Social media is like if someone took all the problems of usenet and amplified them to the point of unusability...

Writing music (or any other creative endeavor) is not just about mimicking learned patterns, but about experimenting until you create something actually new. Models are recombining patterns using deep learning, which can give the appearance of novelty without actually being genuine creations, unless there's adequate guidance and shaping by a human. The problem is that there is a way that real inspiration and innovation *feel* which becomes delocalized when the cognitive labor is mostly offloaded to a model and thus hard to recognize, especially if you don't actually have experience doing the creative act yourself. So people who don't know how to write music will make slop, and even experienced artists could end up with stuff that is mostly slop if they're not paying very careful attention.

Plus the social value of creativity is based on recognition of the effort involved in creating novel things; many people appreciate art because it reflects human experience and human effort, which can get muddled or lost with generative AI.

I have been writing music and studying computing since childhood and studying some machine learning since I was a teen, three decades ago. I don't think all generative AI is useless or offensive (though the resource overconsumption with the LLMs-in-everything fad is a serious problem, and I do believe there is a type of expected-usage violation / consent problem with many AI vendor training sets and products). The disagreements about deep learning and generative AI (exaggerated by a bubble-driven profit motive, unfortunately) will take work to solve because new social contract concepts will have to gradually be explored and tested over the coming years by billions of humans until a general consensus is reached on what fair use now means and how intellectual "property" ethics are navigated.

I think people are asserting a lot of things which amount to gazing into a crystal ball around these topics, but there are at least two things which I feel pretty sure of based on my experience: the human creative process is much more complicated than LLM/GAN training+prompting, and actual human creativity has value which a machine is unlikely to replicate effectively at least anytime soon â" though simulacra of creativity pass enough of a capitalist sniff test to make money, detracting from the livelihoods of artists already dealing with the nightmarish economic calculus of trying to make creative things while paying the bills in the contemporary era.

Of course, litigative copyright scalping companies don't add any value to society either and are effectively just another type of nuisance; Round Hill looks to be a hedge fund manager's project to make money off others' labor without actually facilitating human creativity. Cue the infamous "I believe everyone involved in this story should die" Norm Macdonald line... (which is much more applicable here than the original transphobic "joke"!)

Y'gotta stop cutting education and vaccine funding.

Freedom of speech exists exactly BECAUSE speech is dangerous, particularly to entrenched powers.

The reason why it's enshrined in constitutions is because the people that wrote those constitutions wanted the citizens to be in charge, for them to push back and reform governments when they went astray. Protesting and reporting are usually especially enshrined because we know that without those rights, the people are oppressed. The first thing that goes when authoritarians come in is an abrogation of those rights, SPECIFICALLY because authoritarians know that free speech is inherently dangerous to their grasp on power. Only by keeping people in the dark and spreading propaganda can they retain their hold on power.

We saw it happen with Trump and Fox News and all of his toadies buying up TV stations and news networks. If speech isn't powerful and dangerous, then why are so many people concerned with the ability to control it?

And yet, even in these societies with free speech, there have also been limits put on it, because there's no way to run a society with unfettered free speech. We've long since decided that libel and slander are illegal, you can't make threats of physical violence to other people, conspiracy to commit [some crime] is itself a crime.

So I dunno man, how is it that you think that there's no such thing as hate speech? A violent threat can send someone into hiding very nearly as effectively as actually attempting the violence. It was just speech, but it still had an effect. Can you really possibly believe that words have no weight? That speech has no consequence? Have you never read any history, particularly of charismatic cult leaders or politicians?

People are spurred to action by words all the time, and you can't just dust your hands of it and say, "hey, I was just saying words over here that made them believe that that guy was coming to kill their kids in the night and poison their water and salt the earth. Of COURSE I was as convincing as possible and they believed me and attacked him, but that has NOTHING to do with the things I said!"

Your claim is absurd on its face. There's literal millennia of evidence.

My company instituted it because it was too hard to compete on salary alone. I make a bit less per year, but my hourly rate is now higher.

It's been an amazing experience. 4 days a week is more than 20% better than 5 days a week. I'm excited to work on monday, I don't feel like I've been through the wringer on thursday. I would guess that averaged over a whole year, I get at least as much work done on the 4DWW, though for shorter periods of time, 5 days WILL generate more work (much like crunch will also generate a lot of work in a short amount of time, but as it goes on, productivity drops).

But 4DWWs have nothing to do with AI. We mostly don't use it (I work in games; the discussion is fraught, so we mostly just don't use it at all, and most of us at the company want very little to do with it) and our productivity is just fine.

Something that I think a lot of people miss, particularly with programming, is that when you use agents, you effectively make programmers into managers whether they want to be or are good at it or not. Making programmers outline broad tasks and review the results and iterate without writing code themselves is manager work. It's all the worst parts of programming and none of the stuff that we actually like. And not everyone wants to be a manager! I'm a programming lead, and I enjoy it, but it's hard and it uses my brain in a completely different way that I would not have been interested in when I was 25. I may not have even been ABLE when I was 25.

AI doesn't relieve you of any work, it just changes the nature of the work away from the actual job description. Of course nobody's switching to the 4DWW--you just made everyone's job harder and worse, so everyone is always behind.

I work a 4 day work week. My pay is slightly lower than at my last job, but my hourly rate is higher. My company started offering it years ago because they couldn't compete on salary, but they realized that some of us would really just like a better life, and that was something they could manage.

The 4DWW isn't as transformative to me as remote work, but it's been so good for me. I'm excited to get back to work on Monday, and I don't ever feel like any part of the week is a slog. I'm happy to occasionally sit down and fix something on the weekend quickly because my brain happened on the answer while I was relaxing.

If we all must work in this capitalist hellscape, 4 days a week is much more than 20% better than 5.

And since the cartoon is from almost 20 YEARS ago, why are injection attacks even still a thing? Have we still not figured out the need to separate the command stream from the data stream? It's not different just because it's AI rather than SQL.

I mean, it's possible a judge might use AI to confirm a few details

IANAL and all, but it seems like using AI to confirm something would be another form of malpractice. "Yes, our AI's hallucinations agree with your AI's hallucinations. Motion sustained."

There's a reason the aphorism, "the Pen is mightier than the Sword," exists. You cannot simultaneously hold that the only power is physical power but also believe ideas or ideologies are powerful. Of course they are. It's the basis of religion and politics writ large.

People can be convinced that an ideology is correct, and then do terrible things in the service of that ideology. It's not that complicated.

The reason why wealth itself is important is because wealth begets wealth. You're right that to some extent it's an under-consumption problem, but fundamentally, wealthy people use their wealth to accumulate more wealth.

And that sounds a bit tautological, but what I mean is: if you have a huge amount of wealth, the things you buy are things like property, stocks in other companies, natural resources, etc. Wealth accumulation accelerates over time. But there isn't an infinite amount of wealth to be had. There's a limit to how many homes there are, how many farms and oil wells and all those things. Governments are in debt and can't help their citizens because they no longer own big blocks of apartments, they no longer own productive land or natural resource companies. (Actually, some do, and you'll note that they're the ones that provide ongoing support to their citizens.)

Even with a little bit of wealth, you can anchor your whole life. Owning your own home is huge. Put enough money into investments, and there's a time at which contributions to your portfolio are less than the money the portfolio generates on its own. And of course, this wealth is both real and illusory; stocks have no value until you sell them, but they can serve as collateral for loans at lower interest rates, and you don't pay taxes on loans.

The rich DO compete with folks for real estate, they become landlords, which is an inherently parasitic position. Consider: a landlord buys a home and rents it out. They pay the mortgage and for upkeep, and they charge a tenant for their own costs, plus some amount of profit (or, occasionally, no profit, on the basis that land value goes up over time). If the tenant can pay this rent, that means they could own the property themselves, but there's an intermediary skimming profit off the top.

So more and more people are locked out of ownership, because the initial cost of ownership is too high, but we know factually that they could actually pay for and maintain that property themselves, because that's what the rent covers. Where does that extra money go? And what is it paying for? It's paying for nothing; the landlord is a parasite, plain and simple.

But anywhere that someone with tremendous wealth goes, the same story is allowed to play out. We've all seen the stories of these private investment firms buying up good businesses, saddling them with debt, taking all the good stuff, and then leaving the business to go bankrupt. It's wealth extraction that only rich people can do, and it destroys businesses big and small.

Ultimately, the accumulation of wealth is a de facto accumulation of power. Our politics is not SUPPOSED to be influenced by money, but it definitely is. Elon Musk doesn't need to be able to vote multiple times to influence the outcome of elections, he can just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it--an amount he makes back in a trivial amount of time--and get the outcome that he wants.

You're right that the extremely rich use the same phones as I do, eat the same food as I do. What that tells us--what we all already know--is that they don't NEED to be that rich. They can live a life of extraordinary luxury with so much less. So my concern with wealth is that it is not created out of thin air, and there's a finite amount of it to go around. The billionaire class growing in number as well as their fortunes growing by huge amounts happening at the same time as governments running huge deficits and the middle class shrinking is not a random coincidence. One is the cause of the other. That's why when many of us talk about wealth, it's as a *transfer*, from one class to another. Billionaires are literally impoverishing the rest of us.

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

Oh, so if Trump can cancel the next election, he simply remains president?

If Trump can cancel the next election it becomes a moot point. The presidency will be determined by the results of the ensuing civil war.

Depends on the studio and position. A very well paid senior programmer might make $150k-$170k in the US. But that's pretty much the top end of the scale. Salaries in the game industry are infamously low because it's so FUN. Aren't you grateful to have such a FUN job? It's FUN, be grateful that you make any money at all so you can be creative!

Designers make less, Artists make less. QA makes WAY less (which is a travesty, because we depend on them so much in the development cycle. As a programmer, I probably talk to QA as much as I talk to design).

But if you're a Canadian programmer, you might make $150k and live in a city like Vancouver which has insanely high housing costs. Maybe you have kids, or pets.

You've kind of hit the nail on the head with regards to the issue, though: many developers aren't paid particularly well, even by huge companies that make billions of dollars (and indeed, that's why the companies are so profitable).

I interviewed at Roblox, and their salary ranges STARTED far beyond where most studios ranges ENDED for my position (Senior Programmer, 20 years experience). They told me that they consider tech companies like Google to be their competition for talent, not other game studios, so their salaries are adjusted accordingly.

So yeah, very easy to believe that people are feeling the pinch after getting laid off. It's not a lucrative industry for the workers.

This comment is very stupid for a lot of reasons.

1. Not every developer needs help
2. Not every developer wasn't able to find a new job
3. The intention is not to distribute money to every person that lost their job in the layoffs, it's to extend a lifeline to people who are struggling
4. The thing that would meaningfully change things is to implement strong labour laws, tax the wealth of the extremely wealthy, and make it easier to form unions. The number of roadblocks to unionizing have increased over the decades, which is one of many reasons there's been such an obvious, ongoing, inexorable transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class.

When the government is in the pocket of these huge companies and actively make laws diminishing the power of workers, it's an obvious bad-faith question to ask why people don't do something about it.

I have lots of ways to meaningfully change things, but I can't buy a politician because I'm not a billionaire, so changing things take longer. Don't worry, though, we're making some progress despite that.

I presume that this "God data structure" is referring to the Higgs Bogon, the basis of the bogomips metric. Splitting the bogon is the first step to creating a kernel that can run on quantum computers. Or, possibly, the first step to causing vacuum collapse and the destruction of the universe as we know it. Hard to tell when messing with God stuff.