We’re still in the mid-late 2020s. Once we really get to the late 2020s, attention spans won’t be long enough to even finish reading your comment. People will be speaking (not typing) to LLMs and getting distracted mid-sentence.
Reminds me of an unfinished game I did long time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTtX8CavRTk
It also had a 3D mode. Unfortunately it was too difficult to understand what was going on and most play testers were just confused, instead of having fun. :)
That looks really cool, though confusing even though I do understand Hilbert curves. I’m having a very difficult time intuiting the strategy for a game like this. I think the core concept is very interesting though.
No situation justifies external interference, especially not by the US, which has done more than its fair share of invading and then just making things worse for everyone, like in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A country border drawn arbitrarily (straight!) by an English Lord hundreds of years ago?
A country border not everybody agrees about?
A country border defined to keep out intervention more than to protect?
A country border that is porous and is walked across daily by people that aren’t even sure where it is?
Etc…
At some point you may release that humans live on both sides of lines that often exist only on maps, and serve only to keep people servile to autocrats.
Autocrats whom make sure that their schools teach the importance of borders.
> also completely unfazed by the premise that it has been 'hacked into' a late-90's computer game. This was surprising, but fits with Claude's playful personality and flexible disposition.
When I read things like this, I wonder if it's just me not understanding this brave new world, or half of AI developers are delusional and really believe that they are dealing with a sentient being.
I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech.
I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it.
These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.
It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.
> but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech
A wake-up call for me was when I requested fair trade coffee for the office due to potential human/child slavery issues with coffee, even sourced the roast from our supplier that was fair trade (which wasn't more expensive), then after getting one order of it, since one of the execs preferred the other coffee we stopped getting it.
> These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.
How do you find work that aligns with your values?
I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.
When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources.
You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.
You can however reduce your impacts substantially relative to peers with trivial behavior changes. Switch to biking instead of driving for just half your trips and now you’ve essentially doubled your fuel efficiency without any technological advancement necessary.
This is true, but the tech world is very interconnected and broadly supports/enables human rights abuses and war crimes to agree that most industries are not.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft develop tech used in the genocide of Palestinians, this is basically an IBM and Nazi Germany situation. And many more directly support genocide and human rights abuses as well, while many others are happy to pay those companies millions of dollars for their services.
Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.
> then I switch back to objectively
And that's one of the issues: there's no "objective" way to look at reality. What to you looks objective, to me seems optimistic, in the way that the author denounces as not helping.
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
> And I've vibe coded entire ephemeral apps just to find a single bug because why not - code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use. Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions.
I'm not super up-to-date on all that's happening in AI-land, but in this quote I can find something that most techno-enthusiast seem to have decided to ignore: no, code is not free. There are immense resources (energy, water, materials) that go into these data centers in order to produce this "free" code. And the material consequences are terribly damaging to thousands of people. With the further construction of data centers to feed this free video coding style, we're further destroying parts of the world. Well done, AGI loverboys.
Assuming your fact is true, that corn merely uses an order of magnitude or two more water than AI is surprising, given the utility of corn. It feeds the entire US (hundreds of millions of people), is used as animal feed (thus also feeding us), and is widely exported to feed other people. I the spirit of the “I think”s and “I believe”s of this blog post, I think that corn has a lot more utility than AI.
I could have worded that more clearly: The vast majority (90%+) of corn grown in the US is not for human consumption, with most of that 90% being used for bioethanol.
If you don't do that, and are a homesteader, then yes. You are a very small minority outlier. (Assuming you aren't ordering supplies delivered instead of driving to the store.
> Eat meat.
Yes, not eating meat is in the minority.
> Fly on vacation.
So, don't vacation, walk to vacation, or drive to vacation? 1/3 are also consumptive.
It seems you are either a very significant outlier, or you're being daft. I'm curious which. Would you mind clarifying?
Thank you for the clarification! I'm impressed. I've always been envious of the bicycle friendliness of roads in the Netherlands. Here in the US stroads and poor bike infrastructure still reigns. It really depends on the region.
Whats the point of this question? These are things (some) people do while existing as humans, not sure how thats relevant? The AI is consuming vast resources while note existing as a human, it doesnt get some innate privilege to consume some amount of resources like we do.
My guess is that “free” is meant in terms of the old definition where you’re not having to pay someone to create and maintain it. But yes, it’s important to realize there really is a cost here and one that can’t just be captured by a dollar amount.
Can we please stop saying "AI is doing this", "AI is doing that", and instead point out at the companies and individuals that are shoveling AI down our throats as the ones that are decimating industries or destroying jobs, almost exclusively for their own economical benefit?
Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.
No, "AI" is part of progress like other force multipliers. For the Hoover dam, the government hired thousands of people. Today you would have hundreds. What enables that is machinery. Do we want to go back to manual labor? What about paralegals? Hundreds of people reading thousands of paper documents. Or a few paralegals and lawyers reviewing AI output and following up manually to confirm?
What people seem to be against is progress, or at least the rate of progress. We certainly should stop and think and assess the repercussions of the rate of progress and the response we should have were it to threaten to destabilize society. I don't think we should say, oh, A.I., this is where I will fight. We need to be rational and assess the consequences and find rational answers to ensure social stability (we don't want famine or Hoovervilles).
This is deliberate from both the left and the right to keep costs down. "AI" is ambient and no one can pin the blame on anyone.
In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result.
In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons
1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own
2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby)
3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries
> There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared.
In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them.
A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques.
These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.
It also rubs me the wrong way since "AI" quite literally means everything from LLMs to how the ghosts in Pacman move.
Like, you don't hate AI. You hate the way it's being used. It would be weird to say "I hate that computers have the ability to transpose spoken language to text". Or "I can't stand the ambient listening tool being used to treat my father's UTI's while he has Alzheimer's". Or even better "I hate that my credit card company is trying to determine whether someone is fraudulently using it".
And what's worse is that it treats this is a relatively new problem. But rich people abusing the system to make more money at the cost of making others poor is hardly a new thing.
Is a week the whole attention timespan of the late 2020s?
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