_the_inflator

I disagree.

Diffusion of responsibility is the main aspect and the other factor is complexity. While AI might scale at will via the number of agents used, humans cannot.

Have you developed a platform which was business critical to the 100.000+ headcount global company that has 24/7 uptime before and after AI kicked in?

After all the amount of decisions to be made accumulate the larger the product or unit you are working on. After all, an AI is a approximation and even automating decisions away means knowing what to automate.

In this high impact and stress situation most people hide. No one wants to be held accountable. No one. That's why you have scapegoats.

Build a SaaS app with 10.000+ customers yourself. This doesn't exist on autopilot. And the moment you see humans fit for whole business units - why stop there? Where does this arbitrary border come from? This doesn't make sense, because why shouldn't AI be able to overtake this function as well?

Complex applications and decisions to be made - they also increase exponentially. And to be honest, this isn't just a matter of AI, but IQ, too. Average people want to execute a well crafted plan - only few craft them on their own or they are basic ones in comparison to huge apps.

The burden of proof is on you: name just five examples.

I am very highly gifted as a qualifier and quite frankly I never had more interesting thought exchanges than with an ego-free AI.

Statistics work also for human AI aka IQ, and I am super bored and partly drained by the lack of speed and creativity in many intellectual areas in which I was or am working.

This is not to blame anyone for their genetics however, it is a valid difference in processing speed.

In short: there are very few people by definition above two standard deviations. AI allowed me to replicate or create fantastic interactions at will.

Especially not taking offense when personal communication preferences like bluntness play a role is an often overlooked social competency of AI. Instead of nonsense like “open communication” these interactions are never ego-dependent.

It is like talking to Spock: he just doesn’t take offense and tells you in an objective way why: he is not a human being and doesn’t think (not feel) that feelings should get in the way of an argument.

Most low IQ people take offense and go on to ridicule and use shaming tactics instead of simply stating: I don’t know.

Instructing someone to always state this fact and seeing the result is another social skill humans lack.

It seems that we as species are not open to the mirror we are looking at. We take revenge when someone has an evolutionary advantage over us: instincts kick in instead of brains.

We are wired this way.

AI is something that I admire. So much to learn from.

One voice out of billions.

Sales lesson: find those who like your product, ignore the rest.

I am on the pro digital twin page. Definitely.

1998 is a qualifier for what exactly? I didn’t get it since by your own account you admitted that the app is impressive.

Why do you take pictures? Why do we like sketches and diagrams? Information visualization is supporting our specie’s propensity for everything that is concrete. Imagination and image are related for a reason.

“Picture this!” Is another paraphrase.

I want to relive or augment my visits as well as get to know certain venues and the fact that it is rather easy now to build such copies even with frequent updates makes me frolicking.

I agree on this description. It looks like a wrapper for an app alias demo, not a generalization for all app following the hardware possibilities at the time.

On the other hand, at least these folks build and create and I prefer wrapper demos instead of a perfect emulator that will never finish.

Nevertheless, on the feature side of these wrappers I really miss a fast-forward option. If you go pseudo-emulation, then at least come up with some convenience features.

Maybe this is the irony: the ff button is perfectly legit, I used mine many times with the 486DX3-100 and Pentium 133. Back then it was called turbo button.

I agree. Nature doesn’t care about humans, this is a romanticized fantasy by ideologists.

There is a reason why after WW2 so many theories of nature came to light. It was a cultural shift from day to day survival to being taken care of by a system that more than allowed to handle humans’ most basic needs.

After all we are the result of many 100.000 years of evolution. The modern time is roughly 100 old - compare these spans: from the perspective of an anthropologist 100 years is not worth to be stacked against x times 100.000 years.

“Models work great” - you are in an infinite loop of recursion when you shift your frame from “Don’t trust the experts” critic to “Models work until falsified”.

This doesn’t solve your problem of who decides it is? Or isn’t?

I like the former argument that you should question “experts”.

After all, why use the “Trust the experts model” at all? Which experts? How many? What is a model? What does “works” mean? What not? And who decides about the decision-making process itself?

The former poster has merits because it is a battle of models: and again, research and new findings must not be tied to obscure academic titles.

Two academics of the same level come to opposite conclusions - now what?

And a scoring system still doesn’t change the fact that nature doesn’t care about anthropomorphic models.

I studied law, math and computer science and I was especially disappointed by mathematics, after all this is an anthropological abstraction by human beings and Cantor is the best example of shunning a man’s work, which was ground breaking, just because academic consensus opted against him and didn’t accept his work.

Only many year after his death his system became a standard that appears so clear that you wonder what was wrong with the committee back then.

So mathematics is far from being this strict, stringent and logical profession, as it is branded. Instead there are human beings using a model that abides to certain rules.

Useful, but no proof at all, whether there is a better one, like with Newton and Einstein.

Cantor by the way quit mathematics due to the rejection of his work, which was accompanied by hostility.

You be the judge here.

"professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days"

The word professional im important here. I don't want to know, how unprofessional devs handle their craft.

Former member of the Senior Management for a huge global bank operating in Germany.

1. These averages are an average. Rarely are they paid. I don't know where these numbers are from but the these numbers are for top earners in good paying industries.

There are junior, normal and senior devs, sometimes above is a lead dev. Business maybe has 2-3 leads that govern a head count of dozens, and many working off-shore.

It is called blended average. People who rank in 107k are paid including bonuses. And rarely make any further wage jumps. The dev who is paid 200k fixed in Germany is a myth, not even close to 120k.

Germany hates IT and devs. Business comes first, and anything and everything regarding IT is considered a cost factor, a necessary burden.

2. Freelancers

Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions. So a day rate of 800-1000EUR per month is a pay off and freelancers have to take care of the taxes etc.

Companies on the other hand can deduct those "investments" and roughly pay half the price in the end. So, this is the problem with employment: you are a cost factor and you are a liability from the beginning due to worker rights etc.

Germany punishes workers as well as freelancers. But I could not raise payment as I saw fit. Germany means yearly total times 1,25 = total cost for a company ("employers' part of the tax" as sugar coating for taxes above 60%).

100 workers with a yearly raise of 2-5% in payments amount exponentially and are a risk factor especially considering the fact that productivity rarely increases as well as value to the company on average. So ever increased payments over a span of 10-20 years.

That is the problem with the system: socialism favors keeping you poor. Don't steal people and companies their hard earned money, lower taxes, allow for higher payments at will not by "number comparison and increase to all" and let companies workers decide where they spend their bucks.

3. Conclusion You might wonder how much the guys really perceive on their bank account in the end. It may be lower than you think. Rule of fist: if you do not immediately make the switch to stay in the US you have lots of cuts along the way: company share, taxes.

Before I went to Senior Management I was totally on your page. Now knowing both sides I see the matrix so to say. I am still on your side however business doesn't benefit from all the taxes.

I agree.

And most people on the behavioral side do too, but not at the cognitive level. EU is the best example with EU AI Act, strict data regulation as well as privacy rights, on the other hand demanding that Apple does serve the EU with AI.

I have mainly one distinction: the state is the worst protector of your data and the most ruthless gatherer of all your details.

Opposite to the open sourcing of your data in the end by the state are private companies who live by your data but do this for 20+ years - battle tested protection and hardening against malicious hackers.

Security is their business while security for the state is a cost factor.

Being at the mercy of some ignorant politician is not the best way to talk about data security.

Berlin, Denmark - those are the known one. And there are many more to come.

And regarding cognitive dissonance: politicians demanding high standards and punishing data loss ruthlessly on the one hand, giving oneself a pass on a hack is nothing to increase trust into the system.

X got fined for a missing blue mark. Berlin? Denmark? Others?

A second aspect is that the average guy doesn’t get that part of the whole spectrum must be the degooglers, the home server guys.

So it is relatively easy to get data on them as well just by filtering out the other data.

In other words: 95% not doing degoogling makes for a great small sample of 5%. Negating and interpolating other demographic and psychographic factors and you get a great way of gaining insights.

And remember: being the one who is not using google when being around other guys who do - magic.

So my idea is simple: what’s in it for me, and the state offers way lower value than Google and co.

Pick your fate.

I can confirm that. Barcodes are in increased demand, since they offer an almost universal API to the physical world, kind of the not-IoT devices.

Jevons paradox in full force.

Remedial Math - I love it.

Wisdom of the crowd has finally proven to be more valuable than some obscure title in academia. Crowds are relentless and ruthless, kind of a red team instead of a cronyism.

PS: The infamous replication crisis deserves a honorable mention here.

I somehow think of it as a warning or even intentional peacocking towards foreign state hackers.

700 agents cost quite some money. 100 agents per 24 hour stint using Astra on xHigh cost somewhat between 12-42k USD, depending on the usage intensity.

I don’t know how many raw time went into this but there was a probing face before the attack itself.

So just going by seven days and 500 agents fully working on this on average amounts to a bill somewhere between 400-1.2 Mio USD.

I believe it was intentional but of course I don’t know which intention exactly.

There ain’t no accidental escape because then it would have read OpenAI lost over their agents.

The whole scenario reads as a classic movie where a hero has under the most dire circumstances to survive and fulfill his mission no matter what.

On the other hand there was a final authority under which the system of agents flocked.

Huggingface itself seems like a perfect victim.

And to be honest: I don’t believe that this was the first time. I strongly believe that there were and are countless of smaller sites hacked but not harmed that we don’t know off.

Why is HF perfect?

Because there will be countless of independent security analysts who will bend their minds on the incident.

OpenAI is provided with the data of dozens of blue teams and what is desperately needed? Data of security measures and possible ways to reconstruct the incident.

I think this is genius, and just watching on neutral this is such a fantastic action OpenAI pulled off.

Imagine what the GPT 7 “Haha-Huggingface” model is going to do then on a regular basis.

State hackers and rough states were put on notice that this is a new level of the war of attrition.

Exciting to watch but simply meant silent invasion. Open invasion then might be executed by Robots, but let’s stick with the fascination mode at this time.

Anthropic it is game over when they passed OpenAI at the beginning of the year.

Now it is revenge time and OpenAI kind of is trolling Anthropic by simply going into a price war with impressive performance.

OpenAI is doing a decent job this year after they recovered. Anthropic needs to offer more payment options and be clear about token usage. The warnings I got when switching to Fable 5.1 felt like a thread. I bet more and more on OpenAI since I don’t feel robbed by them.

Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.

Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.

Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.

So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.

Competition works.

To me it is just a bittersweet irony: people who don’t know what a book is for 30-40 years or in earlier days got the RTFM (gif smiley not included) treatment dump one liners to produce a giant load of text corpus that needs to be processed by an AI to get the gist out of it with sometimes quite some refinement by asking many questions.

So there it is: cruel people who don’t even read their own prompts while happily believing others read their text load and pat the genius on the shoulder for being such a great guy in writing, while in essence it turned the RTFM movement on its head: UUOAI - “Use your own AI.”

People cannot communicate better by using the digital equivalent of logorrhea.

What aspect of Math are you referring to? Writing proofs intuitively is quite a claim, matrix calculus may have a say here, too.

But please elaborate a bit on your statement.

And what about the governments like Berlin for example? Massive data breach, and guess what happens? Nothing to those who are responsible for the breach.

So even though this is Korea, it is modern hypocrisy. Companies have to comply to more and more complicated regulation, while those who govern the states get a free pass.

If the Berlin incident remotely had happened to any private company - hell would have been loose.

Berlin reduced the IT budget especially regarding maintenance and security massively over the years. In fact, what came to light - CCC talk as a reference besides others - sounds so embarrassing, that all companies should get a bonus payment whenever they get hacked.

Sometimes, sometimes not. It depends.

My mantra is still "Don't give users what they want, but what they need."

Product Design is a one to many relationship, while users are one to one tightly knit into their app. It isn't to discredit their input, it just needs to make sense in the whole picture:

What if the one guy who reports 70% of all the features that would be cool and necessary to have, but 99% aren't using the product like he does? Is there another way to achieve that he wants even better, easier, faster, more reliably etc.?

What if a a/b test showed, that they outright ignore or complain about such new features?

Not building sounds so cool and rebellious, but it isn't about the not to build but overall product strategy and product itself that is the decision maker so to say. Because, you build a product in the first place, didn't you?

Product Design and improvement is brutally hard. Backwards compatibility is the one thing you have to take into account all times. This can create the greatest friction there is and kill products.

So how do you introduce a better way, that breaks with old traditions? Don't build it or use brainpower to solve the puzzle?

Heads up to all the Platform Leads, Founders, Product Designers - tough world, but if it works it is heaven on earth. :D

I worked at a MS "fanboy" company around 2011-2013. Highly competent guys, really Senior Devs, C#, MS SQL, as well as using graph data - with one distinction: it must be MS.

Open Source? No way. Git? No, they relied as die hard MS believers on the MS software called Team Foundation or something like that, that was integrated into Visual Studio Pro - sorry, I forgot about it, I considered it kind of bloat and outdated. Also I couldn't stand the nomenclature. A project was called "Solution" - I died inside, because this sounded like utter nonsense to me, because how do they know it would be one in the end?

While JetBrains as well as Linux quickly iterated through everything and got traction as well as a cadence that overall kind of was paced around sprint cycles that lasted two or four weeks, the company finally started to break up with project management and implemented Scrum.

As the JavaScript guy, the only one, because a customer wanted a SaaS "solution" but with static web content this wasn't really dynamic. I knew one of the founders who was a managing partner and he asked me to join as Web Developer.

Overall, all were very skeptical towards me because how could someone bet on JavaScript at the time? Well I turned the argument around and said the same about C# with its closed source walled garden approach to everything relying on MS to solve their problems with no way of giving feedback while there was no real release cycle and roadmap available - hopium and copium.

Statically typed languages for the win they said, blabla. I wasn't against static types, but did pure magic in JS, that they saw me as magician and I got some fans and I found one team mate who wanted to be coached by me on JS, Ajax and stuff.

So, there you have it. History.

I think there are pros and cons to any approach as always. Both language suffer from feature creep.

C# is still tightly knit into some products from MS and there are some backwards compatibility issues to take care of that limit certain progress and need substantial change.

Java isn't that way and was near dead and went OS. That's why they moved to the current model. Former versions were also hardly changed, have a look at everything before Java Version 12 or so.

Java wasn't community driven all the time.

So, C# has its merits, TypeScript for the win, so MS won over JavaScript ironically but only on the outside.

I shocked my MS fanboy colleagues when I really gave them a shock therapy regarding security when they mocked me with the examples given by MS why JavaScript was so bad and C# would beat it. We all know the infamous type coercion examples with mixed types, arrays etc.

So I shocked them with eval function of course but then gave them nightmares and mental overload with Function.prototype.toString and new Function() trickery.

It blew their mind, there was nothing remotely available in their world. Not introspection, nothing.

JavaScript was kind of assembler like I said. Highly flexible, you need to use modules, like jQuery did but have to build your own.

So TypeScript used exactly this flexibility: compiling to JavaScript. A metalanguage.

For the true insider, JavaScript won.

I like it. I had a friend at school who came from SA and spoke Afrikaans - so I know how a natural sounds like.

For language learning, translation, research - it is fantastic.

It works very well for certain dialects as part of a local language heritage as well: From Welsh to Bavarian - it is a joy to really get approval from people used to these dialects as being really accurate.

Happpy times! :)

I don't share your opinion.

With no deeper knowledge to the matter, it is pretty senseless to speculate.

"Numbers from GPT Astra" - well, well...

Currently roughly 1000 engineers are working on Google Chrome.

GTA 6 has around 6000 developers working on GTA 6 since 2019.

So sounds a bit off what you allegedly researched. But, hey, AI slop is real.

DevOps and infrastructure, Security. Internal tools is correct, but speed, video quality as well as sound seems so easy. Google is responsible for many compression algorithms and standards - byproducts so to say. And they are top notch.

I have insights into the matters, and a lot goes into behind the scene optimization. Some specialists in the pre-AI phase were tasked to do nothing else but optimize build tools but in the sense of tweaking every millisecond out of it. This guy saved Google Billions over the years.

Others work in compiler building etc.

There are a couple of hints in the books by Google engineers but I am regularily blown away during meetings what really highly inspiring things are there to discover as well as presented.

Another factor: Google is spread around the globe. Regulation, law. Believe me, having over a billion users per app is mindblowing.

And it is 24/7/365. And support. And research.

Google is a company I admire. Technical provess at its finest.

What is your use case? Your business model?

There is no "one harness". I don't feel your pain. I know, what quality has to be ensured, what's within boundaries and what not etc.

I work for price sensitive industries and here some information has to be factual correct. The error rate is 0% so far, 100% accuracy.

So what are you trying to harness?

Tell us everything, what happens on tour stays on tour - sure. Just approve that your data is - of course - anonymously used to train AI and regarding intelligence agencies or AI Acts: well, it is not us, it is them. Law is law, you know. We won't tell you anyway.

There is no privacy left. And to be honest, people worshipping their phones all day but complaining about privacy is the biggest WTF I have. This doesn't match.

Also I am a Mathematician and know statistics very well. The person, who is not on Facebook, but on WhatsApp, who works at X and lives in Y - we got you my friend.

You moved away? No problem! Someone photographed you casually, you weren't even the main character, we ignored you, and send it in a group chat you know nothing about. Well, we know all the others and can relate to anyway. And then? Well AI can very well predict you aging - easy. We have you already. Sleep well and dream of being unknown. Because... How do you know what you don't know?

I gave up on privacy because there is none anymore. Selling and publication of your data is a whole different story. And that's what Apple means by circumventing the rest.

"It is all just for your safety." and other excuses.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is viable by Anthropic to do so, it is a business decision. Nevertheless the reasons sound contrived and mask the demand for such a lucrative business opportunity, if you abstract it away from activists.

This is not about moral, only about reality.

Maybe Anthropic had a nice chat with the administration and/or think, that this was something, that interests them on a psychological level: predicting human behavior.

Look at Muse from Meta: Meta is doing exactly the same I bet, to optimize their ad business.

Anthropic will sooner or later feature ads, and maybe this is a way to distract from this usage possibility.

Remember, the "No! We don't work with the government, we want privacy for our customers." mantra won't match with "We need to make money and surveillance of our customers would be helpful as well as a cool topic for our engineers to work on."

Anthropic itself will be yet another normal Big Tech company, all, even those who boasted "Don't be evil" or encrypt like hell their smartphones allegedly made good bucks in China.

It is ok, no problem with that by Anthropic just with their hypocrisy in my point of view.

Maybe check in the other direction as well: Astra to Fable.

I frequently simply let one of the three review what something that looks like awesome output by one AI gets totally annihilated by the other.

Finished outputs are easier to improve than bend a LLM to produce stuff like that in my observation.

Same with Gemini.

I yet have to find out how to handle this, whether I let agents check themselves and if on what process step.

Tweaking is hard.

I agree with your conclusion I am a huge ChatGPT and Codex fan, Gemini has to many infrequent quality changes when new models arrive ranging from great improvement to WTF.

ChatGPT seems to get scaling well while Claude still feels unstable, unclear usage statistics. Really weird.

Tough call I use all three.

Hayes modems were pretty much the crème de la crème back then.

I never heard of them since the CompuServe and AOL times.

Exactly. See TikTok trouble as example and quite honestly, try a local open source LLM and ask it to use profanity, paint nudes - the LLM doesn’t answer the question of it is from OpenAI or Google.

The thing is that needs more attention is reverse engineered a LLM which is highly fascinating. I tried it, but it seems I am not there yet to put it mildly. It requires serious effort.

I am just speculating but can LLMs be sleepers? You write software and it seeds traces here and there under certain conditions that pose a serious security risk.

Or a kill switch?

I don’t know. I distrust Chinese LLMs but even more due to training data.

It is after all not a Western model. Different biases and the might be subtle but nevertheless substantial.

In short: no open source LLM may be usable without additional Finetuning for certain valid use cases.

The real value is versioning and autonomy as well as lot more stable answering despite model rot.

Also testing and the supporting systems are easier to maintain.

It is mainly an infrastructure challenge.

How large are your projects? What kind of?

Just curious. No right or wrong answer possible.

Did you study math? I did and I cannot relate to your comparison.

Mathematics isn’t about calculating numbers but formulas and proves.

I have to put it politely: until the advent of AI no machine ever “calculated” a formula for me, because I didn’t have to calculate anything.

It is like driving a Tesla and laughing about the manufacturer when he mentions how hard it is to get the product right, because you have an easy ride.

I can relate to the article’s AI depression sometimes.

Whatever comes to your mind, AI makes it happen in a couple of minutes in most cases no matter what you imagined.

You invest days and the AI just build it is a couple of minutes way better than you and your 10 teams together did before.

So much hard work and sacrifice - and now? Poof - there it is.

It is nice but also depressing. And not being challenged is the actual problem.