robbiewxyz

Sorry to ask again but which informal fallacy does it seem to you that I am using in my first statement? There are several [0]. In the interest of understanding, maybe I can make my passive phrasing a bit more active: when I say "this rephrasing is directly unhelpful [to] empathy", I could also say "if I tended to use the phrasing you did I am confident I would find myself with a reputation for being unempathetic i.e. rude". If you disagree with the statement it'd be great to hear your argument, but again disagreement does not imply fallacy.

Your second statement strikes me as using two specific fallacies while also being severely out of touch. First, a moralistic fallacy [1] where you assert what facts "should" be while making a statement about what is or is not needed. Second, a false equivalence fallacy [2] where you imply without explanation that verifiability & not-needing-agreement are equivalent. I'm open to argument, but it seems to me that the two describe independently varying spaces: facts describing the space of reality with agreement describing alignment in the space of conviction. Finally, your overall statement is very strange to hear in the big 2026 when so many important & verifiable facts are so widely & disastrously disagreed upon. See the ongoing USA vaccine safety scare & measles outbreak as an example [3].

Finally, pointing to general & easily-accessible resources in response to a specific question is normally understood to be condescending & a form of insult. I'm not sure if you meant it that way but graciously declining to answer is almost always a better alternative.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy, see paragraph 2.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_fallacy#Moralistic_..., the last example specifically names should-is equivalency.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_resurgence_in_the_Unit...

I hope to hear from you but either way this will be my last reply here.

This rephrasing is directly unhelpful to the goal of empathy for the humans caught in the change. If we come off as insensitive we will have no hope of influencing people. Also if you see a specific fallacy, please do name which one so I can improve.

All that said, I personally unequivocally agree with each of your points. I hope you are channeling this rage not only into comments sections but also into the hard work of tearing down & replacing the many incumbent systems that plagerize, denigrate, steal, oppress, monopolize, waste, & enslave. I certainly am.

Those are some strong claims to make without so much as listing, much less explaining or sourcing, the negative outcomes you so positively forecast.

Also outcomes are generally not positive or negative in & of themselves: if you could specify who exactly you anticipate will be worse off, it would make your comment much more insightful.

Approaching significant change with humanity asks us to have empathy for many emotions at once. With respect to LLMs & other generative models those include but aren't limited to:

* Excitement from people who are able to make things they could not,

* Fear from people who's livelihoods are threatened,

* Betrayal from artists whose work is being ripped off,

* Alarm from activists looking out for ecosystems & the climate.

To add to an already-difficult challenge: many people, corporations, & governments are pushing extreme greed, hubris, & dehumanization for various reasons.

This piece does an excellent job laying out its recommendations with sensitivity for people of different perspectives & positions. I very much appreciate that.

Wealth follows an extreme power law. This tax is pennies to those who will pay it.

For startets, the revenue raised makes NYC as a city more sustainable by funding social programs for the normal people who keep the lights on.

This's certainly a betrayal of their community.

But they got bought out. By the tech equivalent of private equity. Every community in the USA & in most of the world is aware what happens when the friendly neighborhood business you've supported & relied on sells.

This is an old & systemic capitalistic phenomenon more than it is anything specific to AI. Hopefully someday we can figure out a real solution.

Modern transformer-based STT architectures are complex but many are abstractly not entirely unlike putting the results of standard SST through an LLM with the prompt "clean this up & make it make sense". The behavior is trained in rather than prompted but the result is similar.

Obviously this results in hallucinations, mistaken implications, & inaccurately assumed context.

I played Nethack quite a bit as a teen but was never patient enough to ascend. Always YASD.

I revisited the game a few years ago & was happy to realize I had, in the meantime, grown the necessary patience. Ascending felt great.

I've wondered the same. A look at his contemporary media quotes gives maybe a hint. From Navalny: "It is difficult for me to understand exactly what is going on in [Putin's] mind. [...] 20 years of power would spoil anyone and make them crazy. He thinks he can do whatever he wants."

If this quote is genuine, as opposed to wistful, it suggests Navalny's evaluation of Russia was that Putin couldn't, in fact, do whatever he wanted there. As best I can tell, such an evaluation would have been pretty damn close to completely inaccurate.

The choice to return to Russia as a catastrophically-failed gamble based on that premise is what makes the most sense to me.

Keep in mind that an organization made of fairly nice people may do terribly not-nice things. "Just doing my job" is a hell of a drug.

This is exactly true in my experience. The usefulness of AI varies wildly depending on the complexity, correctness-requirements, & especially novelty of the domain!

This attribute plus a bit of human tribalism, social echo-chambering, & some motivated reasoning by people with a horse in the race, explains most of the disagreement I see in rhetoric around AI.

Who is surprised by this? Surely you don't imagine a woman who dared to call her boss a rich jerk was surprised when he retaliated! US women are taught very young how powerful men act when their egos are threatened.

As for "the consequences", those are what are at stake now. They are what the courts & to some extent the people of the USA get to decide.

It's not that complicated, really. The value of Art is human connection. The same basic desire that drives love, belonging, pride, shame, & hate. All of these are diminished as the fraction of a work that we're confident represents human intentionality decreases.

AI is being pushed forcefully on K-12 teachers and the effect education quality is horrible. Some teachers, including my cousin, refuse to use the AI tools but most don't. The result is that my 6th & 8th grade siblings mostly bring home assignments that are nonsensical, obviously AI-generated bullshit.

I'm infuriated to see these capable kids wasting their time working on slop a human never bothered to review before assigning and will probably never bother to grade.

Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.

Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.

A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.

So you may mean well but a comment repeating the (debatable) negative impacts of rent control really comes off as silly in a thread about the realpage cartel (price fixing is worse than rent control in every way) and hopes of home ownership (demand for primary i.e. non-investment homes is unaffected or increased by rent control).

To add to other comments, gun violence has a massive mental health component for which preventative treatment can save many lives. Of course it warrants study!

And given the well-documented copycat-killer phenomenon, modeling it similarly to an epidemic is very reasonable.

This is an important topic. I wonder what it is that makes duopoly so prevalent in tech e.g. Apple vs Google for mobile, Apple vs Microsoft for desktop, Uber vs Lyft for ride sharing.

As for the linked article, it reads too much like AI slop for me to be bothered to analyze any of its specific points. If it's not AI, someone please correct me.

Ultimately the attitude of self-restraint called for in the article seems near-impossible: modern capitalism puts companies in a desperate race for dominance, and modern foreign policy puts countries in the same. From the penultimate paragraph:

"I think in all of this is implicit the idea of technological determinism, that productivity is power, and if you don't adapt you die. I reject this as an artifact of darwinism and materialism. The world is far more complex and full of grace than we think."

This argument is the one that either makes or breaks the article's feasibility and I fear the author is too optimistic.

What force of nature is it that can possibly hold its own against darwinism?

My gut is this comes down to lack of real antitrust enforcement. If your customers have no choice but to come crawling back to you then why treat them well?

If you'd be so kind as to share, I'm very interested in any common threads you may see in the people who ultimately crash back down. I grew up in pretty extreme poverty, got a big break of sorts, and I do my best to avoid ending up back where I came from.

Their routers only have this feature because the internet providers who sell those routers pay for bandwidth themselves lol. If residential internet plans sold on a pay-per-byte basis you can bet routers’d still ship with non-unique passwords.

From what I gather, life for most of these "regular people" in Germany was still very much in the tolerable range until well into WWII.

This was a very weird realization and one that left me pretty sad.

Edit to clarify: I also mean no condescension toward "regular people".

Honestly fair enough. Pay package over principles pretty well does describe the policy of far too many of the colleagues I've worked with over the years.

Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.

I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.

With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.

Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.

Thousands of years may refer to domestication of e.g. corn.

There's such obviously fucked up incentives in this industry.

- When employers select insurance, providers will 100% of the time tend toward ignoring the interests of those who are insured: the incentives to do so are just too strong.

- When an insurance company also owns a pharmacy, it will 100% of the time tend toward overcharging: again all the incentives encourage this.

Unfortunately it seems most folks have little or no experience analyzing incentive structures when looking for levers to pull to improve outcomes. It'd be great to see popular discourse focus more on the environmental factors that incentivise these kinds of corporate abuse.

This is, in a significant part, the flip side of the housing crisis coin. Some of these mums and dads saved up but many, many more of them grew their wealth alongside their home values.

Zoning policy, building regulations, and interest rates are a massive gate guarding generational wealth, for better or worse. Having personally suffered a lot for my parents poverty and homelessness, I have my biases, but then again don't we all.