It’s interesting because I’m seeing some emerging conversations where users are tending to prefer general agents that have their preferential bias over more constrained or specially built agents, because there are certain arbitrary goal criteria they either have forced on them or want to force upon the agent and the general purpose agents tend to do well at this because they just trudge along and do whatever.
Meanwhile more specialized agents that try to add or enforce constraints around a problem space where certain aspects tend to be well established don’t sit well with a lot of uses. “No, you and general knowledge don’t know best, I know best… do this.”
I can see the use case for both but I’m seeing a whole lot more willingness to want confirmation bias, essentially to automate away parts of jobs and tasks people already do but in the personalized or opinionated way they’ve established, unwilling to explore alternative options.
So the general purpose agent structures that just kickoff whatever they can tend to favor best in terms of positive feedback from agent users. Meanwhile it to some degree ignores many of the potential benenfits of having agents with general knowledge and bounded by general established bounds. It’s basically the whole “please do parts of my job for me but only the way I want them done.”
People aren’t ready for being wrong or change, they just want to automate parts of their processes away. So I’m not sure “no” is going to sit well with a lot of people.
Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work.
Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.
I don’t think this is a good long term solution. LLMs can do easy language substitutions and you can even force them to add errors. So relying on that alone won’t work as people intentionally make things look more “human.”
Right, but the problem here are other humans yelling "witch," not LLMs. You're combating people's terrible witch-detector, not anything factual or real.
I think it’s taken by greed focused extremists, they’re just trying to bide favor with some other extremist groups as their flail to maintain their power and attempt to expand it.
In the security space you’re encouraged to be as transparent as possible. Most modern forms have ample space to write in detailed explanations.
I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in processing background checks. It usually is something that’s asked about in an in person interview at that point.
Tech has slowly been moving that way anyways. In terms of ROI, you’re often much better off targeting whales and large clients than trying to become the ubiquitous market service for consumers. Competition is fierce and people are poor comparatively, so you need the volume for success.
Meanwhile if you go fishing for niche whales, there’s less competition and much higher ROI for them buying. That’s why a lot of tech isn’t really consumer friendly, because it’s not really targeting consumers, it’s targeting other groups that extract wealth from consumers in other ways. You’re selling it to grocery stores because people need to eat and they have the revenue to pay you, and see the proposition of dynamic pricing on consumers and all sorts of other things. Youre marketing it for analyzing communications of civilians for prying governments that want more control. You’re selling it to employers who want to minimize labor costs and maximize revenue, because they have millions or billions often and small industry monopolies exist all around, just find your niche whales to go hunting for.
And right now I’d say a lot of people in tech are happy to implement these things but at some point it’s going to bite you too. You may be helping dynamic pricing for Kroger because you shop at Aldi but at some point all of this will effect you as well, because you’re also a laboring consumer.
The reason why whaling and government contracts are increasingly the best options available is because the wealth from the working class has mostly been extracted... And with less and less disposable wealth available to the populous, targeting them for products gets increasingly competitive as anything non essential gets ignored
It's a negative feedback loop, and the politicians would rather reduce taxes on the rich then reverse that trend
The sad reality is that 80-90% of us are simply no longer economically relevant to $Trillion dollar companies. Even if we were paying customers, each of our total lifetime values is a rounding error on these guys' balance sheets. An individual could swear off Company X, and it wouldn't even be noticed, not even by someone deliberately looking for the economic impact of losing a customer.
We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.
> We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
Thats basically the foundational idealogy of the united states. Thats not the issue.
The real issue is your next sentence. The government can just loophole around their intentional limitations by paying private companies to work on their behalf.
I'm aware it's intentional on the government's end. My point is it is not intentional by the original intentions, and should be a priority for people to advocate to fix.
The only private companies with this power are monopolies. Effective competition would destroy this behavior. So the real problem is the government _intentionally_ and _illegally_ allows monopolies to form so they can get access to this workaround.
>
allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
<
Somehow this reminds me about Blackwater / Xe Technologies? :-/
(Im betting 100 USD that soon we will find out that ICE also deployed "private financed forces" to "support state actions"?)
>We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
It really isn't, given that the government literally has a monopoly on violence, and therefore it makes sense to have more guardrails for it. That's not to say private entities should have free reign to do whatever it wants, but the argument of "private entities can do [thing] that governments can't, so we should ban private entities too!" is at best incomplete.
>Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
Again, this is at best an incomplete argument. The government can't extract a confession out of you (5th amendment). It can however, interview your drinking buddies that you blabbed your latest criminal escapades to. Is that the government "bypassing" the 5th amendment? Arguably. Is that something bad and we should ban? Hardly.
Your cell phone provider does not constitute "drinking buddy". The fact that, in essence, everyone is being surveilled location wise all the time by these providers is reason enough to restrict the activity.
> The poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. DRINKING BUDDY IS WATCHING YOU.
> 'Does Drinking Buddy exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Drinking Buddy is the embodiment of the Party.'
'Does he exist like you or me?'
'You do not exist', said O'Brien.
> Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Drinking Buddy is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Drinking Buddy is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
>Your cell phone provider does not constitute "drinking buddy".
You're right, it should be even more scandalous for the government to get information out of my drinking buddy, because the information I told him was in confidence, and he promised he wouldn't tell anyone. My cell phone provider, on the other hand, clearly says in their ToS who they'll share data with and in what circumstances.
A non-exhaustive list that has, time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again, to downplay the grossly cavalier approach they take to the "privacy" of your location data.
They value it alright. At several dollars per person.
And what many are saying is that the phone provider should not be allowed to be so free with your data in the ToS. In the same way that your landlord can’t add a slavery clause to your lease.
This is why I advocate for making selling location/identifying data illegal. If nobody is allowed to sell it then the government cannot legally buy it.
Government is supposed to follow the law as much as everybody else. Whatever they do has to hold up as legal in court when contested. If they acquire information illegally they will be losing trials.
I agree completely with your first paragraph, but I'm not sure what privatization has to do with it. Also, I agree that more regulation of private parties is needed. Or even better, break up the private companies that are like multi-state governments in terms of power.
Why not vote for some law limiting the government’s buying of this data? After all, I expect a say in how the government is run, so that seems like the appropriate path. I don’t see why I should expect a say in how AT&T is run. AT&T can’t raise an army, or enter my house, or shoot me.
How exactly do I vote for such a law? We do not have a direct democracy, and I'm not aware of any viable political candidates that have this sort of thing as a part of their platform.
I think you’re missing the main limiting resource: money.
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
Complain to our representatives who will do absolutely nothing because the system is ripe for abuse and we’ve put people who actively want to abuse and exploit it into office.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
In my opinion it’s to some degree an artifact of immature and/or rapidly changing technology. Basically not many know what the best approach is, all the use cases aren’t well understood, and things are changing so rapidly they’re basically just creating interfaces around everything so you can change flow in and out of LLMs any way you may desire.
Some paths are emerging popular, but in a lot of cases we’re still not sure even these are the long term paths that will remain. It doesn’t help that there’s not a good taxonomy (that I’m aware of) to define and organize the different approaches out there. “Agent” for example is a highly overloaded term that means a lot of things and even in this space, agents mean different things to different groups.
I liken the discovery/invention of LLMs to the discovery/invention of the electric motor - it's easy to take things like cars, drills, fans, pumps etc. for granted now, and all of the ergonomics and standards around them seem obvious in this era, but it took quite a while to go from "we can put power in this thing and it spins" to the state we're in today.
For LLMs, we're just about at the stage where we've realized we can jam a sharp thing in the spinny part and use it to cut things. The race is on not only to improve the motors (models) themselves, but to invent ways of holding and manipulating and taking advantage of this fundamental thing that feel so natural that they seem obvious in hindsight.
Meanwhile more specialized agents that try to add or enforce constraints around a problem space where certain aspects tend to be well established don’t sit well with a lot of uses. “No, you and general knowledge don’t know best, I know best… do this.”
I can see the use case for both but I’m seeing a whole lot more willingness to want confirmation bias, essentially to automate away parts of jobs and tasks people already do but in the personalized or opinionated way they’ve established, unwilling to explore alternative options.
So the general purpose agent structures that just kickoff whatever they can tend to favor best in terms of positive feedback from agent users. Meanwhile it to some degree ignores many of the potential benenfits of having agents with general knowledge and bounded by general established bounds. It’s basically the whole “please do parts of my job for me but only the way I want them done.”
People aren’t ready for being wrong or change, they just want to automate parts of their processes away. So I’m not sure “no” is going to sit well with a lot of people.
reply