advael

It seems like a bad idea to go to a hospital that specifically is trying to gouge foreigners. I've been to other hospitals in Bangkok specifically though, including for emergency care, and they for the most part charge a tiny fraction of what US ones do, and seem to provide a good standard of care, albeit one with considerably less theater involved

I don't know about cuba specifically, but for a majority of conditions most major cities in the world have good, modern medical care available. I have first-hand experience of this on at least seven countries on three continents just on incidental medical needs, and know others who have described much the same experience in several countries I've never visited. Compared to the US, prices are quite low across the board, even for non-citizens who have to pay out of pocket, due to the unique way the various US industries involved in healthcare have dramatically driven up prices. Medical tourism is sometimes even worth it for people who have insurance.

Yes, one can quite easily make quite fantastic numbers fall out of simply applying arithmetic and not dealing with messy propositions like grounding those numbers in any kind of real world outcome.

I'd love to! Based on FIRE-style calculations I'd need approximately 2 mil at the current cost of living in my city. But if you'd help relocate my household internationally, I could get the cost down considerably. Where can I send the bill?

Lots of kinds of interactions with the physical world could potentially compress or jostle bones

I mean I'm still on cinnamon and thus X11 and thus input-leap, but good to know what the wayland stack is like

Huge fan of "never give it wifi, hook it up to a little linux box, remote control it via input leap" myself

Why? I'd join more book clubs if I didn't have to spend so much time working or looking for work. And I'm luckier than most in that I somewhat got to pursue a career of my choice. I think the vast overwhelming majority of people don't get much fulfillment from their vocation at all, and given a basic income, would spend their time and energy on "economically useless" endeavors that aren't just wireheading. In fact, I think the degree to which people do that now has mostly to do with feeling trapped and isolated by economic conditions that are a political choice already, let alone in a supposedly post-scarcity world

The article does a great job of identifying the locus of the problem: Windows, which has always been an exemplar of bad software, both in the sense of quality and the sense of ethics, and is produced by a company that explores new frontiers in making software bad in both senses every year, a tradition dating to its very founding

I will note that like any large enough company, it also employs a lot of cool people doing great work, and don't see this as a contradiction in any way

So your view is that there's no way to recover, and there's no viable alternative. In other words, that "the rot" has consumed the body politic and there's nothing to be done about it. To me this seems like a rationalization of apathy and inaction, but if it's the conclusion you've really come to, I encourage you to disengage from the political process as would seem to be the logical course of action implied by the claim, though this is partially because frankly the involvement of people with such beliefs in said process likely can only run counter to my interests

I tend to agree with the idea that one shouldn't define oneself by a job, especially since one's career is generally dependent on some combination of market forces, institutional gatekeepers, and other factors that are beyond one's control to varying degrees. However, people do tend to put that kind of personal investment into things they spend most of their time on, and especially things they had to spend a long time training for. In order to realize a world where people aren't defined by their career, we would need to first realize a world in which people weren't equal parts encouraged and forced to put most of their time and effort into one, which would require somewhat different economic arrangements than presently exist

If the predictions of the death of software engineering come to fruition, the only acceptable result of that is a world where "software" is a detail about how computers do things that some people can investigate for the sake of their curiosity, or because they are particularly meticulous about some detail. A world in which any software can be created by prompting eventually converges into a world where people solve their own problems with software, without thinking about the act of creating software. The idea of selling software in that world becomes ridiculous, and computers reach their potential as a tool normal people and businesses alike can use to solve problems.

To be clear, as someone who currently makes a living on making software, this is a major upheaval and sucks for me at least in the short term, because of the economic realities of the society in which we live. However, there are only two classes of alternatives. One is that the "AI can make all software" world fails to materialize. We're certainly not guaranteed this outcome, LLMs still generate sprawling and buggy code and we are in an era of unprecedented levels of tech rot. It's possible this is an unsolvable problem, and engineering, while probably assisted by LLMs, still requires people do a lot of manual work, or at least steering and guiding. The idea that we can already get reliable software out of claude go brr is uh... pretty misguided and silly, and at best the people who push that idea are, shall we say, optimistic. I think software engineering for a company continues to suck in this world, and I hope there's the opportunity for more people to go around being computer-touchers for non-computer-people in a more integrated context, rather than some massive "tech industry" increasingly insulating itself from society at large and building shit to try to ensnare and enthrall people, as it has been for the last few decades.

But I do think it's pretty plausible we get there, get to the computer that you just interact with by asking it for things - which it builds as software on the backend because software is a way more reliable and cheap way to repeatedly do the same task than throwing an LLM at the problem fresh each time you need something - but mostly people don't worry about that part. In that world, we either get to own computers or we don't, and if we don't, we are in an authoritarian dystopia the likes of which the world has never seen and may never escape. Personally I want the world where a computer is just a tool most people have, that does computation things a person or organization wants, and asking in a way that gets them what they want is a pretty normal skill to have. I think we could get there on our current trajectory. But we could also get a world where governments and corporations conspire to hoard computation and lock the general public out of it.

I don't think "software factories" are useless any more than I think writing programming languages was useless ten years ago. Not everyone cares about setting the terms by which we build things with computers, but some do, and more power to them. Letting this be monopolized is a part of how we get the bad outcomes. If operating systems had fully become a monopoly, we'd already be much further into the bad outcomes than we are

While the phrasing I used derived from a well-known image in modern culture, good enough fundamental literacy skills could likely help you deduce the intent of my reply

Often, there are many solutions to a problem, with different externalities and implementation requirements. Speed limit enforcement for sure has some benefits, but also some downsides. Any absolute has edge cases that don't work, but I don't in fact think creating the large networks of people empowered to surveil citizens to enforce speed limits is the only viable means of reducing traffic deaths, a goal which is often better served by creating more viable transportation alternatives to cars. I don't think carceral approaches to problems are always wrong, but they are often an attempt to individuate a problem that's better addressed on the level of infrastructure

My brother in china once told me "In china, every company of a certain size has board seats filled by a representative of the party, to make sure corporate and government priorities align. In america, every company of a certain size sends lobbyists and sometimes runs candidates directly, to make sure corporate and government priorities align"

Concentration of power has many instances of convergent evolution, but societies trending dystopian is heavily correlated with concentration of power regardless of the shape it takes

Yet you also participate in society, curious

There is no form of surveillance that does more good than harm in the long run. The endless debates about the value of "catching bad guys" or "keeping people on their best behavior" should be rightly seen as opposed to the fundamental notion that human beings are capable of cooperation and altruism at scale. No amount of mass surveillance is justifiable, and there is no version of the future in which we allow it but do not create dystopia

Ah yes, the ol' "the unwashed masses are too dumb to know what's good for them"

I can't imagine you're big on democracy per se either, huh

It's sad to me that the entire canon of "brilliant moves" available to business people are essentially strategies for designing dystopian outcomes at a massive scale. This is probably not fully the case, but disproportionately this seems to be what is called "brilliant" in that field

I think "relative to other countries" it has fallen out of favor quite a lot. That's the story the data tell, unambiguously. What it didn't do is fall behind other countries in absolute terms, but in relative terms it did

IDK do we still consider china - a country that currently has a fairly enormous middle class - to be communist? For that matter, do we view the current american economy to be a free market? (It's certainly "capitalist" in the strict academic sense of the word, wherein capital invested is the means by which ownership is ascertained, but that's generally not what people mean colloquially, so I find that using that term mostly bogs people down in semantics)

Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.

From both experience and the continued state of the incentives that lead to the behavior, it seems unreasonable to trust any company at their word about such things

I think these companies very much want to assign responsibility to an entity we can't meaningfully jail or fine. I think it may sometimes make sense to claim model provider negligence instead of operator responsibility, and user intent can likely be easily ascertained by reading the conversation logs. In a case where a company used its own model, responsibility is obviously and unambiguously within the company, of course.

Demand from whom? I think a lot of people are pretty constantly observing that software quality in applications they use (or are forced to interact with) has been declining across the board for a while, and that this seems to have accelerated recently. The average lay understanding of this is "because AI" but it's probably a combination of sometimes being models producing sloppy code and sometimes being poor morale and management and product design in this industry that's essentially coming apart at the seams from the perspective of its workforce. I think it's uncontroversial to say that people already dislike this and wish for better software quality. For the most part, though, they either don't have or won't use any levers of market pressure for this. Their software choices are largely limited to what google or apple will allow for their phones, or what employers require them to use. I'll tell anyone who will listen that they should use FOSS where they can, but people really resist this idea even where it's extremely feasible and the tradeoffs are mostly familiarity (like their desktop OS). Consumers of software seem to partially think this way because they have been disempowered so thoroughly that they seldom have a choice

So as market pressure goes, that leaves employers. I do see the occasional oddball project that resists this wave, but "doing things correctly even if it takes longer" is not a value you're really allowed to have in an economy where the make or break factor for your business is usually getting investment capital, and capital is, as a population, probably the most all-in on LLMs of anyone, to the point where I believe they'd push for vibecoding even in instances where they can't find numbers that justify doing so.

A ton of people not in tech hate genAI so much that they say they'll, for example, not purchase a game if they know someone used it for any part of it, and yell about it online, and such, but games are pretty much the only consumer-facing software people make purchasing decisions about, so maybe that moves a needle there, but gamers failed to rally against microtransactions, DLC piecemealing, or even things like always-on DRM or revoking purchases that literally remove their ability to play their games, so I doubt that's going to materialize a change in something that could be more easily obfuscated in response to this pressure like the provenance of the software

Market pressures require at least a somewhat free market, and the overall american market for software is drastically distorted by various oligopsonies that by and large has a vested interest in LLMs (and specifically the corporate black box ones) being used for as much as possible

I really don't know enough about it to know whether you're right or not, nor do I know whether or not you know enough to make the claim you're making, so I won't make an argument one way or another because it's non-sequitur to what I said anyway. The fact that you or I or Sam Altman or Terrence Tao believe the claim is irrelevant to whether this obligates the person who wrote the blog post to believe the claim, and it sounds like he's willing to consider the possibility that it is right, and would read the paper if it reached a threshold of comprehensibility expected of people making that kind of claim.

I don't think the claim is "they definitely have an oracle that solves the problem, and I reject it because it's hard to read". The claim is "OpenAI claims to have used an oracle to solve the problem. The proof is very difficult to read, and to even know if it does or not, we have to go through it with a fine-toothed comb, but they're going around claiming they definitely solved the problem (or at least getting press that claims that which they aren't pushing back against) and this might convince the people who sign grants even if it isn't true"

People who are invested in the idea that we've invented a general intelligence, now, which includes all these companies that are literally financially invested in this claim they are making, will tend to believe that its results can already be trusted in domains like this. Some mathematicians seem to believe some of the proofs written by their models, and some, like this one, don't. I do think it's valid for an expert to push back against the claim that the best use of their time right now is to verify the poorly written work of everyone who's claimed to solve the problem

It's a feedback loop. I've fallen into something close to it (Thought not on the level of just not testing things before I ship them) myself once or twice under pressure. If there are deadlines that get tighter and tighter and execs and managers make credible threats about them and every checkpoint takes days, and every time you look for feedback people are doing PR reviews with AI and saying "IDK ask claude" and giving you LLM output in response to your questions then you're going against the grain by having standards in a way that could threaten your job security. If you happen to have the kind of power that lets you push back successfully in your organization, or the kind of organization that will actually take pushback seriously and not just label you a problem for it, I encourage you to be the change you want to see in the world. I think a lot of people don't meaningfully have that option. I have already found that out the hard way once. This tech is not unique in having modes of usage that are lazy, addictive, or sloppy. The difference here is that the culture from the top down in a staggering number of organizations is creating active pressure to use it that way

In general, it's bizarre that people look at problems this systemic and conclude that they are primarily a failing happening at the level of individual contributors. This organizational rot didn't even start with LLMs, though it's certainly been accelerated by them

It's a bit of a tautology to say that things are inevitable if we don't avoid them, though of course I agree

"Everything moving to the cloud" is far from inevitable, and represents a concentration of power. Of course existing tech corps want that, they proposed it and have pushed it in the first place, but I strongly disprefer my personal things being on someone else's computer, don't need a ton of computer to host them on the internet myself for my own purposes, and am far from alone in this. The logical endpoint of priorities of large businesses and governments are not inherently inevitable