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"Critiquing the current system" on its own is nearly useless. Literally everyone can do it. Yes, articulating a more workable system is hard, that's why it's actually meaningful.

Thank you, now this is a solid answer. I don't think I agree with everything in it entirely, but it's well written and certainly gives me a lot to think about.

Yes, we've all heard this a million times. I'm afraid you've still given zero actual solution or even anything approaching one. "A radical break" okay, a radical break from what? How? To do what differently?

> and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube

I don't disagree with you at all, but doesn't this go against what most people are claiming in this thread (that Meta products are uniquely engineered to be addictive, to a significant degree)? Hacker News doesn't have any especially "addictive" features. They don't make money off this site, there's no ads, there's no personalized algorithm, no promotion of ragebait, etc. Yet plenty of us use it day after day or find ourselves distracted by it.

Youtube is more obviously addictive, but it's hardly social media. It's just media.

Meta has done a lot of harm in the world, don't get me wrong, but I think people are stretching a bit when they act like none of these technologies would be addictive on their own if not for the company's design.

> I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.

This has been bugging me damn near every time people talk about this stuff. Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.

And I'll be the first to admit that finding a "solution" is hard! It's almost like it's an unprecedented technological change! But could we at least be honest and admit it's hard, or are we just going to keep making fun of anyone who tries to talk about it and then do nothing?

Sigh. What can you do, I guess.

Fair enough. Thank you!

> GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft)

It's questionable whether those two companies care that much about piracy, they make most of their money off enterprise, right? For a while I heard it theorized that Adobe and Microsoft largely let people get away with it, since it still keeps them in the ecosystem and therefore makes them likelier to use those products at work. Versus Bambu which probably still sells mainly to random hobbyists/home users

Looks dope, though I'm surprised, is Tailscale fine with their DERP servers being used by non-customers like this? (Yes, it's a Tailscale project, but doesn't require login.) I vaguely assumed there was an auth step before you could use one as a relay. They mention a rate limit, but still

> Today, though, almost everyone carries either a contactless credit card or a phone with an NFC wallet. I would pay $0.25 for access to a clean public toilet if I could swipe one of those instead of having to carry change.

This is one of those things that gets ruined by credit card transaction fees though, right?

It is kinda depressing that after all these fintech companies and society's ~decade long scam-filled obsession with cryptocurrency, we still don't really have a good solution for microtransactions. Credit card companies still take that fixed fee everywhere, right?

I more or less just wrote "never say stuff like 'good insight' or 'you're right to push back', and avoid addressing me directly, just answer questions". I'm sure there's better ways to write it, but meh, it seems to have worked well enough

There is a wide gulf between not caring about your work at all and getting angry about it. Plenty of us care about our work and the projects we own, we want them to be solid and will stand up to defend them. None of that requires getting angry about it.

There's even levels to anger, and I don't think this author is referring to venting annoyance or expressing politely to someone that they did something wrong. "Oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years" anyone would get annoyed by that, it's only human. There are plenty of ways people express annoyance. Throwing a fit over it and screaming at your boss or coworkers is just dumb.

(Yes, of course I'd get mad if someone started doodling in the corner of my painting. I'd also get mad if a coworker went on my computer and deleted files at random. These are contrived scenarios that don't apply to 99.9% of regular office work.)

I often hear stories from more toxic workplaces about engineers yelling during meetings, insulting and degrading each other, etc. That's the kind of anger that's unproductive and largely unwarranted unless you're literally working on a life-or-death scenario (which some engineers are, but the vast majority are not).

And that's really what it comes down to. For the overwhelming majority of software projects, it's just not that deep. You mention "artists and craftspeople" but even for them, it's really not that deep. Artists and craftspeople go through tons of abuse, annoying clients, etc. and they don't respond to it by flipping their shit and getting mad. At the end of the day it's just a job, we can value it, but it's almost certainly not important enough to be worth getting angry about.

I'd seen it around but assumed it was an effect of how you prompt it or something. And figured people were overexaggerating a bit when they complained about it.

Nope, I just tried it out myself recently and... wow. In the very first conversation it started glazing me about being right to push back, having the crucial insight, and something something the load-bearing-whatever.

So yeah, I'm on the same page as you, how on earth have they not fixed it yet? Do people like it? I added a system prompt to tell it to stop doing it and it's helped a decent bit already. ChatGPT/Codex has some annoying bits of prose but it never did this, so it can't be that complicated to get rid of.

I mean, having said what I said, we are literally in a thread about the future of mathematics being in question because LLMs are solving advanced problems. I feel like the "stochastic parrot" meme is a bit outdated by now. The bots' output may be annoying to read but they're clearly onto something, whether we call it "understanding" or not.

Someone just brought up this point to me a few days ago on here, I'm definitely increasingly convinced that it's one of the main reasons (maybe even the main reason?) AI prose is so annoying to read through, and so rarely seems able to convey true understanding. It assigns the same narrative importance and dramatic tone to everything (the load bearing whatever, the crucial insight, the smoking gun) even when it's trivial.

> I wonder why it had to be built near so many people

I can't read the link either, but at a glance, the first one wasn't. It's in clearly industrial land a long way from any houses, with its closest neighbors as far as I can tell being a steel mill, a few existing power plants, and a wastewater plant.

The second one is practically right in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods, and for that, yeah, I want to know as well. I'm guessing the land was cheap, industrial-zoned, and near a substation?

(Not to excuse what Musk is doing in either case - it's fucked and has wide ranging effects. But I think it's important to clarify the first because I've seen a repeated trend of people acting like a new DC is going to be built in the middle of a peaceful picket-fence neighborhood, and then you look it up, and it's actually being built on top of a former steel mill a mile away from the nearest house. It gets annoying.)

> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business

In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful.

We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone.

I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.

Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before?

I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever.

On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.

> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want.

I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK.

Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.

I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.

Nope, not at all. Was just curious what you were using it for that was so unrelated to computers, but what you said makes a lot of sense

Makes sense. Thanks for the post!

Genuine question, what are you spending that on? The $20/month ChatGPT/Codex subscription has largely been enough for me as an IT worker.

> They have an incentive to pad everything and to never lower costs because their budget will be lowered otherwise.

Sure, but in the absence of widespread corruption (which until now, the US has been relatively clear of) they don't just get to go home with that budget in their pocket. They're still paid on standardized pay scales. Any extra budget still gets spent on the actual org or project, with the exception of random things like travel or office supplies.

The contractor takes home every extra dollar as profit.

I don't disagree at all that neither system is perfect, of course, but just saying.

I mean, I might be missing something, but isn't part of the idea with cloud infra that you can scale down as well?

Large orgs with significant demand might go out and buy local LLM hardware, but most businesses probably don't want to bother dropping $2k on a box with a beefy GPU and would rather just pay the lowest subscription tier so their employees can occasionally make queries.

Plus, you know, the whole economies of scale thing. Local LLM has a lot of privacy and independence benefits, but I'm not really seeing the world where it becomes more energy- or cost-efficient to buy your own hardware (and use it 1% of the time) versus sharing a giant machine, or even the same machine, in a datacenter (where it has a much higher utilization factor).

That's wild. I knew he was the circuitjs guy which is impressive on its own, and vaguely knew of the other simulations as well, but writing zsh as an undergrad... Wow

"People with a criminal record" sort of implies that they were criminals before the whole Flock thing and are angry at Flock because they are criminals.

Regardless, I'm not sure where you're going with this. The Tiktokers actually going out and cutting down cameras are probably 0.01% of the "vaguely mad at Flock/ALPR" group.

I was thinking the same. RISC-V is certainly impressive and I'm glad we have it, but the original article isn't wrong in its complaints either.

It definitely could have gone with a less abrasive tone (as entertaining as it is), so it's no wonder it's getting some pushback.

Lol pretty much everyone I've seen talking about Flock is a terminally online nerdy type (myself included). The people I see protesting it in the news and such are either similar young privacy-minded people or boomers. I don't think either of these groups tend to have criminal records, nor that there's a grand conspiracy of petty criminals working together to get rid of Flock, the one superhero that would defeat them once and for all.

Maybe it's easy to work people up about it because people don't like being monitored.

I agree it's not all equivalent and some of it is useful, but people have clearly made their voices heard that they think blanket license plate recording is excessive and makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps society will listen.

> How is an LLM summary really any worse than reading through random blogs, forum posts, or reddit?

For me it's that I find LLM prose annoying to read through, so if it's anything I want to really sit down and learn about, I prefer a proper blog/forum/etc writeup. But yeah, for quick summaries it kinda does just work at this point, fairly reliably and rapidly. I'm pretty confused by the attitude as well.

Sorry, I misspoke there. I do occasionally use it for outright word definitions (and in that case I find it more useful than, say, dictionary.com because my search bar defaults to it, it usually defaults to the most common definition, and it puts it in more easily-readable terms) but I more so meant that I'll use it for quick inquiries, often just to get a sense of what a thing is. For instance, some random recent searches:

  - cloudflare workers free tier
  - tubular lock
  - hasl finish
  - js null coalesce

For all of these it gives a perfectly acceptable result. So does the top search result, and if I want more info I'll click through to it, but it does the job of a summary just fine.

I'm not saying it's the best thing in the world, I'm just generally surprised by the amount of people that seem to hate it. It seems to do its job fine for me.

Sure, I've done this for more complicated questions and sometimes it reveals flaws. But I don't use Google for anything complicated. Generally it's just to get a quick vague definition of a term, pretty much.