983 karma · joined March 23, 2020
I already chose a job that I believe is minimally harmful within the AI space. I work in an autonomous vehicle company which I believe puts safety first and is on track to reducing injuries and deaths to humans. This is not the thread where I wish to debate that premise, but that's just my belief so I'm happy to work towards it.
I realize that we are complicit in enabling Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, TSMC, et al. in the rest of the AI space.
I only have space to think about this so much. I still need to pay rent next month, and I don't have enough saved up to pay rent for the remaining several decades of my life.
> have no skills that would help you after the collapse
That's not what I said. I only have 1 high-paying skill that can help me buy that optionality, and that's software engineering. I don't know of anything else high-paying that I could study quick enough, and other high-paying industries including lawyers and doctors are also predatory in different ways. I don't think the alternatives are better.
As for post-collapse skills, I think the ultimate is just being able to live off the land and move to somewhere that has the right climate and natural resources for that. Moving to another country isn't logistically straightforward, but money can help remove some of those hurdles, both in terms of residence permits and in terms of buying land and housing. So the priority is still financial. The learnings happen in parallel.
> Seems like a better use of your time
Not looking for advice on time management advice. I'm only trying to protect my family's future by building optionality. My individual decisions aren't going to change what the system is doing.
My personal view of the modality of failure: I don't think AI will destroy humans, but rather functionally dismantle civilization as we know it; I think we will just increasingly become slaves to the systems they create and the world won't be run in human interests anymore (it already is not run in the bests interest of the non-ultra-wealthy, so it's really just an extension of that: I think the future will just start moving toward s/ultra-wealthy/AI/) and we will increasingly become more like worker ants.
2. I disagree, I think some countries of the world are more likely to value stability of the population than others. I think there are places that are likely to be more safe than others. Also, a notable side effect of current trade wars is that some countries may end up getting left out of a good chunk of the destruction.
My personal take is almost all capitalist enterprises are on a path to cause destruction to civilization. AI is not unique here, and every industry is "AI or die" right now.
As for short term survival, I don't have the option to just quit in protest without income, nor do I think that will be effective in accomplishing anything. If anything I will just pigeon-hole myself into becoming a worse future-victim of the system than I already would be.
I also feel a need to amass retirement levels of wealth right ASAP before this all comes crashing down, and then move to somewhere else away from this mess.
The only good way for me to do that is to keep working in AI, because nothing else that I have skills for pays that high.
You can say the age of the universe is 14 billion years, but that's in our reference frame.
In another reference frame it may be a different number.
That was 15 years ago. Now, living costs have gone up, I'm getting taxed to death by not just governments but increasingly more by businesses themselves ("benefits fees", "installation fee", "convenience fee", guilt-tip screens, sneaky price increases, etc.) so now I feel no guilt in playing the system to get at least some of my money back. Now I just churn 1-2 credit cards a year to pay my taxes and get some of it back in the massive sign up bonuses, which more than cover the transaction costs, fees, and then get me another few thousand back.
If merchants across the world make a deal with me to charge exactly the listed/advertised number exactly, no more, no less, then I'll pay in cash again.
Deal? No? Okay, you continue paying your merchant fees and I'll continue reaping the credit card bonuses to the maximum possible.
Silicone is more flexible and high-temperature resistant, but it does have a major downside of being very easy to cut and strip. That's not great either, especially for power applications where short circuits are a concern.
Silicone also kinda sucks for crimping. Most crimps have one set of tabs which grab the conductor (which is fine) and then another set which grab the insulation, but in the case of silicone the insulation set tend to just slice the insulation and don't mechanically grab it.
If you search my company's Slack for "smoke" the results are almost all within the past 2 years ...
You arguably need a lot more intelligence to assemble furniture.
I actually have a profitable trading agent, and hell no I will not open source it. It also looks nothing like this. For one this bot is ingesting a shitton of noisy sources that have almost no signal and using them naively.
Put the code on the blockchain somewhere and it will be un-deleteable.
Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.
Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.
Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".
I'd bet more on this. For one none of the coding tools have exponential backoff on retries
1. Generate a bunch of responses with both Claude and various non-Claude LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Kimi)
2. Train a discriminator model that can differentiate Claude vs. non-Claude
3. Train a de-watermarking model using the discriminator model as loss
That's pendantic. Add traffic, air conditioning, a shitton of traffic lights, a restroom stop, and a detour to buy groceries on the way. Oh and if your tires are at 38 instead of 42 psi you're going to lose some range there too. And then some wind, elevation changes. Roof rack bars, because people actually do go on outdoor trips (who would have thought?) And you probably want to arrive with 10-20% left, not 0. You're quickly looking at needing 84 miles of effective range to make the 42 miles safely. 168 miles for the round trip. Yeah, shit adds up fast.
My EV has a 363 mile "EPA rating" (whoever those charlatans are) but the realistic range I got from day 0 with a fresh battery in real life conditions is closer to 200-250 miles.
That's over-optimistic and you will probably only get that in a small handful of places in the world like the southwestern US or the Middle East and even then only for part of the year.
The hot, sunny, never-cloudy parts of the world also tend to be the ones where driving long distances is most necessary.
This is ridiculous.