DonaldPShimoda
I regret to inform you that this is actually a description of abstraction, not approximation. :) The twenty "dollars" abstract over the notion of "a quantity that is owed" such that you can exchange the otherwise meaningless scraps of paper (or just bytes these days!) for other goods/services. If you were not going to use that money for something else, it actually has no value, curiously enough.
Decades ago, money had a concrete value in that you could request the issuing government to take your dollars and give you gold at an established exchange rate. When we abandoned the gold standard (and all forms of fiscal concretization), money became inherently abstract.
> Turns out money is just a more verifiable and simplified form of favors.
I should like to refer you to the book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" for an alternative look at monetary systems, credit and debt, favors, and more. I found it a fascinating read (I mean that genuinely), and very educational with regard to this claim in particular.
Money is an abstraction, not an approximation. There is not of necessity any real basis for any price that has ever been attached to any product or service, ever. Money is an artificial mechanism by which we exchange debt owed by the issuing state that itself also has no real basis.
> If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people.
On this we agree, but, of course, my point was that when I say "value" I don't mean monetary value. A person's value is intangible, and the value of their works (whatever those may be) is derived entirely from the relationship formed between the artist and their context and the connection from this relationship to whoever wishes to partake of the art.
> As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes, and you functionally can't help anyone.
What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.
But I do care about, for example, a recently published author, or someone who posts their paintings on social media. Regardless of where the law stands in each particular case, I think it's repugnant that statistical models were trained on these inputs with the intent of offering the ability to produce similar outputs without any payment or even attribution to the original artist.
> Information wants to be free!
If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.
I think about how disappointing it is when a new project makes it to the front page of HN and I click through and it's just... vibe-coded slop. Looks pretty at first, but it's clear that there isn't really much human underneath. Lots of obvious interface problems or just a distinct lack of a personal touch. It's empty, and it makes me sad.
Or even not in software, I think of all the people who have been so quick to offload their thought processes to a statistical model. What do you mean you don't know what you want to eat at this restaurant so you asked Claude and got recommended something that isn't even on the menu?
And that's just individual stuff. I am genuinely fearful of the integration of AI into, say, the legal and judicial processes, or governance, or whatever else. People give the models wayyyy too much credibility considering they (the models) cannot give an accurate confidence interval for their results, and I think it's going to make things much worse for disadvantaged communities to a degree that the communities will not be able to overcome by using the technologies themselves.
But, of course, this is also part of the immorality of the AI industry.
For the time being, I'm content to simply not use it myself. I don't think it's reasonable for me to foist my morals onto those around me, in the same way that my very close vegan friend still talks to me when I order a whole milk latte. I don't think there's a way to exist in modern society without incurring some degree of (likely indirect) immorality, so it's all about setting boundaries for myself where I can and accepting where I end up.
1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts. Their manner of operation is also problematic: disadvantaged communities are being exploited at a rapidly increasing disproportionate rate in the name of "more compute".
2. I am fundamentally disinterested in the productivity mindset that LLMs lean into. I don't care to "produce more"; the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it. This is an easier position to hold as someone who does not hold a typical corporate job, but even if I did I would still resist because an increase in my output would not correlate to an increase in my salary.
At the root of it all is people. I care about people (their existence, their happiness, my connections to them, their connections to each other), and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people, so I want no part of it.
Your argument grows more ludicrous with each byte you submit.
To your point anyway, knowing these things does not make someone a better driver, nor does not knowing these things make someone a worse driver. They're separate skills, just as understanding how to program has little bearing on a person's ability to operate a computer.
AI is being marketed as a tool that does not require expertise to wield, so it's unclear to me why you'd think the hype would get more people to go to college.
Anyway, the problem is likely more to do with job prospects. Most CS undergrads I talk to these days are perpetually concerned with the job market; things have not been good for a while now. And this on top of the over-enrollment problem: many schools have been accepting far more undergrads in CS than they could handle for the better part of a decade now, resulting in ultimately poorer outcomes for everyone involved except the upper administration.
Barring significant improvements to either of those issues, reducing enrollment is necessary. But society is not exactly going out of its way to help high schoolers find many viable alternatives, which is really where our efforts ought to focus, in my opinion.
What was going on recently was AI companies were specifically seeking out rare — or sometimes irreplaceable — books to supplement their data sets (and hopefully getting a leg up on their competitors). The destruction of the books wasn't the point, it was just a consequence of the business-oriented realization that they could scan the contents of more books faster if they just chopped off the bindings rather than investing the time to care for the books and keep them intact (plus supposedly playing along with copyright law by "only having one copy of the copyrighted material").
The difference lies in the power dynamic: if you don't like the terms, you can look elsewhere to find a better fit; if the employer doesn't like the terms, you may find yourself out of a job faster than you can replace it. For some people it may not be a big deal, but for many it's a significant factor in how hard they push for what they feel would be fair compensation.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
In formal verification, "the specification" means the encoded claims that will be proved, i.e., the lemmas and theorems to which the proofs directly correspond. When we use proof assistant languages (e.g., Rocq, Lean) to accomplish the verification, this means the specification is given as a type.
I think this is not what the parent comment had meant by "specification"; it seemed to me that they meant that word to refer to the human-accessible document that states what the program ought to do.
The translation of an informal (human-readable) specification into a formal specification is not always straightforward, often due to issues on either (or both) end(s) of the process. You can write Rocq code that type-checks and thus "is verified" in the sense that the type-checked code conforms to the formal specification, but if the claims you proved are not what you had intended to claim, then that verification is not very helpful.
So that is where the parent comment introduces "validation" to mean (in my words) the process of ensuring that your formal specification matches the informal specification, such that any formal verification that occurs is useful and meaningful.
Ah, yes, I can fondly recall reading and internalizing every word available on the internet when I was young...
I would argue that, in the absence of such evidence, we cannot conclude that the English-to-code conversion process is stochastic; it is merely not deterministic, which is altogether different.
A monad is any construct of abstraction that obeys the Monad Laws. This may seem a useless definition, but my point is that deriving a useful intuition for the concept of the monad is necessarily challenging because they cannot readily be boiled down any further than that without loss of information.
The best intuitive explanation I've developed so far is that a monad is an abstraction over structures of ordered computations. The most ready examples for non-functional programmers are probably exceptions (and their handlers) and nullable types (typically called "optional types" in languages with first-class handling of such things, unlike Java).
That said, the parent comment explicitly pointed out Rhombus as an alternative to an S-expression syntax within that same community, so maybe you could look into that suggestion instead of being pithy about topics in which you are less well informed.
This thread originated with one poster expressing disappointment that someone of the author's acumen would choose this path, and another poster asked why the author (or someone of their skills) should have chosen a different path. I weighed in with an answer to that question.
Obviously the author did not see things the way I suggested, or else the conversation would not have happened.