mekael

Pre vaccination smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people just in the twentieth century [0], the knowledge that allowed for the creation of just that vaccine is worth hundreds trillions of dollars in humans lives, let alone all of `the knowledge and experiences those people were involved in.

The knowledge that created the Haber-Bosch process [1] helps to sustain the majority of the world's populous, add another five hundred trillion dollars for that just to start with.

The creation of the printing press and all written information that allowed it to be built provided dissemination of knowledge beyond the ultra wealthy and is worth a non-finite amount of money.

LLM's are cool math, but they are less than a rounding error in comparison to even the tiniest sliver of human knowledge and technological output.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35143880/ [1] https://cen.acs.org/food/agriculture/The-industrialization-H...

I’m thinking asking the same lines, but also looking into research / lab chemist so I can hang out with my best friend. If im going to change careers so drastically, I might as well enjoy the company.

There are already scores of people capable of building biological weapons or doing GOF work which ends up being essentially the same thing. There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students. [0]

All of which, rogue actors have easy access to and could have accomplished for a few millions dollars anytime in the last decade.

And yet, we aren’t drowning in our own blood while our organs liquify, mainly because building and releasing such a pathogen isn’t something people want to do as it’s pure and utter insanity. For those who are inclined to do so, they would do it regardless of whether they had an llm or not because they are, at the end of the day, zealots.

[0] https://universityresearchpark.org/uw-madison-scientist-allo...

That’s because it is. And not even well presented propaganda.

We align humans via the propagation of morals and ethics, primarily through parenting and social pressure.

May i ask what industry youre in? Also, how’s the winter in SLC?

Sir, this is a Wendy’s

Some of us have always had a class consciousness, we just tend not to be boisterous about it.

Mine is based on two things:

1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate.

2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.

I'm 99.9% sure that everyone is AI in that thread.

I mean, I've done that for a couple of things, but probably 90+ percent was vendored libraries and javascript which could be ignored. Sadly, this is not one of those cases, and Im guessing yours isn't either?

I've found that engineers on a large team do read every line, mainly due to the fact that the skill levels run the gamut from intern to lead, and only 1 or 2 people out of 12 might have knowledge of the application being modified.

It's actually getting worse due to "AI code bloat", for example I have 16k lines of code to review across 3 apps by the end of this week. Normally it would be a quarter of that, but what Claude produces is extremely verbose in some places and anemic in others, and I can't tell at a glance what's right and what looks right with that much ground to cover.

There’s communism the theoretical idea and “communism” the application.

The twentieth century was neither, but just authoritarianism wearing a trench-coat.

That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.

But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant.

I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.

Tell me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem without telling me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem.

Also, in your scenario, the genie is used undermine all of human thought, destroy the ability for people to support themselves in the current economic system (which is in and of itself horrific already) , and is making people consider / commit suicide. Thats not a genie, thats a demon.

As a society we already know how to make the lives of everyone better:

1. Stable housing

2. Access to safe drinking water

3. Access to food

4. Access to healthcare

5. Access to education

6. Stable governments

The EA community has so many "ideas" about what would help, when all they need to do is focus on those six and the world would be as close to a utopia as you or I could hope to see in our lifetimes.

I legitimately thought you were kidding about the shrimp welfare initiative, but after looking it up I was more infuriated about EA than I normally am when it comes up. I can think of several causes which would be better served with 3 million USD, and all of them take care of human beings. Living, breathing, intelligent human beings. These people should not be in any position of power or taken seriously ever.

Im unsure as to how "it's clear that AI is going to make that possible".

Things that help kids learn

- parents who love and care for them

- stable housing

- stable access to food

- stable access to high quality eduction provided by a human being

- stable access to healthcare

None of those are provided by AI, and never can be. The only thing that will is a thorough reimagining of the society we live in.

Note: This is all predicated on living in America, and I pre-apologize to everyone who doesn't.

Years ago i slid down a bannister at a dance club, caught my foot, flipped over backwards, and landed on a barstool. Having grown up poor as dirt, i knew that calling an ambulance would be at least a grand if not double that. I called an uber to take me the 15 blocks to the hospital.

Total cost was 70 bucks (10 bucks for the uber, 60 for the er copay).

The number of people here in the US who use uber as an ambulance is waaay higher than you would think.

At the end of the day doesnt that just end up being universal healthcare but with more steps?

Which one?

As an aside, i read this, gave you an upvote and then went to check your submission history and saw that I’d kick your rep over to 2222. Congrats!

Ive mainly been outputting them to high fidelity jpegs and then stuffing them into a cbz for portability. Works well went im reading on my ipad. As for the others i had them sorted out about a week or two after i decompiled the original binaries.

I’ve definitely kicked myself a few times for not posting about them sooner, but the fear of pissing off CondeNast tempered my willingness to show off

Interestingly enough, i’ve been sitting on a project for the last 12ish years where i just took the FMloader lib and used that from C# to turn the djvu files into pdfs. All that was needed was a decompiler and an hour of banging my head on it. I published some of the results a few years ago but need to go back and actually build out a full app.

Neat fact, those kind of conversations are already happening at ${DAY_JOB}.

Depending on the size of the market in your area, or the market in general, not giving two weeks is effectively blackballing yourself. The city I work in is small enough I might have trouble in the future after leaving a manager in a lurch or burning a bridge.

Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.

Ummm. Plenty of people starved to death as a result of the industrial revolution.

Ive paraphrased it before and i’ll paraphrase it again

“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”

- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).

There are several quite decent open source CRM’s they could have deployed just as rapidly and easily. For example, years ago I lead a team who stood up SuiteCRM in six weeks where the build/customization was three days and the rest of the time was negotiations with other divisions about integrations (i work at a pretty large company). Last i checked it cleared half a million records with the only downtime being during a weekend patch cycle.

You have no idea how many times I’ve asked “why are we not using the project generator” or “why did you write 200 lines to parse a csv? Here’s a library and five lines to get it done” in the last year. Its easily up 20x compared to pre ai, and getting worse.

I’ve worked for companies with less than that in total personnel expenditures (100ish people) and they were actually economically productive / provided a tangible service. With 15 million and a year(ish) I could spin up dedicated teams to build multiple profitable applications. That sounds like hubris, and maybe it is, but i’m pretty confident given my domain knowledge.

Has everyone gone crazy?