You might only be hearing about it now but the warnings have been coming (including by those who are now leading the top labs) for a long time, since before any of those “incentives” were in place.
1,457 karma · joined June 1, 2009
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Surely those ads could sometimes cause someone to think or talk about a concept that they might not have otherwise.
If the ad then pops up again and they notice it this time, it will feel really spooky!
I think it’s similar to the phenomenon where you learn a new word and then immediately see it out in the wild somewhere. It grabs your attention because you were just thinking about it.
In the original example of ordering meat from the butcher, I also wonder if it’s possible that the data from that purchase was tracked and fed into the ad system. That seems more plausible to me than the “phone listening” theory.
Lately I've really been getting into agentic coding (first with Antigravity and now with Claude Code) and I'm really excited about what I'm now able to accomplish on a very small budget of both money and time! It's been a big boon to my ability to automate things that really ought to be the computer's job.
Plus with LLMs, the scope of what is properly the computer's job has increased by a lot! I've created a couple of Pipedream workflows that send freight bills and customer POs to an LLM to extract data. Now I just have to review and occasionally make a few tweaks vs. having to enter everything by hand.
Since building those, my main focus has been on building better tools for myself and the team, such as a little web-app for sales reps to create and send their own purchase orders vs. having to go through accounting (aka me). The nice thing about vibe coding vs. hooking together a bunch of low-code tools is that I can customize the UI to make it exactly what we need.
My current project is building a back-office app to help streamline the process of managing incoming shipping paperwork. This is a much fuzzier problem than regular invoice processing because it's a bunch of different types of documents (BOLs, packing lists, scale tickets) and a lot of judgment calls to make. I don't expect to hand it all off to the LLM but I plan to have the LLM do the first pass of transcribing the data. Then I'll make the human-review portion as ergonomic as possible for myself.
I have a first draft up-and-running but the default interface that Claude Code came up with is not very good. I'm currently discussing the UI design with Claude in chat mode, narrating my manual process as I do it to help flesh out all the details of all the different sources of info and what decisions need to be made.[0] Once we're done I'll ask for a spec that I can take back to Claude Code for implementation.
We treat it like any other toy: they can pretty much play with it whenever they want for as long as they want. Of course they have to share it between the three of them, so there’s a natural limit there.
Every so often we’ll add something new; most recently I installed SimAnt after we were watching ants in our backyard.
So far we’ve been very happy with this approach!
I know I don't have as much of a filter as I ought to!
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pmHZDpak4NeRLLLCw/p/TiDGXt3WrQwt...
I love the instant visual feedback!
And my preference in general would be for a more literal, word-for-word translation so I can learn what each individual word means.
Also, I’m using it in the phone and don’t see a way to get the translation of just one word since I can’t hover.
I’ve learned that yes, maybe 1 out of every 100 items I get rid of will turn out to be something I need again in the future. That’s a worthwhile price to pay for the benefit of not having the other 99 items in my life!
Donating to thrift stores is very convenient. And I learned recently that if I have stuff that’s not really nice enough for the thrift store to sell, I can just list it on Facebook Marketplace for free and people will come take it away from my porch! Makes me feel better about getting rid of stuff that still has some use in it, because I’m not just throwing it in the trash.
My mother-in-law and her friends use a system I call clutter laundering. Anything with too much sentimental value to give to a stranger, they pass along to each other. Presumably once the emotional distance is long enough, somebody can actually get rid of it for good! (That’s what I’ve been helping my MIL do with stuff that comes to her at least!)
"My favorite example of this concept is the humble clothes line. Is it legal to dry your laundry in the sun where you live? In many parts of the country this is expressly forbidden by law and/or private binding agreement. This sort of activity is associated with rural peasants, impoverished slum dwellers, dirty hippies, white trash (or worse), and is at odds with the look and feel of a prosperous community. It might be a scorching day in August but everyone is compelled to operate a mechanical dryer in the house and crank up the air conditioning because anything else is shameful and verboten."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/6/the-other-pitch...
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
[A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail (2016) ](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24957499)