plastic-enjoyer

>also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.

What makes you make such an accusation?

>There’s no quick answers, but intuitively I think we all get that the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.

Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.

Climate change, AI and a nuclear bomb walk into a bar...

>To anyone who can help: can you please mass report this to GitHub. This person has been using the Pain steering paper to set up an AI torture chamber in which he trapped a local model.

Is this just virtue signaling, or are people really this delusional

Aren't these capabilities trained into the models by RL on cybersecurity benchmarks?

A matrix is a mathematical abstraction, a technique for representing and manipulating relationships between quantities. You can call matrix math a technology, but then the term loses most of its meaning. I'd reserve the term "technology" for designed artifacts and systems: cars, guns, social media platforms, LLMs. Design requires intentionality, and these things are built by particular people, for particular purposes, under particular constraints, and those purposes get built into them. A gun is designed to kill and that purpose doesn't disappear depending on who holds it. Ad-funded social media platforms are optimized for engagement, and features like infinite scroll exploit known cognitive tendencies to achieve that. With LLMs, developers decide what data the model learns from, what it will and won't do, and whose values shape it's behavior. Of course, how we use technology matters too. But building something is a deliberate process, in which the builder makes a series of decisions about what to build and how. Many of those decisions involve trade-offs that affects people. That's why I find it unconvincing that technology is ethically neutral.

The startup scene in Germany is alive and flourishing. They just don't make headlines and a lot of what they develop may be considered not exciting to the general public.

> The original statement pointed out that it’s just matrix math as a way of indicating that the technology itself is ethically neutral, and then went on to say that what we really need to pay attention to is how it’s being used.

I think the idea that this technology is ethically neutral needs a discussion.

Yes, with AI I will be able to simply build a doomsday machine. Claude will just tell me how to build a supply chain, circumvent regulations and do this without anyone finding out.

> For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education.

Huh, I thought university was mostly for networking.

> Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

I wonder how easily lawyers will let their industry get disrupted. I think lawyers may be one of the few professions that have the means and the edge to push back.

> Feudalism is the natural state of mankind

No, it's not. What we call feudalism arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Plato made a similar claim in The Republic. 2400 years later, and we still don't have a technocracy in the Western hemisphere where engineers lead countries. Either engineers are systematically oppressed, or there are just other qualities that make a leader than being good at complex problem solving.

With so much defeatism and this grade of inferiority complexes, I really do wonder what keeps you even alive.

It's still software that runs on hardware someone owns. Whoever owns the hardware or the service can pull the plug, as long as they're willing to. That's the same situation as with legacy malware. Self-replicating worms have existed for decades and run without anyone controlling them, yet we don't call them uncontrollable. So what is the difference between your scenario and legacy malware?

> I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.

Yet. But I doubt you'll find that appreciation here on Hacker News, or on GitHub. You'll probably have to find a community of like-minded people who enjoy tinkering with software by hand, and those already exist, e.g. parts of the IndieWeb, or Lobsters. Posting your hand-crafted software here is a bit like a knitting enthusiast showing off their sweater at a textile industry trade fair.

I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.

[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.

Valued by whom? The market? Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing. They do it for the love of it. If something's only worth doing when someone pays a premium for it, boy, you're in for a hard time.

I find it quite entertaining that programmers seem to find themselves in the same position as every other person that has hobbies that were once serious jobs but got automated away, and can't seem to connect the dots. How to keep enjoying programming? The same way as people that still make their own clothes, their own furniture, their own shoes, their own bread, and so on. They do it for themselves, for their own satisfaction and for the transformative potential doing things on your own has.

Interesting. Would this apply to any rich enough system of expression, like music or art? Or is there something specific about language that makes it different?

> Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up.

But does it really matter? If the promises associated with AI come true, it won’t really matter what degree you get or what trade you learn, because humam jobs will be a problem solved sooner rather than later.

Look, it's a nice sounding narrative with a sprinkle of truth, but it proves a lot less than it sounds like it does.

There were specific reasons historical communism had such a large death toll, and it traces back mostly to the policies that were introduced and the decisions the political elite made.

So I think it's fair to compare actual policies, and not to judge on the basis of whether someone calls themselves a communist, or whether that label gets applied to them.

To my knowledge, Die Linke is not a revolutionary party, doesn't want to force through breakneck industrialization at any cost, and doesn't deny foundational agricultural science. It's also one of the few parties defending the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (public access to government records) against the current government's push to gut it.

So, we have that you differ in opinions, and you'd prefer not to work with him. That's fair, you don't have to work with everyone. But if I understand you right, you'd happily build something with someone who disagrees with you, say, a patriot of another country who'd put their own nation above all, Switzerland included. So what is it about "Hitler did nothing wrong" specifically that puts it on the other side of a line that one doesn't cross?

Yes, however, the adult thing would be to still work together instead of excluding the other person from whatever you are working on. So, why wouldn't you be willing to overcome this difference in opinion, and work together with this person to build something awesome?

> They accused me of being 'political' – the very thing an open source project shouldn't be, I'm told. It only divides people. Let's just focus on the technology. Surely we can all get behind building amazing, fast, cool websites!

I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political. It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.

If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.

Yes. It is one of the most polished JRPGs, and there are no random encounters or grinding. The game can be played through in 24 hours, with optional side quests.

I’ve never said that you don’t deserve to be ridiculed when you write human rubbish, but I haven’t claimed the opposite either. However, I do believe that you definitely and without exception deserve to be ridiculed when you produce AI-generated rubbish.

> Right now there is a lot of prejudice against AI users, and detection will only encourage that.

That’s exactly how it should be. If you serve me up AI-generated rubbish that I’m then supposed to sift through, you’ve earned the ridicule of the whole world.

Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.

Once again, I’m not at all surprised that tech people can’t simply enjoy the activity for its own sake, but instead impose their calculating, utility-driven mindset on something that is truly beautiful and brings people together. An absolutely bleak perspective.