brokencode

The downsides you list aren’t specific to AI. Globalization and automation have destabilized labor markets. A small handful of billionaires control most major social media platforms and have a huge influence on politics. Other types of technology, particularly crypto, use large amounts of energy for far more dubious benefits.

AI is just the latest in a long list of disruptive technologies. We can only guess about the long term ramifications. But if history is any indicator, people in a few decades will probably see AI as totally normal and will be discussing the existential threat of something new.

Even regular sync functions in JavaScript can do lots of computations that take a long time. And others perform effects like starting a timer or manipulating the DOM. Should these be indicated with keywords too?

I agree that await is a nice hint in the code that something more substantial is happening, but ultimately it’s limited and quite opaque.

Great IDE support for algebraic effects would probably include inline hints to show effects.

The first ones to discover this would have been rich though. I doubt they cared what would happen to anybody else in the long run.

Developers often pick languages and libraries based on the strength of their developer tools. Having great dev tools was a major reason Ruby on Rails took off, for example.

Why exclude AI dev tools from this decision making? If you don’t find such tools useful, then great, don’t use them. But not everybody feels the same way.

Yeah, they’re saying that this compression is almost as good as is theoretically possible without losing any information.

You’ve also not added anything to the conversation. Instead of a snarky response, you could have asked for some examples of how small businesses have used their small size as an advantage. This may have led to insightful and constructive responses.

I personally like being able to choose because I understand the tradeoffs and want to choose the best one for what I’m asking. So I hope this doesn’t go away.

But I agree that they probably need some kind of basic mode to make things easier for the average person. The basic mode should decide automatically what model to use and hide this from the user.

Idk, it feels like this is what you’d expect versus the actual reality of building something.

From my experience, even building on popular platforms, there are many bugs or poorly documented behaviors in core controls or APIs.

And performance issues in particular can be difficult to fix without trial and error.

Out of curiosity, what do you work on where you don’t have to experiment with different solutions to see what works best?

If it could be implemented that way and would be helpful where Google fails, then why has nobody done this? I’d love to try this out if you can point to a product that does this.

You can criticize LLMs all you want, but the fact is that they provide value to people in ways that alternatives simply don’t. The energy consumption is a concern, but don’t pretend there are viable alternatives when there aren’t.

Okay, so how does the average person search through vector embedding? I would like to try this out.

Well he needs the public not to vote in a bunch of democrats in the midterms. And, if his MAGA movement is going to live on in Vance or others after his term, he will need public support.

You may be right here. The tariffs might not directly cause enough pain for the average person to matter.

The big unknown still is the impact on the economy and job market. His actions may reduce competitiveness of American companies globally due to retaliatory tariffs and resentment.

If the tariffs cause a recession, people will punish him for it.

Great idea, I’m sure that would have helped. Maybe they also could have had Anthony Fauci personally reply to antivax conspiracy theories on Twitter. That would have won hearts and minds.

You think Trump is “friendly” and of course he is. He is the primary beneficiary and spreader of lies about the 2020 election, so why wouldn’t he also be the best arbiter of truth on the subject?

A violent crackdown against who? The people who stormed the capital and assaulted police officers?

Even AG Barr said there was no evidence of widespread fraud. The “plausible evidence” you speak of was a firestorm of unsubstantiated claims on social media that incited a violent attack on the capital.

What in your mind should have happened differently in response to Jan 6?

No widespread fraud was ever proven that could have swayed the election.

Should we have pretended there were major flaws with our voting system just to help you with your feelings?

Or maybe we should have let Trump be president again for no reason just because you were really upset about it.

And did you ever wonder why, if Democrats were able to magically steal the election in even red states like Georgia and Arizona in 2020, they didn’t bother to try it again in 2024?

There are millions of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and either sat out or voted for Trump in 2024.

Not everybody is part of the cult. Many people simply thought Trump would take the economy and prices back to 2019. If he doesn’t, he’ll be punished.

I disagree with this. Jan 6th didn’t affect 99% of peoples lives directly. It was clearly bad, but few people saw impacts in their own lives.

Higher prices and a possible recession will affect every person in the country and even globally.

His MAGA base might not blame him, but that’s only like 30-40% of the electorate. The other 60-70% won’t be happy if their lives are negatively impacted.

I hate to break it to you, but Linux has always had a very significant amount of development done by and for various corporate interests. There are whole companies that exist solely to commercialize Linux.

People learn best in different ways. Some learn best by reading, some by tinkering, some by watching and listening. I heard this over and over in school and college.

I don’t think it has anything to do with reading speed. When taking in complex technical information, you spend more time thinking and trying to understand than actually reading.

If you’re finding that you can quickly race through content, it probably just means you find the content easy to understand because you’re already familiar with many concepts.

Yeah, this is not ideal. I’m hoping that the breaking changes don’t affect the code at my work, since we also had to spend multiple years on a major .NET Core transition. I want the faster compiles right away, not in a few years.

Also, most laptops will run at significantly worse performance when not plugged in. Macs are much more consistent both thermally and when not plugged in.

I’m not dismissing it. I’m saying that it’s different than traditional investments since most of the potential uses are still speculative, whereas it’s pretty obvious what value you can get from ownership of a company or a barrel of oil.

Nope, not at all. Stocks represent partial ownership of a company. If you buy all the stock for a company, you own the company. Companies are valuable because they (ideally) make a profit for the owners.

Bonds are valuable because the company or government that issues them signs a contract to pay out a certain amount on them. They won’t always do that, but thats why we have rating agencies to help investors understand the risk.

The closest equivalent to crypto in traditional assets is probably precious metals and gemstones, though even those typically have some industrial uses to drive demand.

Diamonds are a great example of the downside of looking at the market value of something alone. The natural diamond market has been massively disrupted by the rise of artificial diamonds and diamond alternatives.

At least gold has real world uses, such as in electronics and spacecraft. Keeping large quantities of it safe for the future seems prudent, even outside its use as a value store.

OpenAI releases one dud and suddenly people come out of the woodwork to trash them.

I agree that OpenAI's endless hyping about AGI seems pretty unrealistic, but let's take a breather here. There are no major research projects where you don't run into setbacks and failures before you reach your goals.

And even if they never really progress beyond where they are today with their current models, just bringing down the cost could open up a lot of doors for useful applications.

Clearly it is able to solve various logical problems, and therefore an at least imitate logical thought. Is that not reasoning?

And there are plenty of logical problems that many humans can’t solve. Does that mean they’re not capable of reasoning?

At what point would you say something has reasoning? I’d argue that it’s more about how good something is at reasoning, rather than saying it is or isn’t capable of reasoning in absolute terms.

If your concern is primarily about researchers in academia using this and believing what it says without skepticism, then higher education has failed them.

And if you think that all published “research” was guaranteed to be accurate before AI tools became available, then I think you should start looking more critically at sources yourself.

> “They will be harmed as a result.”

Compared to what exactly? The ad-fueled, SEO-optimized nightmare that is modern web search? Or perhaps the rampant propaganda and blatant falsehoods on social media?

Whoever is blindly trusting what ChatGPT is spitting out is also falling for whatever garbage they’re finding online. ChatGPT is not very smart, but at least it isn’t intentionally deceptive.

I think it’s an incredible improvement for the low information user over any current alternatives.

You have to use your best judgement. If you are confident in your approach, then I think it makes sense.

You are then also owning this decision, and would have to face more consequences for it going awry. So I don't think it "places a ton of pressure on your coworkers" as you say. It relieves them of pressure since they don't have to decide and won't be held accountable.

But if you think an action will be controversial or are unsure, then you need to make sure you are getting feedback and buy in from other stakeholders before proceeding.

This is not only to make sure you are making the right decision, but also spreading accountability for this potentially bad decision to other members of the team. This accountability will put more pressure on your coworkers, but it is needed to help make the right decision.