ryandvm

> It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM [...] can't begin to think about how to make money with one.

I think they can. I think every frontier LLM company in this industry knows exactly how to make money with an LLM and furthermore it's almost bulletproof - they just don't want to say it.

LLMs are going to be the most devastatingly effective ad delivery mechanism that we've ever seen once they start flipping the switches. They're going to load the context up with all your demographic information and preferences and advertising susceptibilities and then tell it to subtly suggest to you all kinds of shit you need to buy.

It's going to be nearly subliminal and so slick that you're not even going to know you're being advertised to. It will be like your best friend gently convincing you over a period of months to buy a new EV, or that you need to refinance your mortgage, or that you should move to Atlanta.

They know exactly how to make money with these things, they just can't be the first ones to say it.

What's funny is that nobody even believes the SpaceX/Tesla fever dream stuff - not even the fanboys. Data centers in space that violate the laws of logistics+thermodynamics? 30 trillion dollars worth of revenue?

No, they only believe that somebody else believes this shit. The entire valuation of Elon's companies is based on greater fool theory. But it notably is called greater fool, not infinite fool; we are going to run out of fools at some point...

Exact same philosophy they use for hiring.

Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen?

They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.

They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.

This future sucks.

We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation.

Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.

What the actual fuck is this opinion? We wouldn't be so up in arms if the grip were tighter?

Yeah, there is a suspicious amount of down-voting of anti-surveillance comments in here. I'd say there's about a 99% chance Flock is paying astroturfers.

"New idea", lol. Diesel locomotives have worked this way since the 1920s.

I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).

But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?

The possibilities are literally endless:

  * Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
  * Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
  * Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
  * "Where has your spouse been?"

In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?

> Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN

Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.

They all have to rely on each other's LLMs to solve their own internal problems now.

Ads are responsible for the enshitification of everything. Literally everything.

- Why is online news just partisan rage-baiting? Ads

- Why is real journalism dying? Ads

- Why are your web search results less helpful? Ads

- Why are recipes 2,000 words long? Ads

- Why is social media engineered for scroll-maxxing?

- Why is your car/TV/refrigerator spamming you?

- Why are pharmaceuticals so expensive?

- Why is your population voting for assholes?

Future generations are going to look back at how we live with advertising the same way we look back on leaded gasoline and asbestos.

Great. I'm looking forward to it being less obvious that my colleagues have stopped understanding their jobs.

Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.

Jesus, please do not remind me that the President in Idiocracy had better leadership skills than our actual President.

To their credit, they dropped the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago /s

I think the worst part is that to the bullshit artists that usually float to the top of any org chart, AI generated docs, and implementation plans, and code is superficially plausible. It's hard to find any particular thing that is wrong with all of it - just a general vibe of verbosity. I am observing entire engineering departments drowning in AI generated RFCs and TDDs and thousand plus word Jira tickets and PR reviews and feedback to the PRs. All just Claude talking to itself via various meat-based secretaries.

Meanwhile, as far as leadership is concerned, they don't really understand what is being delivered they just know there's a lot of it. So they're happy - for now.

I think a lot of shops are going to have to go through a couple years of Github-style "why the fuck is our service always down?" before they put 2 and 2 together.

Right? Unless we've figured out Star Trek Welfare, who is buying anything when 50% of the population is unemployed and wages have crashed for the other 50% because of biblical levels of unemployment.

Yup. I have embraced LLM usage since it's obvious this genie is not going back in the bottle and they are objectively force-multipliers at certain tasks. But I didn't get into software engineering to be productive, I fell into this career because I loved building things and it just sort of evolved into a pretty lucrative hobby.

AI is completely sucking the enjoyment out of my work.

It's like they invented a robot that can build whatever you want out of Legos. You'll never have to touch your Legos again! /s

The real wild shit I'm seeing and having trouble reconciling with continuing my career in this field is that there seems to be a majority contingent of C-suite out there that is absolutely obsessed with force-feeding their organizations AI.

As an software engineer, I will readily admit that LLMs have greatly increased my output - especially on the menial work.

But now we have leadership telling everyone to "use moar AI" on everything, everywhere. I literally have observed folks dropping into incident Slack chats saying things like, "hey all - i asked Claude about this issue and then i had it write a solution. here's the PR." This feels like the kind of thing that should be a fire-able offense, but instead they're getting shout-outs from the CEO.

Hell, the next time I go on vacation, I think I could put Claude Code on YOLO mode for 2 weeks and I'd probably come back to find I'd been promoted.

I do not know how this is going to end, but I have a feeling it's going to get way darker before it gets better.

> Of course, the staff also see how you tio before they prep your food...

Lol. Yeah, that's where the game theory breaks down for me.

I'm all for not tipping people that don't interact with you directly until I start thinking about how the 17-year-old making my pizza feels about tipping on pick-up orders...

I'm sure they can extract $3,500 worth of value from everyone's existence.

We just need more leeches.

Lol. I can't imaging the figures from a Musk venture not holding up.

100%

We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong."

Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year.

This is all complicated by the fact that we're also losing our grasp on reality from the other direction because we have leadership air dropping AI generated manifestos on the product owners and product owners having to use AI to transmute all that shit into 1,500 word Jira tickets that are 10% necessary feature work and 90% LLM boilerplate.

So now you have software engineers whose job has changed radically to the point that the hardest part about being a software engineer is just filtering through AI generated artifacts from all directions just to try to get a feature out the door.

It seems like it would be well within the charter of the Library of Congress to archive a complete scan of every book published in the United States. At least then we wouldn't lose the information. They can figure out distribution and copyright later.

Don't count on the Democrats growing any... erhm... spine in the next 2 years.

Burnt myself on this in Google Maps just this week. I had an appointment in my calendar with the location set to "Dr Firstname Lastname, 123 Main St, 12345". I clicked through it into Google Maps and since it had the full address specified I just trusted it. Well, it turned out that the first result was actually an ad for a competing doctor 20 minutes in the wrong direction.

To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...

Mmmm - I don't do root cause analysis for free. Best I can do is correlation.

Flock can make all the promises it wants, but the reality is that once growth stalls out on camera installations, which it must, shareholders will immediately insist that they pivot into other monetization schemes. There aren't really any laws holding them back, just their already weasel-worded contracts that they could easily renegotiate once the police departments are putting pressure on the city/county/state/federal legislative bodies.

The possibilities are endless:

  - Is your employee visiting your competitors?
  - Where has your husband/wife/lover been?
  - What medical buildings has this person been to?
  - Does this person go to churches / gun ranges?