I am surprised by the title and the story. Understanding has always been the bottleneck; there is nothing new about it. The argument goes like we humans should understand so we can verify and participate. How bold! Maybe we should have been doing that all along...?

Given it is from "AI Engineer conference" that is expected, it is like TED talks of LLMs.

A good chunk of the non-tech-savvy management equates coding with typing. They're rediscovering Amdahl's law in the agentic LLM era.

For what it's worth, I use Brave and it didn't render properly in a normal tab, but rendered correctly on a private tab! Underlying engine is Chromium anyway, so make of that what you will.

That sounds like something absolutely wild happening in Brave.

Or maybe one of your installed extensions modifying the page (presumably private tabs disable those)?

No. If they still draw an enormous amount of water, that's the finite resource that's getting wasted no amount of money could immediately retrieve. Paying for electricity doesn't mean the resources are not shared.

My understanding is that the water argument is the weakest one - the water is given back to the city, it's not like it's used up. And using water for cooling is one of the "cleanest" uses of water, it's not like toilets or showers.

Personally I am much more concerned about datacenters that take it upon themselves to burn natural gas. And noise. Noise pollution can actually be detrimental to your health, and there's basically no mitigation that exists. So we really have to look at noise.

Absolutely not the same! People need jobs to bring in income. I don't believe those who profit off of this will share it with the world. The power is all concentrated in the few hands that decide whether or not the rest get any semblance of income in the long run. I don't believe UBS until it happens.

It sounds like you think no technological advances will make the world richer in the long run. I politely suggest that the past century of economic growth shows problems with this argument. I also think that, while jobs are important for prosperity, the jobs of mathematicians are a minuscule fraction of a percent of the total.

So, you're arguing that just because mathematicians are a minuscule, it doesn't matter for prosperity? Because, if so, that is an insane take honestly.

Really? "The benefit to all of humanity from advances in mathematics outweighs the lost jobs of research mathematicians". That's an insane take?

It is the very humanity that is absent in all of this. The power is still in the hands of a very few. I feel you're dismissing this with a grandeur vision of AI developement.

I hate this timeline. I might be excited for the kind of answers this AI builds for unsolved problems, and also for learning new things by talking to it. But, I feel like I'm in the minority of people here who feel this could be a net negative endeavor with this having to kill a lot of educational institutions and their ability to fund themselves in the long run. It's not worth that.

Thank you! I don't like substack at all. I hate the typography overall. It's not hard to power up a static website, especially these days using Jekyll, Hugo, or hundreds of other such framework in so many different languages.

The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.

That's fair as well. It occured to me as I wrote my post that not everybody would glue themselves to screen while eating.

But how do you read? On a device?

Sounds like I'd enjoy those videos as well! Any particular recommendations?

Kyoto https://youtu.be/cLvzRt2zXZY?is=1xHA-QA43ZJnrbvo

Provence https://youtu.be/HcKDXkwkO-E?is=ERjiyn0HOisl32Zr

What I imagine every Italian family is like https://youtu.be/VIioLuSU7q8?is=isilOdAL8z1GSDw6

I feel seen and heard.

I'm conflicted in feeling there's now a lot more to do with AI, but also if it ain't me doing most of it, where's the fun in that? Days feel meaningless, and don't know who will pay for what I want to do, after all these years of heavy training.

Exactly. We should preserve a society where at least some people have a chance of doing what they love, especially if they have a talent for it. AI is eliminating that, whether or not people can find other jobs.

Disagree. In many professions, people were paid to endure the boring parts to be able to finally do fun parts. See academia; a professor writes grants, attends committee meetings, teaches (sometimes undesirably) and such, to finally go do research which is fun. If the fun parts are predominantly done by AI, and are removing people from getting paid, what fills one's stomach?

Stomach-filling ability is actually tangential to whether one has to engage with the bits they don't want to engage with, since it isn't precluded by the fun parts (there are people out there who are able to fill their stomachs from only doing what they find fun). But also it turns out to be a good example of that which forces one into doing that which they don't find fun. And IMO this - pretty typical - conflation really emphasizes how much we're stuck in and need to change this system that forces so many people to do things they don't want to do so they can fill their stomachs.