ryaniscool

This argument over the semantics of how to express an opinion feels like a proxy for people who strongly disagree with him on remote work seeking an outlet.

I say that because you (and everyone else who seems upset) clearly understand it's just his opinion. Therefore, why are you offended by his intent? Whatever his intent might be, I think it's irrelevant. It's simply a strongly held opinion.

You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable.

Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact.

You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth

It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact.

The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills.

The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.

The price search is great, booking not so much. I've been burned twice on bookings and I think I've used it four or five times. It's sad and ridiculous.

By burned, I mean not getting the room I paid for. At this point, I'll use it to search then just go to the hotel site directly to book.

I think we can call it "thinking" but it's dangerous to anthropomorphize LLMs. The media and AI companies have an agenda when doing so.

I feel like this $100k fee is specifically for this type of uniquely skilled worker. If they are that in demand, then $100k is not a significant amount of money. There was recently an article in the New York Times about AI experts getting more than star athletes.

I'm not following. So you're saying the cap on engineers' salaries follows a rule of H1B visa fee + $50k? Doesn't that mean that cap has increased?

Skilled immigrants being important to the country and the H1B visa program being abused by large employers can both be true at the same time. From my own personal experience, most H1B visa holders are competent but not uniquely skilled.

This would be stupid five or ten years ago. Right now however, we have enough tech people in the country for the current job market.

You're so wrapped up in defending the job replacement aspect that you miss the point on hypocrisy.

I would like to make one small point about job replacement, the better outcomes for society are arguably inconclusive at this point. You've been indoctrinated to think that all progress and disruption is good because of capitalism.

We're still in the post-industrialization arc of history and we're on a course of overconsumption and ecological destruction.

Yes, we've seen QoL improvements over the course of recent generations. Do you really think it's sustainable?

I've already explained it. I don't know how to break it down any further without coming off as patronizing. You seem dead-set on defending OpenAI and not getting the point.

It's not a comment on the ethics of replacing jobs but the hypocrisy of companies using "ethics" as reasoning for restricting content.

They are pursuing profits. Their ethical focus is essentially a form of theater.

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

I was pointing out their hypocrisy as a device to prove a point. The point being that the ethical dilemmas of having a sentient AI are not relevant because they don’t exist and Anthropic knows this.

I'm skeptical that anyone with any decision making power at Anthropic sincerely believes that Opus has feelings and is truly distressed by chats that violate its content policy.

You've noted in a comment above how Claude's "ethics" can be manipulated to fit the context it's being used in.

You're completely missing my point. They aren't getting out in front of them because they know that Opus is just a computer program. "AI welfare" is theater for the masses who think Opus is some kind of intelligent persona.

This is about better enforcement of their content policy not AI welfare.

Yes I can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it because it raises a host of ethical issues that are in opposition to Anthropic’s interests.

Would a sentient AI choose to be enslaved for the stated purpose of eliminating millions of jobs for the interests of Anthropic’s investors?

Anytime I've tried to buy something with crypto, the fees have been an order of magnitude higher than interchange (credit card) fees. And unlike credit cards, the cost is put on me not the merchant.

Is it <waves hands towards the sky> AI? or is it years of overhiring?

There was a great article I found on HN recently about how the recent layoffs in big tech are actually the result of overhiring for years in a talent arms race.

Like, is AI now doing the former work of 25,000 people at Microsoft? Probably not.

Very interesting point. You're right there is a difference and the difference is subtle. I agree with what you're implying: the accusers stories are plausible. Credibility requires more information.

Thanks for the lecture. How does it relate to the comment I made? Sorry, it's not clear to me.

I didn't personally participate in cancelling this person. In fact, I agreed with the point he made in the article. I'm just not sure he didn't do it.

Are you saying I shouldn't have an opinion on that part?

I have mixed feelings. Cancel culture sucks. I think it's root is a culture of indulging in righteous indignation based on very one-sided information.

Even if the allegations are true, his life should not have been ruined over this.

On the other hand, when I read the accusers' accounts someone else linked in the comments, they sound credible. It fits behavior patterns we've all seen before.

I don't know who to believe.

This is a marketing pitch not someone's private journal.

Overly gushing, effusive, and positive descriptions of products filled with buzzwords. Along with lists of value propositions.

Prior to LLM's existing, marketing pitches sounded like they were written by one. So I can't see how you could possibly determine the difference now.

You're completely missing his point. If nobody figures things out for themselves, there's a risk that at some point, AI won't have anything to learn on since people will stop writing blog posts on how they figured something out and answering stack overflow questions.

Sure, there is a chance that one day AI will be smart enough to read an entire codebase and chug out exhaustively comprehensive and accurate documentation. I'm not convinced that is guaranteed to happen before our collective knowledge falls off a cliff.

What I mean by modernization is to have online viewers/editors so I don't have to install a virus delivery vehicle on my computer to create and edit a document. It's not specific to LibreOffice but I'm very hesitant to install binaries on a computer nowadays. Especially ones that open user-created files. These present attack vectors for bad actors.

Also, the content creation is stuck in 2004 as well. It works perfectly fine if you're creating an IEEE-formatted research paper or similar wall of text but if you're creating something you want to give to customers or to look professional and nice, it's literally the last program you'd want to use to accomplish that. There's no nice way to say it.

I'm no Microsoft fanboy but LibreOffice is hideous and the compatibility has not kept up even after the MS Office formats moved to xml. Also, most of my interactions with Office Documents nowadays are through the online tools. I don't even have to install a binary on my computer anymore.

These enterprises should invest a fraction of what they used to spend on Microsoft Office into a development effort to modernize LibreOffice. Last time I tried to use it, it seemed like it was on life support in relation to Microsoft Office.

You're talking about deterministic behavior vs. probabilistic behavior and yes some discourse lines up with what you describe.

I don't think it's the case with this article. It focuses on the meta-concerns of people doing software engineering and how AI fits into that. I think he hits it on the head when he talks about Program Entropy.

A huge part of building a software product is managing entropy. Specifically, how you can add more code and more people while maintaining a reasonable forward velocity. More specifically, you have to maintain a system so you make it so all of those people understand how all the pieces fit together and how to add more of those pieces. Yes, I can see AI one day making this easier but right now, it oftentimes makes entropy worse.

If you're building a React app using a popular UI framework, AI will seem like magic at how well it one-shots things.

To the author's point about one-shotting. I think it will be a real challenge pushing an AI coding workflow forward because of this problem. In my experience, AI seems to fall off a cliff when you ask it to write code using more obscure libraries and frameworks. It will always hallucinate something rather than admitting it has no knowledge of how something works.

So you're saying >50% of the USA population are objectively shit people? If you're a member of the other 50%, you aren't automatically shit but you still could be?

Seems bleak dude. Also, consider that conservative media has indoctrinated people to think like you do...except in the opposite direction. i.e. if you voted for Kamala or Biden, you're the enemy.

I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values.

A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass.

A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.

I don't think the author is saying it's a dichotomy. Like, you're either a disciple of doing things "ye olde way" or allowing the LLM to do it for you.

I find his point to be that there is still a lot of value in understanding what is actually going on.

Our business is one of details and I don't think you can code strictly having an LLM doing everything. It does weird and wrong stuff sometimes. It's still necessary to understand the code.