keybored

On the other hand, I get the sense that the misanthropes proclaiming these supposed facts are quite happy and self-satisfied about it.

> Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?

What this misanthropic/Anthropic-boosting bait is missing is that all of these pieces falling together doesn’t make sense.

1. We are so accustomed to not-even-thinking means that we are legitimately freed from labor and cared for. (The dystopic version of being freed from your labor means that you still have to constantly think to survive. But not in any “economically useful” ways. Surviving for yourself and your family outside of the robot economy)

2. At the same time as point 1, we voluntarily, with all of our leisure time, just don’t think at all. Where is the self-actualization? Where is the spontainety? The drive? Did this in all of these years not come back after being a rat racer/wage slave?

Curiously, the “hacker ethos” here is to create. Not to just “consume”. And that is taken as an intrinsic thing, not just a way to get rich. But that’s not how “people” are?

Other people are mostly like you. But maybe those here who spent their careers implementing Entertaining Ourselves To Death maws genuinely think that “people” (not them though) would genuinely, when left to their own devices and having beeng catered to every need, would just “consume” mindlessly onto death.

Sorry to Goomba anyone here.

> Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture,

All. Take away the “habitat” from an animal and they are helpless, useless, impotent.

Eating the world sounds like an, on the balance, unequal outcome.

It’s just inequality full stop. Trust is a word by wannabe-Bernays polsci people who would just so dearly want the proles to trust their betters, but for some dastardly material reasons they don’t.

A culture where people with 2–3 kids are already swamped with work and obligations.

But how come the fertility rates are low? they ask.

People might be getting fatter or more unfit. Still there are subcultures where people are fit as all --. The commitment is unreal. The amount they can talk about fitness is truly endless. And if you asked them it would be all about character and social milieu. Things might have changed in the last decades, but that’s at best uninteresting facts to them.

More and more divergence, subcultures, while the mean tends towards a bad direction. And no understanding. Because why don’t they Just Do It?

Edit: But I hear that Europe is a large country.

That other Abundance guy writes convincingly that our abundant present isn’t that satisfying. This is also self-consciously a bit tilted towards the author’s milieu. Even the Abundant Class are overworked, undersocialized, and too preoccupied with cheap technological thrills.

You can teach a language model the concept of make no mistakes and how to make no mistakes, but you cannot make it experience the bad consequences of making mistakes that a person operator would suffer.

Modern-day idealistic software manifesto: Just AI sellouts like the rest of us.

> If you’re poor, Europe is better. If you’re middle class, it’s debatably, but probably Europe. If you’re rich, by which I mean you make a few hundred thousand a year or more, America. Obviously.

This is what most Quality of Life America/Europe arguments on Hacker News boil down to. Overrepresentation of rich people. America has more upward redistribution of wealth. Ergo America is better.

> As LLMs generate better code in a higher level language (where better equals fewer defects, and does what you want), scrutiny of that code by humans will naturally drop. Human scrutiny will likely be replaced by something that doesn't exist yet, perhaps some sort of higher-order 'LLM linter', or Lean-esque language or tooling that somehow proves the LLM did the correct thing.

Your “analogy” doesn’t hold up. The scrutiny applied to compilers are done by the compiler developers. Eventually if requirements don’t change the full test suite becomes the oracle. Not because of an attestation from a ghost in the machine but because of scrutiny done, let’s say over two years on a compiler that was reaching feature parity.

This obviously holds for compilers generating correct code since it is so well defined.

And this also holds for the efficiency of the generated code, since that is also obviously scrutinized by compiler developers.

Granted, the venerable LLM and the compiler do meet in a sort of functional intersection where all you can concievably care about is some thing that has a well-defined test for functionality or fitness. In the compiler’s case that’s the benchmark (good enough to not look at the assembly). But then one should go to that example directly and not to compilers in general.

It has to be said a million times. A fully deterministc compiler (or 99.99% or whatever) is categorically different from an LLM.

Hopefully this million plus one mention shifts the right weights around the datacenters.

We’re seeing more and more slippery slope arguments, except the slippery slope leads to human cognitive oblivion and it is actually a good thing actually.

> I just hope that there are more Terence Taos out there than people like me.

Just spare me. Being under external pressure to “ship code” is one thing, but being personally inclined one way or another (no external pressure) is another. And when you think being inclined like that is existentially risk (for human civ?) then, what? It’s just the way you are wired and hopes and prayers that collectively that doesn’t drive us off the cliff?

This aw shucks persona isn’t convincing. Same thing with AI Bros who are (1) making the most awesome tech that has ever existed, and (2) aw shucks hope it doesn’t kill us all in the end.

Every ten minutes of worry becomes ten seconds of relief. Every tasteful delight is followed by three moments of gastric distress. Every fifteen second laugh is built on half an hour of stress/worry/trauma/hurt.

Enjoy every hedonic pleasure. But the balance sheet doesn’t look good even if you always do. It’s either all just a raw deal or we need to look beyond the low- and high-minded enjoyments.

People are saying. If you know you know.

1. Do things well

2. Reflect on doing things well

3. Humbleness about the process (or other meta)

The eternal thug motto: better my boot than the sword of that other thug.

> Be glad our civilization isn't built on sustenance farming anymore.

This decree is by you and what army?

I care a lot more about my gainful employment compared to the everyman being able to create their own... something.[1] That’s very selfish of me, AI Industry, and I’m sorry.

> Would you mind, if you could suddenly, over night, be a carpenter, a watch maker or glassblower?

Yes. If that came with the little-bitty stipulation of being tied to the “compute” property of these AI behemoths.

Of course going beyond that it gets less problematic. Some carpenter-skilled exoskeleton is a lot less problematic than disembodied intelligences spamming our minds and each other.

[1] What exactly? My mind is so saturated with AI tools being literally devtools. On top of devtools on top of devtools.

Well we can finally get back to a semblance of the status quo ante Internetum with something like businesses being able to list all of their contact information on their own websites instead of “see our FB page”.

I can use a worktree to automatically bisect through so many commits that it takes hours. Of course I’m gonna use a worktree or a clone for that rather than let it use “my” worktree. Or I could run tests for a certain setup. Or for another setup. There might be many test setups which test different things.

But I guess to someone those wants indicates “problems” and impurity. “The root problem is that you need to use bisect (i.e. you have bugs).”

It sucks. But yeah. Trillion-dollar industry wants your livelihood. This is but a force of nature.

Whose privilege are you sticking up for here in effect?

We can’t look back with perfect hindsight because both the past and present have deeply ingrained blindspots. They don’t know what it is like to live in a world with perfect edges. We don’t know what it is like to live in a world with no edges. We can read about someone who proclaims that “something will be lost”. We will just think “but I have no need for any of that.” But we don’t even know what it is.

There are many uses for worktrees for people who are more than meat proxies:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31935776/what-would-i-us...

When you are down on your luck

When there is no one to care

There is someone who gives a f*ck

Who can tell you: life is very fair

It is all cause and effect

Have you even tried?

You can make your own life erect

And I’m sorry the soothsayers lied

But I care, believe me it’s true

You child, you fool

Surely the social clubs are not that few

It’s a skill just like shearing wool

The last paragraph was a general extrapolation. Strike it from the record then.

Another convert who can parrot what the detractors said/are saying and that ends with a thoughts-and-prayers socially progressive umm hope this doesn’t exarcerbate hooman differences too much. See you don’t need an LLM to summarize.

The local knitting club and Stanford University use the same flavor of stock/decorative images for their promos and communications.

Can’t believe that the thing that got permanently stale after a month is being put into question. The heresy of it all.

> Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business.

Even the bossman admitted that AI fired his employees, not the boss.

I guess that’s why people talk so much about leadership this leadership that. I’m learning that leadership is when you are the captain of the ship and the ship goes down you man the lifeboat and mourn your sailors over what the Sea did to them.

Yeah I remember the “I fired 75%” getting glossed as how could AI do this to my staff.