These kind of people make their living freaking out kids. I mean if you are that full of yourself, that you think your thoughts are critical to saving the lives of "millions and billions" of people why would you go and talk to a kid about it?
Too many of these kind of pointless people being propped up. Monetizing fear and anxiety 24x7.
Readit Newsjoules77 commented on Cory Doctorow Says the AI Industry Is About to Collapse futurism.com/future-socie... · Posted by u/merlinm
> The evidence is overwhelming; the debate is long over.
This assumes everyone is the same. The detachment philosophy of the Buddhist/ Epictetus/Stoics emerged for a reason. It has lasted in one form or another for thousands of years - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/lecture-8
Horses for courses.
joules77 commented on Have we passed peak social media? ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0... · Posted by u/jnord
Ad prices (and revenue of these companies) keep going up tho...
2010-2022 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU365
2023-2025 - https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/WPU366
joules77 commented on Ask HN: Why isn't AI viewed as a way to prevent humanity from going extinct? · Posted by u/amichail
The number of (self-inflicted) existential threats facing Homo sapiens right now and all you come up with is "mass brain fog"?
AI won't solve human obstinacy, human entitlement, human greed, human short-sightedness, anthropocentric hubris, etc. I seriously doubt anything can, let alone a large language model.
Why not?
These are not new problems. They are ancient and different people have dealt with them with different levels of success. AI has access to all those strategies.
So maybe one day AI dawns Mr. Rogers persona to solve one problem and Abe Lincoln to solve another.
It can do it at scales no individual or group can, so there is potential to nudge the entire chimp troupe in directions never possible before, in ways that "will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills".
joules77 commented on In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information blog.burkert.me/posts/in_... · Posted by u/curioussquirrel
> As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day
The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead.
> The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.
Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer.
I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
Its all subjective. There is no clear quantification of X Attention consumed = Y Value produced. So saying what the algo does is important is like saying astrology is important. Or HN is important ;) At the end of the day most info produced is just entertainment/placebo. 3 inch chimp brains have upper limits on how much they can consume and how many updates to their existing neural net are possible. Since there is nothing signaling these limits to people, people(both producers and consumers of info) live in their own lala land about what their own limits are or when those limits have been crossed, mostly everyone is hallucinating about Value of Info.
The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.05% of info generated is actually consumed. And that was based on a study 10-15 years ago.
joules77 commented on I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone forums.macrumors.com/thre... · Posted by u/dabinat
I empathize. My dad is 98 and can mostly use his iPhone fine, but I just wish I could turn off all the “shortcuts”: He doesn’t get swiping down from different edges of the screen for control panel vs notifications. He doesn’t get hard-pressing on icons for different options (like the flashlight), and so on. Wish I could turn off Siri and Apple Pay, because hitting the “sleep” button just slightly wrong can invoke them and then he’s stumped.
Not just your dad but the vast majority don't use these features either.
The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.
Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.
After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).
There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.
The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.
The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today.
Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI.
Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.
I'm not a hater, it could be true, but it seems to be gospel and I'm not sure why.
Mapping to 2001 feels silly to me, when we've had other bubbles in the past that led to nothing of real substance.
LLMs are cool, but if they can't be relied on to do real work maybe they're not change the world cool? More like 30-40B market cool.
EDIT: Just to be clear here. I'm mostly talking about "agents"
It's nice to have something that can function as a good Google replacement especially since regular websites have gotten SEOified over the years. Even better if we have internal Search/Chat or whatever.
I use Glean at work and it's great.
There's some value in summarizing/brainstorming too etc. My point isn't that LLMs et al aren't useful.
The existing value though doesn't justify the multi-trillion dollar buildout plans. What does is the attempt to replace all white collar labor with agents.
That's the world changing part, not running a pretty successful biz, with a useful product. That's the part where I haven't seen meaningful adoption.
This is currently pitched as something that will have nonzero chance of destroying all human life, we can't settle for "Eh it's a bit better than Google and it makes our programmers like 10% more efficient at writing code."
Cause the story is no more about Business or Economics. This is more like the nuke arms race in the 1940s. Red Queen Dynamics.
I think Elon would find that there are plenty of other kids TV shows that he would approve of on Netflix, so what's the ratio at which it becomes 'pushing an agenda'?
Elon has fallen into that classic trap of 'it exists, but I don't like it, so I must cancel it!' rather than what a normal thinking parent would do, and not allow your kid to watch that one show.
You know, parenting...
There are lots of shows I don't like on Netflix, I just scroll past instead of having a public tantrum.
But I'm not a ketamine addict either.
He is an Attention addict. Just like Trump. They keep churning out shit everyday to get people to pay Attention to them. Why else buy Twitter/start truth social etc. So that their drug keeps flowing.
Their biggest source of anxiety in life is enough people aren't paying attention to them. Anything else that captures more Attention is an automatic existential threat. Netflix captures a lot of Attention. Therefore its a threat.
Give men a manly job they strive for and deserve: Army service. Expand armed forces and military industry, paid for by increased taxes, to absorb all young men who can find neither work nor spouse. And just go on conquest, to expand the limits of the free world.
Because birthrates do not really depend on those men since they can't marry anyway, nor is the economy, they are pretty much expendable and Soviet style loss rate will be acceptable. With that tolerance to losses, America can achieve massive victories.
Quality of the future generation will also improve since women will all have kids - alone - from a small pool of high quality men (those who can get laid on Tinder).
Once the military men retire from service, they can be given property and positions of power in the new lands they take, to create a core of newly forming elites, which will be fair given their sacrifice and will give them equitable, deserved station in life.
Or they can move elsewhere. Just like their ancestors and every other immigrant on the planet does when they can't find a job at home.
Watch what happens if a breakthrough comes out of China, Russia or a shed in Nigeria. What is happening on Wall Street or who is loosing cash or jobs will drop instantly down the list of priorities. Money will be printed to the moon.