palmotea

> I think the examples you listed (doomscrolling, being sedentary, junk food) are related but distinct to ‘avoiding friction’. My perspective is it’s about quality, not the form; even if they correlate.

> I don’t enjoy going to the gym, but I love swimming and hiking, and love that. I haven’t worked out in a gym for years, I don’t want to, and I’m quite healthy and reasonably active.

But that's a problem of the modern low-friction era. If cars hadn't been invented and you had to walk/carry things everywhere it wouldn't matter. No 10,000 steps nonsense. No what do I enjoy better: weights or swimming or hiking? You'd get a lot of exercise by just going about your life.

> Some people are just introverts, and I think the ‘optimal’ amount of IRL time is different for every individual.

I am an introvert, and a big basis of my comment is the personal realization that my drive to get IRL social time was actually insufficient to give me the amount of IRL social time I needed. I'm a lot happier if it's foisted on me and I have less control.

> My hunch is they have an agenda and is willing to lie to spice up the story.

What do you think it is? Be clear.

> If they are not a clanker.

Probably not: "I was trying a VR headset the other days".

> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. ... I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.

It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.

Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.

> I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones.

While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.

> My parents were always busy and exhausted.

So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.

Let me guess: even more whitespace, hiding stuff for a "clean" look like a baby toy.

> With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.

FYI, you're not a decent person, you're a problem person. You lack compassion.

If someone beats you and leaves you for dead in a ditch, when the paramedics find you, what should they say? It pretty obvious: "a dollar spent helping this guy could be used to help someone better, leave him for dead."

> CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Yeah, no.

> Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with... They take time and resources away from the smarter youth...

You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.

Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.

Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.

The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.

> Sean Goedecke has some good insights into where this "build faster to stop other models killing everyone" attitude comes from:

I'm familiar with the existential risk thinking.

The the flaw in that idea that they can avert disaster by building faster is they're likely just racing faster towards more plausible non-extinction disasters. Stuff like Capitalism x AGI totally crushing the economic prospects of nearly all people, AGI-powered totalitarianism, etc.

> I agree, I think this false dichotomy between using LLMs and caring about quality/reliability needs to stop. All these mission critical industries listed in the article rely on extensive testing for quality assurance, with human code review being a layer on top of all that, but far from the most critical one.

At least some places are abolishing formal QA because LLMs. There's a cult of speed uber alles that has a big intersection with LLM enthusiasm.

> We literally cannot touch them, as that would be the first domino to topple in our economy. There is too much money concentrated in this sector, and adverse regulation would create an investor shockwave that would send us into a full blown depression.

Important people will loose too much money on their tulip investments, so tulips must go up forever?

Seems like a "less pain now or more pain later" type situation.

> I don't know, define "hit piece".

Anything that doesn't make Musk look awesome and support his PR goals.

> with the exception that in software there typically isn't an expectation that the client does their own debugging before accepting the software,

There totally is. I don't think there's any industry where a customer can really get away with not testing the products of their suppliers. With software you need to test it and confirm you're getting the results you expect, rather than blindly trusting the vendor.

> and any bugs that manifest in said software after purchase treated as the client's fault for not spotting them.

I'm not sure about B2B licenses (I've never been involved in contracts), but I'm pretty sure for a lot of B2C software, the user is responsible for the output and the vendor's liability is severely capped (like no more than refunding the purchase price).

If there is an Excel bug that costs you a lot of money, you the user are responsible. Microsoft's not going to pay you to make you whole (and I'm pretty confident about that, because logically, if it were otherwise the risk to them would be extreme and they'd probably be bankrupt).

> They have been warning about AI extinction risk for years, and AI progress has only been accelerating.

So, they're either liars or homicidally reckless.

> My experience with lawyers is that if you need a legal document, they often have templates ready to go and will take 10 seconds to find & replace your company name into the document. I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards. They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

You almost certainly work in technology/software. If you (or your employers) sells software in any form, you're doing the same fucking thing.

Their box of templates is equivalent to a library or a SaaS application.

>> Not sure I follow your comment exactly, perhaps I am misunderstanding it but Hawking radiation doesn't involve anything escaping a black hole.

>> The radiation never originates from within the event horizon. Furthermore the radiation itself does not encode any information about what fell into the black hole apart from the electric charge, angular momentum, and mass (all of which must remain conserved).

> I don't know the slightest about this but... That list looks like it is supposed to be limited but that sounds like infinitely more information than zero?

I don't know about electric charge, but can't you observe mass and angular momentum of a black hole from outside? I think the "no information" thing means the Hawking radiation won't let you tell you if the black hole was made from a dead star or just a really big pile of meat or what's going on inside of it.

IIRC, all Hawking radiation does is provide a mechanism for a black hole to eventually decay.

> "the government wants to use our tool to murder people", and declaring that company that says "no" into a "supply chain risk" is absolutely retaliatory and an attempt by the government to influence the behavior of the company.

If Lockheed could brick its planes if the US planned to use them for military action it disagreed with (and showed some indication they couldn't be trusted not to do it), would they be a supply chain risk?

It is not the role of a defense contractors to have oversight and control power over the military they're supplying.

Why do so many of the demo videos of this crab chair show no people sitting on it? Is this chair not for sitting?

> but if your game is getting copied for $100 in tokens

My point is they don't actually have to do a good job, they need to make a pile of shit that looks just good enough to trick a few people into buying it.

> And care about the rule of law. You cannot pass retroactive laws, you cannot pass laws that target individual people. If you pass a general law...

A wealth tax is not a retroactive law, nor something that targets an individual person. It's a "general law" in your parlance. Think about it.

> If you pass a general law (which could very well have reasonable objections), people have to have a chance to leave.

I don't think so. By what legal authority is that required?

> "I'm passing this law that is effective the exact millisecond I sign it, tough shit if you don't like it" is tyranny and despotism. But based on your comment I think you know that.

No, it's not, and don't be ridiculous. When they passed laws against date-rape, would you have judged it "tyranny and despotism" unless the law was delayed to give the date-rapers time to finish up the date-rapes they'd planned?

There's no justice in giving the wealthy the maximum opportunity to pick and choose the laws that apply to them.

> From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable

It's it possible for an LLM-created game to be profitable but "unsuccessful?"

For instance, if (on average) if it costs $100 in tokens and time to make a crappy LLM-game clone, but you can clear $200 in sales per game on average, you're ahead.

And the economics of slop mean there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries who will make all that effort for a $100 payout (or less).

> News at 9.

The idiom is "film at 11."

If you let someone get to hundreds of billions in net worth and then realize they haven’t been appropriately paying back into the system, it’s already too late. Like the article says they can simply say “no” in a variety of ways, from fighting in court to simply leaving.

It's only too late if you're timid and wimpy.

> Ok, so let’s get some data points. Are there games being recreated from devlogs? I’d like to see what the recreations look like.

An LLM "recreation" doesn't have to be complete or very good. It just has to steal enough thunder to be profitable.

> Okay, so all you have are personal attacks, goodbye.

Note: I made no personal attacks.

> There's two main schools of thought regarding the downsides of AI: One is apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature, and is largely influenced by the exact warnings given therein. The other, which I'll call "socio-realism", often looks into the actual past at the introduction of automation and its displacing effects.

Yes! Also the "apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature" serves as a useful strawman fo AI advocates to deflect attention away from the socio-realism critique.

It's happened a few times where I say I don't really care about in the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios [1] but I'm more concern about the "socio-realism," but some AI proponent keeps trying to bend the discussion back to the unrealism of self-replicating von Neumann machines or something.

[1] The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders. Those people often seriously entertain those doomsday scenarios while simultaneously racing as fast as they possibly can to build the technologies that they say would enable them.

> Again, do you have an actual objection to the subject of the article

I was responding to a comment, which apparently is another thing you missed. Maybe work on not doing that, instead of snarkily asking for everything to be carefully spelled out to you?

> or are you just mad it enriches people you don't like?

Nice strawman, pity if someone knocked it down.

Yes, you missed it. Perhaps you should read it again until you get it?

> Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.

Yeah, now instead of old books being turned into toilet paper, we'll get turned into toilet paper. Much better.

But Sam Altman will become richer than God, and isn't that what really matters?

But don't worry! You'll still have access to ChatGPT until your savings run out.

> Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.

Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.

>> 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.