notanastronaut

Master painters hated the first cameras. It was not considered art. People who use a DAW in their bedrooms aren't considered musicians by the classically trained. But think of the importance of Earthrise by William Anders. Or even Skrillex. He may not be your cup of tea, but he got paid (net worth estimated to be $70 million).

Each advance in technology lowers the threshold of entry into any hobby or profession. And the people who "paid the price" or "did it the hard way" resent people who find a way to crowd in without all the suffering and sacrifice. It's a very valid feeling. It won't stop innovation, however. We're just stuck in the middle of the transition phase and it's going to be a bumpy ride.

When a person reads content that is more attuned to their political 'norms', it tends not to register as political information at all. When they come across opposing views, it creates friction, gets stronger attention, and becomes memorable. It can lead to the perception that "HN is extremely X biased" in either direction, based on who you ask.

Everything is political. It is impossible for it to not be. But it is easy to forget that when someone is espousing similar views, then the politics is just background noise and tuned out.

The same entrepreneurs who use public infrastructure, right? Like transportation, utilities and physical systems, internet and telecommunications, the legal system, limited liability, money and banking, capital markets, an educated workforce, nationalized science and R&D, public health, emergency services, commercial standards, trade infrastructure, national security. Let's see, there's also land and property administration, environmental infrastructure, the entire labor ecosystem.

Let's not leave out bankruptcy protection, emergency lending, industry bailouts, disaster assistance, government procurement. Oh, and the Federal Reserve standing behind financial markets to prevent the entire credit system from falling to crap.

I'm pretty sure every entrepreneur took advantage of nearly all of these publicly paid for infrastructure to get where they are, today. There would be no spoils for Brin if not for all these things. Things that taxes provide.

Or by having more money/power than the legislating body of the area you live in. I could gesticulate around broadly in a more frantic fashion, but my point should get across.

The ratio of billionaires to regular people is about 1 billionaire for every 2.67 million people.

I wouldn't trust leaving my wallet around in certain areas and I certainly wouldn't leave my intellectual property around certain people, either.

I'm curious, does that balance the harm out?

I actually prefer if whatever comes next does not include #5. I'd rather Project Gemini stay the way it is versus every website trying to browse my local storage, troll my localhost sockets, and use any scripting, to be honest. For me, personally, as my own choice, HTML+CSS and no scripting, especially third party scripting, is my kind of WWW replacement.

And this might be unpopular here, but monetizing the 'Net (advertising) is what got us in this Dystopian Digital environment in the first place.

Some could say with how quick one is to judge everyone against the lowest common denominator, that such decision making skills is itself, lazy.

The language of this discussion is interesting.

For those arguing for red button pushing, the dominant register is intelligence and rationality. Terms such as "dumb", "idiots", "unintelligent", "naive", and "irrational", are used to describe the blue button pressers. White knight shows up more than once, as well, along side of "hero complex", "suicidal", "collective suicide", "suicidal empathy", "virtue signaling", and "gambling".

Then there are terms for the red side such as "safety", "rational", "dominant", and an appeal to game-theory.

Lastly, there is the accusatory angle, stating blue pressers brought it onto themselves, are psychotic, and "weaponized empathy".

For those arguing for blue button pushing, the overall register is complicity and harm. "Murder" occurs a lot, "genocide", "mass murder", and "kill". All accusatory terms.

Then we have "empathy", "mutual aid", "collective consciousness", "trust and cooperation". And end up with blues calling reds "sociopaths", "ultra-capitalists", "selfish", "violent", and "cynical".

Blues repeatedly invoke the vision of a world with no empathic people left and that red pressers should be "vilified and excommunicated".

There's also a strong hint of class and politics undertone in the red language that doesn't show up as much on the blue side. Religion, rural vs cosmopolitan, etc.

To me, the only heroic action possible is to be a red presser intellectually but empathy pulls them to risk it all for the blue pressers. Everyone else is just entrenched in finger pointing and identity politics.

Red pressers may be the majority. Are there enough of the heroic types of red pressers to save the blue? Who knows. But red pressers need to be keenly aware it is realistically impossible to get 100% of everyone to press the red button, so blue pressers will die without any aid.

Which would you press knowing that?

>>However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.

Unless you're a billionaire* or a CEO firing off memos where you fire half your company's workforce.

u got to be powerful to puond out a txt this way and have ppl still listen to u.

Otherwise, it is getting dismissed because 'you didn't put enough effort into the comment, so I'm not going to read it.'

That is amusing to me.

*Reference to the analysis performed on the Epstein emails and texts.

This. Anthropic didn't really have a choice, at that point, short of killing its company and closing its doors ahead of time.

"Pentagon officials said the Defense Department is planning to keep using Anthropic's tools, regardless of the company's wishes."

NPR - Hegseth threatens to blacklist Anthropic over 'woke AI' concerns

Clearly the threat to go to Grok was just a bluster, which says volumes about what the admin thinks of Grok vs Claude.

There is a sentiment around tools and a particular business sells perfectly fine, cheap, one use tools, for those jobs that you'll only need to do once, maybe twice. But if you want a good quality tool, you spend money on it and buy it elsewhere.

That's how I perceive vibe programming. A small one-off job that it would literally take me longer to write than to have generated? Perfectly fine. For anything else, there are professionals who get it done.

>> it seems you've fallen into the "Russia is our enemy" propaganda trap.

Well, we did have an entire decades long war about it. That we magically assume ended November 9, 1989 but doesn't look like it really ever did, for them.

Продолжай, товарищ

>> We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.

I mean, I had unfettered access in the 90s. And look at how well I turned out?

Wait, don't answer that.

Oh the irony in this comment. A lot of QAnon nonsense is actually credible, now. It's just not pointing as many fingers at the people it lead people to believe.

You're not alone in this line of thinking. While "AI" has its perils, it strikes a nerve on people who previously felt comfortable in their jobs. Worrying about AI is a privileged position, while poorer people cannot afford the luxury to do so.

How many people have lived or had a loved one saved due to automobiles?

We have the benefit of hindsight but we're also making judgment calls looking back on fuzzy recollections, forgetting just how the past used to be before an innovation came along.

Don't forget, the camera also destroyed art and put artists out of a job. Then digital cameras ruined it for the film industry. And on, and on.

I found that unpredictability to be interesting. I'm doing super simple projects with these models and a year, or even six months ago, it would give me a block of code and as soon as you ran it, it would fail. And you'd have to paste the error in and keep going until it was smoothed out.

The other day though I asked for something simple and it one-shotted the problem. To me, that's new.

I know this success was a statistical outlier, however. I grok how to use it and to not trust it. I'm just shocked so many people smart people fail to understand it.

Much like the epidemic we're going through of "everything is fake", every comment that even has a whiff of these tells will automatically be dismissed at "AI".

I've find myself doing it, a time or two.

We're in an era of Disaster Capitalism. Some of the richest people have realized they've nearly extracted all the money they can gain on the current trajectory of nations and came to the conclusion they can make even more money if they destroy everything and then are the ones to rebuild society, their way.

Fallout's storyline from the live-action series, where Vault-Tec dropped the first nuke and started the apocalypse simply so they could wipe out the competition and rebuild later, is a little too on-the-nose.

It's got to be hard to find the right balance, what works for most users, and somehow include those who have workflows that involve using a rapid temperature rise as a way to signal a control. <xkcd1172>

Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/active helps filter out the new article spam? It's where I start, anymore.

There's a reason prohibition failed miserably. Humanity has a drinking problem in the age of fresh water availability.

I think something a lot of people miss out on is that we're not all the same. We all have different internal thought models, whether it is a biological difference (ADHD brain?), educational differences, and overall abilities. And it seems a lot of people have this idea everyone uses "AI" the same way. That's a lack of lateral thinking. Making assumptions we're all burning "calories" in the same way implies we all think, and work, alike.

We are not alike.

>The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.

It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.

Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.

I'm in the same boat. There's a lot of things I don't know and using these models help give direction and narrow focus towards solutions I didn't know about previously. I augment my knowledge, not replace.

Some people learn from rote memorization, some people learn through hands on experience. Some people have "ADHD brains". Some people are on the spectrum. If you visit Wikipedia and check out Learning Styles, there's like eight different suggested models, and even those are criticized extensively.

It seems a sort of parochial universalism has coalesced, but people should keep in mind we don't all learn the same.

ETA: I'd also like to say learning from LLMs are vastly similar, and some ways more useful, than finding blogs on a subject. A lot of time, say for Linux, you'll find instructions that even if you perform them to a tee, something goes pear shaped, because of tiny environment variables or a single package update changes things. Even Photoshop tutorials are not free of this madness. I'm used to mostly correct but just this side of incorrect instructions. LLMs are no different in a lot of ways. At least with them I can tailor my experience to just what I'm trying to do and spend time correcting that versus loading up a YT video trying to understand why X doesn't work. But I can understand if people don't get the same value as I do.

"Abundance of books makes men less studious" - 15th-century Venetian editor, Hieronimo Squarciafico

I'm a big fan of annual contracts versus the whole wedding model. As your next anniversary approaches you review your contract and decide to re-up with the same terms, make changes, or dissolve the marriage.

Not to dog pile, just to affirm what jacquesm is saying. Remember, what you do consciously is what you end up doing unconsciously when you're distracted.

Here is a hypothetical: A loved one is being hauled away in an ambulance and it is a bad scenario. And you're going to follow them. Your mind is busy with the stress, trying to keep things cool while under pressure. What hospital are they going to, again? Do you have a list of prescriptions? Are they going to make it to the hospital? You're under a mental load, here.

The last thing you need is to ask "did I use my turn signal" as you merge lanes. If you do it automatically, without exception, chances are good your mental muscle memory will kick in and just do it.

But if it isn't a learned innate behavior, you may forget to while driving and cause an accident. Simply because the habit isn't there.

It's similar for talking to bots, as well. How you treat an object, a thing seen as lesser, could become how a person treats people they view as lesser, such as wait staff, for example. If I am unerring polite to a machine with no feelings, I'm more likely to be just as polite to people in customer service jobs. Because it is innate:

Watch your thoughts, they become words; Watch your words, they become actions.