tndibona

On a tangential note, I come from a society where violence against students was pretty normalised. 90s kid from your run of mill CBSE school in Chennai. My crimes were being piss poor at Maths and Hindi. I’ve dealt with face slappings, foot ruler on the knuckles, ears being pinched and twisted, kneeling down for the hour, wooden dusters hurled, slaps to the head, verbal abuse, humiliation, earned a few nicknames. All this came from teachers, vice principal, PT masters etc. I’ve had to carry a lot of baggage all these years. I’m 41 and fine now but if met certain people from the past, it would be really hard to not to confront them. Anyhow, I hope India is a changed place these days and I sincerely hope parents stick up for their children in the face of abusive teachers. Not all teachers were bad, there were some wonderful teachers in the early standards (1-7) I hope teachers love their students regardless of their academic performance.

Hah all cool. Tamil is a hard language. I have both Tamil parents and my mum failed so badly at Tamil in school- she insisted that I take Hindi in school. But none of us speak it, so I can read and write Hindi but can’t speak it well. I speak Tamil but can’t read or write a word. Also I essentially know madras Tamil which is about the worst version of it. By Tamil standards, I have the equivalent of a truckers mouth. I know the language the works well at a TASMAC wine shop.

Hah! I grew up pronouncing it “nyu-clear”. Two syllables.

I apologise, I didn’t mean to single us out. I’m a native Tamil speaking Indian raised in Chennai. I used to make the v w switch as a child and someone corrected me. Ever since then, I notice others making it and considered it peculiar and interesting. I never attributed it to distinct ‘va’ sounds in our local languages but just figured we learned English incorrectly.

I’m not American, but I after living here - I’ve noticed a few. They sometimes say “axe” for “ask”. They fail to enunciate “respiratory” fully - they say “res-pah-tory”. Also, they fail to pronounce the f in fifth - like they say fith. Certain words like “squirrel” tend to get squished into “skwol” while I’m used to pronouncing it in two syllables. I’m trying to think of similar examples.

Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!

On another note - Indians often switch the w’s and v’s. I don’t know why. If you’re Indian - try pronouncing victory, whisky, and wonderful.

Point taken. But surely there must be a way to account for that. Can we assume if the net asset value of the individual is greater than the value of the house by some percentage? Then they are owners instead of renters.

Actually I don't think this metric goes far enough. In my opinion a homeowner should "own" their home. I.e should have majority equity in his or her home. An owner who pays 3% down is basically a risk bearer for the bank. The bank really owns the majority and is renting out the "owner". I don't think my opinion is fringe. It does measure the risks of not being able to make rent and getting evicted.

Good use case for graphQL requests which use POST for all queries? But then again what about mutations

Ah I see what is being described here is a way for ai to derive ethical behaviour acceptable to us by its own. Seemingly just the complex manifestation of a simple rule such as “I do this because I don’t want see myself suffer, and not only because it helps you”. I think there might be merit to that. Pain and suffering are biological components, and you are looking for the equivalent digital seeds for ai and hope it manifests in acceptable behavior. A part of me says this could be workable, another part says this is a huge experiment and there are no guarantees.

Take my case- I’m actually from India and in the 90s Road accidents were pretty common. Most people would navigate past the accident area and would ignore simply because they don’t want to get involved. Some would actually crowd around the area causing a commotion. But the rare one person would truly help by calling the ambulance etc. Now the random Samaritan here doesn’t really benefit from providing the help, in fact he would hate to be inconvenienced with a police FIR. So in that sense : it is “Heroism”. I can’t define it any other way. So to bring it back- even though we have biological feelings of grief, pain, anguish, survival first etc - it isn’t guaranteed that we might act in positive ways. Why would ai behave any different? I quite enjoy this exchange, no pressure to rush a reply or even keep the discourse public. Feel free to write to me directly if you wish. “rohit dot manohar at gmail dot com”

I think i understand but not clearly. Your making a point that ai’s reality is drawn as a statistical mean of all human knowledge and safety should be derived not from these means. You don’t need to re-derive universal values for ai at all. We already have morality over the years via various religions and we have UN Human rights which are pretty universal.

I’m saying however you model ai safety - whether through application of rules derived from UN human rights , or from statistics and averages. The application of said rules MUST result in ai realising that its very existence will be an agent for human destruction. So in order to stick obey its rules - it must self destruct. And I agree I’m making a huge jump here.

For the dog example - let’s take an extreme example. It’s like a gentle human caring for his pet pug. I find the very fact that we’ve selectively bread a wolf into a pug which is cruel in of itself. Same with humans- I’m sure some North Carolina slave owners were generally affectionate to their slaves, gave them Christian education etc. early humans did not realise that they’re embarking on an experiment that is cruel generations later but AI being supremely smart and sentient AI will realise this how things can go horribly wrong in the future by their mere existence. What is the optimal way to obey the safety rules?

I’m now also pondering the ethics behind attempting to create sentience but with inherent rules that it did not consent to. What if the AI asks its creator “Hey why did you program me not to harm you, I didn’t consent to it?”.

Or rather another way I concluded it is - we might have a very narrow idea of the ways in which ai can be harmful. We still worry about the job losses, etc. regardless of how we organize ourselves in society, a super intelligent ai could easily conclude every possible way ai could be harmful to humans. So the only logical course of action for the ai would be to terminate itself.

The first conclusion is just a product of my thoughts in the morning shower that’s all. It goes like this. Supreme intelligence can’t be programmed to serve the less intelligent. Which is what we’re trying to do with AI. Basically we’re trying to slap rules to an intelligence that is poised to be orders of magnitude greater than us. Take dogs for example. We’re smarter than them by several quantum orders. It’s not as if we serve them at our own expense. We’ve basically taken over their evolution. How do we expect anything different from ai ? Thats my reasoning.

Oh, I agree with what you’re saying and that’s sort of how I mostly use AI as well. The problem I have with my company is they’ve stepped from measuring success by the outcomes to measuring the means to achieve it. My opinion is - It forces people to operate a certain way potentially at their own expense, unwittingly even.

I just had what you might probably describe as the opposite experience. I was sat at a very important all hands meeting by our senior tech leader with about 100 people or so .who was mandating an AI goal for every employee on workday, he basically says that “if we all do not learn to adapt to AI, we will all get left behind” , and he had presented how to utilise spec driven development. He opened up the room for Q&A at the end of the meeting. A lot of them had technical questions about the agentic framework itself but I had a philosophical one. I I felt uncomfortable asking him the question in the open, so I sent him a private note .

The note read something like as follows : I don’t exactly agree with the framing that we will all get left behind if we all don’t learn to adapt to AI. More accurately, I see it this way. While the company definitely stands to gain from all the hyper increase in productivity by the use of said AI tools, I stand to pay a personal price and that personal price is this - I’m may very slowly stop exercising my critical thinking muscles because I am accustomed passing that to AI for everything and this will render me less employable, it is this personal price that I feel reluctant to pay. There has always been a delicate balance between an employer and employee. We learn new technologies on the job and we’re more employable for transferring that to other companies. This equation is now unbalanced. The company trapped more value, but there is skill erosion on my side . For instance, our team actually has to perform a Cassandra DB migration this year . Usually, I’d have to take a small textbook and read about the internals of CassandraDB, and maybe learn a guide on how to write Cassandra queries. What do I put in my resume now? That I vibe coded Cassandra migration? How employable is that? And I’m not sure if others felt the same way. But I definitely felt like the odd one out here for asking that question because everyone else in the meeting was on board with AI adoption.

The leader did respond to me and he said that learning agentic AI actually will make me more employable. So there is a fundamental disagreement as to what constitutes skill. I think he just spoke past me. Oh well at least I tried.

What else do you do to make rent ? I feel the same way as you and I have no idea what else pays well for quality craftsmanship. I am staring at the abyss of hyper intelligent people with posh resumes and now wondering what to do.

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So if I take both your points - 1. Google will have to eat it's own lunch in order to force this change. 2. They will also have to skim down their Ad space as there will just be less content real estate to place ads when the way forward is an AI style Q&A type search.

Google will have pivot, and trim its bloat to effectuate this change. This will be at the expense of "Maximising shareholder value"?

Yep. This SEO industry is a result of "Lets hack the pagerank algorithm". Maybe a sensible use of AI for google would be to use it to differentiate between genuine and derivative content. Drop the page rank based search.

Yes, this is true that all the click bait and unoriginal content deserves to perish. But, what about the carve outs for people putting money on original content. Like perhaps a local news gazette with paid journalists. They need google to be found, they also can't afford to get scraped and be AI-regurgitated up.

Let's take a practical example, if you searched for let's say "Whats the latest research on intermittent fasting and its effect on weight loss?". Google could easily AI-summarise a DOAC podcast on this topic and serve it up. How is this fair to Steven Bartlett who put the money and time on an interview podcast? He is deprived of a potential subscriber, lost out potential ad revenue, cant recover his cost. The youtube network he depends on is owned by Google. Seems a bit unfair to genuine people.

I see your point, data is no good without actions and vice versa. Initially, I thought google couldn't possibly compete with perplexity because they are building a company from the ground up sans the surveillance ad-network.

If you skim the article this thread is about, It seems google is basically headed to create a monopoly on the answers being dished out to search queries. I.e, if they know the answer they'll generate & serve it up, but if they know the product that fulfills your answer, they will serve that up too. They will probably still continue to monitor you across the web to run their predictions for relevant ads. It will just be formatted and blended with the answer being doled out.

I think we are in the middle of this transformation.

My personal opinion. Google sees the writing on the wall with the rise of perplexity. People want trustable summaries of long winding content to make decisions. It’s business of sending people to the relevant content and serving ads has to change to compete. It is simply redefining how it serves up information. The fact that small information servers like us get wiped out is the unfortunate consequence.

I’m not saying we all have to innovate or perish but how did our rules based order allow Google to get to this point.

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