Thanks for that list of levels, it's helpful to understand how these things are playing out and where I'm at in relation to other engineers utilizing LLM agents.
I can say that I feel comfortable at approximately AI level 5, with occasional forays to AI level 6 when I completely understand the interface and can test it but don't fully understand the implementation. It's not really that different from working on a team, with the agent as a team member.
Oh, IOT shock collars. Hope this company takes security more seriously than most IOT players, or some sick people are going to take hacking into these devices as an opportunity for animal cruelty. :(
One of the hardest things to do is to put yourself in the place of those you see as villains and recognize that they generally see themselves as heroes. The human capacity for self-justification is extremely powerful.
It's the flipside of focus/concentration of attention. Which is the key trick underlying all science, engineering, scholarship etc. The foundation of our civilization.
So you might say that a vast ignorance is implicit to our way of life.
Best-sellers don't sell that many copies in the absolute sense. From what I can tell Careless People has sold around 200,000. Moving the needle just a bit is worth it.
I would argue that reading discussion of "CEO says" "journalism" on HN will often better inform you than reading a mainstream journalist puff-piece interview of a CEO. Many journalists will not provide adversarial viewpoints, because to do so would stanch the flow of interview subjects.
"Access" is the filthy dirty word here. Can't be anything other than a stenographer because you might lose your ACCESS, with which you can do MORE stenography.
Humans are by far the most vicious animal species, because the sophistication with which they apply torture is off-the-charts. Felines and orcas may consume their prey alive or play with them, but it's not in their capacity to keep their victims alive indefinitely with the express goal of inflicting maximum suffering.
A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy.
In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.
Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.
>when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.
sure because they're just making shit up. If you don't have access to a source you're by definition speculating. The fact that they can do it in an abrasive way or in attack mode is a performance of authenticity, not actual reporting. You believe them because they're "just like you".
It's the biggest curse of our time and emotional manipulation. Journalists sometimes have to navigate how they talk to people but a skilled reader can at least extract real information from it even if it requires reading between the lines. The Youtube 'reporters' add nothing, it's entertainment. They're popular to the extent that they reinterpret publicly available information in a way that confirms the biases of their audiences.
The journalist pays for access but the youtuber pays with audience capture, the difference is consumers of mainstream journalism are aware of it. Someone who reads an interview in the NYT with a mainstream politician know in advance that they'll have to be critical, 18 year old's watching youtube don't. Youtubers are infinitely more deferential to their audience than a journalist is ever going to be to an individual subject because the latter is professionally employed and the former is a cancelled subscription wave away from flipping burgers.
Mainstream journalism can't compete its way out of its malaise by insisting on an "impartiality" that demands journalists lie by omission. Such journalism is utterly incapable of meeting the moment and opposing the innovative incrementalist autocracy of Orban, Ergogan, Putin, and others.
Such feckless news organizations are destined to become tools of the state; perhaps that is in fact the smartest play for the profits of their ownership. Certainly Bezos seems to be taking WaPo down the path of collaborator, as are the Ellisons with CBS.
The illusion-of-impartiality model has its loyalists, but this article is about the young news audiences who have have been lost. At least some of them have been lost, not to YouTube and influencers, but to other news outlets (left and right) who have embraced their own biases and adversarial perspectives. You call that a "performance of authenticity", but in the marketplace it has beaten a performance of impartiality which is at least as inauthentic.
>but in the marketplace it has beaten a performance of impartiality
of course it does, the entire logic of market driven news is to cater to the attention and emotionality of a self-selected audience. Journalism cannot compete with that and still perform its function. When someone subscribes to a substack for 10$ they're not going there for facts or because the author is the equivalent of Plato, they're going there because they're sold a quasi-relationship. It's effectively Onlyfans for news.
A journalist at the WSJ say obviously has biases, but there is real impartiality both as an ideal and in practice. John Carreyrou who worked there brought Theranos down, despite Rupert Murdoch being heavily invested in the firm. (and I don't think Rupert Murdoch is the model of an ethical citizen).
'Alternative news', be it left, right, top, bottom or what have you would never do this. For one they don't engage in investigative journalism, but they also couldn't if the subject were the people their audience adores. And given that young people have been taught that the purpose of media is entertainment and gratification, you can't sell them critical analysis or factual information.
I don’t know. Is a random YT channel more trustworthy considering their reliance on sponsorships? And once they do interviews, they face the same issue
I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …
It's not that the random YT channel is actually more trustworthy, but that it exposes the audience to adversarial perspectives which mainstream access journalists hide — thereby eroding the trust of young audiences for mainstream journalist outlets compared to previous generations for whom such adversarial perspectives were less available.
I miss when Christopher Hitchens could get on CNN as a self-identified socialist and have 10 minute discussions /in good faith/ with callers who disagreed with him. Sometimes he would put us silly Americans in our place, sometimes (less often) he would end up looking the fool. And he kept doing it regularly for a decade. Imagine that happening today
The phrase "spiritual successor to WordPress" is not likely to be judged a trademark violation, though. It doesn't create confusion in the marketplace as to whether Emdash is WordPress.
Linux distros and BSD ports did that since the 90's. When Linux distros had barely a PM or just tarballs, Infomagic sold 4 CD full of libre software. When I had no internet at home, back in the day I bought 3 DVD's of Debian Sarge for 20 euros, about $20. A bargain, it was the price of a hard-cover best seller book.
GB's of libre software, graphical install, 2.6 kernel, KDE3 desktop, very light on my Athlon 2000 with 256MB of RAM. It was incredible compared to what you got with Windows XP and 120 Euro per seat. Nonfree software and almost empty.
And, well, if for instance I could get read only, ~16TB durable USB drive with tons of Guix packages offline (in a two yearly basis with stable releases) for $200 I would buy them in the spot.
You would say that $200 for a distro it's expensive, but for what it provides, if you are only interested in libre gaming and tools, they amount you save can be huge. I've seen people spend $400 in Steam games because of the Holyday sales...
Thanks for that list of levels, it's helpful to understand how these things are playing out and where I'm at in relation to other engineers utilizing LLM agents.
I can say that I feel comfortable at approximately AI level 5, with occasional forays to AI level 6 when I completely understand the interface and can test it but don't fully understand the implementation. It's not really that different from working on a team, with the agent as a team member.
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