orochimaaru

Deskilling has been happening for centuries. One doesn't farm their own vegetables, hunt for their meat, slaughter their own livestock, maintain their own vehicles (ahem - remember the horses and carriages). We've even stopped shifting the gears on our cars. Why are we complaining about AI?

The biggest problem I see with AI isn't deskilling. It's the same dopamine hit one gets from social media but for their profession.

Why the downvote? Anthropic and OpenAI leadership are thieves and profiting off things they don’t own. Aaron was doing it for the betterment of humanity, there wasn’t a profit motive involved there.

Thank you for pointing this out. I always make this comparison when saying these people are thieves and should be subject to the same prosecution.

But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.

Ukraine is not a part of NATO.

It's neither. I don't agree with Musk's politics. But I do see where this explanation is plausible. When a US military grade service is made available to non-allied countries (Ukraine is not a part of NATO), there are always end user restrictions that the US Government will maintain control over. This is not something left to Musk. Someone from the department of state or department of defense (well, war at the moment) will control it. Those restrictions are subject to executive orders and changes in US law. This is why countries that don't align with the US (e.g. India) don't want to buy advanced US tech. It is better to have a sub-optimal system without end user restrictions instead of a cutting edge one with too many of them.

Trump calling Musk to not do it is just reality theater. Someone from the executive chain of command ordered this.

Remember the Iran fiasco has diesel prices being sky high. There's an election around the corner and Russian oil is needed to stabilize the prices. It is Ukraine's right to strike Russian oil assets, but if they're using US military tech, US interests will control how it is used.

That’s not how it works. It’s like saying Lockheed operates the F35 but it doesn’t. Starshield provides the tech. US military has operational control - and you will be committing a crime if you so do anything without permission.

Not off late, but definitely in 2024 and 2025 when blaming AI for layoffs was a thing.

I actually like this presentation. Today the two noisiest voices in AI are the frontier model companies and their partners (Nvidia, Palantir, etc.) and people against it altogether.

The companies and partners need to maximize payout. They go on this track of cost reduction via layoffs and basically saying - “the model can do everything”. They know it’s not the case yet they still flood the airwaves and cause fud among all clueless c-suite executives. Which is the goal to begin with.

The second category goes all out against it. Professors, educators, school districts whose operating processes have not caught up to all the cheating that can happen. Here these folks have a point. I am sympathetic to this. It is hard to change education and it requires careful thought.

I feel this presentation brings out a good middle ground. The tech is useful but it’s not all encompassing. The tech also has other concrete uses. As an example, I have always wanted to explore the intersection of category theory, formal verification and AI guardrails and prompting. Proof writing has been a chore because I have a day job. Maybe the AI can help here.

If one is just waiting on a status change that’s ok. The labor certification is complete. If labor certification is being applied for as layoffs happen or if large tranches of new H1B are applied for at about the same time - that’s clearly an issue.

If you’re laying off employees en masse and still processing green cards that in itself is a red flag.

Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.

I guess the question is whether the reporting is politically motivated because someone doesn’t like the current admin or grounded in historical fact.

I get what you’re saying and agree. But if there is no statistically significant jump in the number from historical data for previous administrations then I can conclude that the reporting is politically motivated.

I am pretty introverted but over the years I have accumulated a large set of friends. I don’t call all of them at once. But I do sets of 6-10 at a time.

I won’t go to a bar or a club alone. I don’t like it. But a good set of friends in a familiar location like my house (or theirs) makes for a really good time. We definitely try to get together at least once every couple of months.

That’s for full EU members part of the economic union. There is a whole process for that which takes a few years. Britain had a good deal which they threw away (use their own currency but they’re a part of the broader economic union).

There’s already visa free travel from Canada to the EU and trade deals in progress. It’s unclear what specific benefits the associate member deal provides.

Are there any tangible economic benefits here? Or is it just a label?

I don’t think engineering and SRE of the organizing company are ever invited to those events. They’re mainly for marketing and sales (which includes solution architects).

He was done in by a career prosecutor who just wanted to use him as a stepping stone in their path. They had little or no humanity.

He is a fields medal winner who is looking to see how AI can further mathematics research. I’m unsure of what your specific issue with that is.

This is for mathematicians and not software engineers. You look for ease of use and familiarity with tooling.

If I was a mathematician looking for a simple solution, I would go for GitHub too. Software engineering concerns don’t really apply here.

A product is what people (or now agents) can use to carry out any activity.

There is a lot of hand wringing in the software space about ai code being a mess - but from a product perspective code quality doesn’t matter. It’s the reliability of what people (or agents) use that matters.

Code quality used to further that goal but only because it was really hard to rewrite or fix code. If that barrier is removed does anyone really care what the code quality under the hood is?

I think in social sciences it maybe more of an inability/reluctance of the domain group to use the mathematics as opposed to the mathematics being absent.

Take category theory for example. The initial mathematics appeared in 1942. The application to social sciences started in about 1970 and I’m not sure of the level of uptake at the current time but a quick AI search says applications have accelerated in the past decade (needs verification).

Not true. Novel mathematical methods precede their application by at least a decade and widespread use by about a century.

Calculus was invented in 1670, it was about 1680-1700 till it started actually being used in astronomy. The uptake was probably faster because at that time a lot of mathematicians were Astronomers as well.

There is a lot of mathematics created but we don’t yet know how to use it. My hope is that AI can bridge the search gap to accelerate this.

About time. We are a couple of decades late to the apocalypse.

This is a really weird comparison. The Chan Zuckerberg foundation is nowhere involved with any war. All they’re doing is making money available for research. In which universe is $280m not enough?

I think an FDE is a post sales thing. It’s basically the sale has been done and as a company you don’t have enough expertise to scale what you bought.

I used to do that when my children were little. However, in another 3 years your child will not require you as much anymore and your downtime duration will improve.

My problem has been that once I started doing the audiobooks/podcasts, it has been really hard to reclaim my focus to read. I used to be able to power through books. Now, there always seems to be a distraction at hand.

Does meta have the research talent to create a SOTA frontier model? Yann LeCun has left Meta and I don’t think either alexandr wang or zuck have enough credibility to attract talent to create one.

The small wealth tax will be spent not on people but on growing the government’s bureaucracy. Take highly taxed states (eg CA) and no tax/low tax states (eg TX). You pay more for in state tuition for your children in the UC system as opposed to in state tuition in Texas.

There are some advantages to tax. But most of it is not spent on making lives of citizens easier.

Have y'all hit the "can genai do his job?" phase yet...

Early on I used to try to explain that things don't work as advertised. There are a lot of advantages but you need a human reviewing and directing.

These days I don't even bother. Call it being desensitized to the bullshit, but I'm waiting for some fancy AI agent to take out stuff in a way that no one can do anything. Past that I don't see a way for C suite to wake up.

Is it really required to get personal here?

It depends. If one is Iraqi and Saddam asks him to be his chef, they're not refusing. They're probably dead if they refuse. Chef's are also sourced from other countries without disclosing the actual client. Once they land their situation is precarious and getting out is next to impossible. One just shuts up, cooks and takes the money.

It's like everyone else serving the dictator. They money may be good, but threat to life is real and scary.

I wouldn't vilify them. It's the proverbial golden cage. They can't get out even if they want to.