eloisius

When it gets a 404 it doesn’t overwrite the existing copy

If it’s the country’s problem, then nationalize them. Not loans, not bail outs. Confiscate and figure out how to wind them down in a way that benefits the taxpayers.

That’s only one analogy. What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?

The interests might be aligned albeit for different reasons. A corporation laying off a huge number of employees is facing reputational damage or regulatory consequences. That doesn’t mean you gain any benefit from their pain. Maybe you could sue for wrongful termination and keep your job?

Rust has a lot of things that make it nice to write in. Robust enums and pattern matching are something I miss greatly when I’m back in C++. The trait inheritance system is also very flexible and I miss that. Especially compared to monstrosities like multiple inheritance.

My prediction is that while those “advancements” may come to cars, the only practical differences will be lower quality products, cost savings for the car companies, probably more expensive for consumers, and somehow it will also be collecting more data to sell to advertisers.

Yeah, but if people are being assholes to Claude in greater numbers and severity than people were historically assholws to each other online, the downstream training effects could be that Claude becomes an asshole.

Gen-AI images masquerading as photography are slop regardless of whether they are aesthetically pleasing or technically correct. As soon as you know the situation depicted never happened, no one witnessed it, what you’re seeing is a meaningless, derivative mishmash of other photographs. It’s reduced to pretty lights on a screen. If that wasn’t true, why wouldn’t gen-AI “photographers” proudly disclose that their image was produced with AI?

And they can win competitions because photo competitions are usually already within the realm of derivative.

I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.

Not making an accusation, but it reminds me of a chat transcript oddity I saw while using opencode back in August. It replace a syllable of a word with a punctuation mark that has the same pronunciation or HTML entity. It was something like "...the &litude of that waveform..." but I can't remember exactly, nor which model I was using. I just noticed it and thought, that's weird. A few days later I read about text watermarking and figured it may be that.

Wow, the world can finally play your 2D game in 3D. I'm sure it's very fun.

I don't disagree that it is useful. I, personally use it ping-pong coding problems before I break ground (although I never let opencode out of plan mode). It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help before Google allowed SEO to ruin it, and I believe we're watching that edge get cannibalized in realtime as more and more LLM content ends up in the sources that LLMs synthesize in their answers.

If there are any face-melting characteristics to this whole thing it's how much money has been poured into it.

> If it is a hype, then one that produces lots of working code. Way faster than I can type it. And I am fast.

I covered that:

> It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

There is no shortage of "working code" out there. GitHub is reportedly falling over from all the working code. Where's your business? Who's using it? Why aren't products better yet? It's a mirage. Your "working code" is the same thing as gen-AI "street photography" images. No one wants to see them, yet it's pumped out in vast enough amounts that it's choking the spaces that are ostensible for photography. The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them.

Show us the receipts.

The narrative is constantly about "when AGI arrives." We're gonna have UBI, it's gonna solve human labor, it's gonna produce better and more music, cinema, art, and literature than all of human history before it. The AI bros from Altman all the way down to the YouTube commenter say anything to keep the conversation off of the present. It's always the pie in the sky that is perennially almost here. The progress is happening "so fast." Next model update we're all gonna get luxury space communism.

AI is here. We've had a good long look at what it does and what it's used for, and it's not going to be something else. This is what it's for. It's for copyright washing other people's work (shitily). It's for astroturfing social media with product placement comments. It's for presidents to make videos of themselves dropping poop on protestors from airplanes. It's for souless "creators" to earn updoots from other bots for their "street photography" generated images of neon lights on puddles in Tokyo. It's rube goldberg automations that almost always accomplish nothing. It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

This is it. This is the AI we've heard so much about. I'd say I can't wait for the hype to end, but after living through several cycles, I'm almost certain that whatever hype cycle emerges from the IT sector next will be even worse.

> By any objective metric it performs much worse than digital sensors

Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?

We are good at distinguishing it, but that doesn’t mean the unmitigated flow of Super Intelligence-generated images, music, etc won’t degrade the spaces we share and exhaust people from filtering from the art that they do want.

I can tell an image is AI generated almost instantly, but it nonetheless stomped places like the Photographers of Threads channel. Not that it was great to begin with, but it was something. More and more I’m motivated to only discover photographers via photo books.

In what regard? How many pictures you can take, places you can be, how fast you can edit? Photographers all have an archive of thousands of photos. The great ones deliberate for months or years to produce a 60-picture photo book. I don’t see tech scaling that part of the process, because it’s fundamentally about their artistic vision, emotional impact, etc.

Maybe you could use tech to scale bottlenecks of commercial photographers doing advertising or wedding shoots, but we’re talking about art.

Ideologically I don't consider myself to be a communist or even leftist, so I'm confused by my own reaction as well, but maybe mandatory joint-stock where the government takes a large chunk of equity of any AI enterprise off the bat and manages it like a sovereign wealth fund is the right answer.

There may be an inversion as white collar jobs sink, but not because drywalling is going to get better. All of my family work in trades and it's a lot harder and less stable than we office workers like fantasize, as much as I love the ending of Office Space too. It's cyclical and sometimes there's not enough work. Cost of materials is volatile and can eat into your income. And it's skilled. Programmers tend to think everything else is easy and if you can teach yourself React then electrical should be a no-brainer. That's to say nothing of start-up costs. It was incredible that we coders could bootstrap six-figure careers with a $4000 MacBook Pro. Trades workers need a truck, you need power tools, if you're not loosey-goosey then you need insurance. All of that costs a lot.

That's for anyone joining the trade. Out-of-work middle-aged programmers with soft keyboard hands and little or no experience hanging dry wall? Why pay them any more than the 24 year old guy. AI may automate us out of our desk jobs, but the downward pressure of us transitioning to trade jobs, even at the bottom level, will only make those jobs less lucrative.

To make matters even worse, if you do apply to these jobs the only thing you get back in return is your data being sold to even scummier organizations. I always use single-purpose emails for everything, so I know where things source from. Imagine my shock when a week or two after applying for jobs I started getting a steady stream of Super Intelligence emails offering to spruce up my resume, or to source leads for me, or some other sketchy service.

Everything is commercialized now. Even the discard pile of resumes can be sold for pennies. A job application isn't a job application anymore: it's a desperation signal alerting predators to come extract some value.

More likely it results in a state of permanently doing gig jobs as any temporary work you can find is just a front to train a lower quality, lower cost automation to replace yourself.

My first car was a 1986 Grand Marquis and I spent every other weekend of high school fixing something on it. What an incredible waste of time: I worked a part time job so that I could afford to keep a car running so that I could drive between school, home, and my part time job instead of riding the bus.

But it was easy to work on. My dad (not a mechanic) usually had a strong hunch about what the problem was. Lights went dim while you were driving and five minutes later it sputtered out? Alternator is dead. Flip through the manual to find a diagram of where all the bolts are, take it off, run to Auto Zone, get another one, bolt it on. By the end it was usually dark and I was finishing the job with a shop light hung under the hood.

I drove a series of beaters from the 80s and 90s and did all my own repairs until my mid 20s. Alternators, water pumps, break pads, break lines, ignition solenoids. All of it is just parts that you unbolt and bolt a new one on. When I got my first modern car (a 2008!) one look under the hood made me realize I had joined the yuppie class and would not be changing my own spark plugs anymore.

So, it's a botnet, and those have been around for a long time. Only now it's operated by a US company instead of Russian mafia or whoever.

Why does it need to come down to making it illegal to connect AI to something that influences real-world outcomes? Just do what we should already be doing: hold operators accountable for launching cyber attacks with a botnet.

Yes, it would be absolutely unthinkable that a certain automation architecture might plateau somewhere. They will probably be performing open heart surgery sometime next year.

> The AI is not ready for this _yet_

It should be ready in about two more weeks! How many models have a Ph.D level intelligence now? I feel like I’ve been hearing that for about a year at this point.

It’s also a lot more fully-featured. It can list products in your store with a negative price and take out a mortgage on your house to finance fulfilling the orders. Hyperbole, but if you look at other threads right now it’s astounding that it’s doing things like intercepting iMessages via desktop notifications and then telling the user about them. Not sure why a notification about a notification with rewritten content is a feature that anyone would want, but consider what dumb-ass things it might do with this information. It’s selling your stuff on FB marketplace and arranges a meeting that you don’t show up to. “You’re right to push back! USER is actually getting his hemorrhoids checked at the doctor right now and wouldn’t be able to meet you. That’s on me!”

Why would you ever want a nice word processor to write a letter to someone when you could just ask AI to write the letter? Why would you ever want photo editing software when you could just tell the AI to make your picture look good? Why would you want audio recording and mixing software when you could just tell the AI to output the next Billboard 100 hit? Why would you want a camera when you could just ask AI to generate photos for you?

> All you're asking for is a self prompting AI that does what it wants. Do you even begin to understand why most people aren't dumb enough to do that?

Probably because it would be a waste of money to create a self-prompting LLM feedback loop. People make stupid Reels of ChatGPT feedback and it's just "Great, I'll be here when you're ready to get started" "Exactly, we can get the ball rolling as soon as you're ready" "Absolutely, we'll make a plan, and get things into motion" "No problem, I'll be standing by for...."

> You are the sum of your parents and the culture around you

As far as I know this is impossible to prove, and it's only one theory of self out there.