Is it because "Meta identifies you as a male" or because men look longer at sexy pictures of women? I assume Meta has some heuristic to determine how long you look at items in their feed even if you don't click anything.
As I remember it the basic idea is that the new generation of drones is piloted close enough to targets and then the AI takes over for "the last mile". This gets around jamming, which otherwise would make it hard for dones to connect with their targets.
AI also led me to experiment a bit more. In my case it helped remove the barrier to getting that initial bare-bones skeleton of code in a new environment by helping setting up libraries and a compile chain I was unfamiliar with and then giving me a baseline to build off of. Did you find that AI helped you evenly all the way through the experience or was it more helpful earlier or later on?
It was probably most helpful early on when there was lots of code to write and stuff to configure. Context is an issue as time passes. But it's still quite helpful for tweaking things/adding features later on, as long as I provide it with the necessary context/point it to the right files to read.
There is limited evidence for social media being a problem. This whole thing is a garden-variety moral panic. Particularly troubling is the constant vitriol aimed at Mark Zuckerberg. I admire Mark for ignoring the whole thing, being a family man, and continuing to build products.
If people want to get up-in-arms about something, it should be online gambling. We've run the experient there. The harms are clear and the world is better when gambling is highly restricted.
Where are the amazing no-hassle, no-boilerplate tools from last generation? Or the generation before that? Give me a break: it's easy to post this but it's proven very hard to simply "pick the right abstraction for everyone".
> And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not.
I work with a large number of programmers who don't use AI and don't have an accurate mental map for the codebases they work in...
I don't think AI will make these folks more destructive. If anything, it will improve their contributions because AI will be better at understanding the codebase than them.
Good programmers will use AI like a tool. Bad programmers will use AI in lieu of understanding what's going on. It's a win in both cases.
> I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known.
What is he talking about? AI?
I can't relate. Maybe it's because his identity vaguely repulses me. Although in some ways I'm part of it, I never liked the programmer subculture that he's mourning.
I find AI exciting because I don't know where it's headed. If it can do my job better than me, that's even more exciting. Maybe I'll have to find a new job or just learn to use new, diffeent tools but either way, change is interesting.
Why do people like fictional narrative so much? I'm not sure why, other than some platitude like "forming narratives is how people understand the world". But I'm not sure why it follows that fictional narratives are so important to us.
I appreciate Gray calling out the Soviets and others but I think the whole argument is wrong.
The link between Enlightenment values and imperialism/subjugation of Asia/Africa/Americans is far from clear. Enlightenment values aside, conquering people and taking their stuff was just normal at the time. And while imperialism enriched certain people and led to economic growth, it was probably worse from a economic-growth-first perspective (compared to free trade and sovereignty).
Along the same lines, American slavery was highly profitable for some but there is no good argument that it was essential to the US's economic development. Paying workers supports economic growth by increasing productivity and demand.
Over time, this project of attacking the enlightenment/liberalism has started to seem increasingly boring and wrong to me. For one, the vast majority of these critiques rely on Enlightenment values to critique the Enlightenment. So maybe we should be more enlightened! For another, right-wing populism makes liberal capitalism much more attractive.
I don’t have the data to make a rigorous argument but my intuition tells me that slavery quite likely played a considerable role. It just feels difficult to imagine that something they were so deeply invested in for generations wasn’t that important.
I’ve also wondered if the fiction of American exceptionalism is meant to help future generations pretend that the foundation of their success isn’t built upon an incredible horror perpetrated by their ancestors.
> It just feels difficult to imagine that something they were so deeply invested in for generations wasn’t that important.
Southern culture was about having giant houses, partying, and not laboring. They didn't fight for the economics of it but rather to preserve that way of life.
> I’ve also wondered if the fiction of American exceptionalism is meant to help future generations pretend that the foundation of their success isn’t built upon an incredible horror perpetrated by their ancestors.
American exceptionalism isn't a fiction. It's probably a selection effect due to immmigration.
And the "incredible horror" is very real...but I'm not convinced that it was necessary ("built upon") for American success.
My sense is that most immigrants ended up in the north by far, which was richer, more densely populated and had better jobs. Slavery made it significantly harder for free laborers to find work in the south.
It is psychologically interesting that many people claim that slavery was the bedrock for the modern US economic. As if it's not enough to say "slavery was evil" but something more, like "slavery was evil AND without it the US would be a backwater". But I just don't see a lot of evidence for that theory being true.
Basically every civilization was built upon some form of slavery, and unfortunately slavery still takes place in many parts of the world. This was (and is) evil, yet we can’t seem to eliminate it, only push it under the rug. Often we encourage near-slavery conditions in other countries, but technically the work is “voluntary” so we don’t call it slavery. Do brutal work in the tin mines or you won’t have food for your family, and your only other choice is to join an armed militia/gang. That sort of thing.
Of course in the US we still have prison labor, thanks to the 13th amendment loophole, and under-the-table labor by immigrants, who can accept low pay and terrible conditions or get deported. Louisiana’s Angola prison is literally a former plantation and still basically operates as one.
The great hope of modernity, for those who believe in it, is that machines may finally replace slaves. (China’s “dark factories” are an example of how this could work.) Sadly we may hit planetary limits before we manage to automate the worst work, and in catabolic collapse we will almost certainly return to open slavery.
(To be clear, in no way is this a justification of slavery. It’s an indictment of the human race.)
The issue I have with that is that we conflate cheptel slavery and older forms of slavery. We changed the nature of slavery in the 17th century, but kept the same words to describe it.
Some of these are after Viking times. And even so, why should it only count if it’s after Viking times? You get a pass just because?
Besides, you almost certainly use products that use minerals produced under conditions similar to slavery. It is not possible to escape some link to this in the modern globalized world.
I never said it was necessary, only that it was universal.
I suspect that the recent aversion to slavery is more of a function of our relative level of development (and the education that comes with it) than anything else. Morality can only thrive when there is a reasonable standard of living, otherwise people will find ways to justify evil.
Today it seems that we are at a level of development where we can only justify slavery if it is out of sight. I hope we can advance further, but we may be at our limit, as other moral taboos are already breaking down.
You're assuming there aren't "new things" latent inside currently existing information. That's definitely false, particulary for math/physics.
But it's worth thinking more about this. What gives humans the ability to discover "new things"? I would say it's due to our interaction with the universe via our senses, and not due to some special powers intrinsic to our brains that LLMs lack. And the thing is, we can feed novel measurements to LLMs (or, eventually, hook them up to camera feeds to "give them senses")
No it isn't false. If it is new it is novel, novel because it is known to some degree and two other abstracted known things prove the third. Just pattern matching connecting dots.
The vast majority of work by mathematicians uses n abstracted known things to prove something that is unproven. In fact, there is a view in philosophy that all math consists only of this.
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