BrenBarn

I notice this in the attitudes of students towards reading. They will take a 10-page journal article and ask the AI for a summary and then read a summary that's the equivalent of maybe half a page. But if the article could have been half a page, why is it actually 10 pages? It's true that there is some boilerplate, but it's strange to me that people could think that 90% of what they're reading is (to use your phrase) "not true semantic information". It's like if you went to a restaurant and ordered a 10-oz steak and they brought you a little teeny bite of steak and said "Oh, other places will give you a bigger one, but most of that is just filler, we just took out all the superfluous parts." It's a worrying sign for our future if things like this are not tripping people's skeptic sensors and making them wonder if they might possibly be missing something.

Yes, but what if you own 100 houses? I'm pretty sure there is some number N of houses (or total value of houses) where I would be fine telling the person, "You don't get to decide what to do with these houses anymore, they're going to be given to people who need houses." Not as a matter of antitrust or monopoly but just directly as a matter of an individual controlling too much wealth.

Aside from that, once you admit that there can be restrictions on property rights, it's unclear how property rights in and of themselves is a steelman of private equity. Why not just say that "you can't sell to private equity" is one of the restrictions? Or, perhaps more subtly, why not say that a private equity company of a certain size is not allowed to buy any additional company, independent of what rights that company's owner has to sell?

I think that "everyone should be able to do what they want with their own property", per se, is not a good principle for society. Sometimes people should not be allowed to do what they want with their property. In particular, I think the more property a person has, the less freedom they should have to do what they want with it. (This can also take the form of "the amount of property a person can own should be limited".)

In theory this is true, but in practice I am skeptical that it's generally possible to do this with generic "business" intelligence that is not accompanied by specific understanding of and genuine care for the actual substance of what the business does. That is, no matter how good you are at "business", you're not going to have a good hamburger stand unless you care about making good hamburgers. It's true that the importance of this varies from one business to another, but I don't see any particular tendency for PE to gravitate towards industries where it matters less. (Medicine is an example of an area where it would matter most.)

> Many people don't really run businesses efficiently.

In many cases that's a good thing, depending on what we mean by efficient. Lots of people run businesses in ways that make less money than they could, and often that's good.

> I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.

Doesn't the evidence suggest it is indeed often worse?

> The steelman argument is that private equity is just property rights. If I build a business I get to decide what to do with it.

You're gonna need to steelman that again, because in and of itself that is also not something I see as desirable.

I'm not sure that's true. Like if they produced nothing but the worst of the slop they're currently producing, a lot of people would still be bothered by that just because of the sheer volume of such slop that can now be produced.

And that's because the DMCA lets Google exploit its position. It's still a DMCA problem until the DMCA is either repealed or fixed to produce a comprehensively good situation.

It's not totally clear from the examples given, but I feel like in some cases these changes aren't a genuine effort to improve things. They're just a sort of cycle of changing things to chase fads or look busy.

The better outcome would be for everyone to slow roll everything rather than speeding up the rate of bug propagation.

And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.

> I am not interested in blaming companies or people

> The issue isn't the models becoming smarter. The issue is that the process of "testing" was careless.

But that's just it. People (working at companies) made the models, people (working at companies) were careless in the testing. So I do want to blame those people and those companies. They did bad stuff. They deserve blame.

I think what it does answer is "why is it reasonable for anyone to say I should not be angry?" The answer is "it isn't". Maybe some people are angry, maybe some people aren't. But I think it's wrong and frankly kind of gross for someone to suggest that other people shouldn't be angry about what's happening.

What I want from a query language is for it to not be a language, but some kind of specification of components that can then be transmitted to the engine in a machine-readable way. The bizarre thing about SQL is that it has to be written in SQL. What if instead a JSON representation of the query (something akin to the AST, with a bit of processing done to boil it down) is what the engine took in? Then each language could specify the query in whatever syntax is most idiomatic for that language. Right now we do this with ORMs, but it's a huge pain because the ORMs are like a transpiler with a really free-form and messy language as the target. All the ORMs are just pasting strings together. If the "native" query format were more structured, we could have a lot more cool approaches for wrapping that on the programmer-facing side.

The dangerous thing about amplifying is that bad people are often more willing to amplify their activities, because they don't care about the negative effects. We are seeing this now as AI companies (and large companies of all kinds) rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities. Meanwhile people who actually care about doing the right thing get trampled.

We need to shift the incentives by adding ruinous penalties for things that are currently quite commonplace if they are done by large players. Some dude training his own AI on his own computer can scrape and train. The fine for OpenAI or Meta using a single copyrighted book without permission should be in the tens or hundreds of millions.

What we're seeing currently in our society is a "loophole inversion" where the rules have an effect mainly via their loopholes. The most profitable activity is to find loopholes and exploit them as frenetically as possible to gain as much advantage as you can before the loophole is closed, or get people hooked on the loophole so it's retroactively legalized. Entities that are big enough to do this are big enough because they have lots of money behind them. Entities doing the same kinds of things without lots of money are not really doing much harm. So the best approach is to adopt a "sliding scale" in which even tiny violations by wealthy actors result in penalties enormously greater than fairly large violations by small players.

> You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes.

And they should be doing that from inside a jail cell.

Solution: break Amazon up into itty bitty pieces.

A one-stop online shop for everything, automatic free shipping, automatically buying stuff you "need", many things that Amazon provides --- all of them are drugs from which we as a society must wean ourselves, even if the pains of withdrawal are great.

There is a great phone app called World Geography Quiz that will quiz you on flags, country shapes, capitals, and all the rest. It has a staged entry thing where you get access to more categories and regions as you play. I'm not affiliated with it or anything, just thought of it when I saw this because it's become a real go-to geo quiz fix for me.

> I feel like a lot of tech innovation and "business process innovation" over the past 15 years was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations when the tide went out and seeing that lots of companies had been pantsless the whole time.

It's not just tech, it's everything. One of the things the US is really "good" at is allowing a massive gap to emerge between law and enforcement.

I also don't like the fatalistic mindset, but I feel like we're better off trying to retaliate against the makers and operators of the bots, rather than getting into a technological arms race against the bots themselves. That is, the fight is one of policy, law, and morality, not of technology.

It's not a bad idea but we need a multi-pronged approach, with at least one other prong being "destroy the companies that are doing this".

> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.

It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.

We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely.

I agree the web-of-trust model is a good idea for the future. Lobsters has something sort of like it in that you can see a tree of who invited who. I don't think it has a fully fleshed-out system for reputation flow on that basis though.

I don't think the old web was really a walled garden, though. It was just a sort of isolated garden that was harder to get to. There was nothing outside it threatening it. Now the garden needs walls because there are a lot of dangerous things outside.

By "candidates like this" and "these types of candidates" I assume you mean Nigel Farage.

> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls.

One difference I see is that in the (so-called) "old web" era, if you were not nerdy enough to navigate certain technical issues, the path of least resistance was to not participate. As you say, those people stuck to phone books and newspapers and TV. That meant that entering the world of the internet was adding something; you could still read the newspaper and watch TV (and most people did), but you had the internet also.

The insidious achievement of the Facebooks and TikToks of the world is to make things smooth enough and make participation widespread enough that nowadays its harder to not participate, somehow, in some facet of online interaction, than it is to participate. By doing that they created a flood of junky stuff, and now AI has come along to amplify that approach many times.

This means that now, what the nerds are trying to do is not to add, but to subtract. In the old web, you went to the web to get something you couldn't get from traditional media or communications. But now, if a "new old web" is created, it will largely be to not get things you are effectively being forced to get from the flood of social media and AI content. That doesn't mean it can't be done, and in a way I hope it is done, but it means it's going to have to be qualitatively different. Before, the walls kept you in and you hopped over to get out, but now we're all out in the wilderness, and if people build walls, it will be to keep the wild world out and keep yourself safe inside.

> The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation

That is a problem whenever people do things for money. It suggests that a big problem with our society is people are encouraged (in some cases effectively forced) to want money too much.

> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.

This is why I don't have any patience for the people who say "but AI is so powerful! we can do so much!" It amplifies the bad stuff more than the good stuff, so it's a net negative.

> Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of… maximizing my use of the tools. It’s reflexive in the worst way, a productivity ouroboros.

More flour more water. More water more flour.

I think that is one reason why it was better.