I think the ROI criticism is generally off the mark. Most homeowners that resist rezoning, etc. are concerned about quality of life issues rather than home values (although those are aligned if significantly lower quality of life reduces home values). For example, the idea that I'd benefit if my area was upzoned because I could sell my home/land for much more doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't want to sell my home, and I don't want the neighborhood to change around me in a way that I would eventually want to.
I wonder if some tipping point has been reached. At the beginning of the week I thought "This regime is doomed, no way the populace will back down now.". But of course the regime is not going to give up without a fight, there's a high chance of ending up in prison (if you're lower down the food chain, a higher chance, if you're pretty high up, I guess Fox News will still pay you to spit out propaganda), so I don't expect the violence to abate. (Would you rather be in jail, or invent all sorts of justification why being a henchman of a fascist regime is "fine"?).
I wonder how much more violent the oppression will be. Aren't we already in uncharted territory? (I guess civil rights warriors of the 60's will be laughing at that idea...).
This drives me absolutely crazy. Non-falsifiable and non-deterministic results. All of this stuff is (at best) anecdotes and vibes being presented as science and engineering.
That is my experience. Sometimes the LLM gives good results, sometimes it does something stupid. You tell it what to do, and like a stubborn 5 year old it ignores you - even after it tries it and fails it will do what you tell it for a while and then go back to the thing that doesn't work.
Isn't that the vast majority of products? By making things easier they change the scale it is accomplished at? Farming wasn't previously impossible before the tractor.
People seemingly have some very odd views on products when it comes to AI.
It's actually a fair question. There are software projects I wouldn't have taken on without an LLM. Not because I couldn't make it. But because of the time needed to create it.
I could have taken the time to do the math to figure out what the rewards structure is for my Wawa points and compare it to my car's fuel tank to discover I should strictly buy sandwiches and never gas.
People have been making nude celebrity photos for decades now with just Photoshop.
Some activities have gotten a speed up. But so far it was all possible before just possibly not feasible.
This conversation is naive and simplifies technologies into “does it achieve something you otherwise couldn’t”.
The answer is that chatgpt allows you to do things more efficiently than before. Efficiency doesn’t sound sexy but this is what adds up to higher prosperity.
Arguments like this can be used against internet. What does it allow you to do now that you couldn’t do before?
Answer might be “oh I don’t know, it allows me to search and index information, talk to friends”.
It doesn’t sound that sexy. You can still visit a library. You can still phone your friends. But the ease of doing so adds up and creates a whole ecosystem that brings so many things.
No. I'm just stating that a huge portion of these comments have their own emotional investment and are confusing OUGHT/IS. On top of that their arguments aren't particularly sound, and if they were applied to any other technologies that we worship here in the church of HN would seem like an advanced form of hypocrisy.
...generate piles of low quality content for almost free.
AI is fascinating technology with undoubtedly fantastic applications in the future, but LLMs mostly seem to be doing two things: provide a small speedup for high quality work, and provide a massive speedup to low quality work.
I don't think it's comparable to the plow or the phone in its impact on society, unless that impact will be drowning us in slop.
There is a particular problem that comes with your line of thinking and why AI will never be able to solve it. In fact it's not a solved human problem either.
And that is slop work is always easier and cheaper than doing something right. We can make perfectly good products as it is, yet we find Shien and Temu filled with crap. That's not related to AI. Humans drown themselves in trash whenever we gain the technological capability to do so.
To put this another way, you cannot get a 10x speed up in high quality work without also getting a 1000x speed up in low quality work. We'll pretty much have to kill any further technological advancement if that's a showstopper for you.
Exactly this. These systems are supposed to have been built by some of the smartest scientific and engineering minds on the planet, yet they somehow failed (or chose not) to think about second-order effects and what steady-state outcomes their systems will have. That's engineering 101 right there.
That's a small part on why people became more cynical of tech over the decades. At least with the internet there were large efforts to try and nail down security in the early 00's. Imagine if we instead left it devolve into a moderator-less hellscape where every other media post is some goatse style jump scare.
That's what it feels like with AI. But perhaps worse since companies are lobbying to keep the chaos instead of making a board of standards and etiquette.
This phrase almost always seems to be invoked to attribute purpose (and more specifically, intent and blame) to something based on outcomes, where it should be more considered as a way to stop thinking in terms of those things in the first place.
> Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.
If you survey all the people who own a hammer and ask what they use it for, cooking is not going to make the list of top 10 activities.
If you look around at what LLMs are being used for, the largest spaces where they have been successfully deployed are astroturfing, scamming, and helping people break from reality by sycophantically echoing their users and encouraging psychosis.
Email, by number of emails attempted to send is owned by spammers 10 to 100 fold over legitimate emails. You typically don't see this because of a massive effort by any number of companies to ensure that spam dies before it shows up in your mailbox.
To go back one step farther porn was one of the first successful businesses on the internet, that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place.
Is it possible that these are in the top 10, but not the top 5? I'm pretty sure programming, email/meeting summaries, cheating on homework, random QA, and maybe roleplay/chat are the most popular uses.
The number of programmers in the world is vastly outnumbered by the people that do not program. Email / meeting summaries: maybe. Cheating on homework: maybe not your best example.
What I'm actually telling is that I disagree with far left propaganda.
Many of you seem to jump to the conclusion that I'm some sort of hardcore MAGA supporter or far right Trump fan.
In reality, I'm European and arguably only conservative leaning, and I don't like Trump and his erratic trade and geopolitical policy.
Apparently disagreeing with far left politics already often makes me a pariah on the internet. This discussion alone has already cost me like 10 karma, for pushing back on X supposedly being the worst for political content.
I’d advise folks to consider a) the relationship between poverty, stress, and obesity Nd b) the income inequality of the United States relative to Germany
You cited poverty as a reason but then switched to income inequality as the statistic.
When citing poverty, simply look at poverty rates, not a different statistic. Income inequality is higher in countries with higher incomes, like the United States.
Regardless, obesity is not limited to people in poverty.
Absolutely. The American way of life traps people in a zoo. There is nothing to do other than work (if you are lucky), eat, and consume junk media. For ones who are poor the only difference is the degree to which the food is also junk.
This is patently false -- there is plenty to do besides consume junk media; the fact that our population is addicted to the dopamine associated with short-form video doesn't mean that there aren't other options.
I've made a concerted effort to consume less "junk media" in the last couple of years. In that time I've gotten an Amateur radio licence, I've built a couple of keyboards and speakers, I've started golfing (after a 20 year hiatus), I've learned to bake bread (from scratch, including grinding wheat!), I've read a lot of novels, and I'm happier for all of it.
Everyone has to work -- this is not unique to the United States. But outside of that, eating and living healthier is absolutely possible, it just takes some effort.
No, I want to tell that parent to spend the hour they use scrolling TikTok to do literally anything else, it'll improve their life. I understand my experience is not typical, but there are many things besides "junk media" that are not cost prohibitive.
it really doesnt have to be golf though lol. its all just excuses. i worked minimum wage (actual minimum mind you, no tips, nothing) for about 7 years and i didn't get obese, must be magic.
my hobbies included waking and running around, making stuff on an old laptop (I kept that one!), reading, making planes out of whatever material i could get my hands on that sort of stuff. i ate pasta, eggs, rice, water, tomatos. i never cared about eating the same thing everyday (i still don't but ive learned to eat a little better).
theres plenty more hobbies, obviously none of these being forbidden in the USA lol. and most make more money than I did, not to mention have food stamps and the like.
JFC you do understand that not everyone in America is a software engineer like you who is well compensated and has a proper work/life balance? There are tons of people in America that are just ground into the dirt day in day out with no end in sight. Have some empathy.
Sure, i'm not arguing against that. What I'm arguing against is the statement "there's nothing to do but eat and consume junk media"; That's simply not true, there is plenty to do, and a lot of it is not cost prohibitive.
I wish I could see you try to tell this to my father when he was working manual labor. I'd pay money.
Manual labor which was so grueling that he had sue his company in order to retire early because he could literally no longer walk and required surgery to remove the extreme bowing in his legs.
You could come in, look at the latest Creosote burns on his skin, and tell him that something-- anything! --would be better than watching an hour of Football.
And, while you're at it, you could try to convince him that smoking's bad too.
Another commenter twisting my words -- I'm not saying your father shouldn't be allowed to watch football. I'm saying he has other options, and he's not railroaded into only watching football.
Also, he should probably quit smoking (unclear if it's too late for that, if so I'm sorry)
We should try posting this on a literary discussion forum and see the responses there. I expect a lot of AI FUD and envy but that’ll be evidence in this tools favor.
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