Anamon

> We shouldn't be bullying people delivering trillions of dollars of value to society.

Surely, you mean trillions of dollars of negative value?

Sounds plausible. In Germany, which is on the list, the show runs in syndication on ProSieben. They have their own VOD service and people can probably stream it there.

The people I always loved working with most were the ones that were relentless in their PRs. But I understand it's a culture that's difficult to achieve. For one thing, I think it needs teams that are relatively stable long-term. It can be challenging for people to not see professional criticism like that as personal attacks. Much easier if you know and have a feel for the people you work with, and you go have lunch together after the disagreements in the PR. Everybody benefits, including the customer, but it's a work environment that's increasingly more difficult to maintain.

> Does anyone solder their own microchips at scale anymore?

That comparison doesn't work because up until now, it was only the execution we automated or optimised. Now, we're trying to outsource the understanding itself. No one hand-crafts a microchip, but we know how they're put together. We can debug and improve the process. The suggestion now is to just trust the magical statistics machine and not care that the artifacts become unfixable and unreproducible if and when the magical machine fails.

> If companies want to compete in the world of AI generated code, human code review has to go.

This is a HUGE non-sequitur. It only follows if by "compete" you mean producing more LoC. How often does that translate to market fit or economic success?

This is the mindset that makes me want to leave this industry immediately. Somehow, an industry that already annoyed me with how much "mediocre is good enough" was an acceptable stance, with the emergence of LLM coding tools suddenly decided that "absolute dogshit is good enough" was just as acceptable, as long as everybody else is also fine with eliminating the few quality standards they might have had.

I was going to add this, had I not found a comment already mentioning it =)

The font kerning also usually tends to be way off, making the all-caps even more difficult to read.

I don't see this as inevitable at all. Voice as an interface has so, so many downsides. Privacy, inefficiency, making noise, fatigue, requirements to the environment, not to mention that at least I personally have many times of the day during which I really, really don't want to speak. In almost every circumstance, given all possible choices for input methods, voice would be dead last for me.

> currently changing multiple industries entirely

Four years in, I'm still waiting for a single example of this oft-repeated claim stated as fact.

The only industry I have first-hand experience in is software development, and LLMs are certainly not changing that "entirely". The implementation of quick, throwaway PoCs, maybe, but that ain't an industry.

I already am.

Even research is boring now. The drive towards understanding has almost entirely been replaced by throwing carp at the wall and seeing what sticks. "Researchers" publishing solutions they don't understand, developed through a process they can't share any insight into, solving problems nobody ever asked whether they are worth tackling.

This truly is the most boring, underwhelming timeline in tech and research that I could ever have imagined.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt given the point of the article, and the rest of it was fine, so I also believe it was meant as a joke.

A bit ironic, too, because the same article later quotes polls where a majority of respondents said they immediately stop reading an article and any future ones by the same author if their LLM detector goes off.

That's not true. Copyright applies whether the author says so or not. By default, anything you find on the publicly accessible web, you are NOT free to reuse.

That's why the GenAI companies try to talk their way out by claiming training is "Fair Use". It means they acknowledge that the materials they use are copyrighted and not legal to reproduce without a license.

You can download it and re-upload it on your own site. And that would be an example for something that, in almost all cases, you wouldn't be allowed to do (unless the creator explicitly grants you permission).

I don't think the point is to just create as much content as possible, either. The term "content" alone implies lack of quality.

IMHO, any LLM output is, and systemically forever will be, inferior to human creative output, if not entirely worthless. We can scale and industrialise the production of slop, sure, but who wants that and to what end? We're not getting the next cultural movement or artistic masterpiece from these systems no matter how often we pull the lever of the regurgitation blender machine. Because human intent is the whole point, and without it, there is no reason to make any of this.

I agree that it should be about creating the most value to the consumer. As a consumer, the value I get out of LLM writing or art is almost always exactly zero, and it makes it that much more difficult for me to find the things I would see value in.

Then the natural born humans should also be liable for any criminal acts the corporations founded or run by them commit.

The fact that they don't is crucial, and probably the very reason why the concept of corporations was invented.

That's a lot of optimism about the quality of LLM summaries which, just going by my own experiences with them, I cannot share.

The part about collating all human knowledge also reminds me of the optimism on the early Internet. I miss having such a positive and hopeful outlook on things, but again, can no longer bring myself to truly believe it. Maybe I'm just getting too old.

What I see as the most likely scenario is that for most users, this collation of knowledge will remain behind the oligarch gatekeepers, who can and will manipulate the output to suit their interests.

I know, I know, open models and such, but I don't see those making any dents against the oligopolies. People will still go to Google or OpenAI. No non-nerd is going to self-host a niche model, and the on-device inference most people will be using will be based on models provided by the same, manipulative oligarchs.

The degrading of Google's search result quality is actually a good indicator that this are heading towards more manipulation rather than unfiltered access to real, original human knowledge.

How do you see a possibility of avoiding model collapse? It seems to me to be an unavoidable consequence of two facts I consider pretty much irrefutable:

1) LLM content can at best be as good as the source material it was trained on. That's the upper bound. "Out of distribution" output of LLMs is mostly unusable.

2) LLM-generated content increasingly drowns out original content, online and elsewhere.

This spells "monotonically decreasing content quality" to me.

I find Kinsella's argumentation extremely weak, and his defense of it (e.g. his AMA) entirely unconvincing. Unless you susbscribe to a number of very daring assumptions which, in my view, do not at all track with our reality, his ideas just don't hold up.

That being said, in this scenario of yours, how much of that additional work do you figure would be actually original? If someone wants to make a living with music, why bother learning an instrument and writing songs if nobody can stop them from just recording someone else and selling that?

That's really the heart of this lawsuit, isn't it? If we give freeloaders the right to legally monetise other people's work, we will drown in bland, derivative, stolen garbage and drive out the actual creators, in the process also breaking the "business model" of the freeloaders. A real lose-lose-lose situation which I see as much more realistic and believable than Kinsella's libertarian dream world.

Not much need for extrapolation, either. We can just watch it happen right now. "Content production" on the web is definitely exploding, as per your point. But even in the mainstream, most people will agree that this flood of new, LLM-generated "works" is worth less than the originals they're sloppy pastiches of.

And it gets less likely the longer each use is.

I also doubt this. When I observe people out in town, most of them stare at their phones non-stop. To get to pick them up that often, they'd first have to put them down every now and then.

Not all of us are past that. Touchscreens have a variety of downsides that I think most people simply don't think about too much and put up with, and physical keyboards a number of benefits that people aren't aware of because they've been out of fashion for so long.

Less on the device and more on the keyboard. On Android, you can install third-party keyboards like any other app, and there's a wide range in quality. The default Android one is decent, but not among the best.

I've been strictly a Sony Xperia user for almost 15 years now, and Sony had its own keyboard app early on, which they later discontinued. Swipe typing on the Xperia keyboard is still the fastest and most precise I've ever been able to write on a phone, nothing else ever came close. Then they stopped development and moved over to a Microsoft keyboard, I think. I've never found another keyboard that did swipe typing as well as Sony.

I dislike haptic feedback a lot, not least because of how noisy it is.

There's also something to be said about touch-typing. Even though it was slower due to T9, I miss the dumbphone days of being able to type an error-free message without ever having to look down at the keys.

Not sure about the key waterproofing of this phone, but not being able to type out in the rain is another thing that really makes me dislike touchscreen typing.

I don't remember if it was the Commodore or some other phone, but one of them was explicitly advertised as a "second phone", recognising that banking etc. will probably be a dealbreaker for many.

The way I imagined it is that I'd still have my main smartphone at home and maybe for office days at work, but bring the other one when I go out, to visit friends or family, etc. Being out and about is where I think not having the attention-grabbing and distractions is most important. At home, I feel like I personally can control it quite well myself.

It's the very idea of having two devices instead of one that still keeps me from these things, though. Even if I only ever had one with me, that's still about twice the work of maintenance, updates, remembering to charge, having two lines...

I don't like the general dismissal of environmental concerns around LLM use as "doom-mongering". There was some miscalculation or misunderstanding around data center water usage once, and now this keeps being used as a supposed knock-out argument. Water consumption, however big of an issue it may or may not be, is just one of maybe a hundred ways in which LLM proliferation is amoral and anti-environmental.

The same bugs me about cars. Suddenly, driving cars is cool and modern and unproblematic again, because the market is switching to electric engines. As if fossil fuel consumption was the only thing environmentally problematic about building and driving cars! It's not, not by a long shot.

The environmental impact of LLM use also has to be considered in light of the wasteful ways in which they're being employed in general. Sharing and reusing has gone out of fashion. Millions and millions of LLM-assisted programmers, for instance, or now re-inventing and re-implementing the same things, in the most inefficient way, because that's more profitable to the oligarchs than actually collaborating and building on each other's work.

> A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there

Can that be true?

I've read at some point at which speed on average the sound of tires on tarmac will be louder than the sound of an engine, and it was a surprisingly low speed. I don't recall the exact number, but I remember that it was below the average in-city traffic speed (save stop-and-go averages).

This definitely matches my real-world experience. I can't usually make out engine sounds in passing traffic, because the tire noise is so freaking loud. I certainly couldn't blindly tell electric from ICE by sound of a passing vehicle at, say, 40 or 50 km/h.

> you just can't beat the efficiency.

High-rise buildings are extremely inefficient compared to low-rise buildings, in pretty much every dimension except amount of people packed per area.

I just had a horrifying flashback to the Creative Labs driver download page... some wizard-style abomination three levels deep, nothing just a simple link.

Still, the archive was complete and you'd end up getting what you went there for, so still infinitely better than the average experience today.

> Bill was in charge of MS at the time

No, he wasn't anymore.

My favourite bit was this:

> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?

I don't subscribe to that absolute of "everybody".

Counter-example: me. I define enough money as not having to worry how to pay rent, bills and food, and being able to do spontaneous purchases without thinking too much about if I can afford it. I'm at that point with my medium-high middle-class income, and I don't want to earn more. I probably wouldn't refuse if it was offered to me, but having more money than I do now would also very likely make me feel very guilty. I don't need more, and I'm already in an incredibly luxurious position that I feel pretty conflicted about because of how much it was all down to luck.

I suspect most of my best friends, who are predominantly about as not-rich-but-comfortable as me, feel similarly. Otherwise we probably wouldn't be such good friends.

Indeed, the most authentic memories you have may be the ones you never think about.