techpineapple

If this isn't fake I'll eat my hat.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947100

I’m not a religious person, but sometimes I wonder if the downfall of religion in society really fucked some people up. Where happened to our values? What happened to family, and being involved in your community. Now I’m a failure if I haven’t built 2 companies by the age of thirty?

I feel like this vision of the world is completely antithetical to how humans work. I assert that humans don't want a UI that adapts to their use case, that they want an UI that is predictable and works the same every time, and it is funny to me, like how many companies realize they need to get rid of their cli/dsl in order to grow.

So you disagree with Sam Altman?

https://futurism.com/sam-altman-admits-ai-bubble

Things that are useful (I.e. houses) can still create a bubble (2008)

This article is one of those “technically true” things I’m tired of hearing about from modern economics. It’s technically true we could retrain all white collar folks who lose their jobs to LLMs to work in blue collar work, it’s technically true that the glut of new folks wouldn’t cause wages to go down, it’s technically true that once we have all that economic productivity it could be redistributed to make everyone more prosperous.

As many a wise man has said before me, gdp doesn’t reflect prosperity on the ground, or put another way:

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

One thing I think is weird in the debate is it seems people are equating LLMs with CPU’s, this whole category of devices that process and calculate and can have infinite architecture and innovation. But what if LLMs are more like a specific implementation like DSP’s, sure lots of interesting ways to make things sound better, but it’s never going to fundamentally revolutionize computing as a whole.

The first. No one gives a fuck about workers. I hope I’m wrong by the way, nothing would make me happier than LLm’s being regulated out of existence.

I mean, I can imagine any future, but the problem with “created by AI” is that because it’s relatively inexpensive, it seems like it will necessarily become noise rather than signal, if a person could pop out a high quality video in a day, in which case signal will revert to the celebrity that is marketing it rather than the video itself.

> The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."

Welcome to tech, that’s what we do here.

I generally don’t believe in Panacea’s, and if these jobs were so great and the solution to all our problems, why is it when we live in a country where a large percentage of folks are rural or otherwise have blue collar values, there not pursuing them?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all blue collar jobs are bad, many are fantastic! But like all things, it’s likely a pyramid. Just like a lot of software engineering jobs are shitty.

If it is offered as a panacea, then the glut of applicants will just drive down wages.

Something that bugs me about all these articles. It’s all bullshit. Almost any future is possible at this point and the data can be analyzed in almost any way. Could be AI, could be the economy, could be vibes. You’ll just get stupider reading all this shit.

AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients.

I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.

One interesting question about AGI and why it may be a decent way off - I wonder if it would require an evolutionary process. Maybe you could do this with smaller models, but instead of training 1 relatively big model you train a million random models and choose the best of those and use those to train like two million models, with mutations, rinse and repeat a while.

Whatever it is, basically instead of training a handful of models at a time, we should be training millions.

I think the comparison between AI and the web is interesting. I still feel like AI has this assumption that it's going to surmount a gap that it may not surmount.

The internet basically just got gradually better at all the things around it. Better graphics, faster internet, better programming languages, bigger hard drives.

But we still don't know what LLM's are. They're maybe just a feature, not a whole suite of technologies creating an ecosystem, the idea that they'll make the leap from Fancy Lisa AI Companion to colleague is fanciful. I don't think there's a direct line that shows that up and to the right automatically means superintelligence.

You think the kind of people propping up the AI bubble want congress to flip?

I've been trying to figure this out, like I think the 2008 bubble burst for a lot of reason but it was basically a ponzi scheme that ran out of new people to buy houses at constantly inflated rates.

Bernie Madoff got caught when 2008 happened and he didn't have enough money to pay back investors, if 2008 never happened he maybe keeps going.

For Elon Musk, and maybe why he bought Twitter, he has to stay popular enough that enough people believe his companies are the best investment available. If someone surpassed him, and Tesla didn't seem like the place where robots or self-driving might happen, then people would probably move away.

For AI, maybe something similar? People would have to start deciding that investing somewhere else is better than investing in AI and let the AI companies start to fail.

Presumably the cause of a bubble is just too many people thinking AI is the best place to invest their money? And the bubble will pop when they decide to invest somewhere else?

‘ “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),”’

I feel dirty reading this. Who read this and thought this was ok?

Yeah, I’d love to live in the post-agi utopia where we can all do what we want, but liberals are often not good at making trade offs within our own value systems

One thing about my own challenges with AI are;

Almost every other tool I adopt, once I learn how to use it, I always know the use case. Whether it's slack, docker an IDE, zoom, most programming libraries. So yeah, it took me a while to switch from VIM to an IDE, but there was never _really_ a question of "Maybe the IDE won't work here". VIM might have been better for certain things, but the IDE didn't just outright fail, there was always an option.

AI, there's always the overhead of wondering, maybe it just won't work? So when I think it will work it's great, but it's very hard to get addicted to a solution that has that overhead.

I think this is bad, but I didn't seen any reference to the opposite. How many people pretend to hold more right wing views than they actually do. Self-censorship is the nature of society, and it seems like a microscopically brief window of time where this wasn't true, if at all. I would probably argue that self-censorship on economic issues may matter more (How many people would admit they hold socialist / communist views? I would definitely feel worried about it).

So I'm not all that convinced by this argument. I observe in a lot of ways the classical liberal movement has a very narrow perspective on the acceptable range of beliefs; for sure "wokeness" has spread like wildfire, and I have my criticisms, but I don't think the people who care do so because they lament the loss of academic freedom, it's just annoyance at feeling like they lost control of the narrative. PG's recent screed on free speech was reviewed by a whose who of people who have a very narrow set of "acceptable" liberal beliefs.

Yeah, I feel like something has got to give, maybe we don’t fund student loans for certain majors. Maybe we bring back certain types of book or social clubs to learn these materials instead. Online learning? I totally see the beauty in the humanities, it’s largely all I read for fun, But you can’t have a system that incentivizes people to take out bigger and bigger loans on investments that don’t pay back.

I've long highly valued this kind of naivety, so if it's not naivety, it's a shame.

I'm a bit skeptical of the "It's definetly AI killing jobs" thing, but the increasing number of college graduates unemployed is interesting. In 2008, college graduates had clearly lower unemployment rates. Could it be something else about this recession?

I do feel like attributing macroeconomic trends to almost anything is so weird in this post-pandemic space.

Is this article super meta or just not realize the context behind why this line makes the rest of the article super hard to read?

Note: I’m going to say CP instead of competitive programming for the rest of the article because it’s easier to write.

> Whenever I’m critical of anything GenAI, without fail I get asked the same question. “do you think every major CEO could be wrong?”

I think one of the most helpful mental models about unanimity is, are the decisions independent, or unified? In theory if you do a literature review, you’re summarizing different research experiences, but if you’re 100 CEO’s, it’s all the same data they’re looking at, it’s really only one opinion, and prediction is hard, especially about the future.

> We are likely in for the biggest market crash in history

I don't think there's the kind of systemic risk that you had in a say 2008 is there?, but I do think there is likely to be a "correction" to put it lightly.

> Are we being forced into a situation where we are invested too much in this to come face to face with it doesn't work and it makes everything worse?

Yes, but don't worry, they're getting close to the government so they'll get bailed out.

> What is this capacity being built for? It no longer makes any sense.

Give more power to Silicon Valley billionaires.

> just want a better google, therapist, life coach, or programming mate; not some superintelligent being that can solve the Riemann hypothesis

Except it seems like it's a worse google, therapist, life coach and programming mate, with the personality of someone who spends all their time trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis.

a things I noticed on ChatGPT’s websit:

I couldn’t tell if gpt-5’s answer was better than gpt-4’s in the examples they gave but I did notice that it seemed to be trying to _sound_ smarter, and as I think it highlighted in this article, I don’t usually want to talk to PHDs. Many businesses in the world operate perfectly fine without a PHD, and gpt-5 is kinda the worst of all worlds. Less helpful answers in a tone of someone geeking out while talking down to you.

I think it’s a little funny that every time I ask Claude a question it says “how insightful!” But that’s basically the only problem I have with the tone.