gretch

There was a guy named Cypher who betrayed the humans and cut a deal with the robots to live in the matrix as a rich guy. He fully accepts the steak he eats is not “real” but he enjoys it nonetheless

> For nearly all tasks, I want the fastest and smartest AI model.

This is not nearly true for everyone else in the world.

For example, think about the world in ~2021 pre-LLM. Would anyone say the sentence "I only want the fastest and smartest humans working on my project"?

No of course not. Most people don't want to pay $10 million dollar salary to the best programmers in the world. They prefer to pay $200k salary to a median programmer and that's good enough for their ecommerce website.

Yes this is all true.

So then the problem is that Anthropic seems hypocritical when they knowingly insert themselves into this chain, and then complain about people down-chain from them.

To remedy the negative impressions (if they even care to do so) they should do 1 of 2 things: 1) stop complaining about it 2) stop distilling other people's work

I'm American and I enjoy hosting at my house. I do it often (imo).

I think some of the stats reviewed in this post are crazy because it is specifically "did it 12+ times in the last year", which means if you only did it 11 times, you simply register as a 'false' according to this modeling.

The graphs with once per year are much more reasonable.

I'm sure these stats still tell you something about life in america, but I feel like this bar is set so extremely high. I'm saying this as someone who LOVES hosting - I don't want to do it 12 times a year. (maybe it's because I set too high of a quality bar for myself?)

When people say “the problem is that our economic system…”, I’ve stared to simply ask, “which economic system is the one where you do not need a job?”

You made the assumption that it was fairly valued before and the loss was a "true" loss.

But possible it could have been over-valued before, unbeknownst to low-information external investors. After all, right now it as a PE of 450+. (Google PE is 17, Meta PE is 27, Tesla PE is 330)

The stock dropping on CEO departure had nothing to do with his personal performance, and everything to do with the information that he revealed on the way out. Why would the CEO leave a rising and successful company on the verge of innovation?

And thus tying it back to pay - people should be paid based on their output and their personal performance, not based on simply serving as a signal which any warm body can do. That said, I don't think truly amazing CEOs are overpaid, e.g. steve jobs of old.

> This isn't the gotcha you think it is

You really presume what I think about it huh?

> It isn't clever

Never said it was

> easiest way to trivialize someone else's moral convictions

Did not trivialize it at all. Regardless of what's "right" or "wrong" we are definitely in the territory of "advanced ethics" and not "trivial/beginner ethics"

> Wrong. I specifically stated I hold myself to a higher bar than I held anyone else. I took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did.

This is not what I was trying to say.

First let me state the assumption I made: You think that working at Anthropic/OpenAI is morally bad because that's the parent thread, and you made a comment about how somethings are good enough and other things are too bad to tolerate.

So yes, you hold yourself to the bar of I should not work at Anthropic/OpenAI - but the point is that this bar is convenient to hold yourself to.

Did you "took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did."

Or did you simply never work there, maybe never even had an offer to work there.

> but I don't think you can reasonably expect that of paying taxes at all.

You should beware that you've rationalized everything you do as good enough, and everything that other people do is morally questionable.

Have you set the bar for what is 'reasonable' to be extremely convenient for your own circumstances?

> Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them.

I've been to Japan. How would you comment on the aesthetic of this "Little Texas" bar in Tokyo: https://www.littletexas.jp/

Do you think they are valuing the true culture of modern Texas? Because in my opinion this bar is filled with the most basic Texas cliches I can think of: cowboy hats, longhorn skulls, etc. Probably a lot more egregious than putting a sakura on a poster.

Personally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment.

Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101.

It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"

It is because you know this and you continually choose to keep using it.

It’s be like if your 2001 BMW car was super fuel efficient, and then for whatever reason the 2028 model guzzled gas and you chose to buy it anyway

Just because the thing you did once upon a time was efficient, does not mean you have a lifetime pass to engage with it no matter the updated circumstances

This really isn't a new problem.

That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".

Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.

I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.

source: my parents were in the restaurant business

I agree

I only wish I could convince some humans in my life to slow down and do things with care.

This is not the bar for societal adoption, and we can already see a demonstration that it is false.

A waymo is basically an industrial strength robot. It operates among inherently unpredictable humans already. There is no guarantee that it will never, ever hurt a human.

And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a waymo and ride it and society accepts it.

I feel like people who have high EQ should actually grasp the infinite depth and complexity of even the median human.

Just imagine, there’s a woman Alice who cleans your home once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight with her husband this morning on (something completely unrelated to you).

Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad vibes while she is moving around your house?

Family member gossips "that crazy [deejaaymac] always burying secrets in the backyard..."

Or straight up betrays you (you slighted them at some family event)

No technology in the world can protect you against every threat model and unlikely scenario.

What if the robber hits you in the head and you get brain damage and forget your password?

What the law says and enforcement of the law are sometimes 2 different things, but generally employees should not be shorting their own stock, lock up or no lock up.

The issue is that this creates a conflict of interest.

In the worst case scenario, as an employee, you can literally do a bad thing to cause the stock to go down. E.g. An engineer can make a bug which blows up a rocket.

So then you could short the stock, bug a rocket, and become super rich.

It's the same issue with athletes betting on their own team - it's trivial to throw the game.

> Now add 30 or 50 or 100 other topics you dip into on any given day.

In a world without YouTube/LLMs, you weren't going to learn these things anyway. Today, you also don't learn them. So how can you argue that something is lost?

> the amount of time/energy to properly learn something has stayed the same or even increased

The whole point of my post is that LLMs, YouTube, and other internet resources which are easy to access have lowered activation energy to where learning something is at least possible.

I can tell you for sure I would never even try to learn a second language if I had to go to a class physically, or carry a book with me in my pocket to translate as I traverse the real world.

I definitely retain it. In the case of the gardening - I pretty much immediately go outside and practice it.

In other words, how I get the info doesn’t matter (book, video, llm) because I’m locking in the skill by doing the thing in the garden.

And sometimes it is kinda wrong/suboptimal, but not more than e.g. asking a friend for gardening tips. Usually this is based on lack of context, like eg im growing cherry tomatoes and the AI assumed I had full size tomatoes

> Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?

To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples

1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase.

2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini

Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?

Also earthquakes

You compared “companies in the US” to this 1 thing that 1 company did in Japan.

Why don’t you cherry pick the compensation at 1 company, maybe nvidia or openai, and do the comparison.

> Anyone who holds bonds in this market will likely lose money.

Yes, you lose money (or more precisely you lose opportunity) but you gain certainty. Which is what you want for retirement

That’s pretty much the definition of risk premium.

Turns out you don't have to bet your whole career.

Do you think if AI turns out to be a dud, most of us will permanently lose our career as software engineers?

> This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!

Do you have more info on this? Where is it coming from and what does it look like?

Because this is actually crazy if true.

Like, just compare to a situation where they strongly discourage Reading outside of school.

Not to mention that math is just a basic life skill and it gets exercised just going through normal every day stuff (at least middle school level math)

Or maybe this guy was always going to reach the endpoint of shooting up a school, and he happened to talk to ChatGPT along the way.

These people have existed long before llm chats and they had no problem committing horrific offence in the absence

> The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line

As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.

It's such a lose-lose for everyone

The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....

If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...

Let's look at Almonds which _could be_ produced where water is not scarce, maybe, but instead is grown in central valley CA based on quickly depleting ground water.

Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise

A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...

Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.

That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.