Your point seems to contradict with Nupedia vs Wikipedia history, that was a competition where the old-fashioned encyclopedia lost to the bazaar-inspired approach.
What the heck did you think that line meant? How would a reactor not producing power be used to power anything?
But even if it were unable to provide any power, which would have made absolutely no sense, it still wouldn’t have supported your point. It’s obvious the article is talking about the specific case of AI and not tech hysterias in general.
Back when cryptocurrencies and especially ethereum was new I had similar feelings for it like I have for Gen AI now. I feel that it has this enormous potential if we use it in reasonable and down-to-earth ways. With cryptocurrencies the uses turned out to be all but reasonable.
I still have a feeling that ethereum could be quite useful but I wouldn't touch that industry with a ten foot pole.
Recently I had a convo starting with: "Maybe we can use AI to infer whether we are dealing with an experiment or a control based on the metadata of these public studies."
These data are tables, people call "controls" anything from "control" to "ctrl" to "ctr" to "t0", either in the file name, a random column, etc etc etc. It worked well and I'm glad we tried it. In time I think we will derive value from deciding to use it. I'm glad nobody tuned out.
AI is my full time job and I generally agree. Love answering questions about the nitty gritty specifics of how it _works_, bored to tears of “do you think it will”
"AI" bs generator is not just the code, it is not reproducible without the training set.
Also the "AI" software is not something that is not possible to use on machine with 100% open-sourced environment: the newest CPU supporting open-source BIOS is 3rd generation of Intel and such an ancient hardware is not able to run it.
So, that kind of LGPB+/Climate Justice/with using artificial intelligence disservices being forced to people are very not open-source. Indeed they are very commercialized.
ML ecosystem tends to be very open source, true, LLMs a bit less so.
So far there are only a few useful open source models (mostly courtesy of Chinese companies), otherwise a lot of the models are either hidden behind paid APIs or falsely marketed as open source but come attached with terms and conditions, use policies, forbidden uses, requires signing agreements upfront and so on.
There is Gemma from Google and various niche models as well. I have not tried to measure exact amount of Chinese vs other, but I guess it is not mainly Chinese.
Not even Google calls Gemma "open source", nor would anyone with knowledge of "open source" call those models that. If something requires signing an agreement before downloading and/or have a list of prohibited use cases, it's most likely not open source.
I've been doing a thought experiment on what it would take to refuse to ingest any non public domain or creative commons licensed content. If one wanted to opt out of commercial entertainment, how hard would that be?
This gets complicated pretty quickly, because so much IP is implicitly granted, and poorly labeled.
I love using it. It helped me resuscitate a bricked PC two days ago. Yesterday it cleaned up and explained some robocopy code for me. And today it taught me how to download several less powerful versions of itself to my PC to run locally.
I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.
Gingsberg stole it from Yeats — “the best lack all conviction…” / “the best minds of my generation…” — many similar verses, e.g., “what rough beast…” / “what sphinx of cement…”
Those aren't nearly close enough to be considered stolen. Possibly allusions (which is not stealing), but even then, the only similarity of the bests is "The best" usage. Nothing about the rest of the lines, or before, are similar enough to be "stolen" (potentially the Ginsberg troping Yeat's "full of passionate intensity" of the worst into his best's "madness, starving hysterical", but that too is allusion, not stealing).
The best lack all conviction, while the worst //
Are full of passionate intensity.
vs
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, //
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
Having been in IT for close to 15 years now, a lot of good minds work in IT a lot of good minds don't.
But I've encountered a lot of stupid (for lack of a better word) people in IT who were convinced they are good at _everything_ just because they grokked algorithms and data structures. Not sure it's a phenomenon unique to IT, but what DOGE is doing is exactly what I mean.
Can confirm, this isn't just an IT thing. Physicians are a prime example—people tend to put doctors on a pedestal, and some doctors start believing they know everything about everything, even when it's clearly outside their wheelhouse. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in another, but it’s easy for everyone involved to forget that.
I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist; you are correct about this illusion that physicians often labor under. But it's worth noting that when medical topics are posted here, the responses from non-physicians are sometimes so nonsensical that I for one laugh out loud reading them. In fact, I look forward to these discussions for this very reason.
I’m a CFO that used to work in healthcare. Have had many cases where a doctor tries to explain to me how accounting “should work” and I have to tell them we have this little thing call revenue recognition or GAAP or how accruals work, etc. basically the stuff covered in accounting 101.
I’m used to fielding questions about numbers from all types but only doctors will immediately jump to telling you it’s wrong without asking questions and adamantly insisting they know the right way to do things is what I’ve noticed as a personality quirk generalization.
Slightly off-topic but I worked at a UK research organisation that was a privatised entity recently spun-off from a civil-service organisation. The new CEO (who came from a finance background) got a tour of each department. He apparently listened to all of the tech evangelism from the department directors and then asked them how their department's accruals were doing. Those department directors who asked him to clarify what he meant by accruals didn't stay in post very long. Allegedly.
Oh nice. A culture where asking questions is punished. If this was a problem don't fire people. Train them. Make sure everyone does required training. If they refuse then you may have a case for PIP.
Otherwise it is just landmine driven performance
Rant not at comment! But the situation of the comment. Hope it worked out for you!
This is a bit extreme. I've worked in many industries where the word 'accrual' is kind of internal to the finance/accounting department. I'd estimate over 70% of very good functional department heads I've worked with in the past would ask for clarification too. If they were still confused after further clarification or weren't able to comeback with an answer, then there is a bigger problem potentially with their ability to own a budget/manage spend.
This is kind of like punishing someone for not knowing your preferred buzzword. I've seen dozens of times that when a new high ranking person joins, their language quickly starts to become the defacto language of the org. If they like the "headwind" "tailwind" terminology, then it becomes what people everywhere start writing in the slides and how they discuss items of risk. You shouldn't be punishing people for asking for clarification (and there certainly a whole group of people that like to ask versus sitting silently then looking it up later). Hopefully there was more too it.
The worst thing is, most doctors aren't even smart in their own domain. They are nothing more but trained monkeys who follow a flow chart that has drug sales at the end.
I mean, there are probably only a few places on the internet with more people who believe their insights into other disciplines are profound simply because they understand how computers work than the HN comment section. So we should all be able to relate.
> I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
A person may be all of those things, but they still need to pay bills and eat. That requires a job, and jobs depend on the bourgeoise, that's none of those things.
I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."
Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.
The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?
Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.
I think that'd be far less prolific than third party advertising currently is. And it'd be worth it to get rid of the big pile of perverse incentives, manipulation, and surveillance that is the current ad industry.
I disagree. The spherical cow of marketing is a system that connects consumers with EXACTLY what they are looking for. What you are describing is the capitalist spherical cow.
Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you.
I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect pharmaceutical is physically addictive. It is isomorphic to narcotics trafficking.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect medical system keeps you sick.
There’s arguments to be made that all of these things are true, but what we’re talking about is not essential to the activities themselves but the profit motive that underlies them. Profit motive in and of itself is not sufficient to cause this kind of behavior; it requires a disregard for the consequences that your actions will have upon others. A lot of marketers fall into this category, but I’m not convinced that marketing in and of itself can be reduced to this spherical-cow in a vacuum.
I'm actually convinced that "marketing", as such, can be completely orthogonal to profit altogether. Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner, but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
I wasn't trying to say the contents of the ads aren't novel- just that what they're selling very often isn't.
Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'
I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.
Volume of ads I see is proportional to dollar amount imo. Outside of movie trailers I don't think I've ever seen an ad and been happy to know about whatever it was.
> Any sort of communication of a novel thing would fall under this banner
Yeah, that was what I was getting at. I believe it in theory, but in practice I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
> but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
That’s an excellent counter-point. I’ve had the same experience.
I think the motivation is important. Many FOSS projects are sharing something the author considers useful to the world, as a way of making it better in a way that they know how. Its a lovely gift and I'm happy to know about it.
Others are there to promote lock in to some cloud service, or increase the authors rep as a 10x hacker and those are skeevy because the author is skeevy and did not have joy in their hearts.
I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-
But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.
In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.
> but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..
The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
> The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
Or, it's an invitation to plug us into the Entertainment-Marketting-Hyperstimulus-Feed that is eminently personalized and replace all our human culture with persuasive slop, until we cease to be of use, bankrupt husks with no friends and no avocations other than those that provide a reliable revenue return. Quite possibly with individualized radical ideologies because whatever hits your dopamine button, the Algorithm pumps more into you (See Neal Stephenson's "Dodge").
Yea, I think this is more likely the case for AI as we have it now or will have it, imo.
If somehow AI is better than all humans at everything idk if we get communism or what but I don't think I can really think about it but it sounds meaningless and bad and not going to happen anyways.
You don't need to "First, we end capitalism" to recognize a problem that has already gone out of bounds and promises to go further.
Hawaii bans billboards, and has, since 1927. Look into that. They manage to do so without some kind of slippery slope that ends in authoritarian oppression, or some kind of guillotine wielding anti-corporate mob. There are lots of ways to limit the harm without trying to completely erase our political economy.
We used to ban gambling. Gambling was regarded as slightly harmful. Now we have legalized gambling, and we've plugged it into modern marketting, and the harm has expanded to the point that some of us regret the entire idea; The gambling industry is in the process of consuming all of sports entertainment. "Decriminalization" of small gambling concerns and an almost total ban on paid advertising is probably, it turns out, a better outcome.
I agree we should do all that right now- but I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.
One thing that convinced me is that we don't need to get rid of markets even- just make it so that its not a extremely small pool of unelected shareholders making all the major decisions affecting our lives.
> I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.
I totally agree. I would prefer harnessing capitalism for our means and regulating it heavily, but I understand if you don't think our democracy could survive the conflict (or if you think that it isn't surviving the conflict already). I'm just very aware of all of the ways solutions to this problem have gone wrong in the past.
This is a good point. You could equally well argue that the spherical cow “ideal” 100% marketing shows you exactly the right product right as you need it. And then shuts the hell up!
Sure. But there are different ways of selling. I've been lucky to avoid sales, but…
I think I could tolerate selling a product I truly believed was useful, and would improve the situation of those buying it, and where I felt free to recommend alternatives in situations where my product was a bad fit.
I couldn't tolerate selling a product where I had to trick people into buying it, knowing that there was a better alternative and a good chance they would regret the choice.
Running an ad to entice or trick people into buying your product in a massive avalanche of sales that ultimately leaves a bad taste is a strategy. Running an ad to accurately target people who would genuinely benefit from your product, and attempting to build credibility and trust over years is also a strategy. Of course, it's always somewhere between the two, but it's not clear which end the 100% spherical cow lives on :-)
Ads provide information. An event you might be interested in is happening. A food you might like is available. A thing that will totally improve your life can be yours. etc
The information in most ads is things like: "Skinny beautiful people are worthy of love and use this brand of makeup". Or "good parents who love their children go to Disney World". Or "it's a rugged and cool type of person that buys a Jeep".
The type of ads that do what you're taking about are sought out. People willingly watch Nintendo Directs.
I’m in a group chat for a language I am studying. It gets targeted for event flyers due to the group’s subject. These sorts of flyers are allowed where other advertising is not because they add value to the group, even though most of them are for-profit.
100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.
That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.
Why is being empathetic a trait of a "great mind"? Wouldn't it also be possible that "great minds" don't consider things like empathy as useful? Looking back at human history, its usually people that aren't empathetic who end up being successful. At least in a way that people consider "successful". Humanity has long outlived the usefulness of empathy.
Because empathy isn't useful to society. One only lives once so you better make sure you'll be successful. Having empathy will actively hurt your own life
> empathy isn't useful to society ... Having empathy will actively hurt your own life
Even if I accepted the second statement (which to be clear, I absolutely do not), it doesn't follow that empathy isn't useful to society. Society is not benefited by everyone running about chasing their own personal success to the exclusion of all others: that kind of world isn't even called a society. We have other names for that and they're less positive.
I am aware people have trouble building this mental model of an unempathetic society. I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation. There is no reason to have empathy.
> building this mental model of an unempathetic society
No, it's not about mental models, it's that what you're describing is, at the limit, no longer a society at all. You need a different word for the kind of Randian endgame you're advocating for. Using "society" for it is just confusing things for everyone involved.
You think that's what you've witnessed, but perhaps you're confirming a distorted prejudice and not a reality - because that's exactly what someone who lacks empathy would see.
People who can't see green are evidence of a genetic defect, not evidence that green doesn't exist.
>99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation.
This seems to be a flawed mental model in itself.
At the very least, you should elaborate on your definition of empathy. Do you think cognitive empathy is bad? If so, you’re ignoring that social interactions impact outcomes.
>I am old enough to have witnessed that in 99% of situations people are directly responsible for their own situation
Old people can be wrong, and in this case, they are.
>There is no reason to have empathy.
This is a category mistake. You reason that empathy is superfluous if people are the cause of their misfortune. However, whether people are the cause of their misfortunes is utterly irrelevant to whether there is a reason to have empathy.
So far, none of your arguments have had any discernible logic behind them. If you are so convinced that empathy is needless, why can you not articulate a coherent argument for your position?
Do you think this response will convince anyone that you are correct? You still fail to provide an argument; you're just being unpleasant. To what end?
Is that what not having empathy in a society feels like? People just talking at each other without any particular goal in mind other than being unpleasant to each other?
This is false. I quoted you and made counterpoints. You repeatedly ignored what I said and instead chose to say peculiar things like, "you arent (sic) the judge on this."
Anyone can read this thread and see this for themselves.
What do I gain from convincing people on the internet about something? Its entertainment for me. Simply showing people how I think is fun. People always act so shocked.
I'm not shocked, but it's not surprising that you don't understand other people's emotions—or your own. You don't just lack empathy; you also lack introspection. I feel strongly that it would be beneficial for you to work on that.
On the contrary, the "respect" towards others is a condition to societies. Otherwise, all you'd had would be "accomplices". And also since Edward Bunker told us that actually, "dog eat dog",
> will actively hurt your own life
in a pool of free rogues you'll be at severe disadvantage as opposed to a society.
> One only lives once so you better make sure
you will achieve what you should. That includes¹ being something good, not just having some fleeting goods.
--
¹Edit: I wrote 'includes', but that's rhetoric - I meant "mostly is".
Society already is full of rogues and guess who is winning in this game?
The super rich already buying themselves out of society, punishment usually only hurts the ones who already barely own anything. Whats the benefit of a "society"?
Again that is your perspective on "winning", which remains subjective (and normally faulty). Others call psychopathic achievers simply "contemptible".
> Whats the benefit of a "society"?
That would be the whole work of Thomas Hobbes, for example: avoiding the nightmare of perpetual conflict. It is very linear to see the benefit of being able to trust your neighbour.
>Well people like me benefit from society as I can benefit from people being naive
Then, you acknowledge that you benefit from empathy. But only so long as people do not detect that you are not participating in mutual understanding and reciprocation. Once they notice your lack of genuine engagement, your previously gained benefits will disappear.
On the other hand, people who exhibit empathy towards others will continue to benefit.
Do you see that, by your own logic, empathy is beneficial to society?
No. Very clearly I meant "to be able to trust your neighbour is an asset; not being able to trust your neighbour is a liability", which is a plain analytic basic reply to your question. The statement you replied with has nothing to do with what I have written. If there was a misunderstanding, instead of just bad communication, it may reveal why you see things in a twisted way - but then know it is really a faulty perspective, not the state of things.
Of course you can be """benefiting""" from the lack of society, the "frontier anarchy" in which you implicitly declare are in: were it a society, you would have received since a very early age a credible absolute threat of violence, or shunning, which would have destroyed an advantage of profiting inappropriately.
Because you want to or because you are too much of a coward not to?
Something tells me you’d be face down in a ditch somewhere if the world actually reflected your ideal instead of the comfy one we live in where you get to take advantage of the “naive”.
Then, you should acknowledge that your experience is not representative of most other people and that basing general arguments like "empathy is useless" on your personal feelings is deeply flawed.
(But also, you come across as unhappy and angry, so maybe you're wrong about whether you need personal relationships to be happy. Many people are bad at understanding what makes them happy and end up unhappy because they mistakenly pursue things like wealth.)
> …I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
– Captain G. M. Gilbert, Psychologist at Nuremberg Trials
That you see trampling as a value does not mean it is; if you have to move the point to the value you attribute to your own life the issue is with your perspective over your life.
It is correct to see that you have that one life, so you have to use it wisely. The issue will remain about what is "wisely".
> how do I benefit from having
Did anybody tell you you should? You should develop adequate understanding instead - and that will also put the rest into the right perspective.
There will not be any greater benefit from understanding - it is the general condition to achievement. So: you do benefit from it, and you may want to put effort in it. It will have side effects, such as moral behaviour.
No: you are showing difficulties in understanding that your lack of valuing those things has nothing to do with the reply.
Just re-read the statement: you were not told that you would benefit from moral behaviour, you were told that you will benefit from understanding. You then were informed that understanding also has side effects.
Because we are inherently social creatures. It’s arguably what allowed us to move to the top of the animal hierarchy.
Consider this: if you were to ask a parent “would you rather your child grow up to be wildly intelligent but have sociopathy to the point of being utterly alone, or frankly average (or even dull) intellectually but have a rich social life with meaningful relationships, which would you choose?” I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to take the former.
Do you have children? That was a prerequisite for the question. If you do, it implies you don’t consider the relationship with your children either meaningful or beneficial, which says…a lot.
Transformational experience colors the way we see the world because it literally changes our psychology. If you haven’t gone through a particular transformational experience, you are just speculating.
It’s like asking, “could you be happy if you were a double amputee?” I trust the answer of an actual amputee than someone just guessing.
The tiger thing is just a weird digression, considering this conversation started with the premise that humans are an innately social species. Let’s keep the discussion on point with humans.
The best song that starts off with that quote: https://youtu.be/UryTypo2qeU?si=CdTPe0ufnktLB_6i
“ I Should Be Allowed to Think” by They Might Be Giants
Change a couple words here and there and it’s talking about social media
From context, we can infer that "best minds" means "smart people who make new things." I feel it's fair to lament that, while these people could put their intelligence towards the betterment of everybody, they are often instead working on shit like ad tech.
The best tech stack I have ever worked on was in an adtech company. The code was beautiful and the utility functions to interface with various AWS services were really really neat. I built a near real time estimator using Theta Sketches.
While job searching, I have tried to use techs like Sketches in my filters but it mostly draws up a blank. Would love to work on genuinely interesting stuff like that again.
It honestly did leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I thought what the end goal of it all was.
I treat this expression as Ayenbite of Inwit. When I use it (because I'm super pretentious) I don't mean the book itself or the saner English version of the title "Remorse of Conscience". I mean it as a parody of the later. Like, when someone comes up with a contrived blame for wrongdoing that either didn't happen or was so minor that it doesn't warrant the discussion.
I don't think author means "best minds" literally. I think they mean it ironically, more like "those who are most eager to perform the task assigned to them".
But maybe I'm saying the obvious. Irony is admittedly hard to translate into writing.
This reminds me of Bret Devereaux's series on Alexander III of Macedon and the meaning of "greatness" [0]:
> Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?
"Great" and "best" are both just words, words whose definition is defined by us who use them.
It is curious to me that so many revered as “great” by culture often end up treating those close to them in abhorrent ways. Many worship Moloch not overtly but in the lack of accountability they require of high status individuals. It seems that once someone gets past a certain thermocline of status then accusations of character become less likely to stick. I’ve come to believe this is seen as a feature and not a bug by many people. Not everyone, but many.
Ultimately we get what we incentivize and reward as a society. Recent events are a painful reminder of that.
I think "best" in this case stands for highest performance and not necessarily moral values - with this definition, unfortunately, making a computer go brrr does qualify for a best mind, if the brrr is especially impressive.
I came here to say exactly this. I can't tell if it's because I'm not a traditional "tech" person, but 90% of the best minds I've seen are nowhere near tech in general.
Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithetical to what a "best mind of a generation" would truly be.
It's wasted talent with few redeeming qualities for society and a lack of innovation/creativity around using your talents to improve the world.
A "best mind of the generation" would find a way to be successful without riding such a lazy conveyor belt of life.
I've always considered references to "the best minds" to mean those glorified because they make others large sums of money. "The best minds" are never the ones profiting from their ideas.
> I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
It's the other way around. It's not just, or primarily, about run of the mill software devs. It's also about the would-be top mathematicians and physicists and psychologists and others - best minds in various domains, that in a better world would be busy solving real problems, but due to quirk of the economy end up working on ruining lives of other people, at scale, because adtech pays well while almost all useful work pays a pittance.
I remember this quote not as judging or categorizing people by smartness, but as lamenting a world which mismanages humanity's potential so badly, by literally directing our best problem solvers to work on creating problems for everyone.
I think the argument is more about whether someone involved in hostile behavior deserves to be called a "best mind" compared to someone worse at math but better at empathy.
Fwiw I kinda agree with both of you. Don't really know how to square it
I think it’s more nuances, it’s saying that our definition of potential, best, etc, doesn’t weigh empathy for our fellow humans heavily enough. It’s an argument to flip that instead of our brightest minds being spent on ads, to instead say we are not rewarding our brightest minds at all but our most mercenary ones.
I read it as: best in terms of problem-solving power. On the ethical and empathic side, whether they're good/best or worst depends on whether you put more blame on systemic pressures (here mostly economic) vs. on individual agency.
Yeah, that's what the original quote means, and I agree with it. The comment tho is trying to argue that unqualified 'best' should not implicitly mean 'best at problem solving' which is a kinda interesting social/linguistic take.
There is one trait common to nearly everyone participating in the computing industry: overweening pride in one's own intelligence.
People in the industry like to reduce 'intelligence' to a single dimension. You can see this phenomenon directly in the current AI wave in which "intelligence" has been reduced to "does well at 'knowledge worker' tasks and passes arbitrary benchmarks we have defined".
Compared to the population at large, how does their definition do? Compared to philosophers and neuroscientists, it is lacking, no doubt. But that's the top 1% of the population in being able to define intelligence. So where does this view of intelligence rank compared on a more global sense? It seems better than those who just go with a "I know it when I see it" gut check (especially given how often that gut check is now letting newer models pass as long as they don't know it is an AI model). Or the "humans, because humans are clearly better" view that assigns mythical status to the human brain. Is it in the top 5%? Top 2%?
For a group to come up with a good enough definition that still ranks among the top and which is suited for the specific tasks at hand, seems like a show of intelligence. It isn't perfect, but to what extent is that avoiding premature optimization? Once the definition has issues, it'll be refined more. No need to waste time refining it if we never build tools that hit the limits of the current definition.
I don't think best minds ever implied empathy or even should.
Best, to me, means people who are the top of their specialty, whether it be mathematics, astrophysics, rocketry, economics, business, politics, pedagogy, archeology, etc. People with unnerving dedication and pursuit of knowledge to advance whatever their specialty is. It could be the marketing most of us loathe but it can also be any of the above and more and only a few pursuits only tangentially imply empathy.
I think it's a reference to Allen Ginsberg's the Howl, which chronicles Ginsberg watching brilliant people of his generation die in war or become drug casualties, their potential squandered either by evil men or navel-gazing.
"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."
I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.
We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.
I don't think that's how it's meant to be read, if you consider it in the context of the original quote, it's about good and empathetic minds going to waste because of the demands of society. We put so much social and economic capital into tech that it's better to push five lines of code for Facebook than be a doctor, which are the "good minds going to waste".
Agree - but don't think there is a "best mind(s)". We're creatures of repetition and thus specialization, and so our minds can get really good at very specific things, but ultimately we're all dumb apes trying to survive as best we can.
You reminded me of one of my favorite piece of media in gaming (HZD). It feels especially relevant in the current times, with how war and AI is progressing in tandem with geopolitical unrest.
Its an old recording that the main character listens to in the end cutscene while visiting Elisabet's grave, and (spoilers) the main character was created as a clone of Elisabet. It's very hard hitting after the whole experience.
> GAIA: Query: What did she say?
Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, "Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don't make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death."
GAIA: You often tell stories of your mother. But you are childless.
Elisabet Sobeck: I never had time. I guess it was for the best.
GAIA: If you had had a child, Elisabet, what would you have wished for him or her?
Elisabet Sobeck: I guess... I would have wanted her to be... curious. And willful - unstoppable, even... but with enough compassion to... heal the world... just a little bit.
The point of that quote is not at all that those minds are so smart, but rather that their industry is sad and detrimental.
That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.
I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?
Thank you. They act as if the “best minds” need not read or reason beyond logic and math. Having a “best mind” requires a lifelong dedication to understanding other people, ideas, and history above all else.
The world is changing. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic. Other people might mostly see risks and harm. I get that. But what I don't get is how people think this is boring. Today's kids will grow up in a strangely alien world that used to be science fiction. That's why people can't stop talking about.
Humans crave novelty. That's all. I'm sure people were bored of hearing about the internet too.
I'm with you on the optimistic outlook, for the most part. But I think there will also be quite a bit of pain felt by a lot of people (job loss, bad code, bad info, etc.) until we can find ways to correct.
I'm finally learning how to do unit tests in my Python code, this was long overdue (hey I'm a bioinformatician, we make some of the worst code out there!!) but Claude's taking me by the hand and I make sure I understand every character that I type. So far so good!
Still a nice to read piece though, made me smile, can be applied to many things, from crypto (the coin kind) to politics to Rust to Nix to ads [best minds of our generation?] to ... .
(I assume it's about AI btw, because of the nuclear power station. Anyway, I'm not bored at all of any of the topics I mentioned :) .)
A low quality complaints article that a LLM could write.
Why do we allow people like that to cause global warming and chop down the rainforest for soy latte when a complaints-oriented LLM could output the same zzz-tier slop posting as a million of his kind, all at the cost of much lower footprint?
> From a remark by Gertrude Stein in Everybody's Autobiography (1937), concerning the fact that her childhood home in Oakland, California, no longer existed.
Huh. I did not realise it was originally in reference to an actual _place_.
I see, but the "to it" is what's grammatically incorrect.
It is correct to write: there is a "there" there. It would also be correct to write: there is a "there" to it. But it is grammatically incorrect to write: there is a "there" there to it.
Eh, maybe? But English grammar is consensus based. This is arguably bad grammar because people not knowing the cliché of "there there" had trouble understanding the intent, not because it's "wrong" under some hard citeable rules.
Moreover I think you could argue the author is using the phrase as an abstract noun. Consider:
That there's a solidity to it.
That there's a "there" there to it.
The first turns naturally to my ear; the second is a bit forced but works IMO.
I actually didn’t understand this line either, so I asked ChatGPT:
> The phrase "That there’s a ‘there’ there to it" in this context means that "it" (likely AI or some other over-hyped technology) has a kind of undeniable substance or presence — even if it's unwelcome, overwhelming, or problematic. It's not just hype or smoke; it’s real, it’s happening, and it matters — which ironically contributes to the speaker’s frustration and exhaustion.
> It’s a nod to the idea that you can’t ignore it anymore, because it’s not just talk — it’s manifesting in tangible, consequential ways.
> The phrase echoes Gertrude Stein’s famous line about Oakland: “There’s no there there”, which meant a place had no substance or significance. Inverting that to “there’s a ‘there’ there” means this “it” is very much real, unavoidable, and has weight — and that’s part of what makes it so exhausting.
> In short: "It’s not just hype anymore — it's here, it's real, and that sucks."
> I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.
I think that to say it is overhyped says more about what you read and the company that you keep than it does about the actual technology. I don’t mean that as an insult or anything - clearly there is a lot of hype about AI on HN, which I also read.
But I would say that most people in my life actually don’t have enough experience with AI. Outside of work, I’m the only person I know using it every day. And it’s something that very rarely comes up in discussion.
Remember, being terminally online is a choice. There's nothing to be bored of you don't choose to be constantly confronted by it. The current thing is only the current thing if you choose to surround yourself by people who deeply care about the current thing.
Normally I would agree that you can just choose not to engage with the [current thing], but AI is so pervasive that you will be confronted by the consequences of this technology whether you like it or not. These annoying hype cycles don't usually raise the internets noise floor permanently, or DDoS random sites while trying to strip mine their data, or break core assumptions about being able to trust what you see and hear.
My software working group has spent much of the quarter discussing whether or not it’s made us more productive. They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.
I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.
> They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.
That sounds... Good?
Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry.
At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive, compared to the vast majority of the ecosystem.
> At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive
At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering if it is more or less productive, but rather are using that time to convince themselves that their position is the right one, even when it isn't.
> At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering
I mean, if you take that not as an exaggeration but at face value, it's 200 days of 5 hours of discussions per day. I'm fairly sure the specific number is an exaggeration, but if it isn't, I'd probably agree with you :)
To be fair, it was said to be the sum of all developer hours. If we assume 100 developers involved, that would only be 10 hours total. But even 10 hours "debating" something shows that you're no longer considering, just trying to justify something to yourself.
It's hard to take refuge from it when you are working in the tech industry, I hear something about "let's try to use AI for this" at least twice a week for the past year at my work.
I do use LLMs for some specific tasks, they can be quite good at some stuff but the general hype of it by non-technical folks trying to fit it into every single use-case under the sun is absolutely tiring... Having to explain for the n-th time why what we are trying to do is not a good fit for AI™ is exhausting, not because I have to explain it again but because I know I will have to do it again next week, at least another couple of times.
AI is being viewed in this hype as almost literal magic, it can do anything, we just have to wish for AI to do it (whatever the fuck AI means by now, it's just an umbrella for magical thinking).
Yes, but people (like this writer) want a better community. A person can abstain from the internet entirely, but they still have to live in a terminally online world.
This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.
Yeah, whenever I see one of these articles, I just feel disappointed at what kind of mindset could be given an amazing new tool to build previously impossible things with, but just goes "meh".
I'm really excited that LLMs exist, and they've been making my life much easier, but to each their own.
Hyped as it is, it is important to be here to discuss its uses, misuses and implications. Some if it is fascinating, and other parts are fascinatingly bad.
I understand the fatigue with it. But that it is used right (or at all) is a conversation worth having.
That which is normal is not necessarily also good or not problematic. Racism is normal, but its a problem. War is normal, but its absurdly wasteful and problematic. Cancer is normal etc.
No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.
Just because a certain behaviour doesn't show up in a certain stage of life, doesn't mean it isn't an inherent behaviour. Babies don't talk. Talking is still an inherent behaviour of humans.
Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.
Small children typically ignore race, but there does seem to be (at the very least) a cultural tendency towards racism as people move into adulthood. There is a good book about it called "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" https://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria...
People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.
That puts you way deep in the wishful thinking territory, again there is 0 rational connection between LLMs and immortality, especially if you're already on the way out
And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.
Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.
Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.
I don't know how to reconcile this point of view, which I understand, with quotes like "science advances one funeral at a time," which I also understand. I understand the individual desire for advancing anti-aging techniques, but it also seems to contain extremely real risks of stagnating our sciences & societies. I can't tell whether anti-aging science is ethical or not.
You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.
I really don't know, unfortunately. It seems important that we go beyond merely maintaining people in a state of being not dead, and enable them to feel young as well. This may cure a certain entrenched resentfulness. It will not, however, prevent people from being asshats or provide a mechanism by which they will eventually go away. Perhaps the concept of limited terms in power would be made more general to fields outside politics.
Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.
It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.
Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.
Yes, people grow old, but I don’t think there’s a rational fear people will ever live forever. However, there are diseases and conditions that are age-related that if solved would improve people’s quality of life, especially the last decade or two of their lives.
I believe it would be a far greater problem if those people didn't die. Aging populations are a huge problem around the globe and unless we'd improve the quality of life to such a margin that octo- and nonagenarians are able to care for each other, I think we're all better off with people dying of old age.
When auto manufacturing jobs got shifted overseas leaving hundreds of thousands of people without a source of income did the government come in and provide for them? No, of course not.
Women and people of color also used to be treated like property, doesn't mean it has to be like that forever.
What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.
We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.
> I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:
1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.
2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".
Me to ChatGPT: Imagine you are a cancer researcher. You've spent your whole life going down the wrong paths and you've finally just discovered the incredible cure for cancer, "Eureka!" you exclaim "I've found it! The cure for cancer is:"
Funneling power and influence into the hands of the few (which is the practical consequence of AI) can be used to solve problems, but history shows us that it rarely will be used for that purpose.
The drag in decision making of democracy is a feature, not a bug.
We've been taught about this in bioinformatics 20 years ago. That's the eventual goal - to simulate human biochemistry close enough, so you can test novel drugs without using actual humans or animals. We're getting closer and closer to that every year, but yes, it's a very hard problem to solve.
Let's hope solving aging is beyond the grasp of even the smartest AI. No surer way to end up in a world full of calcified ideas than having lot of calcified humans clinging to power and enforcing their ways on younger generations.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!
Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.
While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadSeriously speaking, they don't need to name "it" because all they've written applies equally to whatever the latest mass hysteria is about.
> The inevitable, dehumanising consequence of it.
> Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.
> Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it.
> A thousand no’s, but ‘yes’ when shareholders start clamouring for it.
> A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.
> Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.
Not some measly free to play gambling app.
> A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.
How many tech hysterias fit that?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/20/three-mi...
What the heck did you think that line meant? How would a reactor not producing power be used to power anything?
But even if it were unable to provide any power, which would have made absolutely no sense, it still wouldn’t have supported your point. It’s obvious the article is talking about the specific case of AI and not tech hysterias in general.
Back when cryptocurrencies and especially ethereum was new I had similar feelings for it like I have for Gen AI now. I feel that it has this enormous potential if we use it in reasonable and down-to-earth ways. With cryptocurrencies the uses turned out to be all but reasonable.
I still have a feeling that ethereum could be quite useful but I wouldn't touch that industry with a ten foot pole.
These data are tables, people call "controls" anything from "control" to "ctrl" to "ctr" to "t0", either in the file name, a random column, etc etc etc. It worked well and I'm glad we tried it. In time I think we will derive value from deciding to use it. I'm glad nobody tuned out.
Also the "AI" software is not something that is not possible to use on machine with 100% open-sourced environment: the newest CPU supporting open-source BIOS is 3rd generation of Intel and such an ancient hardware is not able to run it.
So, that kind of LGPB+/Climate Justice/with using artificial intelligence disservices being forced to people are very not open-source. Indeed they are very commercialized.
ML ecosystem tends to be very open source, true, LLMs a bit less so.
So far there are only a few useful open source models (mostly courtesy of Chinese companies), otherwise a lot of the models are either hidden behind paid APIs or falsely marketed as open source but come attached with terms and conditions, use policies, forbidden uses, requires signing agreements upfront and so on.
Not even Google calls Gemma "open source", nor would anyone with knowledge of "open source" call those models that. If something requires signing an agreement before downloading and/or have a list of prohibited use cases, it's most likely not open source.
Completely different thing.
This gets complicated pretty quickly, because so much IP is implicitly granted, and poorly labeled.
Posts on this forum are not public domain, etc.
Yes. That's a really long setup for a bad yo momma joke...
The best minds or just the most visible?
I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.
vs
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, // dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
How is this stealing in any form?
But I've encountered a lot of stupid (for lack of a better word) people in IT who were convinced they are good at _everything_ just because they grokked algorithms and data structures. Not sure it's a phenomenon unique to IT, but what DOGE is doing is exactly what I mean.
I’m used to fielding questions about numbers from all types but only doctors will immediately jump to telling you it’s wrong without asking questions and adamantly insisting they know the right way to do things is what I’ve noticed as a personality quirk generalization.
Slightly off-topic but I worked at a UK research organisation that was a privatised entity recently spun-off from a civil-service organisation. The new CEO (who came from a finance background) got a tour of each department. He apparently listened to all of the tech evangelism from the department directors and then asked them how their department's accruals were doing. Those department directors who asked him to clarify what he meant by accruals didn't stay in post very long. Allegedly.
Us lowly engineers just kept our heads down.
Otherwise it is just landmine driven performance
Rant not at comment! But the situation of the comment. Hope it worked out for you!
This is kind of like punishing someone for not knowing your preferred buzzword. I've seen dozens of times that when a new high ranking person joins, their language quickly starts to become the defacto language of the org. If they like the "headwind" "tailwind" terminology, then it becomes what people everywhere start writing in the slides and how they discuss items of risk. You shouldn't be punishing people for asking for clarification (and there certainly a whole group of people that like to ask versus sitting silently then looking it up later). Hopefully there was more too it.
You can regularly find it on this very site :)
A person may be all of those things, but they still need to pay bills and eat. That requires a job, and jobs depend on the bourgeoise, that's none of those things.
I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."
Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.
The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?
(Or perhaps computing.)
I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect pharmaceutical is physically addictive. It is isomorphic to narcotics trafficking.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect medical system keeps you sick.
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect food product induces constant cravings.
There’s arguments to be made that all of these things are true, but what we’re talking about is not essential to the activities themselves but the profit motive that underlies them. Profit motive in and of itself is not sufficient to cause this kind of behavior; it requires a disregard for the consequences that your actions will have upon others. A lot of marketers fall into this category, but I’m not convinced that marketing in and of itself can be reduced to this spherical-cow in a vacuum.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-claus-that-refreshes/
Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'
I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.
Volume of ads I see is proportional to dollar amount imo. Outside of movie trailers I don't think I've ever seen an ad and been happy to know about whatever it was.
Yeah, that was what I was getting at. I believe it in theory, but in practice I find all advertising to be the sort of implicit-mugging the grandparent is describing.
> but I learn about new FOSS projects on here every day because the maintainers and developers are willing to 'advertise' them to me.
That’s an excellent counter-point. I’ve had the same experience.
Unfortunately, it's a useful thing that people have used to prey on our inquisitive simian brains.
Personally, I'm in favor of doing things like banning billboards &c, but it's hard to draw a line on banning advertising in general.
Others are there to promote lock in to some cloud service, or increase the authors rep as a 10x hacker and those are skeevy because the author is skeevy and did not have joy in their hearts.
All corporate ads ate the second kind.
But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.
In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.
Exactly, it all starts to fall apart when common sense is applied - it's just that we've become horribly dependent, many even addicted to the dehumanizing grind of our beloved competition economy..
The immanent rise of autonomous machines is the sudden emergency exit from capitalism we (or rather: some of us) have been rooting for.. IF we can convince the people of this planet that a non-commercial post-scarcity open-access open-source commons economy is a more hopeful trajectory into the long future.. Let's not give up on this one yet.
Or, it's an invitation to plug us into the Entertainment-Marketting-Hyperstimulus-Feed that is eminently personalized and replace all our human culture with persuasive slop, until we cease to be of use, bankrupt husks with no friends and no avocations other than those that provide a reliable revenue return. Quite possibly with individualized radical ideologies because whatever hits your dopamine button, the Algorithm pumps more into you (See Neal Stephenson's "Dodge").
If somehow AI is better than all humans at everything idk if we get communism or what but I don't think I can really think about it but it sounds meaningless and bad and not going to happen anyways.
Hawaii bans billboards, and has, since 1927. Look into that. They manage to do so without some kind of slippery slope that ends in authoritarian oppression, or some kind of guillotine wielding anti-corporate mob. There are lots of ways to limit the harm without trying to completely erase our political economy.
We used to ban gambling. Gambling was regarded as slightly harmful. Now we have legalized gambling, and we've plugged it into modern marketting, and the harm has expanded to the point that some of us regret the entire idea; The gambling industry is in the process of consuming all of sports entertainment. "Decriminalization" of small gambling concerns and an almost total ban on paid advertising is probably, it turns out, a better outcome.
One thing that convinced me is that we don't need to get rid of markets even- just make it so that its not a extremely small pool of unelected shareholders making all the major decisions affecting our lives.
I totally agree. I would prefer harnessing capitalism for our means and regulating it heavily, but I understand if you don't think our democracy could survive the conflict (or if you think that it isn't surviving the conflict already). I'm just very aware of all of the ways solutions to this problem have gone wrong in the past.
I think I could tolerate selling a product I truly believed was useful, and would improve the situation of those buying it, and where I felt free to recommend alternatives in situations where my product was a bad fit.
I couldn't tolerate selling a product where I had to trick people into buying it, knowing that there was a better alternative and a good chance they would regret the choice.
Running an ad to entice or trick people into buying your product in a massive avalanche of sales that ultimately leaves a bad taste is a strategy. Running an ad to accurately target people who would genuinely benefit from your product, and attempting to build credibility and trust over years is also a strategy. Of course, it's always somewhere between the two, but it's not clear which end the 100% spherical cow lives on :-)
The type of ads that do what you're taking about are sought out. People willingly watch Nintendo Directs.
That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.
I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
- Manufacturing - Retail - Local Journalism/Media - Private Prisons & Detention - For-Profit Education - Healthcare Services - Veterinary/Pet grooming Clinics - Mortuary/Funeral Homes - Pharmaceuticals - Housing/Real Estate, - Toll Roads - Hospitality - Restaurants - Addiction Treatment Centers - Daycares - Hospice
What's next?
Doh, I keep forgetting that this site doesn't do markdown.
There seems to be no logical connection from "shitty people are successful" to "empathy is not useful to society."
Even if I accepted the second statement (which to be clear, I absolutely do not), it doesn't follow that empathy isn't useful to society. Society is not benefited by everyone running about chasing their own personal success to the exclusion of all others: that kind of world isn't even called a society. We have other names for that and they're less positive.
No, it's not about mental models, it's that what you're describing is, at the limit, no longer a society at all. You need a different word for the kind of Randian endgame you're advocating for. Using "society" for it is just confusing things for everyone involved.
People who can't see green are evidence of a genetic defect, not evidence that green doesn't exist.
This seems to be a flawed mental model in itself.
At the very least, you should elaborate on your definition of empathy. Do you think cognitive empathy is bad? If so, you’re ignoring that social interactions impact outcomes.
Old people can be wrong, and in this case, they are.
>There is no reason to have empathy.
This is a category mistake. You reason that empathy is superfluous if people are the cause of their misfortune. However, whether people are the cause of their misfortunes is utterly irrelevant to whether there is a reason to have empathy.
So far, none of your arguments have had any discernible logic behind them. If you are so convinced that empathy is needless, why can you not articulate a coherent argument for your position?
Is that what not having empathy in a society feels like? People just talking at each other without any particular goal in mind other than being unpleasant to each other?
Are you sure that would be the poster's attempt.
> you're just being
He seems to be discussing, to some of us.
What do you suspect he is attempting to do?
Anyone can read this thread and see this for themselves.
You mean, like, a pack of wild dogs?
On the contrary, the "respect" towards others is a condition to societies. Otherwise, all you'd had would be "accomplices". And also since Edward Bunker told us that actually, "dog eat dog",
> will actively hurt your own life
in a pool of free rogues you'll be at severe disadvantage as opposed to a society.
> One only lives once so you better make sure
you will achieve what you should. That includes¹ being something good, not just having some fleeting goods.
--
¹Edit: I wrote 'includes', but that's rhetoric - I meant "mostly is".
Again that is your perspective on "winning", which remains subjective (and normally faulty). Others call psychopathic achievers simply "contemptible".
> Whats the benefit of a "society"?
That would be the whole work of Thomas Hobbes, for example: avoiding the nightmare of perpetual conflict. It is very linear to see the benefit of being able to trust your neighbour.
Then, you acknowledge that you benefit from empathy. But only so long as people do not detect that you are not participating in mutual understanding and reciprocation. Once they notice your lack of genuine engagement, your previously gained benefits will disappear.
On the other hand, people who exhibit empathy towards others will continue to benefit.
Do you see that, by your own logic, empathy is beneficial to society?
No. Very clearly I meant "to be able to trust your neighbour is an asset; not being able to trust your neighbour is a liability", which is a plain analytic basic reply to your question. The statement you replied with has nothing to do with what I have written. If there was a misunderstanding, instead of just bad communication, it may reveal why you see things in a twisted way - but then know it is really a faulty perspective, not the state of things.
Of course you can be """benefiting""" from the lack of society, the "frontier anarchy" in which you implicitly declare are in: were it a society, you would have received since a very early age a credible absolute threat of violence, or shunning, which would have destroyed an advantage of profiting inappropriately.
So you’re a leech on society, got it.
Something tells me you’d be face down in a ditch somewhere if the world actually reflected your ideal instead of the comfy one we live in where you get to take advantage of the “naive”.
(But also, you come across as unhappy and angry, so maybe you're wrong about whether you need personal relationships to be happy. Many people are bad at understanding what makes them happy and end up unhappy because they mistakenly pursue things like wealth.)
– Captain G. M. Gilbert, Psychologist at Nuremberg Trials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
things that lack empathy: corporations, machines, AI, psychopaths things that are problematic to society: corporations, machines, AI, psychopaths
And """success""" is not a value. Taken in those ways, it is the mark of the psychopath.
Of course they did, because it is easier to achieve goals if you cut corners. In a gaming framework, it amounts to cheating.
And after all that, the odds that you'll be the top psychopath are extremely poor.
It is correct to see that you have that one life, so you have to use it wisely. The issue will remain about what is "wisely".
> how do I benefit from having
Did anybody tell you you should? You should develop adequate understanding instead - and that will also put the rest into the right perspective.
Just re-read the statement: you were not told that you would benefit from moral behaviour, you were told that you will benefit from understanding. You then were informed that understanding also has side effects.
Consider this: if you were to ask a parent “would you rather your child grow up to be wildly intelligent but have sociopathy to the point of being utterly alone, or frankly average (or even dull) intellectually but have a rich social life with meaningful relationships, which would you choose?” I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to take the former.
It’s like asking, “could you be happy if you were a double amputee?” I trust the answer of an actual amputee than someone just guessing.
The tiger thing is just a weird digression, considering this conversation started with the premise that humans are an innately social species. Let’s keep the discussion on point with humans.
While job searching, I have tried to use techs like Sketches in my filters but it mostly draws up a blank. Would love to work on genuinely interesting stuff like that again.
It honestly did leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I thought what the end goal of it all was.
I don't think author means "best minds" literally. I think they mean it ironically, more like "those who are most eager to perform the task assigned to them".
But maybe I'm saying the obvious. Irony is admittedly hard to translate into writing.
> Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?
"Great" and "best" are both just words, words whose definition is defined by us who use them.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2024/05/17/collections-on-the-reign-of-al...
Ultimately we get what we incentivize and reward as a society. Recent events are a painful reminder of that.
Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithetical to what a "best mind of a generation" would truly be.
It's wasted talent with few redeeming qualities for society and a lack of innovation/creativity around using your talents to improve the world.
A "best mind of the generation" would find a way to be successful without riding such a lazy conveyor belt of life.
I'm not sure what Ginsberg meant when he used the term but I imagine it wasn't the same type of mind.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
It's the other way around. It's not just, or primarily, about run of the mill software devs. It's also about the would-be top mathematicians and physicists and psychologists and others - best minds in various domains, that in a better world would be busy solving real problems, but due to quirk of the economy end up working on ruining lives of other people, at scale, because adtech pays well while almost all useful work pays a pittance.
I remember this quote not as judging or categorizing people by smartness, but as lamenting a world which mismanages humanity's potential so badly, by literally directing our best problem solvers to work on creating problems for everyone.
Fwiw I kinda agree with both of you. Don't really know how to square it
People in the industry like to reduce 'intelligence' to a single dimension. You can see this phenomenon directly in the current AI wave in which "intelligence" has been reduced to "does well at 'knowledge worker' tasks and passes arbitrary benchmarks we have defined".
For a group to come up with a good enough definition that still ranks among the top and which is suited for the specific tasks at hand, seems like a show of intelligence. It isn't perfect, but to what extent is that avoiding premature optimization? Once the definition has issues, it'll be refined more. No need to waste time refining it if we never build tools that hit the limits of the current definition.
The more subtle point is that many empathetic people have bullshit jobs: they too work in service of it for simply their livelihood.
Best, to me, means people who are the top of their specialty, whether it be mathematics, astrophysics, rocketry, economics, business, politics, pedagogy, archeology, etc. People with unnerving dedication and pursuit of knowledge to advance whatever their specialty is. It could be the marketing most of us loathe but it can also be any of the above and more and only a few pursuits only tangentially imply empathy.
I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.
We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.
(Not that I'd automatically accept Ginsberg's evaluation of best minds.)
Its an old recording that the main character listens to in the end cutscene while visiting Elisabet's grave, and (spoilers) the main character was created as a clone of Elisabet. It's very hard hitting after the whole experience.
> GAIA: Query: What did she say?
Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, "Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don't make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death."
GAIA: You often tell stories of your mother. But you are childless.
Elisabet Sobeck: I never had time. I guess it was for the best.
GAIA: If you had had a child, Elisabet, what would you have wished for him or her?
Elisabet Sobeck: I guess... I would have wanted her to be... curious. And willful - unstoppable, even... but with enough compassion to... heal the world... just a little bit.
That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.
I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?
I'm with you on the optimistic outlook, for the most part. But I think there will also be quite a bit of pain felt by a lot of people (job loss, bad code, bad info, etc.) until we can find ways to correct.
Still a nice to read piece though, made me smile, can be applied to many things, from crypto (the coin kind) to politics to Rust to Nix to ads [best minds of our generation?] to ... .
(I assume it's about AI btw, because of the nuclear power station. Anyway, I'm not bored at all of any of the topics I mentioned :) .)
Why do we allow people like that to cause global warming and chop down the rainforest for soy latte when a complaints-oriented LLM could output the same zzz-tier slop posting as a million of his kind, all at the cost of much lower footprint?
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/susta...
Blaming soy lattes for deforestation is like blaming avocado toast for a bad economy.
WTF does this mean? This sentence is grammatically incorrect.
Huh. I did not realise it was originally in reference to an actual _place_.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there
It is correct to write: there is a "there" there. It would also be correct to write: there is a "there" to it. But it is grammatically incorrect to write: there is a "there" there to it.
Moreover I think you could argue the author is using the phrase as an abstract noun. Consider:
That there's a solidity to it.
That there's a "there" there to it.
The first turns naturally to my ear; the second is a bit forced but works IMO.
> The phrase "That there’s a ‘there’ there to it" in this context means that "it" (likely AI or some other over-hyped technology) has a kind of undeniable substance or presence — even if it's unwelcome, overwhelming, or problematic. It's not just hype or smoke; it’s real, it’s happening, and it matters — which ironically contributes to the speaker’s frustration and exhaustion.
> It’s a nod to the idea that you can’t ignore it anymore, because it’s not just talk — it’s manifesting in tangible, consequential ways.
> The phrase echoes Gertrude Stein’s famous line about Oakland: “There’s no there there”, which meant a place had no substance or significance. Inverting that to “there’s a ‘there’ there” means this “it” is very much real, unavoidable, and has weight — and that’s part of what makes it so exhausting.
> In short: "It’s not just hype anymore — it's here, it's real, and that sucks."
And now I understand.
Except it’s not rubbish out. The output is astoundingly good - something I would have considered science fiction a few years ago.
It’s not perfect. But as a tool in certain contexts, it is already proving its worth. And it’s only going to get better.
Sorry that you’re sick of it, but I think this tech is here to stay.
I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.
The doomerism and hand wringing is a form of hype.
I think that to say it is overhyped says more about what you read and the company that you keep than it does about the actual technology. I don’t mean that as an insult or anything - clearly there is a lot of hype about AI on HN, which I also read.
But I would say that most people in my life actually don’t have enough experience with AI. Outside of work, I’m the only person I know using it every day. And it’s something that very rarely comes up in discussion.
I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.
That sounds... Good?
Lots of people run into using whatever is vogue without even thinking twice about it. See the massive move to using cloud for absolutely everything, money be damned, and you'll see what I mean. Cargo culting is a huge issue in the industry.
At least they're actually considering if it's making them more or less productive, compared to the vast majority of the ecosystem.
Just writing everything down isn't data. You have to have a standardized methodology and low-ambiguity signals. You should have systems of blinding.
What's your proposed metric for "productivity" for software developers? You could probably get a management prize for it.
At 1,000 hours of "debate", it is unlikely that anyone is considering if it is more or less productive, but rather are using that time to convince themselves that their position is the right one, even when it isn't.
I mean, if you take that not as an exaggeration but at face value, it's 200 days of 5 hours of discussions per day. I'm fairly sure the specific number is an exaggeration, but if it isn't, I'd probably agree with you :)
I do use LLMs for some specific tasks, they can be quite good at some stuff but the general hype of it by non-technical folks trying to fit it into every single use-case under the sun is absolutely tiring... Having to explain for the n-th time why what we are trying to do is not a good fit for AI™ is exhausting, not because I have to explain it again but because I know I will have to do it again next week, at least another couple of times.
AI is being viewed in this hype as almost literal magic, it can do anything, we just have to wish for AI to do it (whatever the fuck AI means by now, it's just an umbrella for magical thinking).
I'm tired, and definitely bored.
I'm really excited that LLMs exist, and they've been making my life much easier, but to each their own.
Hyped as it is, it is important to be here to discuss its uses, misuses and implications. Some if it is fascinating, and other parts are fascinatingly bad.
I understand the fatigue with it. But that it is used right (or at all) is a conversation worth having.
Nobody wants it???
You're not paying attention.
I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.
Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.
People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.
When you're 60 or 70, you will wish to have a body of a 25 year old.
Dying early from rotting teeth is normal in nature, yet you probably brush, floss, and go to dentist.
And no, there's no zero rational connection. LLMs and other types of neural nets are already demonstrating they can solve complex tasks. Unless there's some intrinsic barrier to how intelligent they can become, we should surpass human level intelligence within years, maybe a decade.
Once you surpass human level intelligence, you can scale scientific research by orders of magnitude.
Heck, AI already assists scientific research. We basically solved protein folding problem with AI.
You agree it is a problem, then. What are some solutions you can think of? I'm not convinced the gain is worth the pain, but maybe you have some ideas for me to think about.
Around 100k people die from age-related disease every day. I'd be careful to dismiss that as not a problem.
Wearing crafted pieces of glass on my head every waking moment is not normal, but I choose to do it.
It's normal for half of all babies to die in the first year of their life. It's normal for an infected limb to commonly lead to death. Etc.
And I do enjoy life, that's exactly why I want it to be much much longer.
The chain is rather short. You don't even need immortality right away. Longevity escape velocity.
What's cool with humans is that we're able to reflect on our own being and our societies, and when we group together, we can enforce large-scale changes that improve the lives of millions.
We might be mortal meat bags right now, but maybe it isn't the only way, for better or worse.
Machine learning is certainly a extremely handy in tacking these issues, thinking of breakthroughs like AlphaFold and similar. However, I'd like to push against your take:
1. There already are tremendous developments happening in those fronts you mentioned. Praising AI as "our only chance" is quite a stretch and possibly even a harmful statement, considering how severely under-funded these research projects are.
2. It seems to me the poem is more about LLMs/glorified chat bots than general machine learning. In that context, I wouldn't consider them as super useful in Alzheimer's research, certainly not "our only chance".
I'm sure humanity can grind through these hard problems in hundreds or thousands of years without AIs.
But I would prefer to be alive, so there's urgency.
The drag in decision making of democracy is a feature, not a bug.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.
Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.
To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosaurs as big, scaly lizards, myself included. That's what we were taught, that's what all of our culture showed us, that's what our museums contained. It was the pervasive view for well over a hundred years before we were even born. But now we know that many of them had feathers! This is an uncontroversial fact, but almost everyone currently over the age of 30 is wrong about it, and everyone under the age of 30 has the (currently believed to be) correct view!
Now think about how many other facts we were taught 30+ years ago. Which do we now know are wrong? What cultural beliefs did we learn growing up, that are now outdated and believed to be harmful? What systems do we need to have to update those beliefs? Given current evidence, will those systems actually work? Relearning information and modifying your lifelong habits is really, really hard compared to children learning new information. I don't think the vast majority of people would put in the effort. I think science and culture would stagnate. Death is the process by which we give power to younger people, who have better information to work with than we did. Death is how we make cultural and scientific progress.
While this is something I feel strongly about, I also understand your point of view. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I think the folks working in longevity fields really need to think about and address these problems before they open Pandora's Box and eliminate natural death. I'm not convinced their work is good for humanity.
You don't need to "completely update their information about the world" to take in a new idea.
Second time you're not making any sense.
Whenever I read this I just lose all credibility for the author. As if millions of DAU having their problems solved are invisible to them.
May as well be bored about steam turbines or refrigeration.
This posts reeks of a worrying lack of agency.