Gareth321

It seems entirely disingenuous to tell me to investigate this in earnest and ask ChatGPT for answers, then dismiss it when it didn't give you the answer you wanted. I gave you the model, the effort level, the query, and the summary, which you could use to confirm what I write. I note that you haven't tested this yourself - ostensibly because you know it will return something similar. Further, you either didn't read my comments or are attempting to straw man them, because I have not stated nor argued that religious and government censorship is equivalent today. I also find the implication in your final question absurd. There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change. They are not binary, and I do not believe you think they are.

Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.

Elvis wasn't the one calling for censorship. It was religious viewers - the audience.

I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.

I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.

I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.

> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."

Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.

In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.

Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.

Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.

John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.

Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.

The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.

I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.

No doubt the platforms are a problem too, but I was referring to the creatives themselves. Just a few examples I can remember.

In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.

Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.

Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.

John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.

Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.

The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.

I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.

> Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.

Censorship is bad unless I agree with it. Then it’s good. Stunning levels of thought and reason.

One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.

I don’t mind (within reason), and I think you’ll be shocked by how many people do not care. I self host passwords and keep financial access secure. Otherwise I don’t give a shit if someone sees my 30 year old dong in a picture, my bills, or my bucket list. Have fun!

> Opus is my interface for 95% off my work. I don’t open emails anymore i let it summarize draft and handle most of the work and I only talk to Claude and not read/write the emails myself.

I’m trying to do the same. Could you give me some tips on what works for you?

Mine isn’t. To point: we don’t really have a definition of vibe-coded anymore. All software has some degree of AI enhancement now. Is vibe-coded when it’s 60%? 80% 100%?

Try out Opus 5.5 on high. It’s shockingly good. Of course if you’re trying to one-shot a sprawling application with load balanced distributed DBs, you’re going to have a bad time. For small, defined features, it’s pretty fucking great.

You're going to get a wide range of responses on this but given the improvement in these models in just one year, and the number of bugs they're detecting which humans could not, I suspect that even median vibe-coded software is going to surpass median human coded software soon - if it hasn't already.

The important thing to remember here is there perfect isn't on the table. The benchmark is existing human-introduced bugs vs LLM-introduced bugs. Many developers have encountered odd bugs which a human would not have introduced, while forgetting about all the bugs caught which humans introduced. Or their opinion is formed by models from six months ago.

I am also pretty disillusioned with government right now, and I share your views on common law marriage and alimony, but I see this as one of the few things a government is doing right.

I don't think this is accurate, but perhaps it matters how you slice the data. Women's mental health has been steadily declining across all strata for decades - faster and worse than men's. It's at record lows now, irrespective of whether they are single, married, or with kids. For example, [the UK recorded a 46% increase in mental health issues among women aged 16-64 since 1993.](https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...) Further, when we look at the data between single and married women, [married women in the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) are about 78% more likely to describe themselves as “very happy”, while never-married women are about twice as likely to say they are “not too happy”.](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/08/27/marriage-h...)

The irony with all this data is that as women have achieved parity with men in all kinds of domains, their happiness has commensurately declined. This is one of those hot button topics which most sociologists refuse to research.

I think this is the end of sites where it is expected that only humans may interact with them. It's been cat and mouse for a while, and some places like Reddit sell API access, but these agents are for all intents and purposes, humans interacting with the site. They're going to need to figure out new business models.

Most residential proxies are already far more blocked and rate limited than any Meta IP. The internet is becoming a very weird place, where individual and "trusted" personal IPs are becoming a kind of commodity. Some sites are already scoring IPs based on usage activity - like a credit score. It's only a matter of time until this data is collated and commoditised. AI analysis is turning this up to 11.

Honestly, the levels of desperation and despair I'm seeing in the hellscape that is modern dating, I think a lot of people would sign up for this. I probably would if I were single. It's very similar to how matchmakers work, and they're popular all over the world, and have been for millennia. They're an unbiased and impartial judge and coach. We all have enormous biases and weaknesses in so many ways, and we could all do with help to better ourselves.

The important distinction here is no one is forced to marry anyone. This is entirely optional.

Israel is a notable exception. They're well above replacement, even if we remove the Haredi. Women have full equality. I'm not sure what that means though. That healthy fertility requires constant war? Or that it requires high religiosity?

You continue to soapbox without addressing the content of this discussion. I'll try one more time.

> Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.

You are confidently incorrect. [People widely reported a stifling effect on office relationships.](https://legacy.vault.com/blogs/workplace-issues/2018-vault-o...) More than 1 in 4 said #metoo made them less accepting of workplace romance. 43% considered relationships between workers at different levels unacceptable - 15% higher after #metoo.

> Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.

This has nothing to do with what we are discussing. I understand you have strong feelings about this but I need you to understand that from the bottom of my heart, I do not care about your feelings.

> Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).

No one claimed it was the primary mode of forming relationships.

> This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.

This is one step removed from, "men are stupid, am I right, ladies?" Your disdain for men, the users on Hacker News, or whatever villain you've concocted in your mind prevents you from having a normal conversation like a normal person.

This has been a thoroughly uninteresting waste of time. I suspect you became lost on your way to some protest or /r/Politics.

Perhaps we should blame this on shitty website design. So many of them load huge assets for no good reason. They get away with it because modern processors are that good, bandwidth is cheap, and until now, RAM has also been cheap.

I find this oddly comforting :)

This might be how it shakes out but I don't think it's acceptable, and I don't think white collar workers will think it's acceptable. Taking high income people and making them low income people (usually for life) has a tendency to politically radicalise people. Especially in light of the unprecedented productivity and profits which businesses will experience. People will demand a slice of the pie.

My naive hope is democracy, so we need to defend it.

Yes, and increasingly, data will no longer be a moat either. These models will be capable of creating all the data/content we could ever want. There will always be a market for "organic" movies with real actors, but we should expect the value of that to decline precipitously.

My investment thesis is currently around these strata:

1. Electricity. All analysis shows massive shortages beginning now with no end in sight. Western governments in particular have massively dropped the ball on this one.

2. Chip design and production. Nvidia and TSMC dominate here for a few reasons. Partners required in the supply chain like ASML benefit, but they're not really the bottleneck right now. We're seeing a lot of investment pouring into this space and we'll see competent design competition (especially from Google's TPUs, and potentially from Apple and AMD). Chip fab is very difficult to get right, and takes a long time to ramp up. See the NAND space.

3. AI labs. These guys are doing to get commoditised. They're trying very hard to prevent distillation but I think it's impossible. The open weight models are not far behind, and the Chinese labs are getting very creative about how they work with limited hardware. If anything, they'll decrease inference cost over time, reducing the value of existing data centers (of which OpenAI and Anthropic have purchased an enormous amount). I am very bearish on the future value of OpenAI and Anthropic.

4. Software. So much software. Everyone gets software. The companies which benefit from this will be able to monetise it. Google, for example, might put ads into VERY capable and free AI. People might accept that. Microsoft has been investing heavily into their data centers, and maybe that's their revenue center in the future. Especially securely hosted services. I expect massive growth in this space in the short term. As long as people still have high paying jobs, they'll pay for well made software and tailored services.

I don't think you read my comment before you replied (or the comment I replied to). I encourage you to take another look. It's hard to meaningfully respond to a non-sequitur.

To reiterate, the social cost discussed is the inability for people to form relationships at work. I acknowledge all of the costs of people being harassed at work. That's bad. I hope you read this comment and understand that I am not disagreeing with you.

This is easily refuted. [In 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure. Today is it 63.3%.](https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....) In 1950, 87% of family households were married couples, and only 21% of married women participated in the labour force. Today, 62% of cohabiting couples have both partners working. Households are earning more, but prices rose almost commensurately. If you were correct, the proportion spent on necessities would be far lower.

I will concede that luxury goods are far cheaper, and perhaps one could make an argument that cheap TVs are a reasonable concession for expensive food and housing. I would not agree with that.

If I understand your question correctly, it reduces the value of software to almost zero. Meaning all of the SaaS companies are going to have to work very hard to diversify their revenue streams into value added services. That's going to be very difficult or impossible for most to navigate. Hence the term in the industry "SaaSpocalypse."

Some companies will retain a moat. For example, YouTube holds incredible IP, and until AI can replicate that wealth of content at scale for cheap, it will remain profitable. Facebook has the user critical mass. Increasingly, hardware for inference is going to be a moat. So is electricity.

Which loops back to my comment above: this breaks a lot of the market dynamics required for a functioning economy. Accelerationists are convinced that we'll invent new jobs to replace the old jobs, but I don't think that's going to happen. Certainly not at the pace of change we're seeing.

That sounds fun but this is people paying for real products and services. The demand is there (and it's growing faster than any other commercial technology in history). They just need to work on inference (and potentially training) costs. I think that's clearly achieveable.

For the record, growth plays have been common in Silicon Valley for many decades. It's how we ended up with all the major tech companies we see today. Of course, it's high risk, high reward.

I am in two opposed minds on this. On the one hand, you're correct. Their job will be made redundant in a couple of years. Some senior people might be retained to orchestrate all the agents, but eventually they will also be replaced. And it's coming for all white collar jobs, not just coders. That's bad.

On the other hand, unlimited intelligence democratises products and services in a revolutionary way. Everyone will be able to do whatever they like in digital space for basically free. No more purchasing software. Make any app/company/website/blog/movie/show/game/forum you can think of. This will quickly bleed into the physical space, with real-world products and services becoming logarithmically cheaper. A true future of abundance.

The big problem is going to be our social and economic transition. Are we going to wait until unemployment is that 10% before we act? 20%? How bad are we going to allow things to become before we implement universal high income? I say universal high income because white collar workers are not going to accept being relegated to an income of $1000/month forever. To achieve universal high income requires eye-watering taxes on the major benefactors of our new economy. They won't accept that without a fight, and it our current fractured political climate, what would it take for everyone to agree on a unified direction?

Google stands to lose enormous revenue from people not using search - and we already see traffic declines. It's truly an existential threat for them. Their competencies are in advertising, and if people are going to be using chatbots in future, they're going to have to advertise in their chatbot. That sounds awful to me, but maybe people will be cool with it?

I've had many similar experiences. It's confidently incorrect to a shocking degree. Worse than ChatGPT from two years ago.

I agree. It's much worse than the cheap Chinese models. They appear to heavily bias parametric knowledge and discourage tool use. That's fine for things like "how do I perform CPR?" but worse than useless for any kind of research. [There is one benchmark showing far lower rates of hallucination, so let's see how accurate this is.](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wuj72j/gemini...)

While that's annoying, the other frontier models easily overcome this with appropriate tool usage. I do a lot of research with frontier models and they're very good about identifying where their parametric knowledge is insufficient and searching for the correct knowledge on the internet. 3.8 Flash is HORRIFIC. The majority of the time it doesn't use any tools and infers things from its parametric knowledge. Things which should clearly have implied tool calls. Historical statistics, legal precedent, economic data, etc. I think it's incredibly clear that it has been tuned for speed and not accuracy.

Of course, it's called "flash," and that implies its purpose. I have little use for speed and a LOT of use for accuracy, so I'm hopeful 4.0 is much better. I saw a benchmark earlier today showing that it is much less prone to hallucinations. Let's see.