YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems Posts 0Comments 784Joined 1 yr. ago
I think it's just "World" now. They've apparently had a pretty big marketing push in the states of late, trying to convince trendsetters and influencers to surrender their eyeballs to The Orb.
See I would frame it as practicioners of some of the last few non-bullshit jobs (minimally bullshit jobs) - fields that by necessity require a kind of craft or art that is meaningful or rewarding - being routed around by economic forces that only wanted their work for bullshit results. Like, no matter how passionate you are about graphic design you probably didn't get into the field because shuffling the visuals every so often is X% better for customer engagement and conversion or whatever. But the businesses buying graphic design work are more interested in that than they ever were in making something beautiful or functional, and GenAI gives them the ability to get what they want more cheaply. As an unexpected benefit they also don't have to see you roll your eyes when they tell you it needs to be "more blue" and as an insignificant side effect it brings our culture one step closer to finally drowning the human soul in shit to advance the cause of glorious industry in it's unceasing march to An Even Bigger Number.
I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you're writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what's happening, and if you don't you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they're doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.
Update from my wife: Oh my God I can't believe that none of Elon's kids like him. Not even the manufactured AI ones. Truly reaching new levels of divorced never believed possible.
Holy crap I had missed the actual fallout on that front. Tech execs really are not like us, I guess.
I argue that we shouldn't be tolerant of sloppy factual claims, let alone lies and disinformation, but we also need to keep perspective: it's worth opposing fascists even if they don't pollute that much, and it's worth protecting labor even if the externalities of doing so are fairly negligible. That is, I'll warrant, a somewhat subtle and nuanced position, but hey. This is my blog, so I get to have opinions that take more than a sentence or two to express!
Apparently we live in a world where "lying and Nazis are both bad, and Nazi liars are the worst" is a nuanced and subtle position. Sneers directed at society rather than the writer, but it was just a big oof moment.
Given that the current post-rollback prompt has some interesting features I can only imagine what Elon did to it.
Heartbreaking:Saltman was funny
As always, whatever nefarious ends Elon and Co. may have us undercut by their being greedy and incompetent in equal measure.
I love this. Especially the ending, talking about the titanic struggle to make AI competent enough to outsmart the people who think it's going to be omniscient. Glad to see I've got another writer to chase down that I had somehow missed previously.
Even with the name it had me going for a while. Whoever wrote it is gonna want to have a lawyer on speed dial for the inevitable license violation.
On one hand the AI doomers are convinced he's building a suitcase nuke.
On the other hand, skeptical viewers want more assurance he's not just taking the money and building dumb tweets.
This is the kind of quality journalism that I need more of in my life. Also I learned a surprising amount about olive oil, which means it's more useful than anything else Sam Altman has been involved in as far as I can tell.
Honestly I think his whole channel is pretty damn good if you want to see someone with actual chops - here meaning an economics doctorate and an encyclopedic memory for The Simpsons memes - dig into the research in a way that effectively balances depth and approachability. The first one of his that I remember was an examination of Pinker's use and abuse of data in his radical optimist manifesto that I can't remember the title of.
Massive missed opportunity there.
I still occasionally get the gurdy gurdy music from In Search of a Flat Earth stuck in my head, particularly the sting from "they're all going to Qanon"
Dude literally just discovered word choice and composition. Welcome to writing! I learned about this in public education when I was maybe 14
Possible upside of the AI bubble: getting high school English teachers the barest amount of respect from Administration.
With apologies to anyone with taste:
Sam Francisco was in trouble. Need to find another bubble
Where could that cash be? Seeking rents for me...
But now it's...
SPRINGTIME! For AI! And VC Bros!
Winter! For Users! Like you
We're marching to a faster pace! Effective now: accelerate!
...
As a bonus you can even keep the "don't be stupid, be a smarty" line from the original show
As someone not versed in the relevant deep lore, did emacs vs vim ever actually matter? Like, my experience is with both as command line text editors, which shouldn't have nearly as much impact on the actual code being written as the skills and insight of the person doing the writing. I assumed this was a case where you could grumble through working with the one you didn't like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.