Acidified oceans, poisonous air, and frequent multibillion dollar extreme weather events are a small price to pay for a purely hypothetical $2,400 off my next car, which I am forced to own because the same companies that lobby against climate change regulations are the ones that tore up all the public transit infrastructure that would otherwise allow me not to own a car at all. Americans love getting fucked by our corporate overlords, we can’t get enough of it, it’s our way of life.
The US seems culturally ill-equipped to deal with this reality. We have encouraged several generations of people to channel all of their talents into maximizing their individual income, regardless of externalities or impact to their community. There is low trust and minimal social reward for giving back. We idolize the loudest, most ignorant voices only because they are wealthy and famous. In my own work with the next generation of tech workers, this seems obvious. The younger generations see it as a zero sum game. You only win by making as much money as possible, and the ends justify the means.
Here’s the difference between US and Europe: in US tech, productivity gains due to AI will lead to lower employment and higher expectations for the remaining employees. Salaries will remain the same and any increases in profit will of course go straight to the capital owning class. It will continue to be great for a vanishingly small number of people. On the contrary, Europe’s “socialism” makes them well-prepared to deliver the same level of productivity with AI using more people working fewer hours. And their “socialist” attitude toward where that value should go will result in an increased standard of living for everyone. You know, like the AI utopia we’ve all been promised.
I think they should. Let’s kick off some meaningful economic growth in Europe and provide a counter to the increasingly hegemonic, anti-human US tech oligarchs that have reaped all of the financial rewards of algorithmic radicalization and surveillance capitalism for the past 20 or so years. Maybe Europe can imagine something better.
Maybe having an endless runway isn’t such a good thing; when you don’t have real constraints at play, you can afford to waste more time on ego and drama.
As time goes on, tech seems to become increasingly detached from the lifestyles of normal people. AI friends, automated gift-giving, sunglasses you can talk to. Nobody wants this — it doesn’t meet people where they’re at and resolve real friction in their lives — but billions will be spent convincing us otherwise.
Maybe this is a side effect of tech workers themselves becoming more detached from the rest of the population. You are statistically unlikely to get a job at Google or Meta if you were not cultivated from day one as a high-achieving box ticking grinder. Anything that does not contribute to TC maximization is unimportant here. Beauty, human experiences, and other such intangibles are irrelevant in that worldview.
SV didn’t used to be this way; there were all different manners of perspective and smarts, which led to genuine innovation. Now we are dominated mostly by a hybrid of hyper-efficient, paperclip maximizing engineering and sociopathic MBA share price optimization.
Interesting that this thread mostly consists of people sharing vibe-coded projects they themselves made, not people sharing other people’s projects that they’ve found useful. The latter would provide higher confidence that the project is actually impressive. It’s the IKEA effect for software.
How uninspired are we that the best we can hope for is to be served popcorn by robots? I look forward to a future where the mentally ill in Los Angeles don’t live in tents by ditches; where blue collar migrant workers aren’t snatched off the streets or racially profiled; where human dignity takes precedence over money for a few people. Sorry but it is not possible to separate any Musk project, however benign, from the reality that he is a force for evil as far as human dignity and flourishing are concerned. Enjoy your rollerskating robots.
That would be a very difficult study to design. How do you know with 100% certainty that any given post is AI-generated? If the account is tagged as a bot, then you aren’t measuring the effect of manipulation from comments presented as real. If you are trying to detect whether they are AI-generated, then any noise in your heuristic or model for detecting AI-generated comments is then baked into your results.
Bit of a motte and bailey. Stitching living people into a human centipede is blatantly, obviously wrong and has no scientific merit. Understanding the effects of AI-driven manipulation is, on the other hand, obviously incredibly relevant and important and doing it with a small scale study in a niche subreddit seems like a reasonable way to do it.
As far as IRB violations go, this seems pretty tame to me. Why get so mad at these researchers—who are acting in full transparency by disclosing the study—when nefarious actors (and indeed the platforms themselves!) are engaged in the same kind of manipulation. If we don’t allow it to be studied because it is creepy, then we will never develop any understanding of the very real manipulation that is constantly, quietly happening.
Pretty cool that the EO cites a stat from the National Assessment of Educational Progress as evidence of the department’s failings, without acknowledging of course that the NAEP is administered by the Department of Education. I’m sure the problem will vanish once we no longer have the metrics to track it!
Evidence can probably be given one way or another whether or not DEI impacts performance of an operation (my hypothesis is that it doesn’t and it’s just another boogeyman). All it takes is research. Though even if it’s rigorously demonstrated one way or another, few will care. The guessers are in charge.
You’re just downright uninformed then. See, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey Perhaps you consider it a fad because increasing visibility in Western culture/resulting culture war pushback has just now brought it to your personal attention. Just because you haven’t personally noticed them doesn’t mean trans people haven’t existed for hundreds of years in different capacities all over the globe.
Beyond its immediate appeal to the (somewhat cringy imo) “uncensored model” crowd, this has immediate practical use for improving data synthesis.
I have had several experiences trying to create synthetic data for harmless or benign tasks, only to have noise introduced from overly conservative refusals.
Fair point! 30 min is probably not enough. When I was able to maintain a routine similar to your own, the baseline was indeed better (and the days without were much worse). Best of luck in finding/maintaining the right balance for you.
That a rule-based system is able to outperform a generalist model on a highly-specialized task is not exactly surprising.
What is missing from the discussion (and this is no fault of the paper—this isn’t their focus) is how much cost and effort goes into building the specialist system, vs. using a generalist model.
In the past year or so, arxiv has become more of an advertising platform than a scientific resource. The title of this “paper” makes that quite clear: their company URL is right there!
I’m on Bluesky and tried to get my friends on there too, but without much luck. I don’t find myself using it often.
In my opinion, the problem with Bluesky is that it assumes people want old Twitter/social media back. Beyond their protocols (which the vast majority of social media users do not care about), there is little innovation in the UX or platform. Old Twitter had its moment, and was relevant for a time. But the ship of the last 20ish years of social media has sailed, and people either want something new and different, or they’re ready for it to go away entirely.
> Becker believed that when companies have a big profit cushion … they have the latitude to indulge the personal biases of their managers … At Google in the 2020s, it means creating AI apps that refuse to draw White people in Hitler’s army.
I’m not so sure about this bit of analysis. It falls in line with the (somewhat conspiratorial) view that these organizations have some kind of woke agenda that they want to push to the masses. A far simpler explanation is that the managers have no personal agenda other than to mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies in what can happen when these types of systems are open to the public. It’s not a matter of some manager trying to erase white people—just a sloppy attempt to mitigate the risk of a flood of articles about “Google’s New Racist AI”. Since we don’t have technical solutions to these problems, however, we just swing the pendulum in the other direction; hence, the current flood of articles about “Google’s New Reverse-Racist AI”.
You can’t win, really. As soon as you put something like this into the public, you have people doing ideological pen-testing from every angle. And there is a dearth of technical solutions to this problem.
There seems to be a false dichotomy here, where you either 1. go to school or 2. start a business fresh out of high school. At this age, a person’s frontal cortex has not even finished developing, and yet we culturally treat the moment as a final decision point that determines the outcome of the rest of one’s life. Thiel seems to sell this as option 2.; the final defense against “woke” is to abandon the institutions entirely and forge your own determined path like a little 18 year-old John Galt. But depending on how one uses the resources, it may actually provide a third option: to fuck around and experiment for a little while with low risk of life-ruining failure, while you figure out what it is you actually want to do with your life. This is a privilege afforded to many in non-US countries where gap years are the norm, or where family wealth and connections can accommodate it.
Why should someone’s present self be defined by things entirely out of their control (e.g. childhood trauma)? You seem to assume that “obnoxious people” and “traumatic backstories” go hand-in-hand; on the contrary, some of the most obnoxious people are those who have never faced anything in their lives other than minor and routine inconveniences. Neither person is inherently superior to the other, I’m just saying that I’d personally rather not work at a place that selects exclusively for “perfect” people along a metric unrelated to their job performance.
This interview style seems bound to create a psychologically enmeshed workplace with no healthy boundaries. Or a workplace full of people with charming, easily-shared backstories and nuclear families but no yucky problems. Would not want to work here, personally.
Funny how much these invisible hand types rely on unfalsifiable claims to make their point. “Would have happened anyway, 100% positive of this”. Oh for sure dude.
The burden of proof always seems to fall on people who live in reality.
Why can something so simple and unobjectionable happen in other places but not the US? Your knee-jerk response is the same as my own, but I wonder to what extent the apathy/cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Do you really think it is convenient being homeless? The majority of people who are homeless have experienced levels of abuse, often beginning at a very young age, that are unimaginable to your average “well-adjusted” person. How high functioning do you think you would be if you were constantly beaten and raped as a child; if you were raised in an unstable environment full of constant violence; if you were exposed to addiction at a very young age? These things lead to severe mental illness – many homeless people, for instance, have been in states of constant psychosis for so long that it is nearly impossible for them to organize their thoughts enough to complete even basic tasks. Some people are so far gone that no amount of mental health support would help them.
You argue that the policies are ignorant of incentives; I’d argue that you are ignorant of how truly differently a vast portion of the homeless population experience their existence on this planet. Your mental model of the incentives doesn’t apply to a population who don’t function the same way you do. It is not convenient being homeless, and making it even more difficult will not solve anything.