palmotea

>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.

> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.

You and the GP are talking about totally different things.

Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.

> CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics.

They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine Americans' support for AI!

> Influencer marketing is however inherently contextualized to the para social relationship between the viewer and the creator. The people that buy the product do so because "their" creator told them about it. ... It's aimed at people that want to get closer to the Creator. At least in their head.

Or they just have trouble differentiating between the trusted endorsement of a real social relationship and the paid endorsement of a para-social relationship, and that confusion affords the latter an exploitable amount of trust. In their head, they're already "close" to the influencer, not trying to get there, basically.

It probably works even better once you atomize individuals, and inhibit/discourage natural social relationships. Those social instincts needs somewhere to go, and it's best for all of society if that's into the advertiser's trap via an influencer.

> This is insanely hyperbolic. OepnAI is not a "reich" there is no empire here, it's a company and some data centers. They don't have paramilitary thugs, territorial ambitions, or genocidal intent.

I think there's something like a "reich" here, but don't take the comparison too literally. OpenAI wants to invade society and change it to match their vision, and they're going to do everything in their power (which is quite a lot), to make it go in their direction, and they care little about the harm they will cause. The rest of us are just Czechs to them.

> "The IDE, on Visual FoxPro's own sample projects. Every picture is a real session." starting to have involuntary revulsive twitches from Claude prose

It's beautiful, isn't it?

> Is Altman planning to annex the Sudetenland?

No, he's not a literalist throwback. But he is planning to glorify and expand his OpenAI reich.

> However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?

Because the people doing that dismissing are being dishonest. Their goal is to attack and discredit their enemy, period. Critical testimony from a user has some vague similarities to hypocrisy, so can be twisted for propaganda purposes and portrayed as hypocrisy.

> Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.

That's not true. There are all kinds of products that benefit certain people, so sell, but are overall harmful to the world or a harmful to much larger number of people than those who benefit.

> and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.

The trick is to make the people being harmed too powerless to stop the harm being done to them. Then your problem is solved and everyone (who matters) is happy.

> a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

In an properly-managed world (not ours), we'd figure out how many factories we need to keep the process knowledge fresh and safe, then have those factories build items that last exactly as long to keep their production steady. Then other factories could make other things. End result: more and better stuff.

Like instead of 1000 washing machine factories that make washing machines that last 5 years each, have 100 that make washing machines that last 50 years.

Instead we get hyper-fast planned obsolescence, pushing the frontier of unreliability and waste creation, so number can go up this quarter.

> “Pacing the frontier” sounds smarmy and weird, like the phrase was generated by Claude itself

Claude says it sounds fine. And Claude is now the judge of the English language style, not you.

> Some de-skill, but not all.

So are you agreeing with me or not? Because it's not black and white. Having a few non-deskilled developers around who do the equivalent of "compete in mental calculations" is the same as having none at all.

It's sort of like the retort "AI won't take all the jobs from humans, some will be left [at the very top and very bottom]." Even if true, fat lot of good it does most people who would be unemployed in that scenario.

Also, if you get widespread deskilling, but massive increases in code production due to AI, you're probably still going to get "organizations falling into the trap" like the OP describes and the remaining skilled people getting burned out trying to hold it all together. Modern American business culture (in aggregate) is incapable of learning to not burn people out until everyone is already burned out, only then will it pay attention to the problem (and then probably forget what they learned and start repeat it in 10 years).

> Imo we should speedrun to how we can use ai to write well. We'll get past this weird opus5 talk phase.

No. We need to establish Claudish as the new, beautiful standard for language. Even if you write by hand, if it's not Claudish, it should be looked at as inferior and ugly.

Claudish is the real shape of the gate to our prosperity and happiness, not foolish and sentimental attachment to antiquated prose.

> This is under-appreciated part of it. Search had been deliberately degraded for some time now as part of the usual enshittification arc. Where as AI is still in the early part of the arc where its trying to do better, so the difference between them seems even bigger.

That's how AI will surpass us. Once we enshittify humans sufficiently, AI will flourish. That's why I support extensive AI use in school classrooms, the younger the better, it's the best policy for OpenAI and Anthropic investors.

> There's a continuum between "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination" and "hand written domain driven design development". You can absolutely use coding agents AND have maintainable code. But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.

Yes. But I think the idea is without "hand written domain driven design development" the result trends to "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination," as developers de-skill.

> there are a lot of people who put the lives of dogs above those of people]. I think you'd find that a lot of people will donate to save animals rather than humans

Ok, sure. But I was talking speciesist vs AI. Is there anyone who would genuinely put AI above on on part with humanity (beyond the rare nutjob weirdo)? I think the people who trot out "speciesism" to defend AI don't care about the consequences and just don't want to be told "no."

> Because it will never change if you not try.

That's why it's important to convince people to not try. It reduces the medium term risk to investor returns.

>> We (humans) should help humanity flourish. I understand that not everyone agrees. I have been called a “speciesist” for being “too human-centric”.

> this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.

I don't think there are actually any "speciesist people." I think most, if not all, are the selfish "me people," who have disingenuously created "speciesism" by mad-libbing racism and sexism in a ham-handed attempt deflect criticism/opposition to whatever they want to do. Most of them aren't even "raking in trillions," they just don't like thinking about others or being told "no."

> I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant.

Everyone knows why they're building this stuff (to replace labor, and damn the consequences of people who work for a living), and I think that's the root of popular resistance.

Fears of species-ending catastrophe is an elite preoccupation (as the more likely economic catastrophe will leave them relatively unscathed). They also serve to show the utter insanity of the AI labs and the people who work for them: they have these fears but they're building the machines anyway.

> Getting lucky and drilling through a part of the enclosure that isn't directly protected won't help you if a barometric pressure sensor is tripped as a consequence of breaking the hermetic seal.

That's interesting. I suppose if that technology is in use, the attack would have to occur in a pressure-controlled chamber, so breaking the seal wouldn't cause a change in pressure.

> Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.

The trick is to have alternate accounts, and not have your "real" ones configured as you transit sensitive locations like borders. Once you're past, download your apps and log in to your real accounts.

With LLMs that's even easier. I suppose you could set one up to populate your fake Facebook account with convincing, up-to-date "local sports team" fan activity.

Don't call attention to yourself, make noncompliance look like compliance.

> Sure, but if you’re defending against a nation state actor hopefully you aren’t expecting a raspberry pi to keep you secure.

Is there anything about these techniques that are raspberry pi specific? It seems like they're using lasers to identify and flip particular bits in registers.

> That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely.

All property is fundamentally about exclusion and control to allow for private exploitation. That common bit of rhetoric about copying misses that point. The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.

> Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.

You should note that you misread me: I didn't say they were identical in every respect, I said their "reality" is the same. They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.

> This is going to blow your mind

No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person.

> but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed.

^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history.

Yes, I'm agreeing with you.

> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.

But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it.

> And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.

We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point.

[1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.

> Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.

Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).

> A Tech Priest is way smarter than any software developer you could ever think of.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tech-Priest:

> Despite the never-ending thirst for knowledge of all branches of the order, most Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus have lost the ability to innovate or carry out basic scientific research.

> No longer the master of its creations, the Cult Mechanicus is enslaved to the past. It maintains the glories of yesteryear with rite, dogma and edict instead of true discernment and comprehension.

> For instance, even the theoretically simple process of activating a vehicle's engine is preceded by the application of ritual oils, the burning of sacred resins and the chanting of long and complex hymns.

> In an utopian society, lawyers are an unnecessary profession. Laws should be clear and simple so the common person can be their own "lawyer".

Not really. Modern society is complicated, and law is a technology that is a reflection of the complexity of society.

To make an analogy: you wouldn't say that "in a utopian society, engineers are an unnecessary profession. Buildings should be clear and simple enough that a common person can be their own structural engineer," because that would mean that building technology would no longer handle a lot of the problems we expect it to handle. It wouldn't be utopia, it would be primitivism.

> LLMs help with that goal.

Not really. What they'd actually do is help them produce output they don't understand and lack the competence to evaluate.

If you want to see one in action, I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sApyrDEXGAI

FYI, it looks like you've been banned for the last ~8-9 months, for no obvious reason I can see. I vouched for your comment to make it visible, but they appears to show up as [dead] by default.