devonkim

I think AI wins against people when we start using KPIs in an industrial view of software like defects / LOC, decomposability, etc), or possibly even maintainability / understandability of a codebase. Gosh, even since the 1980s expert systems were already out-performing entire doctors' boards in diagnosing issues in patients so clearly technical performance in KPIs isn't the only measure by which we adopt technology in society.

When it comes to judgment calls for technical decisions, a lot of interesting innovations appear to come from rejecting conventions / averages in favor of a different set of constraints as a trade-off because we challenge the assumptions we make about the demands being asked of a solution / product. I'm thinking in the constellation of the apocryphal Steve Jobs quote about rejecting asking horse riders what they want because if we asked them they'd ask for a more reliable horse.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but I believe I'd disagree with your first point on the perceived lower skill roles with higher design / creative requirements. I've seen a lot of the software industry being software factories rather than something closer to craftsmanship or even proper ABET-style engineering and AI is indeed better than the manually written slop that was encouraged in low-creativity / low-innovation environments such as QA and a lot of infrastructure engineering like defining CI pipelines. It seems reminiscent of the waves that hit industries like coal mining and manufacturing in the US except at a much faster rate and with different driving and resisting forces in automation.

Programmer / engineer compensation in the US market at least has been looking bimodal for at least 12 years now and the first one looks even more devastated in terms of labor than the big tech companies based upon (lack of) job postings and from browsing my connections on LinkedIn.

The demand exploded as so many business cases for computing and automation arose partly because the application of them helped suppress job growth in other areas while also attracting investor capital during heavy deregulation / liberalization trends so it's difficult to attribute any change to an effect in isolation. Let's not forget the old myopic sounding quote where someone thought the global market for computers was maybe $50 million or some other laughably small number.

The issue that hasn't been addressed with the latest wave of computing hype is whether enough new jobs for displaced workers can arise during a time when people are experiencing such economic turmoil and political strife where new jobs or other means of letting people find a way to have gainful employment in society when institutions are so weak now and everyone across professions is being worked to an early grave from sheer stress alone. This resembles Japan or Korea although the US and Canada I can't imagine having the same kind of social drivers although many trends from them are showing up in youth demographic trends. And frankly as I see it a large number of current social problems are from the past 50+ years of the decline of blue collar jobs in developed economies being accessible to as many people and the lack of a competition-driven economy as much as an extractive one in most OECD countries.

It's not like he was going to be a Congressional staffer nor working at a newspaper. But if he was on-call for a lot of his career that'd be kind of amusing

This is sounding eerily similar to how the setup for a Cyberpunk TTRPG scenario. "Militech hired mercenaries raid Militech facilities wearing Arasaka uniforms to make it look like Arasaka did it?"

This is HN, we can use an analogy of TCP window size or UDP packet size in an underlying high latency medium and the receiver and sender have very high processing costs. So perhaps solving the unloading and loading logistics is also worth optimizing for like we did almost for free in computing space? But because we don't have ballpark numbers of each terribly well we're going to have some difficulties with a valid non abstract system design discussion.

Many gun proponents seem to think of them like most people do knives when knives have many, many domestic purposes beyond killing things that have a life. Same things with cars given there's many things cars can do besides get people and things from place to place.

One of the core problems we have in software engineering is the longstanding philosophical problem around creation of cohesive, consistent, objective mental models of inherently subjective concepts like identifying a person, place, etc. Look at the endless lists of falsehoods programmers (tend to) believe about any topic.

You’re right that LLMs specifically have no guarantees about accuracy nor veracity of the text they generate but I posit that that’s the same with people, especially when filtered through the socialization process. The difference is in the kind of errors machines make compared to ones that humans make.

It’s frustrating we’re using anthropomorphic concepts like hallucinations when describing LLM behaviors when the fundamental units of computation and thus failures of computation are so different at every level.

This is what amorality means to me in the context of socioeconomics. It operates in an area of reduced dimensionality to economic value because no other value can be agreed upon in trade between cultures. It doesn’t care if a piece of art, nature or human invention is genuinely novel, rare, irreplaceable, invaluable, etc. unless it can be converted into materializable economic value that is itself subjective and present oriented so that we can plan for our future selves about resources as a proxy.

Both ideas can be true. It’s not on their radar because despite their popularity in consumer space they can’t find a business purpose that aligns with their self interests that require such user information. If I’m running a free podcast, in contrast, I might be happy anyone’s even bothering to visit and listen to what I have to say compared to who they are and whether I can assign a monetary value to their attention because spending money on something without clear, intentional, measurable ROI is anathema to our predominant modus operandi in business

I think it’s unfair to say that it’s “lazy.” Neo Marxists understand the way those factors affect impact economics but because they’re very difficult to quantify in a heavily quantitative focused academic environment you’ll see less focus upon it, even when analyzing standard fare free market capitalism. I consider it a double standard to put burdens of analysis more upon one ideology than another. Sociology and religion are already highly qualitative disciplines by nature of the limits of science and our known physical reality (eg. we can’t time travel let alone reliably) and the kind of advantages systems like feudalism, monarchism, mercantilism, etc. work with authoritarian centralized systems is consistent across many societies including why some cultures tend toward syncretism and why others reject certain tenets and customs. The Nordics weren’t Christian, after all, and they absorbed it much more than American indigenous while Black Americans have very different relationships to Christianity than African blacks such as in Somalia and Ethiopia - this isn’t the wheelhouse of economists typically in academics but various humanities departments unrelated to business. Those influences and trends usually get labeled under the standard generic realities of imperialism given so much orchestrated power influences societies en masse while most bottom up movements against these structures tend to come from humanities focused areas away from economic interests like the arts, but this is why the Soviet Union and even China suppressed these freedoms because of the tendency to cause discord and dissent in a precarious society. As such, most leftist literature, especially outside academia (already an institution that must exist within the confines of a funding society), sounds predominantly like they’re criticizing basically every dominant human social construct, which is where the ideological position is cornered. This isn’t to say that I agree with this kind of discourse either because it doesn’t convince people beholden to these dominant constructs.

The double standard I see across all political and cultural lines is people that demand empathy for them while they demonstrate none for an arbitrary outgroup or one specific to their personal lived experience. This is basically using emotion to drive thoughts rather than emotions to inform thoughts. I have doubts this will go away anytime soon given it takes an incredible amount of effort for people to critically examine themselves. I liken it to debugging and reverse engineering your brain and nervous system.

This seems fairly consistent with deep, accomplished experts in any field or craft - their competencies in one area don't necessarily translate well into validity anywhere else laterally or even vertically. This seems extremely obvious even for typically "smart" people such as doctors, lawyers, engineers because among many folks I know scamming these white collar professionals out of money by feeding into their egotism is basically how they make their living. While I don't think we should fence people into professional castes or anything like that but in the modern age of AI and charisma-based validity / authority healthy skepticism seems like a requisite to not be suckered into modern infomercial quackery.

This whole process happening is exactly what happens in a quest in Cyberpunk 2077. There’s an e-mail chain where a gang tried to extort a corporation and gave up after being unable to reach a person.

I sincerely hope that the game doesn’t become prophetic in the manner Idiocracy has.

Switzerland has a slightly high suicide rate (not the best inverse metric of happiness but a correlation on unhappiness at least) for a country with such high standards of living, so if we look into suicide rates over time we also see a conundrum that over the past 20+ years the suicide rate is overall decreasing but has mostly flattened out. But from what I've observed anecdotally it still has problems like other developed countries with legacy industries declining (see: watchmakers and other artisanal crafts trades rather than mining) where boomers in the country are pretty miserable and that will probably be noticed in macro level statistics.