tarsinge

This is unfortunately a common fallacy: rules with consequences can encourage kids to lie, it’s inferior to trust, so let’s have no rules (and don’t say no) and talk through everything. Not only is not how kids brains grow, but inevitably the parents lack time to talk all day long and the kids end up on their own unprepared to face anything with consequences. This is a recipe for the behavior and anxiety problems that have become so common.

Except if a car was reliable it shouldn’t have errors at least until at least being 10 years old (the 12V battery is an exception because it has a smaller lifespan than the car). I never had a check engine light on my previous car during 10 years of ownership, I’m worried about consumers getting used to a new normal of low quality.

Not only this, but there is a compounded bet that it’ll be OpenAI that cracks AGI and not another lab, particularly Google from which LLMs come in the first place. What makes OpenAI researchers so special at this point?

Problem is the day Google puts a similarly priced and more powerful chatbot similar to ChatGPT and powered by Gemini most users will switch without a second thought, and Google will get all that data about their personal life too. OpenAI having a free tier with powerful models is unsustainable, brand loyalty is a joke at this stage, people will not bother going to ChatGPT if the search bar in their browser starts a discussion with Google. I’m sure big players like Google know OpenAI is a temporary scheme to get free money, they are surfing along now but they are playing the long game.

Google is already integrating this directly in search https://blog.google/products/shopping/agentic-checkout-holid...

I don't know, the kind of developers doing this are the same that would copy paste from stack overflow in the past. Because if you are interested in knowledge and human experience, LLMs or not you are curious about what you read and take ownership of what you produce. In the past these developers would have created the same slop but at a much slower pace, LLMs are just enabling them to do it faster.

> The AI is useless crowd truly makes me scratch my head.

I think it's because, past autocomplete, for AI to be useful professionally you need to already have a lot of background and experience in what you are using it for, in addition to engineering and project management to keep the scope on track. While demos with agents are impressive in practice autonomy is not there they need strong guidance, so it only works as very smart assistant. What you are describing is very representative of this.

If you don't have that level of seniority then you'll struggle to get value from AI because it'll be hard to guide and keep on track, also spotting and navigating errors and wrong thinking paths. You cannot use it as an assistant, only takes what it says at face value, and given it'll randomly be wrong it makes it useless.

I own a small agency and it’s the same for me, but that doesn’t explain the urgency nor the layoffs in the big companies. Yes we are not hiring juniors, but we still hire seniors because they are now more productive. That’s not what we are seeing in big companies.

To me it’s the cumulated effects of many things happening coincidentally: - Massive offshoring

- Money becoming scarce after the ZIRP era and in the recession except for AI investments

- Near monopoly positions that allow layoffs as a strategy to push stock price, without penalty for the decline in quality (enshittification)

- Cherry on the top, LLMs being able to do the work of juniors when used by seniors

If it was only about AI productivity we wouldn’t see this urgency.

Why do you think it’s cultural and not a skill issue? For example Tim Cook said they produce in China not because of costs but skills https://www.benzinga.com/markets/25/04/44783543/when-tim-coo...

Having to tweak the defaults to get something more usable is a huge step back for MacOS. If I wanted to spend time with settings I’d use Linux. I use and recommend Mac OS because historically everything works perfectly out of the box, like an appliance, so I can focus on work and hobbies (that don’t include spending time on the computer as an end goal).

Yes unfortunately it to me the site replaces anxiety inducing news with depressing information. Current news: bad things are happening. 40 years old news: here are the bad decisions that led to bad things happening now.

I’m sorry but no, I consider myself quite rational and I simply didn’t stay up to date on the subject, to me it was still a possible theory with others. When a theory was seriously considered not too long ago you can’t suddenly label it conspiracy.

Yes everybody is trying to find rational reasons but to me like in recent politics a lot has to do with irrational tribalism.

I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.

Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/17/gabe-newell-leviathan-superya...

Back in the days there were not a lot of copies to start with. No laptops, no BYOD, no cloud servers. A developer making a copy would involve buying an expensive large drive (for the time) and sneaking it at work to steal it, not worth the risk. The few hard drives containing the code were archived in a room after release and forgotten.

To me (and it’s my personal experience) I read it as tech people have a bias for systemic thinking, and usually lack skills and/or experience in human social dynamics, especially when young, which makes laissez faire capitalism / libertarianism attractive. I’m a bit on the spectrum and to me it has a video game like quality (e.g. humans that are robot like rational actors) that was appealing and reassuring when trying to make sense of the world.

In short don’t find it condescending to say a bias exists, independently of the agreement with the political line of thinking.

In fact when I was younger I was condescending the other way: surely if you are not into libertarianism your systemic thinking must be limited.

The market itself optimizes for creating companies that are accountability sinks, for obvious reasons.

Regarding that guy, it’s because generally people have two approach to the market: to some the market is just a tool to an end goal, an economic system like any another, it has to be evaluated and corrected to serve that goal if it deviates. To other people, there is no goal, the market is philosophically always right, because it is an economic extension of individual liberty (which is debatable of course, I think Locke was not a proponent of laissez-faire for example).

I’m not an expert in the field but intuitively from my own experience I’d say what’s missing is a world model. By trying to be more conscious about my own vision I’ve started to notice how common it is that I fail to recognize a shape and then use additional knowledge, context and extrapolations to deduce what it can be.

A few examples I encountered recently: If I take a picture of my living room many random object would be impossible to identify by a stranger but easy by the household members. Or when driving, say at night I see a big dark shape coming from the side of the road? If I’m a local I’ll know there are horses in that field and it is fenced, or I might have read a warning sign before that’ll make me able to deduce what I’m seeing a few minutes later.

People are usually not conscious about this but you can try to block the additional informations to only see and process only what’s really coming from your eyes, and realize how soon it gets insufficient.

I don’t have experience in big tech but in the few SaaS companies I’ve seen the issue is UX designers and Product managers overwhelmingly have a B2C culture.

I’m not a native English speaker and I have a hard time figuring out what is behind the term "mechanics" here. What I find online seems to point to working in a garage and knowing how to do repairs, not being a line worker or technician in a factory doing maintenance on machinery like you say. In the article it’s confusing, they talk about servicing and trades school, so not really factory work. Maybe I’m lost in translation but it looks like even English speakers are not using a vague term to talk about different things here? What does is 120k job really about, working in a Ford garage fixing cars or being a factory technician?

I think what the parent is critical about is the "cost center" labeling, because yes once it’s wrongly labeled like this nobody wants to pay for it.

In fact content marketing blogs and SEO spam sites have wall of text designed more or less intentionally to make the user lose a lot of time. Add to this the time to close to cookie tracking banner and the multiple ads. Maybe there was a time in the early 2000s in the early internet when people were just browsing websites for fun where that metric made sense.

What I find highly ironic with Thiel’s silly line of thought is that as someone with a Catholic background the far better candidate is Trump. That is, as a total inversion on values of Jesus, that deceive Christians into following him. On top of my head:

- Extreme pride instead of humility

- Extol strength and warrior attitude instead of kindness

- War on empathy instead of love

- Attachment to material things, money, success, again complete inversion of Jesus teachings on how to get closer to God

- On top of the personality cult, literally posts himself as the Pope

- Sell his own blasphemous bible to make a personal gain

- Leader of the most powerful country, so fitting with the idea of most mankind having been deceived into glorifying himself

Don’t take this seriously of course, my point is just that if someone wants to go with this route picking Greta instead of him is absurd.

If you take into account the silence from officials and politicians then 2) seems more likely.

I don’t know, the biggest difference I see is Thiel and Elon are all about government/tax payer money (through contracts like Palantir or SpaceX, subsidies like Tesla, lobbying, influencing elections, or worst). In that way they align with China, as an autocracy directly financing their companies is their ideal business model. Altman and Zuck OTOH are more typical SV entrepreneurs.

Hyundai has a pretty average or bad reliability reputation, especially with engines with a lot of problematic ones, and has only managed to be average since a few years.

This phenomenon has been happening already under Biden. But it has been very difficult to discuss because like you everybody wants a narrative to blame the other camp. The statistics are good but people complain under Biden? They are brainwashed, and you are a conspirationist for daring questioning that the economy is not the best ever. Same thing happening under Trump? This time yes things are bad in reality and the statistics can’t be trusted. What about a third explanation that both parties are trying to hide the issue and lie to their base?

Just a random example on top of my head, animals don’t have language and show signs of consciousness, as does a toddler. Therefore consciousness is not an emergent property of text processing and LLMs. And as I said, if it comes from computation, why would specific execution paths in the CPU/GPU lead to it and not others? Biological systems and brains have much more complex processes than stateless matrix multiplication.

Consciousness and pain is not an emergent property of computation. This or all the other programs on your computer are already sentient, because it would be highly unlikely it’s specific sequences of instructions, like magic formulas, that creates consciousness. This source code? Draws a chart. This one? Makes the computer feel pain.

And LLMs are trained on the humans trying to describe all of this through text. The point is not if humans have a true experience of reality, it’s that human writings are a poor descriptor of reality anyway, and so LLMs cannot be a stepping stone.

Text and language contain only approximate information filtered through humans eyes and brains. Also animals don't have language and can show quite advanced capabilities compared to what we can currently do in robotics. And if you do enough mindfulness you can dissociate cognition/consciousness from language. I think we are lured because how important language is for us humans, but intuitively it's obvious to me language (and LLMs) are only a subcomponent, or even irrelevant for say self driving or robotics.