throwaway_19sz

Sure, but the comment I was replying to said “Everybody” and “never ever”.

“Never ever” is crazy talk. Just put a couple of dollars in a prepaid account and assume it may all get used up. “Standard practices” won’t get you far in life.

People conflate two very different senses of “autonomous”. One basically means capable of reacting to things automatically without a person in the loop. Lots of computer systems are autonomous in that sense, and have been so for decades. The other sense is more like “accountable”, i.e. it’s a real player on some stage, like a country or a person, capable of governing its own affairs.

One day it may make sense to hold software accountable for its own actions, but we are nowhere near that point.

When OpenAI creates software that performs crimes, what’s actually happened is that OpenAI has performed crimes using software (whether intentionally or through negligence). People need to stop falling for the anthropomorphic PR spin.

Theory: There are more smart, happy people than it seems. It’s just, that particular combination tends to come with a reduced inclination to question their feelings and to engage in discourse about feelings.

You are mixing up what authoritarian leaders want to know with what they want the public to know.

If you measure ‘bang’ by hardware metrics, they’re clearly orders of magnitude better value today. But if ‘bang’ means usefulness at solving life’s problems, it’s harder to compare, because the problems have changed so much, and so many of them now come from computers.

That is a glaring false dichotomy.

Can someone who got past the paywall tell me what the definition of “fully autonomous” is here? I’m guessing it means the software selected targets based on something the human operators decided when they launched the drone? Is the criteria geographic (any humans in a certain zone), or known individuals (facial recognition), or based on enemy uniforms/visual descriptions, or a specific behavioural rule (anyone emerging from this building), or what?

You’re missing the point. OK, it’s not ‘thinking’ in a pure sense; the point is it’s private notes. If someone says something to you, they are allowed to privately prepare it first (thinking, jotted notes, LLM rewriting, running it past lawyers, whatever) and you don’t get to see all that. That’s how it has always been.

Just because someone says/writes something to you doesn’t mean you have any moral right to see all the things they considered and then decided not to say.

I disagree with the sentiment. The prompt is not what you meant to say. It is part of the private act of thinking, of choosing your words. The thing you send is what you meant to say. There has always been a vital distinction between what you think and what you say. The notion that you should ever have direct access to private thoughts that someone chose not to send to you is wrongheaded.

It’s like receiving a letter and then demanding to see someone’s private notebook where they jot down their thoughts, so you can see what they ‘really meant to say’. Most communication involves a degree of negotiation and persuasion. Thoughts are necessarily private.

There is a problem with AI generated emails: they change the balance of time/effort required to write them vs. to read them. I think this is a valid concern.

Funny story no one will believe, but it’s true. A good friend of mine joined a startup as CTO 10 years ago, high growth phase, maybe 200 devs… In his first week he discovered the company had a microservice for generating new UUIDs. One endpoint with its own dedicated team of 3 engineers …including a database guy (the plot thickens). Other teams were instructed to call this service every time they needed a new ‘safe’ UUID. My pal asked wtf. It turned out this service had its own DB to store every previously issued UUID. Requests were handled as follows: it would generate a UUID, then ‘validate’ it by checking its own database to ensure the newly generated UUID didn’t match any previously generated UUIDs, then insert it, then return it to the client. Peace of mind I guess. The team had its own kanban board and sprints.

I have read it. I don’t think you get my point. I said ‘access to’. If you think about it, there is plenty of data freely available about the company in most job applications (often including actual salaries they pay their staff - literally the most pertinent data). Yes, employers will use whatever tools they can to guess at what you might accept. It’s a negotiation.

It is perfectly possible for both sides to approach a salary conversation as the negotiation that it clearly is. In reality, many job candidates barely think about negotiating the salary, but I doubt that’s due to not having enough data points. I think it’s probably more to do with not wanting to be perceived as ‘greedy’ or some other moral badness, and finding it more comfortable to let the recruiter/employer play them like a fiddle. Moral pride to spite their face. Sure, we can feel good in the moment by angrily pointing out that companies take various measures to maximise income and minimise expenditure, as if it’s surprising or ‘wrong’. But it might also be helpful to remember that we are in exactly the same situation. Then perhaps we can start negotiating better deals for ourselves, thus improving life for ourselves and our dependents.