RivieraKid

The general problem is how to ensure quality in a low-competitive-pressure environment, especially public services which are natural monopolies. Quality only appears randomly if the right people happen to be in charge.

Look at what competition does in the AI model space. Imagine there was just OpenAI vs the actual case where there's Anthropic and others which pressure and copy each other.

I wonder if there's any solution to this, I couldn't think of any.

> I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)

Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.

Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.

Why amoral? If a an employee costs the company more than they make, it means the owner of the company is essentially donating his money to the employee. Is it amoral to not do that? What if the owner wants to donate the money to cancer research instead?

I've looked into it before but it's just not on the same level of artistic quality and taste as the original.

I wish someone would create new faction.

Fossil fuels were just a booster that let us skip 2 centuries.

Damn, I just made a similar comment before reading this one.

What if the filter is that other civilizations don't have an incentive to expand?

The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.

Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.

How was AI used when writing the article? Not implying anything, I haven't started reading it (yet).

The weights in the fly's brain are unknown, the connectome doesn't contain such data. Not sure what exactly these demos do, but it's certainly not a simulation of the fly's brain.

This is just nonsense, nice house in a rich country is $2-4M. $10M is enough to FatFIRE as a family.

I don't know, probably not.

In any case, reading summaries (and occasionally following up by reading the full article) is more enjoyable and you learn more per unit of time. Most articles are mostly garbage. And even insightful and informative articles can often be compressed with minimal loss of conveyed insight and information. Typical example is some of Paul Graham essays (I say some because only some are worth reading).

I just copy-paste the text and ask AI to summarize for 90% of articles I see on HN. One of the most time-saving uses of AI.

Well this is what I was hinting at in my original comment. The main determinant of how people feel about AI is whether it threatens their source of income because at the end of the day, that's far more important than everything else.

Sure, you will be slightly better positioned if you're excited about this tech, but the impact will be typically marginal, IMHO.

Not sure about UBI. There will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future, AI only threatens the "sitting behind a computer" class of comfy jobs. But this is a tangential topic...

Well what I'm worried about is that as AI gets better, everyone will be able to use AI to produce things. Just describe the product, or just point to an existing product, and that's it. In other words, AI could became better than every developers while being cheaper. So the market value of being a developer drops to zero.

And will your life get meaningfully worse if AI replaces developers?

There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence.

I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.

For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.

But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).

What's your job or source of income? This is the main factor behind how you feel about AI.

I'm talking about games that start from the initial position.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that a few years old version of Stockfish running on a modern MacBook Air with 1 min per move is unbeatable if the game starts from the initial position.

Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw.

I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.

For some reason, what China is doing seems worse. Part of it is that I want the US to stay ahead of China.

Is this useful in any way?

I'm starting to think that a ChatGPT moment for robotics would require abandoning the current brute force approach to artificial intelligence. ChatGPT's trick was simply more data and compute. A stochastic parrot will eventually become very impressive. But we don't have an equivalent of billions of lines of code for robotics.

It's because existing models are a brute-force approach to intelligence. With enough data and compute, a stochastic parrot will become very impressive.

But with robotics, there's no pre-made dataset that can be parroted. Notice that these datasets, e.g. how to fold clothes, need to be created by humans. That's as if humans needed to write algorithms like quicksort to teach LLMs how to code.

A homeless person usually isn't able to learn what is needed to become a neurosurgeon. So the issue isn't that we don't have enough highly paid jobs - it's that we don't have enough people able to do those jobs. Which makes sense, if everybody could easily become a neurosurgeon, it wouldn't be a highly paid job.

Yeah, makes sense that this would be part of the reason. But the question is whether a 4 day week is the right solution.

In basic economic theory, high wages mean that there's insufficient supply. So I wonder why don't the "truly unemployed" people learn whatever the market rewards and compete with the highly paid workers.

If it is because they can't for whatever reason, 4 day working week doesn't solve anything.

(Genuine question, I'm not making some kind of a right-wing point.)

That assumes monopoly status of the AI companies and no regulation.

No one would need me in the hypothetical case where I own a construction company. I would just own the company and collect profits.

Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument.

Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.

Me saying that humanoid robots won't replace nurses within the next 2 decades is sad? Doesn't make any sense.