I have already written a comment here, apologies. However, I have something else to say other than a hot take, about Ed Zitron:
I believe that Ed Zitron plays a very important gadlfy role in all of this.
However, if you look at his subreddit, it appears that he has created a 100% AI denier following. My gut makes me worry for them, but I wonder where the truth really lies.
For those of us involved with code, Sonnet 3.5 was a revelation, and Opus 4.5 scared the crap out of many, and converted some of us to believers in "the exponential."
Now, in other verifiable output fields like finance/spreadsheets in general, Claude is scaring even more people.
I really do respect Ed, but I feel like his schtick might make too many people complacent, thinking that this is all fake. Also, I could be wrong.
> > My gut makes me worry for them, but I wonder where the truth really lies.
> Why worry?
Because, instead of telling people that "it's all a bubble," while he might be partially correct, he is still creating a confirmation bubble following. He is creating a denialist community, where as his followers might be best served by learning how to use the tools.
I am not sure about any of this.
Why worry? Because if he is wrong, then there is a chance that we will be killing the animals in our zoos, to feed the people. This is something that really happened during the last "great depression."
I worry about the plight of my fellow man as it affects me.
I still don't see what the big deal is. If LLMs are (or become) all they're cracked up to be, it shouldn't matter whether someone "learns to use the tools" today or tomorrow or five years from now. In fact they should become much easier to use as they become more intelligent, you shouldn't need all these fancy prompting strategies anymore.
(Reminds me of search engines. People who really knew how to search for things honed that skill over a period of time, only for those skills to become irrelevant now that search engines are much smarter.)
I guess my point is - why must the technology insist upon itself? Evangelizing for people to use it when they don't want to, just sounds cultish. If it's useful, people will eventually use it - like any other new technology. If someone doesn't find it useful yet, maybe they just don't work in a field that AI is good at yet.
> Because, he tells people that "it's all a bubble," while he might be partially correct, he is still creating a confirmation bubble following. He is creating a denialist community, where as his followers might be best served by learning how to use the tools.
Tractors didn't get it because about the time they became useful for most farmers WWII was pushing the need for less men on the farm so they could go to war. There were tractors before then, but the previous ones had big negatives if you were not a much larger farm than most were then.
I don't understand the question. (maybe the question mark is a mistake?) Assuming it's a statement, my guess is the rapacious capitalists would disagree with that claim.
Comment section isn’t nuanced enough to have this conversation and I am on a phone, but that is the way that the industry slandered the luddites as the parent claims.
The truth was that the machines produced worse quality goods and were less safe, not that people couldn’t skill up to use them and not that there wasn’t enough demand to keep everyone employed. It was quality and safety.
You should look into the issue further, because I had your opinion too until I soberly looked at what the luddites really were arguing for, it wasn’t the end of looms, it was quality standards and fair advertising to consumers.
Every party in the dispute was acting out of economic self-interest: the manufacturers wanted cheaper labour and higher margins, Parliament wanted industrial growth.
Only the workers are getting framed as though self-interest invalidates their position. The Luddites’ arguments about quality standards and consumer fraud were correct on the merits regardless of their motivation for raising them.
“More affordable clothes” that fall apart in a month aren’t more affordable.
And the choice was never mechanisation versus no mechanisation… it was whether the transition would include basic labour and quality standards. With regulation, you’d still have got mechanisation and cheaper clothing in the end… just without the fraudulent goods and wage suppression. Framing it as “society versus a few jobs” is exactly the manufacturer’s argument from the 1810s, which is very effective propaganda reaching through centuries.
“After a few bumps”, mate, people were transported to penal colonies and fucking hanged for asking for quality standards and fair wages.
Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence to protect manufacturer profits. Saying it all worked out eventually doesn’t justify the process, any more than cheap cotton justified the conditions under which it was produced. And frankly, look at modern fast fashion: cheap clothing that falls apart in weeks, produced under appalling conditions overseas. We’re still living with the consequences of the principle that cheapness trumps everything else.
Trying to keep all of labor's sweat as capitalist's own cash is bad actually.
Making clothing more efficient by employing children in dangerous factories is bad actually (what happened in the original factories and now at fast fashion).
Of course you would enjoy that when every single externality involved has conveniently been exported elsewhere and you have been handily trained over generations to accept piss-poor quality clothing as normal.
Perhaps in a couple of centuries when a tube of nutrient slurry is the standard meal, people will be equally proud of not spending 15% of their salary on food...if salaries even exist by then.
> Of course you would enjoy that when every single externality involved has conveniently been exported elsewhere and you have been handily trained over generations to accept piss-poor quality clothing as normal.
Lots of countries attribute the clothing industry to increasing standard of living and economic prosperity. Like India, Pakistan.
Of course, do not ask the question of how they ended up with the original low standard of living to begin with, or how that increased standard of living compares to the standard of living of the westerners proud to announce that they can get the commodities they produce for cheap.
"Something something uplifted from poverty" is much shorter, quippier and cleaner.
If you think that paints an "us vs them" narrative as opposed to asking you not to cut off your introspection where it's convenient for you, then that's on you.
In that sense it's rather similar to triumphantly holding up Big Macs as evidence of the modern food industry being awesome actually. Is it relatively cheaper to fill your stomach than at most other points in history? Sure, but at what cost? There is a debate to be had about whether being stuffed with unhealthy levels of fat/salt/sugar is worth the low price and accessibility, but it would be disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that someone opposed to the existence of McDonald's and the like just "hates efficiency" or wants to "gatekeep" food.
Anyone can make the choice to spend a similarly large amount of their income on clothing the way people did 200 years ago. In fact, it will be even higher quality than people had access to since we have much more advanced materials and techniques than existed back then. But, almost no one does that. Maybe you consider it brainwashing, but I consider it people just making a rational economic choice.
And yes, I can see a world where, if tasteless nutrient slurry was essentially free and perfect nutrition for the body, then people would gladly consume that for most meals, and maybe splurge every now and then on an "old school" meal. I don't really see a problem with that.
> Anyone can make the choice to spend a similarly large amount of their income on clothing the way people did 200 years ago
You really can't. That price/quality point basically does not exist anymore
What's worse is that we have "designer brands" that charge the higher price point but are the exact same low quality as the lower price point stuff. Actual midrange quality just plain does not exist
Sure it does, you just need to get something custom/bespoke/made to measure.
Take your yearly clothing expenditure and multiply it by 10. And then, just like people 200 years ago, be content with 2 to 4 compete outfits. And then stop buying clothes yearly and go more on 10+ year cycle, where you use your funds to mend clothes instead of replacing them.
Even if you only spend $300 on clothes per year, doing it the old school way means you can spend about $15,000 on 2-4 outfits and save the other $15,000 for mending and cleaning over the next 10 years.
I guarantee you you can find a high quality custom outfit for $5000.
It is precisely because I both make and buy custom apparel that I will always push back on people proudly announcing that the Luddites were wrong because they can buy clothes that are worse than rags for a few dollars today. I have actually felt and worked with quality textiles which is why it's crystal clear to me that the slop the modern garment industry produces (and I mean that very literally, a lot of these clothes straight-up lose their structural integrity after a few routine laundry cycles) is not "efficiency". The fact that I live in a region that becomes the ultimate landfill for all of this slop when westerners discard it, doesn't help either.
The luddites were wrong. They lived in a world where people needed to spend a large amount of their income on clothing. They had no cheap alternative - that's the thing they were fighting against. We live in a world where we can have cheap or expensive clothes. Having an option is better than not having an option at all.
There used to be a social contract, but now there are so many people that it's a problem that there is no work for the displaced. The leverage between the very small number of people with vast amounts of capital and a large number of people with very little capital or leverage - this is a societal dynamic that has existed before in the world. There is historical precedent for this, and it's probably worth paying very close attention to what comes next if you are a very wealthy person pushing against all forms of wealth redistribution.
The recently announced "Golden Dome" project intends to get around this issue by putting a vast constellation of satellites into orbit. Each satellite would likely need a serious source of power in order to use its laser. Assuming that's just an engineering problem, then the issue becomes coverage. That is, depending on the adversary's capabilities, you'd need an absolutely massive constellation in orbit [0].
This is such an insane plan, and I don't mean that in a good way.
For one thing, it can do little to nothing about low flying nuclear tipped cruise missiles, especially in less than ideal weather. These already exist, so the Golden Dome system is already inadequate on day one.
The linked article covers that in depth, it's not implausible to punch a hole through a storm with pulsed laser of that class. Honestly we don't know enough about these systems to know their operational limits but we know weather will play a role.
I agree it is behind - but usually only a few days.
I'm a big fan of the VS Code add-in. Despite the current narrative that IDEs are dead, I find the ability to look at multiple things at once is works much better in some kind of.. GUI editing tool.. than just using a terminal.
> OpenAI is offering private-equity firms preferred equity stakes with a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5%, significantly higher than typical preferred instruments, two people familiar with the matter said. It is also offering early access to its newest AI models as it seeks to enlist investors such as TPG and Advent for its joint venture, three sources said.
I used to cosplay as a bike messenger in Seattle. I did not follow the rules at all on my ride to work. There were few bike lanes, and a lot of morons rode on the sidewalks.
I have only been to Paris once, but the cyclists were much more sane in my experience. The bike lanes were clear, and for the most part they stopped at a red light.
I would wager it's the usage of payments and ignoring of pedestrian lights by cyclists is a big factor.
As a pedestrian, I've had FAR more encounters with aggressive cyclists than aggressive drivers (also anecdotal). Makes walking downtown more stressful.
Complete tangent, but I met my equally nerdy brother in Paris last month.
It was my first time, and his fourth. We stayed South of the Republique metro station.
After the literal 30th indie Manga [0] shop that we walked by, I asked him: "how are all these shops financially viable?" He said: "look inside."
Holy crap, they all had customers inside! I had no idea that Japanese culture has such a strong presence in the heart of Paris, in the middle of Europe.
[0] I should be clear, this was not just Manga. There were so many cool indie retro video game shops that it blew my little mind. I should probably get out of my Silesian village more often.
I have to say, I look forward to visiting Paris again as soon as I can find an excuse. I know there are things people could say negatively, as one could say about any large city, but the energy and diversity really drew me in.
I also really like French food, especially when mixed with the crazy chefs in that area that we stayed.
Edit: just so everyone knows, this is what an airport terminal could be, according to Air France: https://postimg.cc/ZCww5xFs - So cool that I had to take photo.
This was the least customer-hostile area that I have ever seen at an airport. Oh, you have to wait for a flight? Just lay back and chill.
Haha, I get that. You may be aware, but this is Terminal 2G.
It is almost like its own tiny airport for short hops by Air France in the EU.
It feels like a completely different world from the main mixed-carrier international disaster situation. It really feels like a designer experimental terminal.
Does it still have the weird security procedures? (Security at CDG is IME very slow and just, well, strange; at least once they were asking people to _carry their passports through the scanners_, rather than leaving them in their bags like in all other airports in Europe).
CDG wouldn’t be my _least favourite airport (I think that’s probably San Francisco, specifically the international terminal), but it definitely would be up there.
So, my brother was departing intercontinental 3 hours prior to my flight to Prague. I hung out with him at one the main terminals in the crazy long security line, until I could not. He showed up 2.5hrs early, and almost missed his flight. Computers were down or something. Once he got to his gate, he had to take a bus to his A350. Crazy shit show. Quote: "this is so ghetto."
Meanwhile, I went to Terminal 2G, and there was absolutely zero security wait. It was like a 1 screener per 3 people type situation. It was like being at some rich people resort airport. Once I got through security, which took 5 minutes, I was presented with a high-end shopping center, a roving smiling robot garbage/recycling can straight out of Shenzhen asking people for deposits... excellent food, anyone could lay down on comfy couches. It blew my mind. It was France, and Air France, flexing.
… Ah. So I just looked it up; no-one flies to Dublin from there (Aer Lingus is 2A, Air France is 2F). Possibly it’s a Schengen-only terminal.
(Living inside Europe but outside Schengen tends to get you the worst terminals/sections of terminals. Berlin Tegel used to have a tiny little terminal that, as far as I could see, only flew to Ireland and Turkey (not sure where the UK flights went from). Absolutely horrendous; there’d sometimes only be one passport control line, so if the person in front of you had an issue you might be waiting for an hour.)
France is the 2nd largest market for manga after Japan (or it was a few years ago). That's surprising because there are almost 7 times more inhabitants in the US.
Those who were a kid in the 80s and 90s in France saw a lot of Japanese anime on TV during this period, so that's part of the explanation.
I believe that Ed Zitron plays a very important gadlfy role in all of this.
However, if you look at his subreddit, it appears that he has created a 100% AI denier following. My gut makes me worry for them, but I wonder where the truth really lies.
For those of us involved with code, Sonnet 3.5 was a revelation, and Opus 4.5 scared the crap out of many, and converted some of us to believers in "the exponential."
Now, in other verifiable output fields like finance/spreadsheets in general, Claude is scaring even more people.
I really do respect Ed, but I feel like his schtick might make too many people complacent, thinking that this is all fake. Also, I could be wrong.
reply