Tbh, getting good results from ai requires senior level intuition. You can be rusty as hell and not even middling in the language being used, but you have to understand data structures and architecture more than ever to get non-shit results. If you just vibe it, you’ll eventually end up with a mountain of crap that works sort of, and since you’re not doing the coding, you can’t really figure it out as you go along. Sometimes it can work to naively make a thing and then have it rewritten from scratch properly though, so that might be the path.
100% accurate. The architect matters so much more than people think. The most common counter argument to this I've seen on reddit are the vibe coders (particularly inside v0 and lovable subreddits) claiming they built an app that makes $x0,000 over a weekend, so who needs (senior) software engineers and the like?
A few weeks later, there's almost always a listing for a technical co-founder or a CTO with experience on their careers page or LinkedIn :)))
Like, I'm sure it's just laundering gcc's source at some level, but if Claude can handle making a compiler, either we have to reframe a compiler as "not serious", or, well, come up with a different definition for what entails "serious" code.
If losing your job is traumatic, I’d suggest reviewing your relationship with employers and employment in general. It’s not a stable situation, and there is no social aspect in reality. It’s an accounting decision.
Employment is almost always exploitation on one side or the other, with the best case being mutual exploitation.
Employment inherently involves paying less for your work than it is worth. In an ideal situation, in exchange you get access to tools at a cost less than they cost to access on your own.
It’s inherently violent on some level. Ending violence shouldn’t be traumatic.
I challenge you to think about the implications of if you were right.
If employment is violence, we should end it. But then almost everybody would die.
If paying for labor is violence, paying for a product is violence. Nobody should be allowed to buy or sell (or trade). But then everybody would die.
In a good economic transaction, whether purchase of product or labor, both parties end up happy with what they got out of the transaction. What is your time not working worth to you? If that value is higher than the money you get paid for your time and labor, then quit. Nobody is forcing you to work. But then, if you don’t have anything to eat, the value of your empty time might decrease in your own judgment. You might think, actually, I’ve got an excess of time and energy, and I’ve got a need for money and food.
I think it’s a pretty sweet deal to be able to work and get paid. Not violence.
I’m not saying that violence is bad. Farming is violence. Mining is violence. It’s a compromise we make. But ending a session of it shouldn’t be traumatic.
And yes, in many cases it’s a win/win. Without farming, many animals would have been hunted to extinction. Instead, they are amongst the most numerous on the planet, but that isn’t much consolation for the march to the slaughterhouse.
Sacrifices are made. Compromises are accepted. Often, it’s good. Often it’s exploitation. Often it is perhaps worse than slavery, and often it is a path to relative wealth.
It shouldn’t be part of one’s identity or sense of worth, to be a really exploitable person, even if it’s to your own advantage at times.
That's only true if you use a definition of "violence" which is so far outside the accepted definition as to make conversation impossible. Farming and mining are in no way violence unless you resort to idiosyncratic definitions.
I guess if you limit “violence” to violence against humans only? I’ve always thought that violence was applicable to animals and plants as well, so I guess we differ there.
Intentional harm that causes death is firmly in the violence category, imho.
the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy is pretty much the accepted definition, afaik
I’m not thinking of violence as some kind of universal bad thing though, it’s part of the natural world.
Losing your house because you couldn't pay the mortgage is violent, or at least backed by the threat of violence: what happens if you refuse to leave?
In a looser sense, so are having your utilities cut off, losing your children because you can no longer afford to care for them, skipping meals, driving an unregistered car that will get you into an altercation with the police, and everything else that comes as a result of poverty and unemployment.
I'm a little baffled by what you believe the consequences of a layoff are.
That employment is exploitation is evidenced by profits. Employment is a commodity. Any business expects to get more value out of a commodity. Not to break even.
> If employment is violence, we should end it. But then almost everybody would die.
Everyone would die? Are you assuming that employment gets eliminated and nothing is replaced by it?
Anyone who is against the employment relation wants something different. Not something farcical like voluntary self-elimination.
Can you accept that two parties can make an exchange that leaves them both better off? If you can’t accept that, there’s no real point in any further discussion.
I’ve been on both sides of the table for decades. I try to find ways to bind incentives from either side so that they are better aligned, but it’s always exploitative in one way or another. It’s just suboptimal. Perhaps employee owned businesses are the solution.
Being told you no longer have the ability to provide for yourself is also violence, especially when the onus on finding a new means of provision is 100% up to you.
> If losing your job is traumatic, I’d suggest reviewing your relationship with employers and employment in general.
This is a rather clueless and ignorant opinion to have. Your job is what pays your mortgage/rent and your bills, and it's a key factor in where you chose to live. Your job has a fundamental impact in your personal life and your family's experience.
Once you are fired, odds are your life will change radically. And not on your terms.
You should refrain from commenting on things you know nothing about. In occasions such as these, you are clearly both talking out of sheer ignorance and downplaying someone else's traumatic experiences.
No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control. If losing your job is traumatic to you, that is a sign you need to work on improving your detachment from outside factors. Obviously we all have bills to pay and would like to keep a roof over our heads, but being traumatized by losing a job is an extremely unhealthy (and abnormal) response.
That's an interesting parallel. I suspect the point is that entering all relationships with the expectation that all men are pigs carries certain benefits, but then it also likely has costs, such as an inability to form truly deep connections.
Now more than ever it is against your best interests to tip on any automated platform. The data collected will definitely be used against you in algorithmic pricing.
These days it pays to aggressively demonstrate that you are price sensitive and will delay or cancel transactions at the slightest whiff of additional expense.
I only ever tip off-platform or cash even if I pay with card. Also that helps to enable my gift to go only to the service provider. It fucks me on some platforms but I find that an acceptable cost to not get algorithmically spitroasted. Besides, it also helps to eliminate predatory platforms from my ecosystem.
E.g. Uber / UberEats offer lower fairs to drivers if the client is expected to tip higher. I'm not an insider, but it can be observed in the wild as discussed on Reddit.
Saw a system like this at a Podunk, nowhere, USA police station over a decade ago. It had high fidelity maps of peoples comings and goings based on Bluetooth and WiFi MAC IIRC. And some kind of API backend to look up identity based on those identifiers, not sure to who.
You could for example flag a location (house) and get a list of all of the comings and goings over the last x months, then look them up by identity. You could also flag when an individual was in proximity to another, or when someone turned on, off or switched phones.
I’m sure it amounted to illegal surveillance and would be inadmissible if any of it was done without a warrant, but it would be beautiful for parallel construction. (How is that even constitutional???)
It apparently relied on some kind of infrastructure deployment that consisted of “traffic cameras” and “satellites” ( I’m certain not of the spacecraft type) that I assume were just small receivers mounted on street lights, since the streetlights were almost completely replaced at the same time as the cameras were put in, by the same out of state contractor.
I was there to change out a bad SSD and do a RAM upgrade on one of the servers. I don’t imagine the technology has become less invasive.
If you have a phone or carry active Bluetooth devices, assume you are 100 percent tracked 100 percent of the time.
If you want to not be tracked I wouldn't even trust airplane mode. With just a SIM pinging towers already a lot can be done. With airplane mode I'm just being paranoid but I never tested radio emissions myself with it disabled so I'd just leave my phone at home if I was really worried about it.
Turning your phone off (airplane mode or power down, which sign out of networks) or lighting up a new one in the same location as an old one was turned off are treated as significant events in these systems and can be configured as an automatic flag for investigation.
If you care, slip it into a faraday bag instead of turning it off or going into airplane mode and you won’t be flagged nearly as likely. People rarely use airplane mode or turn off their phones in situations where it doesn’t provide a useful clue about activity.
There is a huge overlap between surveillance platforms and behavior analysis / data brokers.
Welcome. Tremendous to have you here. Really historic. Some people said it couldn’t happen, but I said keep an open mind, and now look. Intergalactic diplomacy. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. We’re ready to make a deal, a fair deal, maybe the best deal in the galaxy.
Population decline is disastrous for sprawling developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable.
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.
The economics of infrastructure actually improve for stable or shrinking populations because funding can shift from raw capacity buildout (extremely expensive) to maintenance and value-add services (profitable). Observe that the best infrastructure in the world is in nations with slow population growth, like Western Europe, Japan, and more recently the U.S. and China. Whereas nations with very high population growth struggle to deliver capacity for even basic needs like clean water or paved roads.
Slow population growth or even stable population is dramatically different from population decline. Usually slow growth is the ideal. But even a modest decline shifts extreme burdens onto wage earners. OTOH, it’s great for buying up property.
Exactly this. Their characteristics are by design constrained to be as human-like as possible, and optimized for human-like behavior. It makes perfect sense to characterize them in human terms and to attribute human-like traits to their human-like behavior.
Of course, they are -not humans, but the language and concepts developed around human nature is the set of semantics that most closely applies, with some LLM specific traits added on.
I’d love to hear an actual counterpoint, perhaps there is an alternative set of semantics that closely maps to LLMs, because “text prediction” paradigms fail to adequately intuit the behavior of these devices, while anthropomorphic language is a blunt crudgle but gets in the ballpark, at least.
If you stop comparing LLMs to the professional class and start comparing them to marginalized or low performing humans, it hits different. It’s an interesting thought experiment. I’ve met a lot of people that are less interesting to talk to than a solid 12b finetune, and would have a lot less utility for most kinds of white collar work than any recent SOTA model.
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