apical_dendrite

Wasn't this basically Uber's model? They just ignored any local regulation they didn't like, even to the point of building a system to prevent government officials were trying to take Ubers so they couldn't get fined.

Another interpretation is that someone in the intelligence community felt that since Trump was ignoring what they perceived to be a serious threat to security, their best recourse was to use the media to raise an alarm.

Our CEO, COO, etc are starting to see non-technical work go to customers with huge mistakes (committing to things that don't exist for instance). I also think seeing the Claude-style of writing everywhere has become tiresome for execs. That seems to have helped force a bit of an attitude change from always wanting to know how we could use AI in every process, to insisting that certain things should never be done by AI.

This is anecdotal of course, but at least at my company it's getting a bit easier to advocate for humans to do the thinking and understanding.

Is there an independent source for this story? The guy is not exactly a reliable narrator.

When I was looking for an apartment recently, the big "luxury" buildings use AI agents to schedule tours and answer questions. Tours are also self-serve, you don't actually get to meet and talk to anyone. It's a crappy experience. I had to call an AI agent to figure out how to get in the front door of a building and it completely failed to answer this very basic question (fortunately someone eventually saw me knocking). When I toured one large complex there were several groups wandering through the building at once. It did not give me a particularly safe feeling to see that random people going everywhere in the buildings unescorted had been completely normalized.

> While the ease of generating code this way triggered a greater dopamine reward

I get zero dopamine rush from this. I get a dopamine rush from building something or figuring something out myself. I don't get a dopamine rush for generating thousands of lines of code that I then have to try to understand.

Yes, look up NVA vet. They own 1000+ vet practices but they all sound like small, local businesses.

That's one model of private equity, but PE has also been buying up very successful local businesses in areas like veterinary care. The PE firm keeps the name and branding of the local vet because people have traditionally wanted to take their pet to a trusted local vet, not a big chain.

Their own tweets are also pretty eyebrow-raising:

> One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.

Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?

AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.

This is just wrong. A lot of people take tremendous pride in their work. Particularly highly-skilled people who have been doing the work for a long time.

Joe Biden used to say this all the time - that a job is more than a paycheck, it's an identity and a sense of purpose, often a big part of our social lives as well. Or if you prefer the other side, Trump likes to say that coal miners don't want to learn computers, they want their coal mining jobs back.

With one colleague, I was leaving PR comments and he would just put my feedback into the AI and paste its response. So I decided to cut out the middleman and now I just @cursor and tell it to trim unnecessarily long comments.

Please provide a source. Also, are you also so sneering about the famine relief and AIDS treatment work that USAID was doing?

Is it a weakness of the individual or is it a systemic issue where management sees how fast a single task can be "completed" with AI so they set goals that can only be achieved if you offload everything to AI and then fall into the trap I described above.

We're currently wasting a lot of time cleaning up slop created by overusing AI. The loop is: developer uses AI to create a huge amount of code very quickly. But the developer didn't understand the underlying system very well so the specs generated by the AI contain a lot of faulty assumptions and the code was then built on those assumptions. So you have features that probably shouldn't have existed in the first place, but because they do exist people have provided feedback on them, and the developer then uses the AI to implement that feedback, but still doesn't understand the system so much of the code for the revisions is still wrong. So that individual developer saw a huge productivity increase, in the sense that he generated a vast amount of code really quickly, but the team as a whole saw a productivity decrease.

It's really important to define what "people who can leverage AI" means. I've found that using AI judiciously with close human supervision provides an advantage, but using the latest models with the latest harnesses can look like it's giving you a huge advantage superficially while actually costing you more time in the long run.

There are so many other factors. Will people be pissed if they expected your output and got AI slop instead? Will you lose context on something that you really need to understand?

There are so many contradictions in this statement that either the person who wrote it is completely muddle-headed, or just a bad liar.

> Nothing about our core business has changed – it remains strong and consistent

a few paragraphs later

> But our transformation is going to take time

and the next paragraph

> At the same time, the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months. We need to adjust our cost structure

So is the business strong and consistent, or is it facing a rapidly-changing market, requiring that the business transform and adjust it's cost structure?

> To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans.

A few paragraphs later

> AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.

So do you think AI doesn't replace humans, or do you think that you'll need fewer humans because AI will be doing more of the work?

I think this is a category error. Homer is the iconic writer of the Ancient Greek language and culture, not the modern nation of Greece. Cervantes and Dante are the iconic writers in the Spanish and Italian languages, respectively, not the nations of Spain or Italy. Italy wouldn't even exist as a nation until 500 years after Dante.

The American equivalent of Homer, Dante, or Cervantes is Shakespeare.

Do you consider Frost inaccessible (or for that matter politically-charged)? I think every kid who grows up in New England reads him in elementary or middle school.

As long as the leadership of AI companies and the prominent AI researchers are talking about P(doom) and eliminating 50% of white collar jobs, there will be a backlash. As long as the leadership of corporate America is using AI usage in performance metrics and shoving AI into every single product regardless of whether it actually helps the product, there will be a backlash.

If you tell people that there's a technology that's going to change every aspect of their lives whether they like it or not (and has a non-zero chance of ending humanity entirely) and you want to throw all available resources into building this technology as fast as possible, do not be surprised if people start instinctively cringing every time your technology is mentioned.

If Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg, Amodei, or any of these other people had been half as smart as Steve Jobs, they would have adopted his worldview of computing as a "bicycle for the mind" that enhances rather than replaces humans.

@dang I don't understand why we're talking about some random posts from 12 years ago.

I made a very simple point in the comments here - the headline and article make extraordinary, shocking claims that are not supported by the text of the legislation. For this I get accused of being a sock puppet or a paid foreign agent, despite the fact that I rarely comment on this topic, have a long comment history on a variety of topics, and didn't even say anything in support of Israel, I simply pointed out that the premise of the article is not just incorrect, but laughably so.

I would also like to point out that other comments in this thread include references to 1950s propaganda about Jews controlling the US government, references to how people who support this legislation are "Epstein-bought politicians" and other anti-semitic (not anti-Israel) trash. The far-right 1950s US politician quoted elsewhere in these comments was not anti-Israel - Israel barely existed at that time - he was just an old-fashioned Jew-baiter of a kind that was common in that era (he's mostly remembered for his McCarthyist campaigns against celebrities, but that's another story).

This article is just a new version of those ancient "a secret cabal of Jews control the world" conspiracy theories. The legislation is the equivalent of, say, an HN-funded company signing an MOU with a university to collaborate on R&D. Nobody would describe that as a "merger" between the company and the university. To go from "the DOD will appoint someone in it's vast bureaucracy to supervise research collaborations with Israel" to "the entire vast US and Israeli militaries will merge into one" is absurd and you only get there if you're primed to see the world through this conspiracy-tinted lens.

Do people unfairly conflate legitimate criticism of Israeli actions with anti-semitism? Sure, but then you look at a post like this and commenters are immediately jumping to how the US has been a "puppet state" of the Jews for "generations" (to quote another commenter), and then any pushback is immediately attacked as illegitimate, paid shilling.

@dang you want to weigh in here?

Not really sure how you have a productive conversation when one party says that not only will they consider that anyone who disagrees with them is acting on bad faith, but they intend to disregard all rules and circumvent any bans.

Anyway it's pretty obvious that talking about this topic is completely pointless so I'm going to quit for now because I'm not actually a sock puppet or a paid shill or whatever, I'm just a human being who has a differing opinion.

This is factually wrong. Israel is a "major non-NATO ally" https://www.state.gov/major-non-nato-ally-status

Where in the text do you see anything about a "merger"? Bilateral agreements to develop technology are common between countries. That is nothing resembling a merger. There is no discussion of joint command structure, joint budgeting, etc.

This is fucking dystopian.

You're telling me that the people that I hired and that I work with don't have any knowledge or opinions of any value, and 90% of the time I can just ask a machine instead of talking to them.

If that's the world we live in I fucking hate it. It's so solipsistic and dehumanizing.

This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.

Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!

From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.