anon7725

Yep - I’m firmly in the “first half of the story” camp.

You’re certainly able to sus out everything about my worldview, knowledge level and intentions from my one-sentence comment.

The only thing that LLMs are at risk of subverting is the livelihood of millions of people. AI is a capital intensifier, so the rich will get richer as it sees more uptake.

About copyright - yeah, I’m quite concerned for my friends who are writers and artists.

> You'll get left behind with these takes, it's not smart. If you don't care about advancing technology or society then have fun being a luddite, but you're on the wrong side of history.

FWIW I work in applied research on LLMs.

> If that AI is worth more than a dime, it will recognise how incredibly efficient humans are in physical labor, and employ them instead of ”doing away“ with it (whatever that’s even supposed to mean.)

AI employing all humans does not sound like a wonderful society in which to live. Basically Amazon/Walmart scaled up to the whole population level.

There is a difference between “being useful” and living up to galactic-scale hype.

> Tiny models are unpersuasive, as expected. But once a model is large enough to generate coherent sentences, persuasiveness kinda...stops.

People are persuaded to change their opinions based on social proof, so this isn’t surprising.

> it's hugely beneficial to our species.

Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.

I drew a comparison between “iterate and fail fast” vs “lots of upfront design” as a personal process, rather than a company’s modus operandi. For instance someone might do 2 or 3 prototypes when tasked with delivering a certain feature in order to explore the problem space.

Of course it’s a non issue for big tech.

Is it curtailing the total employment across the industry by affecting smaller firms that may be on more of a defacto cash basis in their planning?

Big tech are the beneficiaries of legislation that primarily suppresses employment in smaller firms.

Not to mention the IRS section 174 changes to the deductibility of software engineer salaries. It was a gift to huge tech employers in that it provided head winds against hiring in SME tech companies.

This union last initiated a strike in 2008 just as the financial crisis hit. They were in a weak position and didn’t get a good deal.

In 2009 Boeing decided to build the 787 in a non-union factory in SC instead of in Washington.

A few years later (can’t recall exactly - it was around 10 years ago), Boeing cut the pensions for new workers. The union was not in a strike position at the time.

In the last 5 years the company has pushed forward with the 737 Max program with all of its problems that you’ve likely heard of.

There was a leadership crisis and a new CEO is starting. They’ve made a big show about recommitting to Washington.

The contract that was voted on this week included a headline raise of 25% over 4 years, but buried in the details was the elimination of a 4% annual bonus.

Sounds like there is a generation’s worth of grievance to sort out, and this being a fraught moment for the company, the union has decided to press their advantage. More power to them. This could have been avoided if the company leadership had a long-term approach to management and employee relations.

> A 25% raise today is not the same thing as a 25% raise over the course of 4 years.

And is also different than 25% over 4 years while also removing a 4% per year annual bonus.

There are plenty of us in our late 40’s and above who work as IC engineers.

There must be a difference between the stress experienced by a financially independent CEO and a marginally-employed gig worker.

One is the stress of essentially playing a game or working on a challenge and the other is existential.

IIRC the GLP-1 drugs have a black box warning for thyroid cancer, as well as some other potential side effects.

Still, I think NNT < NNH all things considered.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here, but I will note that even if you think you’re the world’s greatest Spock-like rationalist, you still have beliefs.

I guess the difference is that there is a social dynamic at play between a student and an instructor. The student may tire of some aspect of the relationship before they tire of learning the material.

For example, unless the instructor has some kind of Jedi master level self control they may begin to show frustration at being asked the same question repeatedly or with minor variations.

Plus it has detailed files.

Everything else being equal, you almost always win when buying a house in inflationary times. Even if you pay a high initial rate you can always refinance to a lower one later. If rates stay higher for longer than anticipated your income is most likely rising as well. In either scenario your debt service expense is trending down as a percentage of your nominal income, and your asset is trending up with inflation.

> If it's actually just the seeing of a musical instrument being crushed that is so upsetting, then what are we to think of the countless instruments thrown in the trash after our elementary school kids give up on being guitarists, drummers, trombone players, or violinists. Why do we even let a 7 year old touch a violin if only 1 out of 100 ever play a level that isn't torture to listen to.

This reminded me of an interesting documentary from the LA Times on the LA Unified School District's musical instrument repair shop.

https://www.latimes.com/shortdocs/la-short-docs-the-last-rep...

> debt for housing, which is a depreciating asset in normal times (housing wears out, land may become more expensive) is not a great idea, but it has been normalized and when you have negative real rates & inflationary policies, as we had for over a decade, it can make a lot of sense

Has there been a 20 year stretch of time in the US in which housing is broadly a depreciating asset?

Seems that land is definitely, and housing for the most part, an appreciating asset over time due to scarcity.

There are lots of ways that stock in food and energy companies could go down while prices go up. A drought or pipeline disruption come to mind.

A couple of other good points vs Canada: most fixed-rate US mortgages don’t have a prepayment penalty, and many offer the option to “recast”, which means you can make a lump-sum payment and reamortize your loan while keeping the rate and end date the same. This has the effect of lowering your monthly payment and is often used as an alternative to refinancing if you’re buying and selling a home in sequence.

> We're not on the earth to "do great things" or "achieve progress" or any of that crap. That's for people who have some special enthusiasm which the rest of us need not share, or, as Bertrand Russell says, for the elite who want us to labor for them. If one builds one's morality or sense of virtue on doing stuff one is a self-whipping slave and probably ready to become a slave driver for other people too.

Thank goodness there are people who do build their morality on "doing stuff": surgeons, cancer researchers, etc.

Some people innovate, and some (most) maintain. A healthy society needs a spectrum of endeavour.

I think our fundamental problem is that many of us do work that does not feel meaningful, and it seems that a lot of meaningful work is not respected and compensated as it should be.

It’s a piece in the popular press. People connect more with writing that is evocative rather than something that reads like a navel-gazing journal article or TPS report.

As a species, we’ve never been paid more or worked less.

There are multiple dimensions in the latent space that is contemporary white collar management.

One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others.

Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization.

A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation).

A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership).

A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored.

If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today.

This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.

I work on cutting edge stuff involving LLMs for big tech. I’m paid well. My work has essentially no real-world utility as I define it - materially improving something important for at least one person in the real world.

Engineers like the ones you describe have more positive impact on the world in one day than I have had in the several years that I’ve been doing this.

I often dream about leaving big tech entirely and working solely on legacy software in an overlooked but important domain.

I guess the grass is always greener and all that.

Keeping a transit system that is relied on by millions of people running seems like a very useful endeavor.

The problem, for an engineer considering this path, is that the gig ends before you want your career to end.

Execs can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent

> the greatest technology the world has ever seen?

Give me a fucking break. Seriously, people.