MisterKent

Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today.

Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion.

But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance.

The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over.

No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance.

Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.

They want people to believe they have massive models, that is effectively their moat at this point.

Because if they don't imply that size is needed for every task, they'll end up tanking their valuations.

https://blog.nilesh.io/post/ai-profit-race

If this makes Elon a trillionaire then he's not the first. All those NFT bros listing their stickers for trillions each have him beat by orders of magnitudes.

I keep seeing this sentiment in general and in this thread.

I wrote about it here too:

https://blog.nilesh.io/post/llms-and-jobs

Just because people have a vague idea of what someone's job is and a deep understanding of their own job, it feels like AI can replace everyone but you.

Now I can produce slop without AI.

Of course, but that's kinda the point I'm making here:

It's a tool not a replacement.

Job losses due to productivity may be inevitable, but that's not the same as being replaced by AI, that's being displaced.

Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...

Software engineering is the practice of taking a concrete problem, converting it into a set of rules (a world model), and then converting those rules into something a computer can execute for a human user.

As long as AI cannot dynamically generate a true world model on the fly, it will continue to fall short.

I imagine any real experts in art would just recognize the painting and so didn't make the "cut"

As I've started a greenfield project lately, and it's been almost entirely LLM driven development, I have concluded that there is no process or step that actually enables them to actually understand a problem.

Humans can think abstractly, parsing a problem space and condensing it into a solution. That is, I can take 10 different seemingly unrelated problems, and determine they're all the same class of problem, and then create a novel (ish) solution for that problem. LLMs simply cannot build that world model AND even when explicitly told the solution, they can't actually hold the model while authoring code.

They're fake thinking, and no amount of harnesses, or increasing the number of models is going to change that.

There was a post here before: tech companies have become adept at taking a thick thing (like friendship) and boxing it up to give you the same surface level feelings but it's not _real_ it's a thin version (following an influencer, social media). And you feel like you're friends with these people, but real friendships are not so simple, they're not so messy.

LLMs are robbing us of thick thinking and convincing us that thin thinking is something real. I don't think anyone can legitimately claim that LLMs are improving their product's actual problem modeling space, beyond just being a randomness / entropy generator where a human can actually choose.

Human written books, code, art are fundamentally shaped by having a true understanding of the abstract problem space and compressing it down it a way that makes sense to other humans. LLMs are just word salad masquerading as intelligence. Letting them into our world is a mistake that will take years to correct.

I'm gonna phrase this terribly.

People said the exact same thing about web searches, and I think there's a lot of devs who would instant search for every issue they hit.

Isn't this just better web search?

On the other hand, it definitely feels like it might be too big a step in the spoon feeding direction.

Writing code without AI feels like art, and writing it with AI feels like painting a wall: get it done quickly, cheaply, and good enough that people don't see issues.

It's the art part of engineering that's being lost, AI has no appreciation of elegance. It has no empathy for cognitive overhead of bad code or poor-fit design patterns.

Cognitive Debt is the phrase to Google btw.

But they did? Goldeneye for the Wii was released?

Try going to OneDrive to see your stuff if you want to be really annoyed.

I've been trying to switch my home cluster from Debian + K3s to Talos but keep running into issues.

What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos? How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term?

My tech friends and I cannot wait for this agentic bubble to pop. Much like the dotcom bubble, there's absolutely value in AI but the hype is absurd and is actively hurting investments into reasonable things (like just good UX).

The hype and zealotry remind me of a cult. And as I go higher up the chain at my big tech company, the more culty they are in their beliefs. And the less they believe AI can do their specific jobs, and the less they have actually tried to use AI beyond badly summarizing documents they barely read before.

AI, as far as I can tell, has been a net negative for humans. It's made labor cheaper, answers less reliable, reduced the value we placed on creativity and professionals in general, allows mass disinformation, and mostly results in people being lazier and not learning the basics of anything. There are of course spots of brightness, but the hype bubble needs to burst so we can move on.

Generically, the social security tech arm probably hires 20 somethings that have a way to access that data as well.

How does it compare to komorebi? I've been using it for about 5 months with great success. I'm a Hyprland user when I'm on my personal machine, but for windows Komorebi has let me keep my muscle memory and workflow largely intact.

Broken

This. 100% this.

LLMs will spit out responses with zero backing with 100% conviction. People see citations and assume it's correct. We're conditioned for it thanks to....everything ever in history. Rarely do I need to check a wikipedia entry's source.

So why do people not understand that: this is absolutely going to pour jet fuel on misinformation in the world. And we as a society are allowed to hold a bar higher for what we'll accept get shoved down our throats by corporate overlords that want their VC payout.

Maybe I'm alone in this, especially on this site.

I'm beginning to become disillusioned with these things. We're replacing like 1000s of jobs with a system that will almost certainly do a worse job than before. And the money is split between hospital shareholders and VC.

I get that there's an efficiency (market) gain here. But these AI startups that target existing sector automations seem like they're most just attempting to drive wealth inequality in a period of already terrible westh inequality.

I am a fan of open source and being able to tinker etc. But I've never felt the need (advantage?) to do more than just use the bios/efi to boot or configure a few basics.

I've been burned by a small SBC that had poor support, but on laptops/desktops never felt limited.

But people always sound so excited to libreboot their personal computer... Am I missing out or is it just nerd cred?

Just tap every ad you come accross until every advertiser leaves the platform

You don't even need gamma for 7:

2 + 2 + 2 + floor(sqrt(2))

Which feels at least more in the spirit of the challenge than gamma.

I got nothing done except thinking about a dozen ways to solve a problem, and a half dozen meetings.

If someone looked at my output the span of a week, I'd be fired. Thank god I'm evaluated over a year.

We don't. Rules are all essentially fictional, and an agreed illusion that we've all been conditioned to see as an immutable.

What the past few decades did was push enough people to the point of no longer seeing the value in continuing the illusion.

I am terrified of the long term ramifications here. But again, I do see how we ended up here.

No mention of standard deviation? Just by the fact the IQ is your place on a normal curve, with a 15 point standard deviation, there are at least 100K+ people in the world with an IQ of 160.

The smartest 0.0032% of the population.

People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"

The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon some off, etc.

Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.

I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.

I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.

I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue with our military spend.

I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money.

I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not.

However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable).

And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every person tangentially related to those in politics.

Two points that are often missed:

1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.

2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.

The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.