dileeparanawake
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
I find performance in resource constrained environments interesting.
In particular trying to find decent code models (on device backup) but also tts applications and voice to text.
From a behavioural POV it seems like an obvious play. These companies and there owners have huge gains via social engineering.
There is very little transparency, accountability or regulation.
The thing that worries me is the unobvious… most people know about instagram and ++ suicide rates. What shocked me was finding out that instagram used things like waiting for people to remove photos of themselves, identify insecurity behaviour, use that to position beauty products to young girls. It seems so so unethical and predatory. Not to mention the impact on public MH when applied at scale.
Another crazy stat was something like screen time av was 4hrs/ day and av attention spans dropped from ~180s to something like ~90s.
The impact in so many areas is so bad. Blows my mind there is such a lack of regulation.
Thinking AI has the potential, at scale to social engineer without the need to bother creating content / making bots.
I noticed this first on X - during the FarageRiots where an Asian woman asked how many people felt safe. The volume of violently racist replies was insane. As an Asian man - it made me feel, very scared about society. I felt outnumbered. It wasn’t reflective of society - as it turned out it was a mass demonstration of racial unity, by the vast majority of Britain. But not on X
On YouTube I noticed it silent deleting my comments. Nothing violent - literally a comment saying I was concerned about NHS privatisation and takeover by the US finance. Noticed the same comment get removed. No notice. No reason. No appeal. Take down. Invisible. Quick google shows lots of people experiencing same thing.
And it got me thinking - wow - imagine shaping public sentiment at mass. Making opinions that weren’t convenient to people owning social media disappear. That creates helplessness. Shapes elections.
The rage bait we see now pulls in attention, shapes conversations and defines the Overton window.
Noticed a post from Theo T3 an hour or so ago that was critical, on X, about OpenAi and the first comment was calling him an OpenAI shill. Certainly seems plausible incentives on X to fuel anti competitor sentiment and amplify useful sentiment.
This article on meta is validating the patterns I’ve seen. It’s deeply concerning. We are in an era where society is micro shaped by social media owners and their agenda.
This issue needs to be addressed. We need regulation and transparent recommendation algorithms and clear limit in targeting users.
And then there is the toxic nature of social media engineered addiction. Side bar I know but has to be said.
We need much more regulation and we need more decentralised ownership for social media companies to protect democracy.
Humans = you’re fired / llms less clear?
Would or could rewards / penalties (like in reinforcement learning) address the accountability issue?
The assumed pre-requisite is LLM has clear responsibility (important for accountability human or otherwise).
I’m thinking responsibly is ownership of task vs accountability- who owns the outcome / get barked at if the outcome isn’t delivered?
How much does a bottle of water cost?
- Supermarket? - Festival? - In a drought, when you're standing in line behind a thirsty billionaire?
People with a large relative net worths, drive asset prices up, like bids in an auction - even if they aren't the final bidder.
I think the ambiguity part is a bit of an illusion - lots of people who make good predictions on complex things, have good, informal, decision making models. But like an llm, a lot of their minds are black boxes, even unto themselves. Therefore hard to replicate.
1. Political - CEOs have significant purchasing power. 2. Obfuscation - engineering is (relatively tightly defined) but being a CEO is often more fluid and a lot of the decision making is wrapped in stuff like ‘gut’ instinct. There’s no docs for a CEO. 3. Cultural - we treat CEO’s like art and idolise their value instead of looking at them like a node, that aggregates organisational data flows. To me a CEO is a little like a model router - but with more politics.
I think there’s a huge opportunity to replace CEOs but I think like in engineering that doesn’t happen in one shot - it happens by devolving responsibilities.
I personally stepped down from the business stuff running startups and small companies because to me it feels like BS and into engineering so perhaps I’m biased.
When I ask my CEO mates they’re obviously dogmatically convinced they are irreplaceable.
But I think the devil is in the detail. I’m a relatively junior engineer and was crapping myself about ai taking every entry level job - until you get into it and realise there’s a lot more nuance. At least near term. Same for CEO’s.
I’d love a world where we can focus on engineering outcomes, not the political crap that weighs us down.
My TLDR is I think the main barrier is political, not pure engineering.
But I suppose / hope we can re-engineer the political, with effort.
Todo lists of any kind in a team context usually fall down and kanban is the way forward.
https://github.com/dileeparanawake