The difference is that tech companies used to feel like they had to at least maintain a polite fiction that they were ethical and in some way serving a greater good. Now we're in the Trump/Musk era, where being unethical is considered morally superior to being pointlessly encumbered by ethics/morals/empathy/etc, so there's no need to pretend.
On Stack Exchange, if someone voted you down, they actually expend their own reputation to do so.
Your answer must have been really bad.
You'd think so, but I've seen plenty of very good answers get downvotes as well, and if you look in the voting records you'll see certain SO accounts that simply carpet-bomb every question and every answer with a downvote, reputation costs be damned.
Why they do that, I don't know. Some weird form of trolling?
I have found many very useful answers on StackOverflow. If you don't, maybe its you?
It might be a personal problem, but I suspect it might also depend on the category of questions the questioner asks. For example, a person asking a C++ question on StackOverflow might have a very different experience from a person asking a CSS question on StackOverflow, simply because the development communities associated with the two languages have different cultural assumptions and thus attract different types of answer-ers.
Some of the issues with asking the same questions over and over are [...]
You're not wrong, but StackOverflow's methodology for handling this problem proved (in hindsight) to be inadequate, because it maintained the experience quality for established users at the expense of new users, and a site like StackOverflow needs both kinds of users to thrive.
A better mechanism might have been to allow repetitive newbie questions, allow people to answer them as well as they care to, and then have an asynchronous "garbage collection" background process (either human-based or automated) that digests the redundant newbie questions into improvements on the canonical ones, and/or collates them into a second tier of non-canonical questions that are deprioritized in the search results. That way the newbies get the help they are looking for ASAP (which is what will bring them back) rather than the pain of rejection, while the experienced users get a well-organized, non-redundant site experience (ditto).
Sounds like a great way to go out of business.
... at which point, the company's costs will drop to zero; making their cost-cutting initiative a complete success!
Instead of letting an LLM run a business directly, and hoping it will continue doing the right thing indefinitely, how about:
1. Task an LLM to write a state-machine/rule-set for running a business (e.g. lots of "if X happens, do Y" rules)
2. Have a human review the state-machine
3. Have a computer run the state machine (which is very unlikely to go haywire since it isn't an AI, rather just a set of rules)
4. If/when the state machine proves insufficient in some new scenario, goto (1)
there's just no way something like this would not have been discovered by now.
If the stories are accurate, then something like this was in fact discovered by now, and that is what led to the articles being written.
Maybe you mean "there's no way something like this would not have been discovered before now", which would make more sense... but keep in mind that Teslas famously support over-the-air software updates, so it's technically trivial for any Tesla to have a 100% honest odometer on days 0-N, then receive a firmware update and have a "creative" odometer on day N+1, and a Tesla corporation that is under enormous pressure to reduce costs due to falling sales will have different incentives than a Tesla corporation that is doing well financially.
I stopped reading after the first bullet point.
Why do you write in half-formed bullet phrases? Don't you know how to write a full sentence anymore?
Fantastic example of the canonical StackOverflow answer style, bravo
That sounds just as retarded, but resulting in the opposite: a bunch of 'answers' that are really meant to be comments, thereby polluting the whole site.
That does sometimes happen, but the non-'answers' are downvoted or deleted quickly, so they don't pollute the site.
If people wonder what I mean on what a backup plan looks like then look at studies out of the UK, UN, EU, or any of a number of studies on the issue. Many of these studies will point to solutions other than relying on only renewable energy sources and energy storage as the most viable option.
Could you come out and say what you mean? Right now you're being very vague. I'm guessing some flavor of nuclear, or perhaps geothermal?
For some reason when given the easy way and the hard way, we always go hard.
Nah, the easy way was to do nothing and leave all the problem-solving for the future to deal with. Works great, until the future actually arrives, and the bills come due.
Have they not realized that answers to questions on their site are often outdated and therefore useless?
Realizing that is the easy part. The hard part is fixing the problem, especially if you don't have an active user base who is willing to update the answers.
And of course AIs will run into the same problem, unless there are well-informed human beings available to update their knowledge base.
I dunno, a 100-year error seems pretty broken to me.
n/t
Also because it's a challenge -- if you can successfully build a mechanical human being, you can probably build most any other kind of robot as well afterwards, with the insights you learned during the development process.
No skis take rocks like rental skis!
