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mrdependable

590 karma · joined August 27, 2017

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mrdependable··on Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow?
Off topic, but where do you find these brands to buy?
mrdependable··on I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore
Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.
mrdependable··on I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore
Were they wrong?
mrdependable··on Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction
All the tech companies are trying to find data the others don’t have access to. That is one way they try to edge out the competition.
mrdependable··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
My biggest problem with Claude is that anything I mention it won't shut up about. Then it gets saved in memory and it will keep repeating it to me forever with weird random exposition.
mrdependable··on Ask HN: What browser do you use?
I just started using Brave Origin after trying to switch to Safari for a while. Safari felt aggravating to use after having used Chrome for so long, but Brave has been great.
mrdependable··on I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
Sounds like a lot more work than just teaching communication skills.
mrdependable··on Discovery Loop
Which engineering discipline touches most of these?
mrdependable··on Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone else
It's a globalization problem that countries have a hard time creating policy against. Countries don't have the enforcement power that they used to. The best we have come up with is using our own markets as leverage. In a hundred years I imagine wealth and income will look much more uniform across the world. Unfortunately, right now, we are stuck competing with people who can earn much less than people in the US. Now we have to worry about this AI disaster waiting to happen because countries have no real power to stop it. They say it looks like AI won't destroy jobs, but I think really we are just watching the various legs on a table be kicked out. It will still stand until it doesn't.
mrdependable··on Ask HN: Why are US tech workers so pro open borders?
People support things that sound like a good idea to them, or that have been sold as a good idea to them, especially if they think it won't negatively affect them. It's easy to be pro open borders when you can't see how it would negatively impact you.

You say it clearly does not benefit them, but the problem is that nothing is really clear or obvious about it. There are a lot of different puzzle pieces, history, and order of effects that need to be considered which most people don't.

mrdependable··on I'm opening VSCode less and less every day
Don't you need to look at the code you want to change in order to direct the AI in what you want to do, or are you simply telling it to make a feature and then looking at the changes it makes?
mrdependable··on Ask HN: Why are so many "AI evangelists" posting such insufferable content?
I think of LinkedIn like walking into a Tony Robbins event. At least, what I imagine they are like from those old infomercials.
mrdependable··on Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?
A sad state of affairs when the law is what people look to in order to decide between right and wrong.
mrdependable··on Ad on the HN front page? Gauntlet AI?
If I'm not mistaken, isn't this the same person behind Lambda School? I saw the same ad like a year or two ago.
mrdependable··on Claude Fable 5
Hobbling the model may be smart tactically for them, but feels like it sets a really dangerous precedent.
mrdependable··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
I suppose if Spaghetti Inc and Olive Garden were in the business of creating and licensing recipes, they would both be in trouble. But they are selling labor and ingredients, which is what people are paying for. Also, pizza and spaghetti have been around a long time and patents don't last forever, so I don't see how this applies.

Maybe a better example would be to explain how drug companies are able to cover the cost of research and development, or how Studio Ghibli is able to invest in animating a movie that anyone can sell. Should everyone provide the full suite of services a business needs in order to earn a profit? That seems like an inefficient way to organize the economy. The mechanical engineer also has to be a marketer or else he doesn't deserve to be paid for an invention? How does that make sense?

> Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?

You cut the sentence that answers the question.

mrdependable··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
An AI training is not equivalent to a human learning, despite how we like to anthropomorphize the process, and ideas are not protected by copyright in the first place.

Your point was that people that create something valuable are not entitled to stop others from capturing the value of their creation, ostensibly because they “don’t want to do the hard work.” My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it. In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?

Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function. AI still needs people doing the work that it is displacing, but it strips the economic incentive to do it.

mrdependable··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
You say means of production is an antiquated idea, but the world you are using as an example of the idea being unnecessary is a world where copyright exists. The world would look very different otherwise, and you can actually get a sneak peek of what would happen by looking at AI companies. These are not people using ingenuity to capture value that no else bothered to. They are owners of massive capital training for free on everyone's work to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't, but to replace them outright.
mrdependable··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.
mrdependable··on The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies
It's entitled for others to believe they have any say in what happens with the work of others. The world without these protections would be worse off by far. What I gather from what you are saying is that if I write a song, or a book, anyone else should be able to take what I've done and make their own money off it. By that logic, a publisher wouldn't need to compensate writers. Record executives wouldn't need to compensate musicians. Whoever holds the means for extracting value are at a huge permanent advantage.

We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.

mrdependable··on AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
I wonder if this could be explained in a similar way to Hollywood movies. If the movies are designed to please the largest group of people, there is a greater chance people will choose to see it than another movie. The human law professors come with their own personalities, beliefs, and opinions that come through in their writing. An LLM has been trained to please the largest swathe of the population. That doesn't mean the answer is better; just like Captain America isn't necessarily better than American Beauty.
mrdependable··on AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers
How do you envision that playing out? It would basically be like everyone that didn’t still have a job living off minimum wage. Would no one be allowed to work also?
mrdependable··on The dead economy theory
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
mrdependable··on The dead economy theory
I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick.

Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.

mrdependable··on The dead economy theory
You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.
mrdependable··on Claude Opus 4.8
I am not talking about how much data is required to make intelligence. I am talking about how it uses the data it already has. It can tell you about every scam in the book, research about the scams, how to spot scams, who does the scamming, etc. Everything under the sun about scams. However, without the “skill” included in a prompt it will fall for scams.
mrdependable··on Claude Opus 4.8
With the amount of data these models have, they should be much more capable if there was an actual intelligence behind it. If you saw someone running into a wall continuously until you showed them how to use a door, even though they have seen people use doors a million times, what would you call that?

The fact that Anthropic needs to poke, prod, and guide these models to behave in the desired way does not give the impression of intelligence. It gives the impression of a complicated automaton.

mrdependable··on Claude Opus 4.8
I don't know how people can read stuff like this and think LLMs are intelligent or conscious.
mrdependable··on Claude Opus 4.8
Gave me wrong information on my very first question. Wasn’t even complicated, and I wasn’t trying to trick it.
mrdependable··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.
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