dzink

Show the operating system. That is the core of what people will be using - they need to know what it looks like. How easy it is. The phone looks like all other phones.

In 2009 a Turner Broadcasting executive stood in front of employees and said they are not worried about Online streaming because it only covered 15 minutes of watching time among consumers. TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, HBO, Time Inc were all under the same ownership umbrella along with the entire MGM catalog Ted Turner had acquired at the cost of losing control of his company. There were executives who knew what they were doing but some were performative - using buzz words and bravado to hide that they had no idea. Many were trying to extract as much as possible from both ends - 50% of revenue from consumers and 50% from advertisers. Even when those two were in direct conflict with each-other’s interests. They believed content was king and so they invested in content, instead of distribution. They hoarded their back catalog for years.

In the mean time Netflix started with 3 CDs per month plans and when they began streaming on 2007 we didn’t use it at start because we assumed that it would cut out of the 3 movies allotment. So we were scared to use it for a while. Yet we used it regularly - because unlike the cable service, streaming didn’t have ads. And ads were massive massive abuse and waste of time for consumers. You can benchmark the level of abuse by the types of ads in the super bowl: Alcohol, crypto, gambling, cars…

The reality is that cable was a paid premium service, unlike broadcast TV, which was free and littered with ads. Mix the two and you lose the golden goose.

That said, the bravado of that executive stuck with me since then.

Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.

It’s back.

The only question is whether what is valuable to Humans remains what is valuable. If major chunks of global money is in the hands of a few entities who can generate more money by doing things that humans don’t care for (example oligarchs profiting from war, or by some far out analogy - some AI company blocking the sun to extract as much energy as possible to power AI farms at the expense of food farms). Then you have a real problem.

Money at its start was human willpower packaged conveniently for transport - in exchange for money you could have humans do something for you they wouldn’t normally do on their own. If you can make money by crunching numbers with a GPU that doesn’t sleep or eat, using energy that doesn’t need humans to make, and you can buy products with it that make you more money automatically, how much would you ask of humans and serve to humans?

The easiest way to miss the joker is to trust in confidence. Dunning Krueger is alive and well and the worst professionals and founders run in and pose with bravado. Real passion goes into the details and with persistance. Real passionate people have initiative to do more and will be happy to tell you about it. The key is to have someone in the room who knows what they are talking about and can separate the BS from the truth.

So what’s the catch? Are they selling the prompting data?

I grew up with real cow milk from neighborhood cows and I can taste the difference. To this day I won’t buy milk that tastes reconstituted.

Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.

Government having a large AI farm goes towards one thing: using the AI to “guide” citizens with a firm and totally not-political arm.

With AI code complexity is a cost bigger than money. Because it takes infinite amount of time from humans (maintainers, engineers) and requires increasing amount of memory and hardware to handle (unnecessarily) you have to account for it and hold contributors accountable for it. Otherwise any code will become unmanageable and un-runable and un-upgradable.

Exploring the scenarios and corner cases is how rules should be written, just like any code.

In this case producing anything commercial and anything with AI period should always be disclosed.

Since at this stage we can often tell when something is AI (though not everyone and not always), especially food images at a restaurant, for me that immediately downgrades the quality or value of a product That’s going to be the natural human response. And users of the tech will likely be lumped in with very poor attempts, downgrading the value of anyone who uses it. That is natural payback for trying to go commercial.

However in the hobbyist space - the space where humans learn what AI attempts will also do is expand the creative space massively - people will get to iterate much faster with their own styles and new styles will emerge. Just like the invention of writing and publishing - the original writers were people with tremendous time and resource privilege on their hands, but the art of writing would have never ever bloomed if it didn’t become available to anyone over time. Humans then draw higher order conclusions and insights from the abundance, even if it takes energy for filtering.

That said, abuse in the form of pretending something generated is real or taking credit for generated work as real should be illegal. If you teach the moral compass along with the book or you built the identification along with the work you will get a lot more authentic novelty even with AI tools.

Human learning is transformative. It takes time. Time, not money, is the criteria for value to human life. Humans can re-draw in styles they see and the law sees it as transformative work. Humans draw conclusions from learning and apply it to other fields - that’s natural intelligence. If AI helps humans make more new, transformative work, not the same characters as the studios, not the same plots, then the studio should not try to rent-extract. Otherwise someone will try to do it to stick figures and any other style and you’d have to teach toddlers rules for any stile before you give them a crayon. The only real impact will be that hype and styles “in fashion” will just play out faster and in the mean time the Studios get their name sealed in human minds for anything done in their style - which is more immortality than abuse.

The Airpods 2 have a whistle problem for me. Any time someone whistles or anything makes a loud noise I would feel a pressure on my ear that was quite unpleasant and stemming from the airpod. Haven’t tried the 3 but I wonder if it is related.

Also possible use cases: Drones, Drone attacks on individuals with smartwatches, tracking of dissidents, these days you have to think about all possible angles.

From Hackathons, to Workflow, Apple Shortcuts, Sky and now OpenAI… Congratulations Ari! His team knows Apple software better than anyone, but will Apple allow third parties access to all functionality under the pretext of sandboxing or security?

The system is off. Contributor would write a new piece. Spammers would go in and remove legitimate articles it links to and replace with spam links. Wikipedia bots go through and purge the new contributions. Contributors stop caring.

I know an average farmer who is using ChatGPT all the time to look up illnesses and treatments for his crop, or optimal production techniques, taxes etc. The speed of looking up and getting better information has never been greater. The average person is a gross overstatement when everyone has interests that vary and strives to improve. In fact the whole point of AI is to help provide much faster cycles of improvement to anyone trying to improve in anything. Thus not white collar specific. Especially when it provides window to people with other skills to do more white collar work for themselves or add those skills.

Why the padding self on the back after a few opinions? You have large tech and government players and then you have regular people.

1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production).

2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too.

3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted.

4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising.

Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?

I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make progress can give you infinite dopamine rewards and fuel more desire to work. The key is finding your Brain’s most constructive sources of dopamine and see how much you can feed it.

AI use on corporate code means exponentially compounding complexity. Even if carefully planned for, AI enables more features to be added and more will be added a-la-carte, and the tower inevitably becomes bigger than humans can manage, especially if they are allowed increasingly less time to maintain a fast growing pile of code. That means eventually large enough code bases will be manageable only by AI or not at all. Talk about lock-in.

Green is likely sponsored by Putin as a way of keeping Europe away from Nuclear and any other viable alternatives to Russian gas. (proof: Former German chancellor on board with Russian energy companies.) Not investing enough in Nuclear and solar is Germany’s biggest mistake.

I say it again and again. China owns a big chunk of US equities and an even bigger chunk of Bitcoin holdings. The first sign of any conflict between US and China interests is always a dump in those.

The name is way too long for people to type queries using it.

It may be common in many places, but it is also a great filtering mechanism for envy. People who belittle others for fun feel a need to project some kind of social status above others. It’s toxic behavior because it can grow.

I seek out the social groups where people try to help eachother and where most of the conversation is towards pushing a common goal or helping each other’s pursuits. That way someone saying something negative is a signal, and the negative can be addressed. You can only move fast and in the right direction with clear signaling. If the signal is diluted by people with low self esteem who would rather belittle those who do than do the doing, then you need to clear the signal.

You should allow people to pick more options to resolve the issues. If energy is low, enable a nap, or food, or some other way to replenish, instead of “watching tv”.

We are a cerebellum. Our brain summarizes one layer of data into insights for the layer above that and programming is one layer. AI is now forcing us to think not how things should be built but what should we built - everyone is a promoted to product manager. What should be built now can be answered by what is needed by humans, or companies, or AI, or government. All of the above should be serving humans. So what do people want or need? How can we harness AI to solve more needs.

I think of it from another angle. AI is reaching an energy limit. Companies are way overvalued and in a race to spend most of their gains on AI and that may end badly. Governments are on edge and conflict is brewing. All of that and unknown unknowns can put a stop on the amazing stream of affordable AI we have now. I am using the models as fast as possible to build things I find meaningful and to learn as much as possible. Having unlimited help with any idea that I come up with is incredible. It’s akin to infinite VC funding, but you don’t owe equity or a cent back. The world is now what your cerebellum can come up with. And what you know about the needs of people.

AI can help people stuck with skills that are no longer useful to acquire new skills. The premise is AI driven re-qualification of talent towards fields that are needed and faster than any educational system can do at the moment. Nursing (the academic steps before practical skills can be learned in person somewhere), electrical engineering, entrepreneurship for people who may want to start that with a skill they already have, etc.

This was bound to happen, but they will also likely see a much higher chargeback rate across the board if users are surprised when random comments or agent actions place orders or that orders placed too easily need to be reversed. Because consumers have less disposable income with all the AI-enabled layoffs, the bigger bonanza will come if OpenAI creates educational pathways via AI to enable more people to make money with AI. Entrepreneurial guides that take you step by step, accounting and other hurdles that AI can walk you through as you grow, brainstorming and exploring new business ideas, training people for a new trade or career path as employees. That will be the true game-changer that beats AGI. Because when you can give the entire society an easy ladder towards the industries that need them most, you will have a society that makes money off of AI to spend via AI shopping experience and gains purpose.

Reading only the title, I thought this was going to be about how little startups can only grow if the are solving some real friction for users, instead of something that can be solved by a user with just a couple of extra queries to ChatGPT. If remembering your company’s niche when it’s needed and finding the credentials to log in is more effort than solving the problem with newer LLM’s, the growth may not be exponential. But then the content turned to be about personal growth.