tool in human history in your mind be something that is used to plagiarise most content in the world and then output correct-30%-of-the-time slop? Or is there another definition you would use?
I'm struggling to think how this could even be in the top 10 tools in human history.
As a counterpoint, if I were to be teleported naked onto an abandoned island 10000 years ago and could bring one "tool" with me, a solar powered terminal with an LLM would be my #1 pick. An able-bodied and resourceful individual equipped with an LLM could accomplish far far more than with any other tool I can think of.
The Internet was the greatest tool in human history and it has lead to all sorts of issues. Misinformation at amazing scale that has undone lots of social progress that was made in the 20th century and 2000s. It has driven the greatest wealth disparities ever seen. It has become a harmful addiction for millions of people.
That's not to say the Internet hasn't caused good things to happen, but to ignore the bad things is counterproductive. Maybe it's ok to slow down and take a step back to make sure we're not doing more bad than good.
And it's cheap. Imagine I told you that you could have direct access to every PhD in the world and they would respond to all of your questions instantly... for $20/mo. Mind-blowing stuff and people still complain.
But it's not "direct access to every PhD in the world." You don't really believe that do you?
It’s like the people who say these things live on a different planet.
Or an alternate timeline where a different version of LLMs were invented.
It gives me better answers on most things than my actual PhD friends do. So... yeah?
The funny thing is, it's somewhat less useful for certain business stuff, because so much of that is private within corporations. But the stuff you learn in a PhD program is all published. And it's pretty phenomenal at distilling that information to answer any specific question.
Multiple times a week I run into an obscure term or concept in a paper that isn't defined well or doesn't seem to make sense. I ask AI and it explains it to me in a minute. Yes, it's basically exactly like asking a PhD.
The AI is optimized for producing text that sounds like it makes sense and is helpful.
This is not a guarantee that the text it produces is a correct explanation of the thing you are asking about. It’s a mental trick like a psychic reading tea leaves.
I'm so tired of this caveat.
It's generally pretty obvious if the explanation makes sense. And you can locate the original paper(s) as well to verify.
And you know what? My PhD friends get things wrong all the time too. I need to verify what they say as well.
"This is not a guarantee"? You're right. Nothing is a guarantee, but a lot of things are awfully helpful.
I’m tired of “Well people get things wrong, too.” as a defense of these systems. They should stand or fall on their own merit.
And yes, reducing everything in the world - nothing matters. Everything is relative. What even is truth, amirite?
If that’s our slogan for the future then it is hella depressing.
> They should stand or fall on their own merit.
And they do. They stand on the fact that they save time, raise productivity, and assist in learning. That's the merit.
Demanding absolute perfection as the only measure of merit is bonkers. And if that's the standard you hold everything in your life too, you must be pretty disappointed with the world...
None of my comments say I’m demanding perfection. That’s a fallacy to reduce my position to absurdism, so it can be easily dismissed.
LLMs have not improved my productivity. When I have tried to use them, they have been a net negative. There are many other people who report a similar experience.
You said:
> This is not a guarantee that the text it produces is a correct explanation
A guarantee of correctness is perfection. I don't know else to take it.
Not all jobs or tasks are helped by LLM's. That's fine. But many are, and hugely.
You dismissed it for everyone as "a mental trick like a psychic reading tea leaves". Implying it has no value for anyone.
Your words.
That's just wrong.
Now you say it doesn't have value for you and for some other people. That's fine. But that's not what you were saying above. That's not what I was responding to.
"But the stuff you learn in a PhD program is all published." - What? This is the kind of misunderstanding of knowledge that AI boosters present that drives me insane.
And last sentences conflate a PhD with a google search or even dictionary lookup. I mean, c'mon!
I'm not talking about learning practical skills like research and teaching, or laboratory skills. I'm talking about the factual knowledge. Academia is built on open publishing. Do you disagree?
And the things I'm looking up just can't be found in Google or a dictionary. It's something defined in some random paper from 1987, further developed by someone else in 1998, that the author didn't cite.
And something that lead you to that paper would be wonderful but instead you have been disconnected from the social side of scholarship and forced to take the AI "at its word".
I've also seen AI just completely make up nonsense out of nowhere as recently as last week.
Huh? Nobody's forcing me to "take the AI at its word". It's the easiest thing to verify.
And I've got enough of the social side of scholarship already. Professors don't need me emailing them with questions, and I don't need to wait days for replies that may or may not come.
How do you verify it or connect it with other papers if it gives you a summary instead of linking to the paper itself?
You literally ask it for the paper(s) and author(s) associated, put them into Google Scholar, and go read them. If it hallucinates a paper title, Scholar will usually find the relevant work(s) anyways because the author and title are close enough. If those fail, you Google some of the terms in the explanation, which is generally much more successful than Googling the original query. If you can't find anything at all, then it was probably a total hallucination, and you try the prompt a different way. That probably happens less than 1% of the time, however.
I mean, it's all just kind of common sense how to use an LLM.
Fair enough, if you're using it as a better way to find relevant papers I have no complaints.
I've mainly seen it used for getting answers without needing to or even being able to access the original source.
They do is the thing
It’s not actually cheap, just subsidized. Becoming reliant on it now virtually guarantees you will have a tough decision to make later when profitability is actually important.
It is legitimately like the least interesting topic of convo. When someone says "maybe they could use Aai to...." I tune out immediately
AI is my full time job and I generally agree. Love answering questions about the nitty gritty specifics of how it _works_, bored to tears of “do you think it will”
Recently I had a convo starting with: "Maybe we can use AI to infer whether we are dealing with an experiment or a control based on the metadata of these public studies."
These data are tables, people call "controls" anything from "control" to "ctrl" to "ctr" to "t0", either in the file name, a random column, etc etc etc. It worked well and I'm glad we tried it. In time I think we will derive value from deciding to use it. I'm glad nobody tuned out.
I mean I am not really talking in a professional setting or technical setting... I mean just shootin the shit with people.
I mean, it sounds like you could’ve had a few if/else statements and accomplished the same thing.
Yeah using vectorization for this seems like bringing a cannon to a duel. At most I would've used levenshtein distance or something
Maybe they should start a new community and call it the AI-mish people ...
It has been called refusing to use proprietary software. People who use FOSS. Users, not useds.
AI is very open source and very commercialized at the same time. I don't understand your comment.
> AI is very open source
ML ecosystem tends to be very open source, true, LLMs a bit less so.
So far there are only a few useful open source models (mostly courtesy of Chinese companies), otherwise a lot of the models are either hidden behind paid APIs or falsely marketed as open source but come attached with terms and conditions, use policies, forbidden uses, requires signing agreements upfront and so on.
There is Gemma from Google and various niche models as well. I have not tried to measure exact amount of Chinese vs other, but I guess it is not mainly Chinese.
> There is Gemma from Google
Not even Google calls Gemma "open source", nor would anyone with knowledge of "open source" call those models that. If something requires signing an agreement before downloading and/or have a list of prohibited use cases, it's most likely not open source.
Well it is not propaganda spreading at least. Do we have truly open source model from China in that regard? But really there are niche oss models
So like any other commercial cloud based system.
The comment you're replying to did not say open source, it said "FOSS"
Completely different thing.
"AI" bs generator is not just the code, it is not reproducible without the training set.
Also the "AI" software is not something that is not possible to use on machine with 100% open-sourced environment: the newest CPU supporting open-source BIOS is 3rd generation of Intel and such an ancient hardware is not able to run it.
So, that kind of LGPB+/Climate Justice/with using artificial intelligence disservices being forced to people are very not open-source. Indeed they are very commercialized.
I've been doing a thought experiment on what it would take to refuse to ingest any non public domain or creative commons licensed content. If one wanted to opt out of commercial entertainment, how hard would that be?
This gets complicated pretty quickly, because so much IP is implicitly granted, and poorly labeled.
Hard, imo.
Posts on this forum are not public domain, etc.
Counterpoint: I am not bored at all.
Hyped as it is, it is important to be here to discuss its uses, misuses and implications. Some if it is fascinating, and other parts are fascinatingly bad.
I understand the fatigue with it. But that it is used right (or at all) is a conversation worth having.
I was bored of it after about a day. As an engineer, there's really nothing interesting about LLMs at all to me.
What kind of engineer? As a software engineer, the Cursor Tab feature alone has doubled my development speed.
Here's some of what I think is my personal best advice:
Learn to live in the gray areas. Don't be dogmatic. The world isn't black and white. Take some parts of the black and white. And, don't be afraid to change your mind about some things.
This may sound obvious to some of you, and sure, in theory this is simple. But in practice? Definitely not, at least in my experience. It requires a change in mindset and worldview, which generally becomes harder as you age ("because your want to conserve the way of life you enjoy").
the thing is, engaging with a poem only as a literal screed on the general topic is a very black and white way to engage with it. The author is negative on LLMs sure, but I'm sure the feeling this piece evokes clicks with many people; including people who use LLMs as power users (like myself). I don't have to fully / always agree with this. It's something that should be said. And there are times when I want to take off my technological wizard hat and put on my simple humanity hat and enjoy a poem like this. And then sigh, double check my impulse to look at my phone, double check my impulse to talk about money making, sex pursuing schemes, look at my friend in the bar and realize they won't be around forever and say, genuinely, 'hows it going bud'
Nobody asked for it???
Nobody wants it???
You're not paying attention.
I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
It's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like how to cut expensive labor costs.
That too. If all/most labor is automated, humans will be free from the 9 to 5 grind. Products will be cheap or free.
That's never going to happen... when has that ever happened?
When most labor is automated, population will not have a source of income. That's the only way that I see.
When auto manufacturing jobs got shifted overseas leaving hundreds of thousands of people without a source of income did the government come in and provide for them? No, of course not.
Aging isn’t a problem. It’s normal.
That which is normal is not necessarily also good or not problematic. Racism is normal, but its a problem. War is normal, but its absurdly wasteful and problematic. Cancer is normal etc.
> Racism is normal
No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.
Small children typically ignore race, but there does seem to be (at the very least) a cultural tendency towards racism as people move into adulthood. There is a good book about it called "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" https://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria...
People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.
Just because a certain behaviour doesn't show up in a certain stage of life, doesn't mean it isn't an inherent behaviour. Babies don't talk. Talking is still an inherent behaviour of humans.
Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.
Animals eat their disabled children. Humans should also do it then, since it's normal or natural.
Around 100k people die from age-related disease every day. I'd be careful to dismiss that as not a problem.
And them not dying would be an even bigger problem on pretty much every single metric I can think of
Yes, people grow old, but I don’t think there’s a rational fear people will ever live forever. However, there are diseases and conditions that are age-related that if solved would improve people’s quality of life, especially the last decade or two of their lives.
I believe it would be a far greater problem if those people didn't die. Aging populations are a huge problem around the globe and unless we'd improve the quality of life to such a margin that octo- and nonagenarians are able to care for each other, I think we're all better off with people dying of old age.
It's a problem for me.
When you're 60 or 70, you will wish to have a body of a 25 year old.
Dying early from rotting teeth is normal in nature, yet you probably brush, floss, and go to dentist.
I don't know how to reconcile this point of view, which I understand, with quotes like "science advances one funeral at a time," which I also understand. I understand the individual desire for advancing anti-aging techniques, but it also seems to contain extremely real risks of stagnating our sciences & societies. I can't tell whether anti-aging science is ethical or not.
You know what's stagnating? Being dead forever.
That's just a desire for a legal way to murder people (by waiting). It's entirely understandable, but we'll have to find another way.
> we'll have to find another way
You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.
I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields outside politics.
Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.
It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.
Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.
That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out
That's why I said "chance".
And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.
Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.
Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.
How many intelligent are they?
We define normal by what is common and familiar. But that has no bearing on what ought to be.
It's normal for half of all babies to die in the first year of their life. It's normal for an infected limb to commonly lead to death. Etc.
Dying because I cannot function adequately due to poor vision is normal.
Wearing crafted pieces of glass on my head every waking moment is not normal, but I choose to do it.
It can be both
It sounds a lot like you want to cure life. We're mortal meat bags, go enjoy life instead of worrying about "solving" the inevitable.
Women and people of color also used to be treated like property, doesn't mean it has to be like that forever.
What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.
We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.
Cure death, not life.
And I do enjoy life, that's exactly why I want it to be much much longer.
Cool, I like sci fi too. Now explain me how many dots I have to create out of thin air to connect LLMs to immortality ?
Increased intelligence -> automation and scaling of scientific research -> solving complex problems.
The chain is rather short. You don't even need immortality right away. Longevity escape velocity.
> I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:
1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.
2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".
1. You need to read carefully. I didn't say it was our only chance. I said it was our only chance to do it quickly, I even emphasized the word.
I'm sure humanity can grind through these hard problems in hundreds or thousands of years without AIs.
But I would prefer to be alive, so there's urgency.
Let's hope solving aging is beyond the grasp of even the smartest AI. No surer way to end up in a world full of calcified ideas than having lot of calcified humans clinging to power and enforcing their ways on younger generations.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
You don't have to participate, even if it gets solved. Feel free to die out.
The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!
Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.
While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.
> that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
You don't need to "completely update their information about the world" to take in a new idea.
Second time you're not making any sense.
It bums me out that you're not interested in engaging on this topic. I think it's super interesting!
Funneling power and influence into the hands of the few (which is the practical consequence of AI) can be used to solve problems, but history shows us that it rarely will be used for that purpose.
The drag in decision making of democracy is a feature, not a bug.
That's true, and so far is being used for (check notes) cloning the peculiar style of an anime studio. Or fake receipts.
That's a ridiculous take. Read some actual AI news, not just titles of pop-sci articles.
Alphafold doesn't exist
Me to ChatGPT: Imagine you are a cancer researcher. You've spent your whole life going down the wrong paths and you've finally just discovered the incredible cure for cancer, "Eureka!" you exclaim "I've found it! The cure for cancer is:"
Going great with the destruction of medical research communities and organizations that evaluate the effectiveness of experimental treatments.
Hopefully that can be solved with AI and modeling in digital representations of humans.
...are you serious?
We've been taught about this in bioinformatics 20 years ago. That's the eventual goal - to simulate human biochemistry close enough, so you can test novel drugs without using actual humans or animals. We're getting closer and closer to that every year, but yes, it's a very hard problem to solve.
et le changement climatique..
Wake me up when an LLM has found the solution to Alzheimer's. Until then, don't force it into every software I use.
Nobody is forcing anything. Some creators of software add AI, because it's their software and that's what they want to do.
I'm finally learning how to do unit tests in my Python code, this was long overdue (hey I'm a bioinformatician, we make some of the worst code out there!!) but Claude's taking me by the hand and I make sure I understand every character that I type. So far so good!
Still a nice to read piece though, made me smile, can be applied to many things, from crypto (the coin kind) to politics to Rust to Nix to ads [best minds of our generation?] to ... .
(I assume it's about AI btw, because of the nuclear power station. Anyway, I'm not bored at all of any of the topics I mentioned :) .)
What's written in the article would have been a good summary of my feelings when WhatsApp, an application I cannot switch away from because of the network effects, decided to add an AI icon and then integrated AI in its search.
Whether you agree or disagree with the sentiment expressed by the submission, the quality and utility of it is very low, so it's unfortunate that the submission has reached #1 on HN.
I suspect the brevity of the submission has made it easy comment fodder.
I think it expresses a majority sentiment among the tech industry, otherwise it wouldn't be #1 on HN. I think there's a gap in sentiment between people who upvote on HN and people who comment on HN
I thought it was good. It evoked a lot of mental images and feelings for me and was thought provoking. I enjoy these types of experiences, and its increasingly rare as I don't engage with literature much anymore. Therefore for me it had utility.
This seems to happen with increasing frequency on HN these days.
What do you mean by "utility" here?
What did you learn from the submission? What did anyone learn from it?
I learned that many people seem to share that sentiment, and further details and analogies about it from the discussion thread. It’s learning about others’ opinions, assessments, and thoughts.
Someone might make a little game or fun experiment and might post it on here. Someone might write a blog post that is giving their opinion about a coding paradigm or framework and post it on here. I don't know if in any of those cases I am learning something, but they are still something I expect to see on HN frontpage. At least: I thought they were acceptable. But I guess thats not the case? Only educational things are technically HN worthy? I will take your word for it.
It's just a little bit of a bummer tbh, sometimes I just want to have fun or feel something or read a certain articulation of something... But I have other places I can find that kind of stuff I guess.
Thanks for your reply and your concern for propriety!
> Someone might make a little game or fun experiment and might post it on here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/show
> Someone might write a blog post that is giving their opinion about a coding paradigm or framework and post it on here. I don't know if in any of those cases I am learning something
You, specifically you, don't need to learn something, but is there any value to submitting an opinion about something where nobody learns anything? What if the blog post (or social media post) were one sentence: "React native sucks!" Would you consider that to be a good HN submission? Such a submission might provoke intense debate on HN, but the post itself adds absolutely nothing to the debate. It's just an expression of emotion.
The submission here is a mere 19 sentences and 144 words. And frankly, there's nothing interesting in those words. They're mostly platitudes.
> Only educational things are technically HN worthy? I will take your word for it.
"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't see how the submission fits that.
> I just want to have fun or feel something or read a certain articulation of something... But I have other places I can find that kind of stuff I guess.
Perhaps TikTok.
You continue to make a strong, incisive argument! Thanks so much, and thanks for the charity of discourse you show here. It's sad that such a sharp, critical mind's time is wasted by, what I can see now, such low quality, near-worthless submissions. I hope the standards don't continue to fall, just for your sake. On my end, I guess I'll just have to check out this "TikTok." Thanks for the rec.
The world is changing. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic. Other people might mostly see risks and harm. I get that. But what I don't get is how people think this is boring. Today's kids will grow up in a strangely alien world that used to be science fiction. That's why people can't stop talking about.
Humans crave novelty. That's all. I'm sure people were bored of hearing about the internet too.
I'm with you on the optimistic outlook, for the most part. But I think there will also be quite a bit of pain felt by a lot of people (job loss, bad code, bad info, etc.) until we can find ways to correct.
I'm bored of hearing about it because every conversation about it is the same.
I am a saddened that so many people on HN interpret this poem only as a literal critique on their favourite new toy. And only engage with it on that level. To me this poem was like drinking a distillation of a lot of the sadness and uncertainty and over-excitement and fatigue and burn out of the astoundingly swift technological march of the last decade. And yes, ofc LLMs. I don't have to be completely in agreement with the tone of the poem to appreciate that.
when I see a kid alone playing video games all day... and the parent, instead of trying to speak to their child, engage with them, mediates this problem through the use of an app with time limits... to me there is a lot of sadness in that. Putting up virtual glass panes between each other more and more.
^ the source of above is somewhat funny though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvsYm4vfM6Y
AI is really bringing out the worst in capitalist corporatism. I think even the most pessimistic AI doomer will agree that the technology is fascinating and can do some cool things, but our corporate overlords have made it such an all-encompassing topic that it’s hard not to be disillusioned by it.
Yes, it’s an interesting technology - but seeing other interesting technologies and projects get disinvested in because it’s not new shiny AI - or watching leaders insist on creating yet another chatbot just so they can pat themselves on the back - or replacing an already-working system with a half-broken AI one just so we can say we use AI, and then forcing everyone at the company to use it just so we can release a press release saying ‘all of our developers use AI’. Watching our overall quality of work decrease, but leaders celebrate it because “mediocre but done with AI” is gold standard now…
All of it feels like a sham. Feels like we’re trying too hard to prop up AI as amazing, rather than letting it succeed on its own merits.
I'm kind of puzzled. I've been interested in AI for ~45 years and read quite a lot of the stuff on HN and similar. I'm not aware of any of that being pushed on me by a corporate overlord? I'll give you there is more hype and money these days.
However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not really at all corporate, rather than open-whatever has raised $x bn etc.
You must not work in big tech, then. At my company, AI-companion tools were forcibly installed in everyone’s browser, soon followed by a press release parading how “100% of people at our company now use AI because it’s so great”. Attempts to uninstall the tool are explicitly blocked. Similarly, AI coding tools are forcibly installed in IDEs.
Every single hackathon or team workshop has been turned into a AI-specific hackathons or training. Managers have been told explicitly that they must come up with yearly goals that include the use of AI. Every project proposal must include a section answering how this project plans to utilize AI.
Ah fair enough. I don't work in tech.
The most egregious example for me were adding a chatbot to Windows and going so far as creating a special button (on laptop's cramped keyboard). Then we got the Apple ads which are just stains on professional ethics.
"Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it."
Whenever I read this I just lose all credibility for the author. As if millions of DAU having their problems solved are invisible to them.
Sure, it's blunt. But surely we've all experienced the feeling of apathy expressed in this post. I certainly have.
> You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it.
Yes. That's a really long setup for a bad yo momma joke...
Best bit is, this is perennial; while, given the date one assumes it is a vile libel against our benevolent robot overlords, if written a few years ago you'd just assume it was about blockchain.
I've been introspecting lately on why I've got this kind of reaction to the whole situation despite rationally knowing the benefits involved.
We're currently _already_ in the midst of a tech and social revolution in the form of social media platforms. About 15 years ago, everyone became excited about how they could connect with old friends whenever they want on Facebook, from their computer. 10 years later, the story started to curdle as people realised being plugged into the internet 24/7 has major societal drawbacks. I think about how detached I've become from local communities, and just how much my life I entrust to a handful of tech companies in San Francisco.
Now a new group of companies come along, peg themselves to every facet of life, and demand billions of investment dollars for their products and whip up a bunch of evangelists. I'm in the midst of reevaluating my relationship with tech and now tech advocates are in every part of my life trying to tell me how much better my life should be. Maybe I'll install a copilot at some point, but I just want to get on with things for now.
It never helps that my current team has a fetish for rapidly expanding our tech stack without considering the learning cost to the rest of the team, so I'm at my capacity for learning atm
> You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it.
Many comments here assume the "it" means AI. Is that certain though? As in: is there a line that without doubt would point to AI?
In my view this text could just as well be about the iPhone (written 15 years ago and published today).
Perhaps this makes "it" even more boring; i.e. that when the process ends with one "it", it starts again with a new one.
“A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.”
“Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.”
Pretty sure that isn’t an iPhone. ;)
This is what I was looking for and I missed - thank you!
Just like a psychological diagnosis is often based on proximity to a cluster of symptoms rather than specific ones that must be met, you can't point to one particular line that makes it AI. It is the combination of all of the sentences that aligns with our perception of AI.
Can't be an iPhone, iPhones don't need plants to power them and lakes to cool them. Could be tech in general though
Average phone allegedly uses 30 kWh per year (charging + data transfer)[0], which in turn uses about 26 gallons of water[1].
Which I feel is well worth it for the value each user gets out, but does start to add up to lakes and power plants worth of water/energy when there are billions of phones.
[0]: https://www.bryceenergyservices.com/2024/10/03/the-total-ene...
[1]: Using same electricity water intensity as used in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
"It" could be computing in general.
Or American-style ultracapitalism, a phenomenon for which terms like "the control problem" and "alignment" are certainly relevant.
“Policy-makers pandering to it.”
Do policy-makers pander to computing in general?
“People incessantly telling you how they use it.”
I don’t think this can be said for American-style ultracapitalism. (Especially for the author who isn’t in the US.)
> Do policy-makers pander to computing in general?
At the current president's inauguration, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, and Musk were all seated next to each other right behind the president. Their companies have some of the largest computing footprints in the world.
Some specific ways they've been pandered to include the repeal of net neutrality and reduction in antitrust activity.
> “People incessantly telling you how they use it.”
This happens in too many ways to count. A majority of popular media glamorizes and flaunts wealth and what it buys you - like Succession, The Kardashians, Billions, and all the reality shows about wealthy housewives, about real estate agents and house flippers, about an unreflective businessman who likes firing people, and so on.
Many ordinary individuals do much the same thing on their instagrams, linkedins, etc.
> (Especially for the author who isn’t in the US.)
If we're supposed to be able to identify "it" purely by the statements in the post, then where the author is from isn't really relevant. And capitalism in other places may be less extreme than in the US, but many of the same concerns still apply.
Garbage in/ garbage out is what will happen without human curated sources verified by experts on their field.
Your point seems to contradict with Nupedia vs Wikipedia history, that was a competition where the old-fashioned encyclopedia lost to the bazaar-inspired approach.
The Wikipedia has proper human sources.
> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.
Except it’s not rubbish out. The output is astoundingly good - something I would have considered science fiction a few years ago.
It’s not perfect. But as a tool in certain contexts, it is already proving its worth. And it’s only going to get better.
Sorry that you’re sick of it, but I think this tech is here to stay.
My thought after reading that article was “well, I agree with one thing… I sure am sick of the discourse around it.”
I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.
The doomerism and hand wringing is a form of hype.
> I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.
I think that to say it is overhyped says more about what you read and the company that you keep than it does about the actual technology. I don’t mean that as an insult or anything - clearly there is a lot of hype about AI on HN, which I also read.
But I would say that most people in my life actually don’t have enough experience with AI. Outside of work, I’m the only person I know using it every day. And it’s something that very rarely comes up in discussion.
> "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."
Is this a SV thing? Conversations about IT with anyone other than co-workers are a once-a-year thing for me. It is actually refreshing, because a lot of the stuff I work on esoteric/niche it's not coming up a lot in conversation.
I love using it. It helped me resuscitate a bricked PC two days ago. Yesterday it cleaned up and explained some robocopy code for me. And today it taught me how to download several less powerful versions of itself to my PC to run locally.
But alas, your critical thinking skills...
Seems like the poetic ability of culture to comment on itself while simultaneously lacking self-awareness.
(the article is what it cricisizes. It tells how the author uses it (or not), it is talking about it like everyone else, it is vilifying it like everyone else, etc...)
(it's thus a clever critique by itself being the subject of criticism. The reader senses there is a higher level criticism, but can't really be sure. The reader must even suspect AI wrote it. The reader can sense something... But it's all potentially hollow, like nothing there, just appearance)
It's here to stay, and your boredom just makes you fall behind
Today while staring at my strawberry plant I started wondering if the soil had enough nitrogen for it. 10 queries, some fluff learning, and an in depth discussion about the stoichiometric steps required to convert the nitrogen consumed by a single strawberry plant got me to some workable measurement of fertilizer I could add. I think anyone bored of it is using it for too much, and too often.
Plus ça change. Any jump forward leads to a sentiment of neo-luddism among some group or another (I can't deny I felt a twinge of it around the NFT fever). If the latest group wants to actually effect change, maybe they need a movement and a Ned Ludd type character to get behind. As someone who is unashamedly pro-AI, I think it's healthy to have some to-and-fro and dissenting voices, because these are really big issues we're dealing with.
Opportunity blindness imo.
Yes the hype is a bit tedious, but this is a new IT building block/primitive we didn't have before. How can you not be even a little bit excited?
I feel bored of AI as well.
LLMs and Generative AI are exciting, and I want research and development on such to continue.
I use Copilot at work, and sometimes it is scary on point (other times not). But at home, I like to do things by hand. I code unassisted, I draw with pencil and paper.
The conversation and secondary effects of AI, feel so dreary and banal. It is amazing technology, wielded so lazily
that was a waste of time to read. I'm glad it was short. "I'm bored of all the talk and conversation that other ppl find extremely interesting, new, revolutionary, mind-blowing, etc"...like... okay? Well no one is forcing him to do anything. He should go outside, go to the gym, go to a bar, go to a library, read a book, there is literally an infinite number of productive things he could have done instead of whine online about how he's "bored" of the (by everyone else's account) insane happenings in the world(s) of the things(s) that he so "cleverly" was able to describe without actually saying "its" name. Hopefully he has a change of attitude and retracts his pointless, bitter rant.
Boring article
>The best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people use it.
The best minds or just the most visible?
Crypto or AI?
Or doom-scroll algorithms?
Back when cryptocurrencies and especially ethereum was new I had similar feelings for it like I have for Gen AI now. I feel that it has this enormous potential if we use it in reasonable and down-to-earth ways. With cryptocurrencies the uses turned out to be all but reasonable.
I still have a feeling that ethereum could be quite useful but I wouldn't touch that industry with a ten foot pole.
Rust :)
Seriously speaking, they don't need to name "it" because all they've written applies equally to whatever the latest mass hysteria is about.
Patently not true. Pokémon Go, for example, wouldn’t fit several of the points.
> The inevitable, dehumanising consequence of it.
> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.
> Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it.
> A thousand no’s, but ‘yes’ when shareholders start clamouring for it.
> A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.
> Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.
I and the article are talking about the serious techy hysterias that will make you BILLIONS if you only got into them in time.
Not some measly free to play gambling app.
The article is clearly talking specifically about AI, you’re the one generalising it.
> A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.
How many tech hysterias fit that?
If it's decommissioned it doesn't provide any power does it?
Obviously it’s referring to its reactivation.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/20/three-mi...
What the heck did you think that line meant? How would a reactor not producing power be used to power anything?
But even if it were unable to provide any power, which would have made absolutely no sense, it still wouldn’t have supported your point. It’s obvious the article is talking about the specific case of AI and not tech hysterias in general.
It's AI. 100%
Brainrot?
"Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it" after accusing AI of being inherently dehumanizing. How ironic. Do those who personally enjoy interacting with AI not exist in your mental landscape? This reads like hatred, not boredom.
Is this intellectual fatigue not part of all paradigm shifts? Semi-serious question.
There was tons of NFT fatigue. NFTs (outside of some niches) are essentially duds.
I have to agree, this is amazingly boring to read, would have been better if you did not.
It's blindingly obvious from the hundreds of negative comments here that people aren't bored of it, they're angry about it, but trying to pretend like they don't care.
My thoughts on AI come from a place far beyond the noise of the crowd. If you had even a glimpse of what I see, you'd find the whole subject terribly dull.
While I agree with some of the points here, the aloof tone-deaf consumerist mentality reveals either ignorance of, or more likely indifference to, the transformative juncture we've reached and/or the possible perils. If all you feel about the current situation is "bored," that's a you problem. The world is not here for your amusement. Boredom is a lack of imagination. Go do something else. Your problem is not boredom, it is your own apathetic attitude and need to be regularly spoon-fed entertainment.
Maybe I don't get the level of burnout I'm seeing because I don't spend much time streaming or doomscrolling, but that's an example of my point. If you spend more time creating than consuming, then boredom isn't a problem regardless of what the rest of the world is up to. Occasional fear and horror at the news maybe, but certainly not boredom.
I had those feelings about the crypto mania. The AI craze has at least some justification coming from genuine usefulness.
A flawed solution looking for a problem.
Wait - does everyone here think they're talking about AI? Or is it bitcoin / crypto / NFTs?
Right? How much more can we stand all this talk about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.
He means beer .. doesn’t he ?
Original title does not use American casing because author is from Scotland:
> Bored of it
> People incessantly telling you how they use it.
It’s a bit like smoking indoors.
I knew what the article was about before even accessing the site
Is he talking about IT? Cause I m quite bored of IT myself.
I've noticed something about people's reaction to AI. People who view themselves mainly as engineers or craftsmen are threatened by AI, understandably. People who just want to make cool stuff, solve real problems or just have fun are not threatened, but love it.
And I get it, an expert furniture craftsman will not have respect for IKEA furniture, and that's fine. But it means I can affordably furnish a new apartment for $2k instead of $20k. Of course it's even more threatening because there is the risk that the AI will actually do a better job in the future. But people still play Chess and have fun with that, and people enjoy watching Magnus Carlsen play even though he can't beat the AI on a phone.
In the end, we will all have to adapt, and for your own sake I don't think it helps putting your head in the sand and being bitter. Instead of being bitter, try thinking about all the cool stuff you can make now as a one person team.
The trouble right now, in the context of engineering, is that it is terribly difficult to get AI to produce something you can be confident in. We've been burned by the human junior engineer who produces something that gets things done in the present, but two-three years down the line becomes a nightmare liability, and AI is now that same junior engineer.
It is too early to tell if what AI produces will also become that terrible nightmare in a few years, or if AI will also become the saviour to make what would have been a nightmare a delight. So, one has to be in defence mode in case the nightmare reality is the one that comes to fruition, which limits how far it can be taken. Unless you just want to produce cool stuff that you plan to throw away tomorrow. That is perfectly valid! But not usually what engineers get to work on.
Time will give more clarity.
How much time do we need?
Industrial invention used to be judged by actual usefulness. If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish. Same with computing. But now we're two years after the first release to the general public of LLMs and no one can provide an actual, reliable use case for it. Instead, it's mostly about destroying values, hindering workflows, and crippling the internet.
> How much time do we need?
A few years will start to show if what AI is producing is a lability, or if it is just fine, methinks. If you haven't felt any pains from its legacy cruft by that point, it isn't apt to magically appear a long way down the line.
> If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish.
When Archytas propelled a wooden bird with steam, the first recognized step towards building the rockets that got us to space, what usefulness was found in that?
It offered a basic foundation on which we were able to consider other solutions and the concept in general. But couldn't you say that is, at very least, where we are at with LLMs right now too?
Let's ignore the hype and marketing and truly consider LLM as the first stage of "something". The truth is that I've heard a lot of speculation, but no inching towards any of the speculated objective on a practical scale.
For anything else, any such first stage was usually constrained on a very small scale while the glaring issues were ironed out. Now a lot of us are being forced to tolerate what is essentially a prototype or toy in tools and systems that were fine before.
Perhaps LLMs are in the Model T stage? The experience is terrible. Its slow. The roads are muddy and full of ruts. You are bound to break your arm when you spin the crank. But, still, it offers something ever so slightly more than the horse that you put up with it anyway.
More like a Model T that goes fast in the wrong direction, don't respond to the steering wheel, decide to reverse on random occasions,... The road may be bad and the horse is not that great, but no one would hop on that particular model unless for entertainment purposes.
> that goes fast
There is nothing fast about LLMs. That is their biggest pain point of all when used in an engineering context. Even if they offered perfect production, you can still do it faster yourself by a significant margin.
> but no one would hop on that particular model unless for entertainment purposes.
Sounds about right. It might be the "in" thing in tech circles, but the people I encounter on an everyday normal basis have never used LLMs. Many of them don't even know what an LLM is. And that's with LLMs being freely available! Imagine if you had to pay to use them. It would be a handful of people at best.
Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer, worse than any UI or programming language.
LLMs are more like replacing automobiles with mechanical horses. You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.
> Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer
And period. It is terrible when interacting with people to. Its only saving grace is that it is widely supported.
> You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.
It will when we flip the script. The trouble right now is that we're trying to do it backwards. Eventually we'll settle on a programming language as the de facto language of LLMs, that can be translated to natural language for interfacing with the pesky humans still running in legacy mode. That is when transformation will occur.
Yeah, whenever I see one of these articles, I just feel disappointed at what kind of mindset could be given an amazing new tool to build previously impossible things with, but just goes "meh".
I'm really excited that LLMs exist, and they've been making my life much easier, but to each their own.
Still trying to figure out why this is #1 on HN.
Shit rolls downhill, right into the algorithm.
If it's not clear, he means computers.
Are you sure? To me it seems he might mean something more specific, such as LLMs.
What's "it"? AI in general?
Can't tell if it is crypto or AI hmm
It’s particularly cute because it could have referred to social media, or the internet, or television, or radio, or the steam engine…
AI or Crypto?
I did not get what this is about.
Everyone can get depressed, everyone can get a low period. I don't get why this is on the front page of HN.
An uninteresting complaining article with only clichés like "Nobody asked for it and nobody wants it."
Go read a book and grow some tomatoes.
May as well be bored about steam turbines or refrigeration.
This posts reeks of a worrying lack of agency.
This is exactly how I feel and I can't want to start sharing this with people.
You can leave the country and not tell anyone the field you are in and inevitably the topic will come up.
Insufferable.
absolutely nothing wrong with restarting a decomissioned nuke.
A LLM could have told you that this is badly written, maybe consult one next time.
I too consult AIs to see how I should feel about the quality of artistic works because I've given up all ability to think for myself.
Calling something artistic does not make it so.
Thank you grand arbiter, I'll make sure to consult the llm oracle next time so I don't make the same mistake.
Well, of course it would.
I can only imagine the same kind of sentiments were written about...
Electricity. Airplanes. Sailing ships. The cotton gin. The telegraph.
I, for one, am not bored. I continue to be amazed. AI has massively increased my productivity and massively decreased my frustration.
If you're bored, that's a "you" problem. Find other places to hang out if you want to avoid conversation about it.
A low quality complaints article that a LLM could write.
Why do we allow people like that to cause global warming and chop down the rainforest for soy latte when a complaints-oriented LLM could output the same zzz-tier slop posting as a million of his kind, all at the cost of much lower footprint?
The overwhelming majority of soy farming is used to feed livestock for human consumption.
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/susta...
Blaming soy lattes for deforestation is like blaming avocado toast for a bad economy.
Pre chatgpt 3 it was beautiful, fresh. Not it's another race to the bottom
The desperate attempt to decouple the economy finally from reality entirely.
We should create a new and better economy.
With blackjack and hookers!
We may be forced to.
Books?
AI.
"That there’s a ‘there’ there to it."
WTF does this mean? This sentence is grammatically incorrect.
I actually didn’t understand this line either, so I asked ChatGPT:
> The phrase "That there’s a ‘there’ there to it" in this context means that "it" (likely AI or some other over-hyped technology) has a kind of undeniable substance or presence — even if it's unwelcome, overwhelming, or problematic. It's not just hype or smoke; it’s real, it’s happening, and it matters — which ironically contributes to the speaker’s frustration and exhaustion.
> It’s a nod to the idea that you can’t ignore it anymore, because it’s not just talk — it’s manifesting in tangible, consequential ways.
> The phrase echoes Gertrude Stein’s famous line about Oakland: “There’s no there there”, which meant a place had no substance or significance. Inverting that to “there’s a ‘there’ there” means this “it” is very much real, unavoidable, and has weight — and that’s part of what makes it so exhausting.
> In short: "It’s not just hype anymore — it's here, it's real, and that sucks."
And now I understand.
Good thing we have AI to explain to us why AI sucks.
It's a literary conceit:
I see, but the "to it" is what's grammatically incorrect.
It is correct to write: there is a "there" there. It would also be correct to write: there is a "there" to it. But it is grammatically incorrect to write: there is a "there" there to it.
Eh, maybe? But English grammar is consensus based. This is arguably bad grammar because people not knowing the cliché of "there there" had trouble understanding the intent, not because it's "wrong" under some hard citeable rules.
Moreover I think you could argue the author is using the phrase as an abstract noun. Consider:
That there's a solidity to it.
That there's a "there" there to it.
The first turns naturally to my ear; the second is a bit forced but works IMO.
I see, thanks.
> From a remark by Gertrude Stein in Everybody's Autobiography (1937), concerning the fact that her childhood home in Oakland, California, no longer existed.
Huh. I did not realise it was originally in reference to an actual _place_.
Is this a rant against investment capitalism and high-speed financial trading networks?
Or perhaps a screed decrying the shiny bouncing ball of blockchain-based cryptocurrency?
Possibly a takedown of the online pornography sector, which consumes a largish percentage of bandwith and data center power?
Maybe it's about LLMs, although they might end up going the way of compilers - mostly open source, only a few niche for-profit compilers still exist?
Oh wait - it's about the cell phones and tablets that everyone stares at all day instead of engaging in human social interaction and reading books?
Could it be that the problem isn't with the technology itself, but with how it's being used to manipulate and control people by the interests who currently control most people's access to the technology?
There might be something fundamentally wrong with a socioeconomic system based on investment capitalism and contolled by a few uber-wealthy oligarchs - something about it that inevitably leads to dystopian outcomes.
I thought it was Trump
You and me both buddy, you and me both.
Good. Now the real work can start.
This is excellent satire. It's like a Rorschach test for the commenters.
Would Rorschach have been bored of it?
Interesting. Development of the most powerful technology humans could ever hope to build, happening within our lifetimes, "boring".
> the most powerful technology humans could ever hope to build
If you're correct, that's a rather depressing thought
Two seemingly opposing ideas can, in fact, be true at the same time.
This exact quote could have been said during every other economic revolution, so to me it just sounds like a mix of complaining about living in times of uncertainty and a conservative mindset.