> I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).
Not sure you're aware but you initially sound like you disagree with the post you replied to, only to follow up by enthusiastically reiterating that author's words as if in agreement.
You realize what shoppers and vendors each consider to be "good" e-commerce sites are fundamentally opposed concepts?
Maybe? I'm not sure which way the OP is arguing, in particular because of that "(Good)". So perhaps I misread the comment as arguing the opposite of what it is.
"if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project"
The tried and true technique of speeding up completion of an established project by adding more people; well known for the tendency to fail successfully.
The reason AGI couldn't do these is the lack of a suitable interface to the physical world. It would take a trivial amount of effort for these to be designed and built by the AGI. Humans could be cut from the loop after an initial production run made up of just the subset of these physical interface devices needed to build more advanced ones.
> utilizing a “hack it till it works”(tm) methodology.
Your post describes my coding perfectly. I don't have CS training of any type, never been formally involved in software development (recently started dabbling in OSS) and never used an LLM/agent for help (do use a local SLM for autocomplete and suggestions only).
Yet I can "code." I suspect a (pre-2023ish) software developer would likely tell me "go learn to code" if i asked for review. I don't know the formal syntax people expect to see and it has organization more typical of raging dumpster fires. Doesn't mean it's not code.
> If the light switch you bought, has a little daylight sensor on it, and turns off when the sun is out, and that's what it does.. you may not like that light switch. You might want one that "does what you want, because you paid for it!" but then you should have purchased a different one, or made a light switch you actually liked.
Not sure this analogy works as it gives prospective light switch buyers a choice of different light switch types. What google is doing seems more like forcing EVERY light switch to have daylight sensors, thus forcing you to save power (even if you're pro-global warming and just trying to do your part for the cause), then telling people with vision problems relating to suboptimal indoor illumination or suffer from sunlight frequency melting disorder or think they've got some other random "daylight makes life suck" bullshit to create a student/hobbyist account.
That's really a different issue. There may be only one light switch vendor, and then you're stuck with what they offer, too. There is room in the market for more manufacturers. I'd definitely buy from one who offered a truly open source and customizable option. But I wouldn't get it for my grandmother, she's much better served by what Google offers already.
Ditto. Coding isn't what i specifically do, but it's something i will choose to do when it's the most efficient solution to a problem. I have no problem describing what i need a program to do and how it should do so in a way that could be understandable even to a small child or clever golden retriever, but i'm not so great at the part where you pull out that syntactic sugar and get to turning people words into computer words. LLMs tend to do a pretty good job at translating languages regardless of whether i'm talking to a person or using a code editor, but i don't want them deciding what i wanted to say for me.
> (just a hypothetical, I assume most parents can't afford to buy one)
It used to be that high school students were required to have a graphing calculator. These had to be purchased by the student (iow by their parents) and without factoring in 20+ years of inflation costed more than some Chromebooks available today. I suspect there were (and still are) financial assistance programs as i've known students living below the poverty line and they were able to meet that requirement.
MS has supported doing gpu virtualization for years in hyper-v with their gpu-pv implementation. Normally it gets used automatically by windows to do gpu acceleration in windows sandbox and WSL2, however it can be used with VMs via powershell.
You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).
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