w10-1
AI in medicine has become pervasive, resulting in less time spent fighting IT or staying up-to-date and more time with patients; no one need be fired because you can always do better work.
It's the opposite of enshittification: quality has gotten better without any visible economic difference.
> the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what
Because this models how to go from oblivious to aware, through investigation and evaluation, while maintaining our own orientation - key to any limited being navigating a world with others
"while maintaining our own orientation": each organized teaching has their own world view (religious, open-liberal, science/art for its own sake, training to combat or fleece the world, etc.). It's extraordinarily difficult to learn and care deeply about any subject without being programmed for these enduring social franchises, adopting dissonant work/home/private or us/other personas, etc. in service of the franchise.
Society will deluge young people with this programming. Parents I hope teach maintaining yourself, the practice of observing yourself and addressing your limits, which would mean being ruthless in pruning delusions, kind about mistakes, and able to retry and/or get help. Indeed, if you teach only that, you'd be expressing a lot of faith that they're unique and good and self-sufficient, and they'll make their way; you believe it, and they will, too.
Yes, once they have learned the usual anecdotal lessons (but before college and life decisions), they'll need intro to systems thinking, to identify ex ante fruitless objectives and cost difficult paths, to game and deconstruct the franchises and make life-decisions based on prospects as well as interests and values.
But play is the most enduring lesson: that (per Nietzsche) after camel-carrying what you need and lion-clearing your workspace, you settle into creating what's interesting.
So teaching should reflect self-observation to be teaching for living your own life, but the goal activity should be creative play, to learn and make life worth living, for yourself and others.
It's like arguing with God: he's got better info that you.
But it's a sad example, for open-source and for small engineering companies. Instead of infrastructure being more easily shared with the collective, or valued enough to build a business, now companies can tailor even major infrastructure to their own needs, and avoid all that coordination.
I'm glad they publish their notes to encourage others, but I suspect we're entering an epoch where confidentiality matters most.
Anthropic's problem was merging code at scale, but the scale problem I have with SCM is really merging all the related docs; these get lost in a stream of a forest of comments, PR's, and documentation, all of which (like a wiki) goes rapidly out of date before anyone notices because none of it is automatically correlated.
Your summary is misleading. Acne is diagnosed, prescriptions are written and applied, initially with Dr review and then only 10% reviewed by doctors.
Medicines are topical and said to have mild side effects - so I guess no retinoids (or accutane pills).
fwiw, physician assistants generally work under a doctor, who's supposed to review about that many of their cases.
You're suggesting "investing" is like R&D?
Investing is when you buy stocks or bitcoin and hope. Except for 1 year, their "investments" have always lost, last year about 50% of total assets:
-908 -4,374 3,970 -1,946 -10,273
"Investing" is traditionally how money is skimmed: something's sold to a friend at an inflated price that only becomes recognized as such years later amidst some other cover/crisis (if not after a statute of limitations). The other option is sweetheart deals - unneeded property leases, jobs for friends, etc. - but those are a bit more traceable, while investments can have multiple shell-company layers and complex derivatives.
But I'm not sure the attention economy is different in this respect from civilization's traditional franchises: the hope and protection rackets run by religion, governments, militaries, businesses, etc. We've been trading beer for labor in the oldest recorded history and probably before. But how would understanding that help?
So: not "citation needed", but back to TFA: can {proposal-x} help liberate people from predation (and self-destruction)? It's fruitless to wish there were no predatory human systems or realize everyone's out to get you; the question is how to cope.
The commenter is suggesting that counter-programming might not be the answer to programming. I would go on to suggest deprogramming, reducing the reactivity of any reward system, and then targeting the deepest values. Traditionally this is occasioned by failure (as a lesson) or getting old (heeding the older wise elders), or breaking the ego (in recovery, severe trauma (war, moral injury), etc.) so it's mostly a no-go zone, but in rare cases of excellent therapy or practice or great relationships one can make progress.
Tracking systems (joyful or otherwise) I think help not in the day-to-day reward hacking (any drug results in resistance) but to give a concrete picture of the value of time and habit: when I well and truly realize how little I do actually contributes to my/y/our future, I am motivated to really look backwards from the future.
Seems like a great idea, worth evaluating and contributing to.
Others afaik in C++ and rust - see e.g.,
- list: https://github.com/pingcap/awesome-database-learning
- list: https://dbdb.io/
- CMU: https://github.com/cmu-db/bustub
- GA tech: https://github.com/jarulraj/buzzdb
- rust/distributed: https://github.com/erikgrinaker/toydb
That said, I disagree on Apple: while the UI can be perfect, it has always imperfectly been trying to do the right thing technically in concert with developers and users, which puts it in the position of imposing constraints that developers and users can relax to varying degrees: wearable and home devices (not at all), iOS (somewhat), macOS (mostly).
wrt a hacker's future: I'm still traumatized both by decades of windows reboots and virus scanning, and by decades of squeezing into Linux (just don't sleep, avoid these displays...). I'm glad Apple stuff mostly just works and ordinary people still have access to unlocked, general-purpose computers, but that might not last. Cheap AI coding might remove any financial incentive to support users programming on their own, and we'd be left with locked devices as consumers or work-only access to programmable computers (at least for the latest hardware of note). If a 40% premium for mac hardware is the price we pay for continued access, so be it.
the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.
If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.
But our society today has very extensive systems with very few deciders, who are largely enmeshed in social and legal constraints to ensure our reliance is safe and effective (at least in the large/long run).
The concern is about that constraint system being displaced - minimally with decider over-reliance on AI (still subject to guardrails?), or maximally with AI itself (no internal guardrails). Slop (in software, medical services, and military targeting) is just the symptom.
That replacement/shift has already been a corrosive side-effect of capitalism, as elites slowly cede loyalty and professional standards to competitive pressure, but even now most constraints allow replacement of bad actors (if demonstrable). AI reliance just makes that shift irreversible. People no longer have incentives or opportunities to spend the decades required to lead effectively, so organizations could never revert the heartless efficient machine elites back to the available incompetent and oblivious humans.
Maybe the result is just wealth transfer, or health, but I'd expect the high-value use to be in a military where very few people can combat many (as is happening in Ukraine now), making the military a preferred option for anyone with resources.
The distribution of (and checks on) responsibility - up, down, across companies and political systems - was intended to constrain agents to organizational goals, but it effectively kills any internal change by requiring near-unanimity and overcoming people's dependence on their jobs. So even if a super-majority of people agreed on some negative projection of AI usage AND had the resources to put work and investments at risk, it still wouldn't be enough to change this trajectory.
huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.
In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.
And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake).
So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).
Competition?
The solution is not just "do only what's needed by the customer".
There are emerging environments where the conditions don't force previously-rational decisions, and where assumptions no longer apply. New tools in the battlefields of yore, new beliefs and practices in cultures...
The stunning march of compute hardware in the last 50 years has changed many such conditions.
Those who work with new freedom - liberated from the strictures of old gods, able to harm enemies without putting themselves at risk, with the time freed from foraging to build - have to identify the new constraints and conditions at work.
And sometimes to make the conditions that make for sanity: Solon got ancient Greece out of a stagnating pickle by getting the wealthy to release the poor from debtors' jails but sign them up for the military that could defend lands and trade routes, if they subjected themselves to land-owner self-government and the annual ostracism of one person who went too far.
Capitalism used competitive markets to liberate but discipline business, but right now the scaling power of compute leads to winner-take-all, and the openness of the West is seeding closed systems (military or foreign) with the power to destroy the liberal governance that sustains it. In software we're stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: an Anthropic+OpenAI duopoly or Chinese control over the lifeblood of enterprise.
If there were someone who in the large had structured the freedom of software to make its practitioners and stakeholders sane, they'd be a good candidate to steer us through this situation, so this freedom wouldn't drive us insane.
It's best not to reduce AI momentum to arguments, especially the "best" arguments (meaning I suppose most acceptable?).
The same forces that feed and motivate humans and that drive resource and governance decisions generally also strongly support building AI, particularly insofar as it can deliver strategic advantages in our many competitions over resources and influence. Cyber-defensive use is at best a nice side-effect, but itself might be cast aside for the sake of other advantages.
In this historical moment, due to the need to generate public interest in product, equity, and debt offerings, some of this building happens in the open. But the military-industrial complex prizes secrecy, in part to hide capabilities, but mostly to imply more capabilities than they actually have. Historically, critical innovation will get bottled up in secrecy (which not coincidentally gives them the power to choose who will gain), but frankly that market is much smaller than enterprise and consumer. So we can bet that it's not only "open models" that are targeted to go under wraps, and more broadly we should not believe that the intentions of researchers matter, but whether governments are more interested in the strategic benefits than the economic ones (or view the economic ones as net-negative for their jurisdications).
"Worse is better"
I can copy and redistribute macOS binaries, and I can write programs/extensions that modify macOS.
These vague terms show that legislators are incapable of regulating software effectively; but they do create an enduring legal franchise to deal with their confusion.
So: sunk costs of large investors mean they'd be willing to pay high interest costs? Thus small investors can rely on this dynamic, shielded by big ones?
Remember, the large investors got large in a near-zero interest rate environment (where exact timing doesn't matter as much), but those days are not coming back. Soon margins will matter most, and while NVDA and Apple have the internal discipline for that, OpenAI et al do not.
I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets like China or India, to address political demands for local siting or jobs). Apple is in the best position to work around or even gap-fix older software/hardware limitations in a controlled environment, and now they can do so without cannibalizing new hardware sales.
Sure, take any slice of a vast number, and you get a big number.
It's not a "wealth transfer" when everyone gets what they bargained for and can opt in or out.
Most importantly, the transaction value of using credit cards or rewards systems - what the user actually gets - is not enumerated.
Beyond what others have noted (mainly deferred payment), credit cards offer legal transaction protections: my legal liability for fraud is limited (unlike debit or Zelle transfers), and I can challenge any transaction even later, which gives the vendor an incentive to ensure I'm happy even after they have my money. While reputation provides some incentive for repeat customers, the ability to retract a transaction governs even non-repeats. I would submit this alone has improves quality of service for everyone anywhere credit cards are accepted.
Rewards vary by type. Cash-back rewards reflect the fact that interchange fees were set to recapture initial investments, but servicing costs have plummeting (thanks to computing); governance-wise, it's almost impossible for a "representative" political system to extract a large cost from a small number of powerful agents with vested interests to provide a tiny amount of benefit to a very large numbers of other people. But that's a much more extensive governance issue.
So where does the benefit go? To competition between credit providers, initially as cash-back, and then to tying rebates to future purchases within controlled channels. For airline point systems that give free flights or upgrades, it improves retention, but other forms of rewards would seem to verge on tying, where power in one market is extended into another.
Politically-mediated wealth transfers are a political issue. Economically-mediated wealth transfers should raise market-regulation policy issues, in particular whether the law is inducing or protecting them, and then whether they are good or bad. Tallying that requires not just seeing the money flow, but seeing all the value received or cost exported.
I don't think it's on them. Proximally, it's not their job to deliver the end-use value; it's their customers' job (if they're doing it, it would be a strong sign of tying). More generally, they operate as a commercial SaaS entity (non-profit or not), and net benefit to the world is not what any company is structured for (even public benefit corporations have mainly indirect effects).
So I think that "criticism" is just a back-handed way of promoting themselves in messianic terms.
IMHO Anthropic, OpenAI et al continue the practices that make people resent companies (US companies): You have to be either connected or nominal (show of diversity) to actually participate in the opportunities or protect yourself from their predations. That's just the nature of knowledge work: you need a ladder of opportunities that start very early to participate, and you'd need to understand subtleties of engagement to see how you're being fleeced as a customer. The divide of rich to poor is not about money but both knowledge and access; it's felt even by long-time experts in the field who are left out or ousted.
Eclipse has been thriving since 2002 mostly by virtue of being able to coordinate developers via plugin's and a business-friendly license.
They did need to upgrade early plugins into OSGI, and most of the new plugin designs benefit from copying OSGI, et al. The key is SAT solvers for dependencies and namespace separation, not forcing clients into the same dependency version.
But as you suggest, relying on the community is a moral hazard. In Eclipse there were big players willing to fund key use-cases for their own purposes; elsewhere I've seen sufficient monetization of plugins to offer incentives and stability.
I would add that VSCode plugins follow a different development model. While any OSGI/Eclipse plugin can provide an interface, I believe in VSCode you're limited to the API's they give you (and they make a mess of them, so there's more inconsistencies e.g., in LSP support that anyone can enumerate).
The problem pre-dates LLM's: writing code that "works" but breaks the underlying model. Because it works, it always sounds reasonable and doesn't raise any flags.
Only someone - human or LLM - who holds the model as the standard would see that this working solution breaks the model.
(In theory, the model is to preserve scaling, flexibility or some other systemic feature not immediately invalidated by this working code, but as always the model itself could be bad.)
LLM's are not bad at giving an account of the model; indeed, fighting with the LLM over what the model is can clarify things. But LLM's will happily hold on to a stream of inconsistent statements as their model, so they are not the authority.