AndrewKemendo

Long time artificial intelligence engineer and founder here: Welcome to the feast or famine world of AI, none of this is new. This is just how life works as somebody trying to build AI as their focus.

I don’t know a single artificial intelligence researcher working in the field for more than 20 years, who hasn’t gotten laid off once or twice in their career because all of the funding fell out for whatever their AI project.

Not only that it was usually funded by some government, and so you had to deal with the political funding cycle in addition to the technology development cycle (still very true).

It’s always been like this “frontier tech “ or “bleeding edge technology” etc…

This is most likely not the final cycle, one where we finally all realize that artificial intelligence is the only technology worth working on and I would be surprised if this is the last “AI bubble.”

The key thing to remember, though is that every AI cycle or AI bubble leads to an entirely evolved set of infrastructure, technologies, and architecture, and ultimately those are the things that matter

Whether or not you make any money is usually the last concern of anyone who’s been working in AI seriously, we’re gonna keep working on AI no matter what.

I run my own local models and there’s no world where “normies” can do this.

In fact, I just switched from a 96 GB ram laptop to a 32 GB ram laptop specifically so I can have GPU acceleration because 20 toks can’t replace the 6000toks or whatever astra does

It’s desire that you’re getting stuck on.

The amount of Cubans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans Panamanians, etc… who had literally nothing and no resources to their name, who walked or hitched to the United States or Canada to back breaking labor to put their kids into high school is staggering.

Similarly for pretty much every cab driver and worker in Dubai, who is from Bangladesh or India or Kuala Lumpur or whatever…

In fact, I knew a very successful Honduran restaurant owner in Houston, who was deported twice from the U.S. between 1980-2000 finally got his citizenship on the third trip.

> Taken to an extreme, everyone at risk in a community leaving would only distill the hostility in to a pure un-hindered hatred that will take far more effort to address in the long run

I think I understand the instinct behind this, but I’m not sure if it’s actually mechanically true.

What I’ve seen in practice is that when there’s an exodus of any major part of any group, then the group effectively dissolves

You’re right there may be some kind of final consolidation period of dogmatic people, which often splinters, but it mostly seems like exodus leads to long term dissolution, which seems like the goal of leaving it

Hence “vote with your feet” is the best protest

I’d love to hear why someone shouldn’t migrate when the environment gets hostile to their way of life?

Seems like an obvious move to me.

Awesome article and interesting to see Heisenberg get it wrong. It really was a perfect situation for the US because we could get all the radioactive material with little issue.

A clean reminder that logistics is everything.

Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.

Well I never thought I’d see Digg used as a primary source

This is certainly an interesting timeline in this section of the light cone

My father told me: “If they are advertising it you don’t need it”

Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”

But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things

Thanks for posting

I have managed epilepsy so it’s good to see progress on treatments even if they aren’t directly applicable

> long-term leases as debt, because they are obligations to the business

I don’t think this is how your average reader of this would interpret debt.

When I and most people think of debt they think a negative equity account balance that you pay off to a bank or lender like a mortgage or credit card. Not a 24 month apt lease because no equity is being exchanged.

In part because of the reason OP said which was severability which isn’t something you can do with owed debt.

Graebers debt demonstrates that this is the most common way to think about it.

Mythical man month applies to humans

I have one collecting dust that I stopped using years ago just because I got bored with it so if you wanna work together, I’m happy to. I’d love to see it get more use.

I’m not sure, I see a good mix of true believers and competent pragmatists.

Very close in feel to what the DoD used to be in the early 2010s

In my ongoing experience with Googlers nobody in Google is functionally worried about anything but keeping moving up the ladder and trying to be on the “retirement level money asap” pathway.

“We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year”

Is probably the best description of the state of engineering today

Kind of a weird argument. I’m the only one in the thread actually talking real dollars and the response is “that doesn’t last forever?”

When will that be?

I just finished a $23k engineering job in 3 months, entirely solo, that would have taken a year without these tools. That’s real money to feed my kids and working tech that made a client happy.

That’s one job and I have several in the pipe.

The “financial payoff” for no more than a few 100 a month at absolute most is there and it’s real. If you aren’t seeing it then you’re doing it wrong.

I usually don’t even spend more than $20 a month each for chpt and claude, deepseek free is solid. I am about to switch fully local too so that should drop to basically cost of watts.

I dunno what yall are doing

Agreed. After a long time in tech the first movers almost always get killed

In fact most people aren’t even aware of most first movers cause they shut down or get acquired and their tech get absorbed into some giant conglomerate

“More done at once”

Why do you need to get more done at once?

It sounds like you’re describing a one shot but with more steps

I stopped thinking about Apple as a technology company when I realized they ACTIVELY fast follow instead of being pioneers in fundamental technology.

I don’t think that’s an insult or bad, if anything it makes them more reliable as a company because they ride the wave of technological advancement rather than on the leading edge.

That’s a really great position as long as you have no ego about being the first - and they repeat over and and over that are THE BEST not the first.

Being third for 100 years beats being first for 40 years and Apple has the Middle Kingdom strategy

How are people hitting limits?

I consider myself a Heavy cgpt user since 2022. To the extent where I’ve made over 30k ish in solo dev side-projects since 2024 that wouldn’t have been possible without hiring a team.

I have not once gotten a over limit notice from openai.

Alternatively, I used to max out my claude tokens very quickly even on fairly small projects.

The only difference I can tell from how I see other people utilizing these tools is that I never once “fire and forget.”

My project flow is: 1000 rounds of text back-and-forth on architecture, data structures, competitive analysis, tool use and calling, etc… and then the last 10% is code writing test development and then usually about five rounds of CI/CD iteration until I get to a MVP or something shippable.

Are the majority of people attempting to one shot and then when they fail they just keep trying to one shot?

In my experience, you can get 90% of the way to the technical solution before generating any code whatsoever.

That’s been true before LLM’s continues to be true now.

He gave his talk first on day 2 of the AGI 26 conference

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQBwtgkHnC4&t=289s&pp=2AGhApAC...

I mean Roger Penrose proposes that consciousness is inside the waveform collapse so…

Many definitions of intelligence and ultimately consciousness rely on fanciful ideas and complex theories

Most human societies claim dominance over “everything else” aka “nature” and in order to do that you need a reason “humans” are different from “nature”

Is this supposed to be computer generated satire?

Edit: Ah, yes:

> Dsrupt is satire about technology's takeover of everyday life, written with AI's help as it happens. The trends are real. The people and companies are made up. A human edits, reviews, and signs off on every story.

Living in a machine Oroborous

Send it to outreach@agi-society.org and I’ll respond from that

Reach out if you need moral support at some point.

I’ve been saying we need a general strike for a long time and I’m hoping it will happen

https://generalstrikeus.com/

> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”

I’m curious if the opposite would work:

“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “

I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.

I'm not sure it's possible to even give a reliability score for a new product.

The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy

The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.

Never pay to be a new product tester

Means you’re out of money