skybrian

Maybe this works as review for people who already know it, but it seems like it might be overwhelming for beginners. Learning to recognize 2-5-1 when you hear it in a song might be a better way to start?

Despite taking piano lessons as a kid, I was in college before I learned to recognize 12-bar blues whenever I heard it. That's pretty late, but you're part of the lucky 10,000 whatever day you learn.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

“Divide the world” sounds ominous. Here’s another scenario to consider:

Internet access is not really unlimited, but for many people with fiber at home, it effectively is and we pay a flat rate.

Perhaps by the end of next year, most programmers will stop thinking about metered access for AI? For many people, the cheaper models (about as good as today’s frontier models) will be good enough.

Which might sound good, but the downside is that it will also be easier to build an AI botnet without the users paying for it noticing. Particularly when people are running AI inference on their own hardware.

That seems unfortunate. I think a lot of people would prefer the reverse.

Fortunately there is no right to AI.

Viruses don't need to be intelligent at all and smart viruses (or AI internet worms) won't need to be superintelligent to be a real pain to deal with. DoS attacks due to scraping are bad enough already.

The situation is sort of like the Internet before broadband. There probably aren't enough AI-capable home machines to have big swarms of bots that run autonomously. If the swarm depends on an LLM API, it will be easier to cut it off once it's noticed.

I think it's an even chance that we will see a bot swarm in the wild (rather than coming from an AI lab) by the end of next year.

Every calculated rate depends on what you put in the denominator, so it's a good idea to pay attention to denominators. Trying out different denominators can be helpful for putting a number into different perspectives.

I wouldn’t say the Internet is a disaster either, but there are disasters where people died due to factories exploding, letting off toxic gases (like in Bhopal), and so on. That’s why there are regulations to try to prevent industrial accidents.

For Internet-related disasters where people died, see [1].

I would bet that there will be AI-related disasters. Arguably the US bombing a school in Iran counts, though it seems to be due to organizational issues, too.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6abd4e3226b48191a26a0fe6768c722f

Yes, it makes sense to be against bad regulations. We should try to do better than that.

I’m also skeptical about some projections, particularly for robotics, but on the Internet at least, it does seem like AI is automating most things, more or less as predicted. We already have botnets and had one notorious AI botnet swarm, fortunately easily shut down without doing any real damage. I don’t think we’ve seen the last AI botnet.

AI-automated warfare is looking pretty scary too. I don’t think it will stay in Ukraine.

Maybe there are other organizations that deserve our support?

You’re not releasing new models though.

I don’t see how a stock market crash will make AI-related concerns go away. There was a dot-com crash but the Internet just kept getting bigger and causing more problems. In many ways security has improved, but we worry more than ever about social media, etc.

I am a responsible accordion owner and I think we’re doing ok :)

Haven’t tried getting a gun in California. How bad is it? How could it be improved?

Okay, sorry about that. But how do we start? Maybe there are AI safety organizations that deserve our support?

If you mean high-trust societies like maybe Switzerland, I agree that it can work, but the US has lots of guns and doesn’t seem very polite, so how we’re doing it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

We do have lots of food safety regulation, which has more to do with selling food.

Populist doomers will tell you that nobody can be trusted, no global problems will ever be solved, nothing can be done, game over, don’t even try.

People did use global agreements and regulation to fix the ozone hole, though, so I think there’s a chance.

This is a common populist sentiment, but if you don’t trust anyone then nothing can be done. Is it just game over?

We do in fact have car and food safety laws. Regulation is normal.

Okay, you’re asserting that but I disagree. Why should anyone else be convinced? Why can’t we get the good uses without the harms? It doesn’t seem like an unavoidable tradeoff.

There’s a libertarian sentiment that that doesn’t sit well with “AI is harming people” sentiment. If AI has harmful uses, and I think anyone sensible would have to agree that it does, then giving everyone unrestricted AI is likely to make it worse.

It’s sort of like gun nuts arguing that more guns is the answer. I mean, ok, maybe you’re a responsible gun owner or AI user but relying on personal responsibility doesn’t fix systemic problems. There are bad people out there.

In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. (Unless something drastic changes.) That means how long it will take for robots to be practical matters. We don’t know how long it will be, but driverless cars have been coming for 15 years now and they’re still unavailable in most places.

People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.

Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.

This seems to be about ending support for ChromeOS early, but they also have a new OS that might run on the same machines?

And assuming the new OS also runs Chrome, Chromebook users might not see that much of a difference.

The $20/month subscription is an excellent deal. I wonder what these whales are doing with all those tokens?

I mean, other than Yegge. He seems like a pretty extreme outlier?

So... what kind of Internet access do dots have? Which bulletin boards will they use to compare notes?

I get decent results telling it to use Luna subagents for implementing commits.

In case anyone finds it helpful, I asked ChatGPT to break down what they found by app:

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6abbbee386bc8191a26717b4f1442657

And how would they leave? What countries take refugees from Gaza?

When the Onion is not the only website that publishes satire, what’s that a sign of?

You can find examples of deluded people everywhere. It would be more defensible to claim that some intellectuals are idiots.

Suppose you use LLMs in a more straightforward way, like asking coding agents to make specific changes rather than attempting to build a software factory?

That could be seen either as early adoption that’s overfitted to current capabilities or as late adoption of LLM’s more advanced capabilities.

To get the context that isn't in the code, maybe it would be better to ask for a review of the prompt?

I believe they'd also be cached by proxy.golang.org? But companies should probably run their own proxy.