simonra

I think it's highly doubtful we're going to see software generally regulated as finance, which like aviation can facilitate damage to individuals on a scale they'll never be able to recover from by themselves (in terms of lifetime needed to (re)acquire the resources). Most of the world is quite insignificant and unimpactful, and already regulated as tightly as it is based on that. Software being a larger part of the services provided or goods transacted is not suddenly going to inspire tighter regulation of the quality of services and goods offered beyond what they already are, like for instance some minimums around certain things not catching fire and killing people, or some services being rendered in a mostly food safe way. If humanity desired to go beyond lazy minimums we'd see universal effective elimination of planned obsolescence, not just best cases of minimum warranty periods measured in a handful of years, and then being fine with products mysteriously failing within days of the sellers support obligations ending.

I am curious about your view on accessibility tooling. Often screen readers or speech to text tools would effectively be external pieces of software instrumenting for instance browsers through their APIs. And surely using local AI going forward could enhance the tooling while also making the users less dependent on a small market charging exorbitant prices for poor user experience. What viable paths do you see for users perfecting user agents for themselves when the big browsers further lose their plot and focus on what's fun to maintain or profitable to ship instead of optimising for every user individually?

Sure, but at what cost? How quickly improvements are delivered is one thing, but the materials and chosen process also come at a premium. And while it probably is worth it in aviation due to life and health being highly irreplaceable, the value of for instance my chat history or photos is certainly finite and quite low. Should they be corrupted, leaked, or worst case gone, it would somewhat suck. But at the same time I've effectively concluded that safeguards are worth about 0.4% of my monthly take home after tax, and when the yearly bill comes due I'm each time increasingly questioning whether I actually do value them even that highly.

School is where we show people that society will sacrifice them for others without consideration. So it would be on brand and efficient to let it be up to the parents convenience. And now that it's said that large swathes of employment will be displaced by language models, surely there will be enough manpower going around to have two or three shifts of teachers?

I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?

Sure, but for people without abundant time to spend alone then watching a show this evening kind of precludes also ingesting a podcast before tomorrow. It's not like the labour movements around the world have negotiated significantly more free time for the big mass of working humans since Netflix said that sleep is their biggest competitor back in 2017.

Wouldn't it be the same as what the tax authorities expect of street buskers, where something was done publicly (just here on the internet) and as a result randoms gave you money/cash (here again the digital equivalent) after the fact with no strings attached?

People who want their games to look prettier and run smoother than what you can get out of the thermal and power budgets of laptops would be the ones still buying the desktops. If you additionally value a not too noisy environment home, then water cooling is way better and more accessible in the desktop form factor (though this is still niche at least for the gpus where all-in-one units are basically non-existent). Laptops are by all means nice toys as well, but on the go phones are better entertainment while in transit, and once you're somewhere you left the comfort of your home to experience it's rarely for your gaming hobby (however it might be a setting where you're reminded that computers are still relatively cheap compared to certain music instruments or sports equipment).

Wouldn't "audience" and "people" both just be a proxy for "time" though?

By law not in Norway, salary has to be deposited to a banking account by the employer, unless it 's impossible or highly inconvenient [0]. And to combat fraud it is basically impossible for the banks to deny you a basic account (how else could the tax authorities reasonably audit who gets paid what), so be ready for the employer taking you to court to make you open one (accounts are free to you as a consumer after all) so that they don't have to deal with salary amounts of cash, and the courts siding with them.

[0]: https://lovdata.no/lov/2005-06-17-62/§14-15

Depends on where in the world you are, Norway for instance has not been using card chips for 2fa consumer auth for banking. Instead the 2fa has been a separate code generating gadget, and now also alternatively an app (which I do get the feeling the company that the banks set up handle auth for all of them are kinda pushing everyone into, but for now there thankfully is an option where you only need 1 online device with nothing more than a functioning browser).

The fine dining was a reference to high art in general, the frozen was directly addressing the worry that pizza places with human made pizza would disappear given cheaper better alternatives. I think the picture still holds. I've been to places that serve human made pizza where I think I would prefer some of the better frozen ones food-wise, but still went and enjoyed the experience (mostly for the social component?).

Similarly, a lot of the fine dining is about showing off an artistic creation that surprises and/or delights, not necessarily the food-artefact beating out others in price nor quality. (Ok, there's the whole show around it as well, but even the places light on the craftsmanship that goes into the ceremony are hard to imagine succumbing to cheaper and better/equivalent alternatives assembled/delivered home, which arguably exist.) I foresee the other arts now competing with LLMs having a similar fate to the fine dining scene. Not capturing the masses, but still doing fine.

Or perhaps ultra small scale brewing of beer would be a better picture now that I've slept on it. It follows the same pattern of most consumption being mass produced good cheap product, but somehow artists putting awesome hand made creations into the world is happening both commercially and by people doing it purely for their love of the craft, despite the prices being higher and the technical quality not rarely lower.

If all you do is complain you'll find yourself left out, for good reason. The internet is really not all that different when it comes to this, if you consume other people's emotional energy without ever giving anything back it would be unhealthy to interact with you, regardless of where or why.

The bigger issue is perhaps whether one views someone else politely pointing out something they would like to see improved/changed as a complaint. I suspect a not insignificant portion of users of English unfortunately would interpret it that way. However, the ubiquity of the LLMs might give us some hope that the sending side over time ceases contributing to the problem by saddling the people they wish to freely sacrifice their lifetime for them with their frustration.

The fine dining scene is doing well despite cheaper alternatives being available (ubiquitous?). So I wouldn't worry about the possibility of experiencing amazing hand crafted pizza disappearing, even if convenient cheap machine made frozen pizzas should become what most people choose experience regularly. And I believe the same goes for other art forms, people enjoy producing and consuming them, and the experience of top notch human productions will be available and no worse regardless of what the masses choose to spend their time and energy on.

Where we might get fucked over is if Bauhaus displaces architecture where some resources are allocated to form instead of all going to function because buyers are cheap. It would be impossible for individuals with taste but little resources to set out with to meaningfully affect the public landscape. But that ship has sailed almost a century ago.

As long as I keep hearing about the need for reducing meat consumption and supply chain slack (food waste), I'm inclined to think Malthus was right despite the limit turning out to be soil capacity rather than labour capacity.

Communication is a means to an end, a tool, not an end in itself, or something with intrinsic/unassigned value. Why would we want more energy wasted on focusing on the packaging (or worse, how the packaging is made) by drawing attention to it, instead of helping directing it towards that which actually matters?

Forgiving is very helpful in enticing those whose content you'd like to parse to start producing content. There's no use in having the worlds greatest pipeline if nothing is being put in and moved through. See the tragedy of the death of flash and "surely someone will come along and make a great frictionless editor for canvas and webgl", only for all the creative energy ending up being sucked up and monetised by roblox, leaving the world worse off.

You sound highly optimistic about the capabilities of LLMs, which makes me curious about the path you see to furthering quality of life at scale. What do you see as the main obstacles to LLMs brewing me beer on demand at my home without involving me past the prompt, and when do you foresee we'll overcome them?

Sandboxing is great, as long as the user has absolute control of it and final say on what goes in and out of it. No program needs to know what else I run on my system that might go against the program creators interests. Like for instance me running a bot do the grunt work of cancelling a gym membership through their app should not be possible to prevent. Sandboxes where the system, or even worse the application inside, decide that the users wishes aren't worth respecting is an attack (that tragically often succeeds) on the user.

Officials at the highest levels like MEPs don't really need to have freedom of association available to them though? They need to work the hardest of all the people they are trusted and charged with improving the lives of, under more scrutiny than any subjects the bodies they belong to govern. Personal freedom and agency are small concessions we should expect those who are put to shape the world based on their promises forego

At the same time the mobile operating systems are vulnerable to vendor lock-in due to the absence of this functionality. It is clearly a worse problem that a user can't give their backup system access to the photos stored by other applications (often social media), or for instance reliably capture media streams to use in for instance a remixing application. Bringing custom clients when the software originally used to create the interesting files starts acting against the users by introducing subscriptions or being abandoned is another example of the user dictating what software accesses what files is critical to secure the users operations. Consumers need security against commercial interests infinitely much more than commercial interests need protections against consumers, and it would be unethical to enable commerce at the expense of individuals like the mobile operating systems do.

No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well. But this got me thinking. Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is, I also haven't heard a satisfactory definition of what pain would actually be in/for such an entity.

These things have long been solved through consumer protection legislation in the developed part of the world. Despite responsibility for card fraud, including debit cards, being placed banks and payment processors, northern Europe has a healthy consumer banking market. Vendors being required to warranty purchases for up to 5 years also hasn't killed off commerce or smaller and tiny actors. The home content insurances strike a decent balance for accidents. Sure, the total cost might not be that different in aggregate (you pay for consumer protections through versting being slightly more expensive), but at the same time it's difficult to envision cutting out or severely limiting a profit driven middle man overall being more expensive.

> In general, even if you have "aligned" AI: aligned with whom or what? > Whom are you comfortable with lording as a some demi-god over you, dictating what to believe?

This is why each country needs to educate and maintain their own researchers across as broad a spectrum of disciplines as possible. Also why there needs to be healthy locally financed (through taxes and grants in addition to consumer spending) ecosystem of reporters and media, so that social media (and LLMs) can be easily discarded as sources of social truth and information like other entertainment products in favour of the trusted ones.

As for technical truths, I don't think using informal social media like the stackexchanges or LLMs to explain how camera lenses or checksums work yields materially worse outcomes than consulting Wikipedia or Knuth. For most things, where it doesn't matter, the blind copy/pasters will prevail. Where it does matter, the organization of the work itself has to set out with establishing accountability that encourages the appropriate amount of diligence anyways. And also the point above about having some local expertise.

Putting any specific string in an "author(s)" or "committer" field is likewise a token gesture that doesn't affect or alter the content. The impact, just like promises of responsibility, would still solely be in biasing the reader, clouding the evaluation.

Unless you believe there is substance in social interactions over time, like trust. But then it would be a socially weird move to dismiss promises of responsibility out of hand instead of picking up the invitation to build trust if that's what's perceived to be lacking.

The price difference would have to be significantly more than 1 to 3% to justify the inconvenience of carrying around cash again for me as a consumer for the things I don't buy online. Also don't underestimate the benefits of not dealing with cash for the merchants either. After cash usage almost vanishing completely they made it mandatory to accept cash a couple of years ago in Norway in an attempt to keep the infrastructure on life support in case of crisis (but still illegal for big transactions like cars and houses because something something crime). At least one hairdresser chain notably resolved it by only accepting pre booked appointments, which you could only get along pre paying for them in an app.

I thought overdosing on opiates was highly easy to achieve, basically pain free, and also relatively cheap even in the social backwaters of the world where they have death penalties?

I don't know, I recall in music repetition actually being enjoyed by the listeners (although not always so much the craftsmen and critics). Same seems to go for verbal communication, while some claim that great authors wouldn't repeat themselves, poetry is also generally rated prettier/better/more enjoyable wording despite often incorporating repetition. Why would visual design/style be any different in regards to human preference for symmetry and repetition/recognizability (even though the ones who create it tire of doing samey stuff all day, every day)?

After a quick check I found the "HP Deskjet Plus 4130" new for 350 NOK (so about 37 USD, which includes 25% VAT and a 2 or 5 (probably 5) year warranty mandated of the vendor). Seems similar to the others that come up when sorting by price on one of the local price comparison sites. So 70 USD would for most people appear to be about twice as much money up front for something that needs to produce the bare minimum and otherwise be easy to dust.

The reason to buy a colour inkjet printer is that it's the cheapest thing you can get your hands on. Usually because the various education systems throughout the world somehow fail to centrally handle printing of course material. Either that, or you're one of the couple of dozen people who prints photos, and additionally in the subset that hasn't also decided to pay for someone else to deal with the cursed product category.