whatnow37373

I think AGI implies it: I can learn something through audio and apply it visually and the other wat around. I don’t think that’s some abstract human quirk. Isn’t that what enabled literacy? It seems kind of obvious intelligence is beneath the modality, agnostic about it.

Maybe we can learn some lessons from digital artists who naturally fret over the use of their skills and how they will be replaced by stable diffusion and friends.

In one way, yes, this massively shifts power into the hands of the less skilled. On the other hand if you’d need some proper and I mean proper marketing materials, who are you going to hire? A professional artist using AI or some dipshit with AI?

There will be slop of course but after a while everyone has slop and the only differentiating factor will be quality or at least some gate-kept arbitrary level of complexity. Like how rich people want fancy hand made stuff.

Edit: my point is mainly that the level will rise to a point that you’d need to be scientist to create a - then - fancy app again. You see this with web. It was easy, we made it ridiculous and I mean ridiculously complicated where you need to study computer science to debug React rendering for your marketing pamphlet.

I can’t remember ever asking a question and getting a helpful answer to be completely honest..

I feel weird when I read about people needing support. Maybe there is something wrong with me.

Yes, that’s true and very cool but you’re an expert. Where do the next generation you’s come from? The ones that did not do weeks of dead-end research which built resilience, skill and the experience to tell Claude now saves them time? You cannot skip that admittedly tedious part of life for free.

I think pro-AI people sometimes forget/ignore the second order effects on society. I worry about that.

You miss the point. It’s not I don’t believe in scarcity or the second law of thermodynamics, it’s that I critique capitalism’s handing of it that is by its very nature exploitative, short-sighted and unsustainable. It needs various and extensive guardrails to be functional at all otherwise it would have destroyed us already.

It’s the classic “capitalism is built on scarcity but behaves as if infinite growth is possible”-critique. There are interesting responses to that but “it’s contradictory” ain’t one of them.

That’s strange, because capitalism is the one that thinks infinity is real. Also it’s trying to break nature, quite literally given the state of our climate.

There are other ways to cooperate that don’t depend on sociopathy and infighting.

Capitalism is just one solution to that problem and I’m not convinced it’s the best one.

In capitalism everything is a function of scarcity. I wonder how long we are going to keep up that particular charade.

So, basically, be super rare? And hard to work with?

If you earn some dough and are treated somewhat nice you have already hit the jackpot.

Don’t give up a perfectly good job just because you have power fantasy issues. You will always be a worker bee, that’s just how the world is set up. Someone or something will own your ass regardless of your compensation structure.

It’s not sci-fi though. If Star Wars is sci-fi then Jurassic Park is a biology documentary.

No matter how you twist it at some point two consciousnesses differentiate on some contradictory issue maybe not name, but surely they differ on some issue otherwise they wouldn’t be .. different consciousnesses. Life as a human moves and is narrated as a single story, not the story of a thousand processes.

If that were true I can call my heart a process, my liver, etc. They are in a way part of me but they do not just ex nihilo cohere into a single narrative. That is an active process and whatever does that is the only really interesting one (IMO). So I think there might be a bunch of processes, sub personalities maybe, but there remains the problem of integration. Whatever integrates is the one that really fascinates me.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me. It is hard to go into any depth in this medium. I think you have really interesting ideas. Have a nice weekend.

It’s a single narrative that controls the body is what I mean. If one consciousness says “I am Peter” then other consciousnesses would know that and be conflicted about, if they don’t call themselves that.

What I mean is that a single narrative “wins”, not a multitude. This has to be explained somehow.

Which one controls the body? There is a problem there. You can’t just have a bunch of disembodied consciousnesses. Well, maybe.. but that sounds kind of strange.

Then there is the beautiful issue of memory: maybe you are X consciousnesses but only one leaves a memory trace?

Consciousness and memory are two very different things. Don’t think too much about this when you have to undergo surgery. Maybe you are aware during the process but only memory-formation is blocked.

Possible. Reminds me of playing the piano with both hands and other stuff like walking stairs, talking, carrying things, planning your day and thinking about some abstract philosophical thing at the same time. It’s not easy or natural, but I am not at all convinced it is impossible.

At this point I will intentionally include a cookie banner even if my sites doesn’t need it. It exudes this … je ne sais quoi.

Powerful the Force is, young Padawan, as is the strength of your doubts. Release them you must.

While this issue is complicated and caused by a variety of factors I believe it is indicative of the quality we are going to be seeing in the coming decades. Well, that plus ads. The ads will always work.

You’re making it seem those guys worked the fields 14 hours straight. It’s just some paperwork..

People will start caring when their devices start bricking, loading websites takes 12sec and registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky.

We are in this weird twilight zone where everything is still relativity high quality and stuff sort of works but in a few decades shit will start degrading faster than you can say “OpenAI”.

Weird thing will start happening like tax systems for the government not being able to be upgraded while consuming billions, infrastructure failing for unknown reasons, simple non or low-power devices that are now ubiquitous will become rare. Everything will require subscriptions and internet access and nothing will work right. You will have to talk to LLMs all day.

I’m European, so: heavy—ass regulation. Don’t trust the market.

We don’t trust capitalism with all important bits of civilization: government, water and food quality, care, education, etc. I don’t see why it has to be let loose here.

Social media has a special place in my heart. A hateful place. If it were up to me I’d ban it outright. It’s eroding the fundaments of society while contributing nothing of value. It’s like crystal meth in that regard.

Alright. I confess, it has parts that functionally work. You can press buttons and enter text and most of the time they respond.

I literally cannot access the “content”, usually a single sentence, without signing in.

I’m frustrated because it is being used by politics and government as well as some sort of universal comms and it’s very, very far from that.

I am not going to analyze my peers’ abilities for my manager. That is literally his F job. It creates unnecessary tensions and again, his job.

Why do so many people roll along with this?

I see engineers often bad-mouthing each other. Why do it for the managerial class? Surely you realize they are herding us like cattle.

Just do your job. Nothing more, nothing less.

X is completely unusable and it saddens me people keep posting valuable content to it.

I don’t particularly care either way but I can see the argument that any human no matter how brilliant is a product of the society he/she was raised and thus purely personal ownership does not exist. Your work is our work, we just play pretend for a few decades but in the end the pieces return to the box they came from.

I believe this was already settled? Didn’t it just experience gravity the same way?

Trigram count can be enough. I saw a demo of that on HN users to look for alt account a year or two ago. Worked great. Found all my alts.

The CPU development curve is often thrown around but it very seldomly fits anything else in reality. It was a very rare and extraordinary set of coincidences that got it us here. Computation using silicon turned out to have massive growth potential for a variety of lucky reasons but say battery tech is not so lucky, nor is fusion nor is quantum computing.

The low hanging fruit has been plucked by said silicon development process and while remarkable improvement in AI efficiency is likely it is highly unlikely for that to follow a similar curve.

More likely is slow, incremental process taking decades. We cannot just wish away billions of parameters and the need for trillions of operations. It’s not like we have some open path of possible improvement like with silicon. We walked that path already.

Maybe photonics..

Yeah but any abstraction can be made to work if it remains sufficiently abstract.

All of life is “energy conversion”. All of programming is “translation”. All programming is “solving problems”. Etc.

Not all abstractions generalize (in an useful way).