johnnyanmac

Are we simply trying go back to 2019 and pretend these are fancy Markov chain generators? I think even the most anti-AI folk have moved beyond that.

I see the government continues to try solving impossible problems in the shadows. A pity.

Aww, I was wondering if I was just looking at an older version. How disappointing. But I suppose, unsurprising given the conversation here. I'm sure such transitions would be bringing a surprising amount of instrumentation down.

It still probably is as it is now. But there's better arguments to support localization than transitions.

>LLMs are not image generation models.

If you do not want to be called a duck, it would help if you stopped quacking like one. Maybe you aren't a duck, but you aren't helping your case with stories like this about how AI generates images.

In theory, sure.

1. Only use open source/CC compliant assets.

2. Acquire rights/licenses to any datasets that do not fit #1. e.g. the Google deal with Reddit for 60m/yr.

3. Offer programs to have creatives willingly submit their data, with some sort of residual output based on the number of times their assets are sampled.

4. If all that is still not enough, hire creatives to create assets for you. This is something Spotify did recently with "ghost artists"[0]. The intentions here are suspect, but a non-consumer facing artist providing work for an LLM wouldn't have the same ethical dilemmas

5. Lastly, if all that still isn't enough: governmental programs to either provide grants, subsidies, or more outreach to get the ball rolling.

Would this cost tens, hundreds of billions of dollars? Yes. But clearly, that was not a barrier to entry for the industry anyway. So we can chalk this down to the personality of leadership or the wider culture of modern big tech

[0]: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

>“I don’t necessarily disagree with you about AI ‘art’, but in my field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the creative output—AI presents very real productivity gains”

Being able to prove such gains in better products would be a start. And an emphasis on how it assists existing engineers/mathmaticians/researchers, not that any accomplishment made with AI assistance is "AI solves problem".

I don't know whatever happened to "words are cheap". I guess it literally made money to say words, so that adage is false for the time being.

>I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets

Well if all those scam job ads paying 100/hr to create AI training content was not a scam and instead the approach from the start, there may have been a chance to bridge that gap ethically. The industry chose to break things and is trying to act mad that people are mad at all the broken stuff.

These results are entirely a consequences of the actions chosen. And I don't believe there was ever an honest consideration of there being ethical training datasets. They just thought they could brute force society with fearmongering and bribes. The BOTD was already low in the beginning but completely gone now.

We call it a "watermark" when a machine "signs" its work. And I wouldn't be surprised if its required as a part of AI disclosure in the coming years.

>I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

And then people wonder why the default mood of AI is so pessimistic. It's just revealing all of society's broken windows and adding a few more in the process.

>Not everything has to be pretty all the time. Functional works, too.

Pretty is user engagement. User engagement is money. So for our current environment, yes. It has to be pretty.

yeah I bought it for Ps3 way back in the day. mindblowing seeing that on PSN when some 6 years prior I was playing it in the middle school computer lab.

>The people who need to most think about performance are those making the frameworks and languages.

Yes. I am not a web dev, but I tend to fall into that category in my domain.

>Why are bloated electron apps so easy to make but building native cross-platform apps with similar ergonomics hard?

If you want to be blunt, it's political. Each OS wants to ultimately build its own moat, so there's less incentive to come together and make a standardized solution. Then Linux is a less centralized OS that makes theoretical cross platform support even harder. Cross platform applications get made despite that friction to fill the obvious demand.

The why's of which cross platform framework wins is hard to say. It only becomes obvious that whoever breaks out tends to win more, and it gets a massive flood of support, funding, and clients. So it snowballs up. Those who don't simply struggle to stay relevant.

Electron likely wins in the market aspect that bloat isn't enough friction to turn off a modern consumer with a modernish (10 years or younger) desktop. And it especially doesn't matter to phones (which tend to skew newer).

For traditional philosophy, perhaps not. Or maybe it's a hyper conservative looking way past their own generation and trying to take us straight to the 1880's. You can argue either: it's a wide net after all.

>I don’t want to have to know about memory training.

And then we wonder why apps are getting so much slower and bloated. That's fine if you don't want to think that low level, but someone needs to worry about performance. And others will need different needs for defining a duplicate in their different use cases.

That's not accidental, anymore than human language itself is accidental. APIs are designed very intentionally, and a good API's parameters have architectural reasons behind what they include (or exclude).

Even your example has unintentional complexity. A 'duplicate'? What's that? Do we compare the memory it points to? Through use of a custom comparator function?by an id or tag? APIs and entire languages are designed around how we define such seemingly simple terms.

Ultimately a language, be it a programming language or human one, is about communication. I find there to be value in knowing how to communicate effectively, even if employers increasingly disregard the value of such knowledge. Without it, we'll quickly find out why it's fundamentall quickly.

I hate that I'm in deep enough to know what you mean. It really harkens back to an article title that keeps popping up in my head.

"I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers"

curation is very expensive (in time) and nearly impossible to do without already being a SME who knows what's good/bad content. I have spend weeks trying to piece together curriculum for a "free" learning path on some topic I desire to learn. It's exhausting.

In that case, why not just find a good Udemy course after maybe a few hours of research and throw $11 at it when it's "on sale" (I hate the psychology there, but that's a whole other bag of worms) when I just got back from paying $12 at Starbucks?

Of course, I'm not a web dev and don't need full books whenever that tech inevitably comes my way. I love books for my own domain, and several of them are well worth their weight in gold, since all the amazing tech out there isn't just freely available to view with an inspector.

I constantly get dragged into web tech from tangential projects. I still found it valuable to take the time to learn Electron (and update my front end knowledge) properly to do a port of an Electron app for a slightly different context.

I used AI to extract the raw frontend structure of the app because I know I can't design to save my life. And I still need to tweak it quite a bit because the interface was always janky (a desktop app but content is overflowing everywhere, and it definitely can all fit in a typical full screen view). But the act of structuring that stuff into a modern framework and hooking up the logic will still come down to me.

Economic headwinds and the collapse of tech labor would definitely impact people's willingness to learn tech, especially on their own time with books/courses. I'm not sure if it's enough alone to cause yearly 50+% declines, though.

AI for sure impacts ad revenue. It's an absolute mess trying to measure proper web traffic anymore, and it' been shown quite a few times how AI summaries in search impact page clicks.

reminds me a lot of my learning process. I read fast, seemingly picked up concepts quickly, can answer some sample questions. I felt fairly prepared, and honestly most classes were a breeze with that.

Then, for better or worse, I was pushed to honors and AP classes in high school. The same methods didn't work there. Things got more abstract and I needed to connect multiple concepts together. Math drills turned into word problems that revealed weaknesses in my older math fundamentals. reciting facts from a required reading wasn't enough; I needed to know what that meant and understand the setting of the book.

My grades suffered and you can argue the "academically optimal" way would have been to not take so many advanced classes. But those experiences definitely helped me to critically think better. Eventually (My English and History appreciation would come much later. Math and Science trained me well).

It is also a shame how much the quality of the teacher can affect this experience and perception of education as a whole. I wonder if those enthusiastic to replace the teacher ever had one that fit their needs?

>But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to.

It's a real shame a leader of an education company doesn't value the actual learning process. Those "low value" processes are the building blocks to understand and master high level concepts. I'm not spending my day to day thinking about the low level memory allocation in my job, but that knowledge and work helps immensely in how I approach the higher level assignments and wider architecture. And I still kick myself because my assembly knowledge is is only 1.5 semester's worth.

And yes, I still look up how to construct an array in C++. Not really because my memory is bad (okay, kind of), but more for the practice of reviewing API's and parameters and maybe making new revelations. I probably knew internally some 12 years ago I could set an initial capacity in one of the array's constructors. I didn't really "understand" the value in that until one random work day 4 years later as I was working through some in-house container packages.

You can even say that doesn't matter if you know what resize() is, but it's those little bits of learning nuggets that builds you up from a "fine engineer" to a "great engineer". Less the knowledge and more the work ethics built to obtain it.

>LLMs with HTMX and plain old CSS and JavaScript (maybe Typescript) is the future.

1. LLM webpages in my experience have definitely not gotten simpler, nor load faster. It just pushes out more of the same junk underneath without any of the oversight we'd give a human

2. I'm not even sure the webpages are the big resource hog anymore. Chromium itself has had the reputation for eating RAM for well over a decade at this point.

3. In many ways, we did this to ourselves. In the name of shipping faster, we (or perhaps the executives) outsourced solutions that would sacrifice the simplicity of the code for "more mainainable, cross platform" frameworks. Electron was a solution for software companies not wanting a dedicated Windows and Mac (and perhaps Linux) team. React was a very specific solution for one of the largest websites in the world, that the rest of the industry adopted as a trend.

In this case, we're in a video game where holding the brake button has you shift into reverse. We've very clearly been moving backward as of late. Maybe let off the brake bhtton for a bit?

Shame the brakes are so selective, as well. Suddenly the friction all disappears when it comes to data centers.

I don't think you two are disagreeing. It's just that the reaction to government surveillance should not be "Big government is all bad, vote in someone to shrink it". It's "outlaw mass surveillance and keep big government focused on serving the people". It's amazing how Reagan's propaganda remains so effective 45 years later.

Immigration is such a consistently used tool when a scapegoat is needed to distract from the economy. It's almost boring how typical the reaction is, and is a shame we still fall for it centuries later.

Pretty good video showing just a few of the examples through history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdAmhumeoLQ

Conservatism is surprisingly simple on the surface. "promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values". That's it.

The real legwork is on "what are these institutions, customs, ans values we want to preserve"? And if you dig deep into US history, you realize that such benefits from traditional values were not equally distributed. So it's rather easy for me to reject the philosophy in this context of the US.

That simplicity is also why conservatism can be said to have no true convictions nor aspirations. It's in the name: it exists to look in the past, see what things are there, and say "I want these things!". But there's a lot of "things" in the past, so this philosophy could be extended to include practically anything. I could say "taxing the rich" is a conservatism perspective and simply point to corporate tax code from the 40's-70's.

So that's a long-winded means of saying that this quote is surprisingly accurate, at least for my country, when looked through the lens of history (the very lens conservatism uses).

for classical liberalism? No, not in particular. One of the defining totem poles is precisely "equality under the law".

Now granted, modern US Democrats are not pure liberals. But on the purely opposite spectrum, it rejects this notion. At least in theory.

>The knowledge isn’t copyrighted and, thank god, cannot be.

We copyright knowledge all the time, what do you mean? Those are called patents.

>I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that.

Yes, hence why I'm baffled people are fine with billion dollar companies DDOSing the internet so they can contain knowledge in a black box. And literally destroying some knowledge in the process.

I guess "hackers" also gladly give up freedom for a bit of convenience when it suits them.

> yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.

Fortunately this is very slowly starting to crack. Maybe not from social pressure as it deserves, but litigation is finally starting to catch up with the tech and some recent court rules have started putting some simple yet major compromises on Meta. We're talking "need to remove likes" levels of major.

I think these are still in appeal (or have already settled), but I'm keeping a close eye on this.

I did wonder about that. It mentions that lower-income individuals have less friends and thus throw less parties. But part of me wondered if that was precisely because they lacked the space to host anything more than a few friends over. Someone in a $2000/month studio apartment may not have the time nor money to try and host anything to begin with. And given costs these days, even the thought of eating out and meeting with friends is difficult.

I was in marching band (so I played at all the games). Is that not normal?

I guess it's just a generational thing, but my late Gen X mother was simply busy. Army drills twice a month will do that. I also concur with other responses that these were all social events anyway, so it's not like I was yearning for Mom to be there.