No, but they "gave grunt work to the code monkeys." People have become a bit more hesitant to use language like that these days, so they just say junior developer.

After I saw this article, I decided to send Gemini to buy a book on ebay for me. The top listing that Gemini pulled up was really sketchy, with the product text being the book I asked for but the image being for a completely different book. Gemini just added it to my cart without noticing the listing was questionable, and I had to abort the process before it went any further. It looks like it is NOT yet cut out to detect "this is fishy" ebay listings.

Sometimes pure math has small errors that slip by the best. Peter Scholze famously didn't trust his own proof that showed functional analysis was effectively a branch of commutative algebra, and wanted some computer verification. Applied math in particular is deliciously messy, something I didn't appreciate until later in life. That isn't to say a mathematical proof is not to be trusted, but rather that a sufficiently complex and recent proof may in fact turn out to have small errors. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a low single digit percent of specialty results in niche math fields might have small errors, like overlooked hypothesis the author had in mind but didn't explicitly put down. Thus, given that this "math" is very applied and recent, I wouldn't be surprised if there are loopholes around it.

Really though, I do want your hot take on something. My understanding is that "LLMs" are definitely not, and never will, reach human type intelligence. But AI companies have been saying that since o1. The current "System 2" view is that LLMs are effectively used as single-neurons in a much larger system. Now, someone might be justified in looking at a lone human neuron and saying "this can't be intelligent," but if you cluster a whole bunch? So, do you think a sufficiently complex cluster of LLMs, each functioning as a "neuron" in a large whole, could eventually give rise to something more authentically intelligent? It just feels like it has a Turing Completeness vibe, where once we have sufficiently complex building blocks we can get whatever we want.

The problem is that "landlords" do not exist in a vacuum. While "landlording" can be difficult, it's also widely recognized as a sound investment. As a consequence, more and more businesses have tried to move into the business. As a result, home ownership costs have risen beyond the intrinsic costs, because now buying a home is tantamount to a business opportunity, and everyone wants their cut of the added value. It also decreases the supply of for sale homes, compounding matters. We now have a situation where many people who do NOT want to rent are forced to, because the ratio of for-rent and for-sale homes skewed due to a rush of investors wanting to capture their share of the pie. It's a similar phenomenon that happened to farmers, where too much farming oddly made farming no longer viable for individual farmers. The counter-intuitive solution was to pay farmers to not plant certain crops, thereby increasing their value. A single farmer farming is a Jeffersonian dream. Too many farmers farming in an industrialized society can have unexpected consequences.

Similarly, a landlord is doing a great service to the community. A post-doc in academia might need to move 1-3 times before landing a tenure track position, so those rental opportunities are wonderful. But if you shove an army of landlords into one area, suddenly people who don't want to rent are forced to, and the landlords get to feast on someone else's misfortunate. At that point, the line between a landlord and a "rent seeker" gets blurry.

This assumes HOAs come about because a group of home owners got together and decided to start an HOA "for the good of the community" In reality, HOA management corporations cut deals with developers to seed HOAs that they can then run for a fee, and local regulations can effectively force HOAs for new homes so they can skip on paying for infrastructure. Technically, the HOA is a non-profit, but the management corporation is not, and it's a multi-billion dollar industry. There's a reason HOAs are so universally hated, fail to serve HOA member interests, yet still spread like wildfire.

https://www.ibisworld.com/unit...

All artists just steal and generate derivative works. In any given culture, the state of art is an accumulated product created by a community over the span of often centuries. I think what irks me about "creatives" that want to dip into AI revenue directly is that they aren't giving credit to the fact their art, too, was based on inspiration from the community they're a part of. The AI isn't really "stealing" from an individual artist, it's really large-scale "cultural appropriation" of a dramatic kind. Thus, there's more of a moral argument for taxing AI to fund the arts. But I am opposed in principle to individual artists cashing in on AI directly, because the statistical patterns the AI is picking up on are the same ones the artist was. Trying to dip into that directly is to basically claim credit for hundreds, even thousands of years, of cultural heritage.

I think the problem is that "I work 100 hours per week!!!!1111" is conservative virtue signaling. Personally, I shamelessly HATE long hours. I worked 80+ hour weeks while in college and working a job, but I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It did let me graduate early, get good grades, and pay my bills. But overall, it was just a miserable experience, and I think anyone who has needed to push those hours probably feels the same. I think it's important to be willing to work long hours when the need arises (like when moving houses, or during a special crunch time at work) but it's not really a great way to live long term.

I think the big issue is that replacing a white collar worker's core tasks really does require full-blown AGI. There is no "it can almost report sales tax to the state comptroller." It either does it, flawlessly, every single time, or bust. Current reasoning models are pretty good, but they're not able to maintain focus and iteratively refine a piece of work over the course of days, which is what's needed to complete certain tasks. However, for some jobs that require content creation, it can be a big time saver. As a consequence, education is a good use case, especially for educators who need to produce materials of a technical nature.

This really, really reads like a paid job advertising. "Sales" positions often feature extravagant promises of enormous earning "potential" and high turn over.

The argument is effectively that if people realize the full price of the meal before purchase, they won't purchase. By hiding the true cost, customers buy something more expensive than they otherwise would have. I agree this is why businesses do it, but disagree with it at the ethical level. Exploiting someone else's inattention or poor math ability is basically what Ferengi were made to parody in Startrek. If customers can't afford your food, tricking them into thinking they can is wrong.

I think the actual solution will be passive reasoning models that tip people off to these sorts of poor business practices. Eventually, these practices will die out because everyone who looks at the menu will get a HUD display of the true out-of-pocket totals in real time, and even red text that tips them off to low-balling. No more tricking customers, no more dishonest surprises at the register. It will be a boon for the majority of businesses that make sure their customers are informed and provide quality products at reasonable rates, because they won't have to worry about a competitor luring customers away with false promises.

Just to clarify.

Did the model actually have enough information to possibly answer the question? If it wasn't familiar with your Mint configuration, and you were using something you rolled on your own, it had no real chance of solving your problem. Second, were you using a paid reasoning model, or a budget light model? In my experience, even today's LLMs are terrible, but the paid reasoning models fair pretty well. Your story just seems odd because in my experience, this is the sort of task reasoners excel at.

About three months ago, I had Copilot create a data table, which to my surprise came out as intended. The problem is, the table couldn't be copy-pasted, edited, printed, or otherwise accessed outside the chat. My only option to "get the table out of Copilot" was a screenshot. I had ChatGPT create it for me instead.

Earlier this week, I asked Copilot to add a couple of events I received via email to my calendar, which it claimed to do. Today, when it was time for the first event, I noticed there was no Outlook event on my phone. I looked for the event for tomorrow, it wasn't there either! It turns out, Copilot just hallucinated the whole thing. A "add this to my calendar" feature is probably one of the few genuinely useful features GenAI could bring to Outlook, but apparently they can't pull off the most obvious use case.

I'm "pushing back" on Copilot because it point-blank lied about adding something to my Outlook calendar and creates outputs that are literally unusable for me (not metaphorically - I needed to get the data table out of Copilot). I'm frustrated just thinking about it.

I said it's rare, not that it's unheard of. Like a true academic, I left myself a nicely sized escape-hatch with that wording.

What you're talking about is usually isolated to certain technical fields that require minimal equipment and can be practiced without hurting anyone, and even then it's the exception not the rule. Good luck finding a non-degreed doctor, dentist, RN, pharmacist, physical therapist, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, rocket scientist, aeronautical engineer, economist, roboticist, CPA, LPC, LBSW, etc. I just named several sizable FIELDS that are pretty much 99.9% occupied by people with those useless degrees. You might be able to find a handful of edge cases where someone managed to get a variant of those titles, but for most part you're not even getting an interview without a degree, and can't even hold the position legally otherwise. And for good reason. Certain fields require sustained, rigorous practice with structured curriculum designed by people who have walked the road, over a protracted period of time. And the higher the cost of learning materials - like patient lives, dangerous engineering equipment, etc. - the higher the need for structured supervision.

And if I may appeal to your ego, I'm going to also bet you've spent a lot of your life feeling that many, if not most, people are downright dumb, because they fail to grasp fairly clear general principles. It's not that they're dumb, it's just that you're unusually smart. Most people aren't going to "pioneer two industries" without sustained supervised practice. If you managed to do it, good on you. But you are the exception, not the rule. I've been in education long enough to see that many highly intelligent people often suffer from the "curse of knowledge," which makes it hard to communicate with people who aren't as knowledgeable as them. What I'm getting at is, you underestimate yourself and overestimate others, which has led you to believe that society can function on the backs of autodidacts. It can't, there aren't enough of them, and therefore structured degrees are needed.

My dad used to work as a repair technician. On more than one occasion, he had enough work to take on an apprentice. Invariably, they'd quit as soon as they got useful to start their own business.

Under the current system, an employer is relieved of the cost of educating the employee (and the risks that go with it) with the trade-off that they pay for the tuition via the employee salary schedule itself. Thus, a college educated worker commands a "higher salary" that covers the upfront education cost. If we switched to employer based training, the employer would need contractual agreements with the employees to avoid what happened to my dad, and the starting salaries would be lower to cover the education costs and risk of an employee not working out. For technical fields, it would also require extensive investment in curriculum development and assessment systems, which would effectively make employers turn into mini colleges anyway (bearing all up front costs, and then passing that down to employees in the form of lower wages).

I'm not saying the employer based system would be entirely bad. But it comes with its own set of problems. In a similar vein, I've seen people tout "barter systems" that completely ignore the downsides (like what, carrying around flour to trade?)

I'm an academic.

I've got a good thing going here, and if you don't keep the lid on it, I might have to get a real job! I make at least half of my living emailing office hours to students, since I have a bad habit of putting them at the top of the syllabus that no one reads. Granted, it was hard work deciding which $100 textbook to make my students buy so I could read my free publisher copy to them verbatim, but that was a one-time adoption activity. And then there's that committee that meets in the printer room when me and the other member happen to be printing at the same time.

In all seriousness though, "very few degrees are useful" is inaccurate. All high technology in society requires extensive, structured study. It is exceedingly rare to see any serious advancement at the fundamental level come from someone without extensive education. The Manhattan project, Internet, air-travel, modern medicine, robotics, industrial systems, etc., are all courtesy of someone with extensive formal study. There are non-degreed "skilled workers" who might take a wrench to an airplane without a degree, but you'll be hard pressed to find someone designing an airplane without a degree.

Now I do agree that a lot of degrees are useless, and it can be hard to tell which ones are a good investment. Ulterior motives have crept into a lot of higher education, just like they've crept into health care.