GolfPopper

>It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.

We had an economic model that supported both the people and the work; the current economic model supports neither.

I would submit that this one of a great many reasons why the current economic model is problematic.

You left out one...

The already shaky economic system (and associated political systems) can't take the strain of every man woman and child in the western world devoting a substantial portion of their income (like 5-10%) to LLM fallout, and we end up with a collapse scenario of some sort. (Which, to be clear, is near-certain to be worse than either of the above.)

>best guess is he plans to deflate the currency to make the debt worthless

That might be the best possible intended outcome, but it also seems unlikely that Donald Trump and his government are involved in anything so far-sighted. Just look at the man's public behavior over the last year; either he is an incredible actor, or this is not a government where anyone in power cares about anything beyond the Big Man's whims of the moment and their personal benefit.

"Hate AI"? Not at all.

Hate marketing BS and wealth extraction? Absolutely.

I see OpenAI, Anthropic, etc (the whole LLM-hype/boom) leaning far more towards being the latter than the former, in which context the dislike makes perfect sense.

Even if they are, watch the video I linked. We, as a species, were conducting an average of dozens nuclear detonations on or near the surface annually. And we stopped. IMHO, that ranks right up there with the Montreal Protocol as one of modern civilization's great accomplishments. (Or perhaps I should say late 20th-century civilization's accomplishments. Now there would probably be a huge movement calling for destroying the ozone layer to get more of the amazing ultraviolet.)

Interesting. It makes me think of J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar script:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar

While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [1] has not entered into force, it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended. There were almost 2,500 nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998.[2] Since then, the only nuclear detonations have been North Korea's six tests.[3] This is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, and I really don't think it gets enough attention. There's an old video on Youtube that has an animated map of all the tests (except North Korea's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...

Phone carriers can't be bothered to police their networks to mitigate flagrant bad actors, who can't be shut down by state law enforcement, so your software company needs to take control of your device away from you. "For your own safety."

It's just a public confession that none of these organizations - not the carriers, not the government, and not Evil Google, are fit for the responsibilities they've claimed.

They were actually doing this already. When you bought the premium plan, they just lied and pretended their in-house ads weren't ads and served you those instead. You still didn't get to just watch the content you wanted.

So, what's the high value perspective that leads to penguins always riding bicycles from left to right?

>All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse

You're right about "continuing to get worse", but our institutions have been failing for more than 20 years. I think it's more like that Hemingway quote about bankruptcy, “Gradually and then suddenly.” in turn, that always makes me think of an exponential growth curve... and I think America, if not the entire world, is headed towards the vertical. Ib other words, when it comes to how dysfunctional our institutions can get, I think we've just begun.

I'll just say that I work in a heavily regulated industry.

Came for the Peter Watts reference, glad to see it! Starfish (1999) focused around this idea and it and it's sequels are well worth the read, IMHO.

As with anything LLM-related, I feel compelled to ask, is that actually what's happening, or are they just successfully convincing their users that's what's happening? I truly cannot tell.

I'm not using any LLMs directly (my workplace still bans them in-house) and my experience on the receiving end of contractors using them is quite poor. That includes one major, "we'll replace your ancient software with shiny new stuff"... with significantly reduced capability that in turn makes everything far more difficult than it was or ought to be. The UI appears much more user friendly, but really is just broken in multiple ways where the much-patched 1980s software it replaced was user-unfriendly but largely worked.

This all could be the result of poor coding, regardless of LLM use, of course.

The term for this that I got from a C.J. Cherryh story is 'Wave Without a Shore'.

Which is one of many reasons why social media, along with the internet in general, ought to be treated as a public utility rather than a private for-profit business.

BepiColombo, another joint ESA-JAXA mission, will enter orbit around Mercury next month after a longer-than-expected journey. It will be the third spacecraft to visit Mercury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo

>We have Ai that can solve any math problem or any technical problem.

Does, "How many p's are in raspberry?" count as a math problem? Because ChatGPT still returns an answer of '2'.

Like our laws on intellectual property?

Calling companies operated by, and for the investor class "your own" is doing some awfully heavy lifting here.

I think calling them ideologues is overly generous for most American politicians. They're vehicles for influence via bribery (which is usually done in a technically legal fashion).

Will they work reliably if they're being fired at someone Thiel likes?

"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own."

This cuts to the heart of it. Elizabeth Holmes' real crime, the reason she was actually punished (insofar as anyone in her position ever gets punished), is that she both embarrassed and defrauded many wealthy and influential individuals.

Looking at how the LLM companies are acting and being treated, an average user could certainly be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

>governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability

Looking at the United States government since the end of the Cold War I don't see a lot of "strategic investments in stability" but rather a lot of technically legal bribery to enable short term profits.

I closed mine a while ago specifically because of the anti-union behavior. It's not acceptable and Amazon should meet its end as a corporate entity as a consequence.

"Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49022152

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-goo...

>And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out.

Hard disagreement.

My issue is not with the work on its own merits (although I think its pretty generic mass-market SF), but rather that it is wearing the skin of something it is not and to which it has no honest claim. It is one thing for an author to take a well-regarded prior work and attempt to complete or expand it. For example, Brandon Sanderson's work completing Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time is very respectable; he tried to complete the series as Jordan would have done. It is quite another to take the name and setting of such a work, steal the surface detail and use it to dress up one's own story that shares nothing of the underlying body or soul of the work - such enterprises are an insult to the original author, the reader, and the self-respect of the new author.

The "later books" the "prequels" are not written by Frank Herbert, they're written by his son Brian and SF author Kevin J. Anderson. And not like Christopher Tolkien editing his father's notes, but a completely separate series with nothing in common with the original work.