Interesting! On a similar journey. For me, the novelty of tech has been wearing off for the last few years. Slowly deleting apps. After this election I am going on media detox. We have also started reading again for fun - it took a while to regain my patience for reading but it has been so much more satisfying than endless web stuff. Have not missed anything so far. Now I have to loose my HN addiction… ;-)
This is the paradox. For software engineers, the current crop of “AI” tools is magic. A huge accelerator. And then they assume the rest of the world will get the same boost. However this is not the case at all. Claude code is great because it is trained on extremely well documented git histories and stack overflow. And outcomes are binary: the code works or it doesn’t; the PR is accepted or it isn’t. Not much else in the business world is like this at all. No training data with this kind of sequential development information. And no real black and white outcomes as such.
I would love it if we can just take the win on having created an amazing tool set for coders. Can’t this be enough?
Fair assessment. Maybe the messaging should focus on “these are great accelerators for software developers” rather than “AI will change everything for everyone everywhere…” It is understandable that non-technical folks are kind of underwhelmed - not due to lack of understanding so much as lack of a tangible need. Not everyone needs an electron microscope or gas chromatograph…
Commercially, this may be what they want to happen. Instead of just getting an answer, they got you to make three more prompts / queries. What do you know? "Engagement" just went up 3X!
Would be lovely, but many issues. 1. If LLMs can't reliably produce factual information today, how can they check if any statement is factual? 2. What about writing that is not recounting facts? e.g. fiction or marketing? 3. who decides what is factual? Does the system give a pass to statements like "full self-driving" or "AGI" or anything accompanied by "the likes of which have never been seen before"?
Software company pens speculative narratives about impact of not-yet-realized features. This reminds me of the corny old copies of The Futurist magazine that my dad kept around. Fun, hopelessly naive, and not at all aligned with how reality unfolded. Nice that Anthropic can afford a team of economists somehow though.
Yep! Our family is on our second one. First was 42” and lasted five years. Current one is 55” and is going on seven years. Both were around $200-250. Picture quality is great for us. Apple TV takes care of streaming. And easy connection to our stereo gives great audio. Cheers!
Closed amazon account when Bz decided to get into politics. I realize I can buy everything I need “in the real world” and thru manufacture websites directly. I do not miss it.
1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.
2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?
Why participate? Why not just skip any site that wants a photo of ID? Also, those sites run massive liability risk for the inevitable data breaches that will occur.
There ARE regulations for sure. But they exist to protect the population at large. For example, food safety laws were not created out of government hostility but rather because food was unsafe. Read (or read about) The Jungle by Upton Sinclair if you want to get creeped out about the food industry in the 1930s before regulations
If businesspeople want to get involved in politics, they should have the courage to run for office like anybody else. Lurking on the sidelines and waiving money around is really lame and laughable.
At the end of the day, the processor can only do Turing operations: assign values to variables (registers, memory locations, storage), loops, bitwise operations, and conditionals. Whether the source code is python, java, or lisp, it has to compile or interpret down to machine code ultimately. Likewise if the running software is a word processor, DOOM, or an LLM, at the end of the day it will be executed by the processor using the three operations. Lots of other fancy hardware and software may accelerate things but ultimately it is those ops that are the running code. The rest is many wonderful conveniences and abstractions.
I think the gap is because 1. For coding, Claude is amazing - mainly because of its curated skills and because massive amounts of working code has already been carefully labeled over the last decade or so via GitHub. And because with any Turing complete language, there is only so much one can do.
But 2. For most other things, LLMs are fairly underwhelming. Research is usually mediocre. Try being rigorous and repeat your research prompt many times - then make a confusion matrix to tally up how many false positives and false negatives occur. And for the rest, be honest and ask yourself if the LLM is doing much more than a basic search engine query or trip to Wikipedia would have told you. For “normie” use cases, it’s handy-ish but far from revolutionary
What other industry regularly acts in such bad faith with respect to claims made? In the securities industry, material misstatement of fact lands people in jail.
Gee, what an optimistic outlook you have. Do you think the truly creative innovators in the fields of tech, science, engineering, and art get out of bed in the morning believing that they are just grimly marching down a path laid out by someone else? While OP’s philosophy may be a bit rosy, it sure leads to better outcomes than dark fatalism.
Forecasts are a thought exercise, not the revelation of something foretold. Best thing to do is think of the outcome you wish for and then try to take whatever actions you can to help make it so. Like with climate change for example.
1. so is everyone who is subject to a corporate mandate... but...
2. this may be ok. A good way to learn a piece of software or tool or process is to play with it. We learn lots of general knowledge through play and experimentation. Heck we get better at musical instruments by playing on them.
Mandates are kind of dumb in many ways. But they will force the issue of discovering whether anything useful can come from AI other than coding.