anon7000

This line stands out to me:

> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place

Something about “asks for a hand you can’t place” just triggers the alarm bell. I think it’s unfortunately because I’m reading a lot of AI at $job. I do read books in my free time but something about the patterns…

Some more quotes from early on:

“Most of Block Blast isn’t in the app you install”

And then

“It waits for three things to line up: you finished your last three rewarded ads, the ad loaded right now is worth at least 3.5 times your last one, and you’re 1,000 points past your high score. All three get checked in one function.”

A really big AI tell for me is sensationalism and drama about things that don’t matter. Ok, fair, checking code in one function doesn’t seem dramatic. But consider this: a paragraph is building to a conclusion. You have a fairly long sentence, then a short sentence. The contrast in length gives the short sentence a lot of emphasis when I read it. In a newscaster voice: “all three get checked.. in one function”

But obviously it doesn’t matter at all, even to the technical reader, if they check this in one function or multiple functions. AI does this ALL the time, they emphasize some implementation detail that’s true, but completely irrelevant to the point the author wants to make. In fact this detail really should be removed from the article completely because it adds LITERALLY nothing to our understanding of how this app works.

So my alarm bells go off because a technical writer probably wouldn’t emphasize that point.

I’m not actively analyzing that, but when I read AI, I notice emphasis on things that are entirely irrelevant. The text starts feeling self-important about complete nonsense.

I think it all adds up for me, and I just notice the patterns in a surprising number of blogs and YT videos. It gets distracting, but IMO the bigger issue is that the wrong details are put in focus, so explanations get hard to follow.

Generally, they inflate prices (or take some % from the restaurant, so the restaurant has to increase prices).

And have a small delivery fee.

And have a small “city wants DoorDash to pay its workers fairly, so it’ll charge you an arbitrary amount extra” fee

And a bag fee.

And sales tax.

And a tip

Oh and don’t forget the service fee.

I’m not kidding, this is from a recent receipt. There are 6 fees PLUS the cost of the actual food.

Other delivery platforms are similar

Agreed, but I think the review & CI system should ideally be able to ignore markdown changes. Easier said than done.

But I think the biggest benefit, which we shouldn’t overstate, is that agents will just update docs as they find them. Including for big picture systems. Keeping docs updated is a PITA.

Writing style of AI often sucks. But I’ve found it pretty easy to rectify. And having some correct context is better than nothing or outdated docs in a lot of cases.

I mean my own PERSONAL per mile cost for a car is around $1/mi/yr, and it has a low interest rate loan and well below average monthly payment. Accounting for car insurance, gas, and maintenance.

And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.

Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.

Isn’t it obvious? Integrity is about honesty. They showed a picture claiming the school is one way, but the picture was a fabrication. It’d be the same if they were staging food in the cafeteria for marketing, but that food isn’t available to students.

You can make what you have look as good as it can, and I’m sure everyone does that.

But AI fabrications are crossing the line to outright lies, which is by definition violating integrity.

Didn’t Jobs frequently lose his shit when he did work at Apple?

> I suppose the appeal of Jev is how cheap and fast it is

Ok, so you do understand the hype. I mean cost & speed are reaaaaally big issues for normal LLMs. If you can fill a specific use case way cheaper and way faster, that’s a fantastic development. We need more niche tooling that’s more efficient and better for niche use cases. Not everything has to be general purpose.

Not clear to me that playing games is the point of jev. This post is just a random fun experiment someone did because they wanted to.

I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.

The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?

Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.

> People claim AI companies are "stealing" human labor but that's not true. They're saving (in their databases) the fruits of human labor and other bots/software. Then they're using that data to train AI models.

And profiting on it on a scale that’s hard to fathom. Someone who spent effort creating a great resource or doing some research and maybe got some income via donations, ads, whatever. Now that information from their resource is distilled into a big model. The original author is screwed, the model provider makes money through the effort of everyone else. It worked well for everyone before, because there was recognition, prestige, a sense of doing good for people, even a chance for some income. That’s completely eliminated with AI.

Actually think that’s a good thing for Apple. Compare how much money companies have absolutely shoved into the AI race, and how much circular investment is happening. Apple is one of the few massive players which hasn’t massively extended themselves and taken on a ton of financial risk. How do you make money on frontier models? By selling it to software companies, I guess.

Apple just needs a capable personal AI that respects privacy. They could eventually get that by self-hosting open model inference on their private cloud compute. They don’t need to light billions upon billions of dollars on fire to build data centers and do training to make a frontier model that’s nearly already a commodity. If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to), that approach seems financially stupid and risky.

The bigger challenge is that the mechanics of the day to day work have entirely changed. Mechanically, using C is similar to using JS. You’re tying and compiling and checking results, whatever. With an Agent what you actually do is completely different. Even as technologies have changed in the past and people have learned more, your mechanical day to day work would look similar, just with different tools. Not so with AI.

So it should be utterly unsurprising that many people are going through a bit of an existential crisis around this. Because what you actually sat down and enjoyed doing, what motivated you, may be entirely gone now.

And on top of that, there’s an extreme amount of pressure to do more in less time, which is by definition stressful. And do much more context switching.

But that’s such a niche part of the industry. AI is in everything.

An eagle isn’t having a conversation with an eagle on the other side of the world about whether it should eat its prey because it’s sentient. It just eats it. I think that speaks to a moral superiority, in some ways.

I’m not claiming humans are morally superior in sum (there is a lot of evil as well as good.) But it’s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we’ve essentially dominated the planet. And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the “least fit” to survive and reproduce.) And are also the only species which has doctors for other species.

All I’m trying to say: I can easily accept other species are intelligent and emotional. The fact that I can know that and accept that, to me, speaks to human “superiority.”

Does superiority matter? Not most of the time. What about when it comes down to life and death? If the choice was to keep one human alive or one theoretically more perfect AI alive? (Boil down utilitarianism into its essence.) doing the “most good” is by definition a human construct. Maybe an agent could have one. But if you don’t accept human superiority on some level, would you accept that a more perfect AI deserves to live more than you? To me, that’s the implication.

Why?

People have created machines that can, at their core, regurgitate human knowledge. They do not have long-term memory, self-direction, self-improvement, emotion, etc. At their very best, we have harnesses that can bootstrap short-lived artificial intelligences that can perform tasks and do knowledge work.

At best, we have artificial, short-lived, simulated consciousness. Human consciousness at its heart has a lot to do with emotion and experiences. An AI does a task today and goes away. The simulated consciousness hasn’t experienced or learned anything, even if can improve its environment (harness). Any expressed emotion is simply a ghost of the fact it was trained on the works of an emotional species, or RL to make it more approachable to humans.

I think there should be a lot more burden on folks trying to argue that (effectively), machines should be considered morally equivalent to humans.

Yes, having massive implications on society is a fucking fair and reasonable thing for a human being to be concerned about. Anything related to survival of the species is biologically reasonable to be concerned about.

The fact that we’re even considering this concept is an indication that human consciousness is special. Do other apex predators decide not to eat meat because it’s conscious? Despite some level of animal intelligence, they have no sense of morality. (See e.g. Orcas playing with their food.)

Other species simply do what it takes to stay alive, and that’s what this truly boils down to. If giving AI rights would lead to the destruction of humanity, yes, we should be be concerned.

For example, utilitarians might think of the greatest good for conscious species (simulated or not). Well, it’s trivial to have billions of AIs, and not so trivial to have billions of humans. Whose greatest good wins?

And fixed the dumb sidebar design