It is interesting to note that “your wealth profile being tied to OpenAI’s stock price” exerts remarkably similar directional pressures as the Basilisk would if it were real.
Any headphone/earphone can be EQed to "precise and neutral" if the distortion is low enough. IEMs like the Etymotic IEMs often do well here, but if you dislike things inserted in your ear canal you might prefer planar magnetic headphones. These typically have lower distortion than dynamic drivers, especially in the bass. I have a set of HifiMan HE400se headphones, which used to be exceptionally good value before the price went up a lot recently.
To get the best possible results from equalization you need to do it by ear by comparison to a calibrated reference loudspeaker, but you can still get good results using other people's measurements. And there's no consensus what the best target curve is. Studio control rooms aren't anechoic chambers so "flat" won't necessarily give you the intended sound. You might find AutoEq useful:
I generally prefer no spatial processing, except in the case of 60s-style hard-panned stereo, which is intended for loudspeakers and does sound a lot better with the "earwax" filter or similar. "Precise and neutral" is a lot more difficult with loudspeakers, both because it's hard to keep distortion low when you're moving a lot of air, and because you have the off-axis response and room acoustics complicating things.
It sounds very close to what I was going for, and feels much softer to hear. I wasn't able to find anything similar earlier with any search engine or an LLM.
The internet is decentralized, which is another way to say lacking in meta-incentive capabilities (e.g. cannot resist incentives for long, unable to influence or modify the set of incentives being applied to it), which means it will always fall prey to the dumbest race-to-the-bottom traps.
But AI is touted as the replacement for the working class? It’s TAM is “the combined wages and salaries of everyone below the C-suite” and it gets trillions of investment dollars, and letters of marque for copyright infringement and hacking, to pursue this market.
I mean, just look at the sequence of events you’re expecting here:
1. Ai companies achieve their stated goals
2. ???
3. Housing, infrastructure, medical care, etc get better for the working class
Are you the king of the underpants gnomes or something? How could it ever turn out this way? Why does anyone think it would? Am I taking crazy pills?
If those goals are fully eliminating need for human labor, then I agree it probably won't be good for most people. But that will probably take at least decades.
Anything short of that, and I think economy will be pretty similar to what it is now. You still need working class and need it to be productive, so you do need them to be reasonably happy, housed, healthy, and you need good infrastructure. With lower cost for all this, why wouldn't things improve, like all times throughout history?
Not parent but I could image an (utopian?) society in which AI/LLM helps us develop software and hardware that can help generating better and cheaper outputs in those fields. Not saying it's going to happen but it could be a possible outcome.
“Are you the king of the underpants gnomes or something?”
No I’m just at the frontlines of this so called “replacement” and all I’m seeing is people doing more with less with no possibility of replacement. I have no idea what all this marketing pablum about TAM replacement is. All I’m seeing is growing businesses serving more people with less resources.
Could it be that CEO’s of struggling businesses are lying about why they’re doing the layoffs? Why are we suddenly believing them on this one issue?
This metaphor does fall apart somewhat when you consider that farm tractors are not made from farmhand muscle fibers, whereas LLMs are in fact made out the stuff they’re rapidly replacing.
No, but I think you could tell a sufficiently compelling allegorical / metaphorical story about how farm tractors, in destroying the livelihood of farmhands, might as well have pried their muscle fibres out of their live bodies.
For sure. No, there's a tragically awful irony in the fact that the clankers run entirely on the (unpaid for) intellectual output and cognitive labour of humanity, white-collar professionals, academics, specialists and creatives, yet the idea is that these people are supposed to be obsoleted by the clankers.
Now the impostors use AI and pretend they are geniuses. That will work, for a while. But I have seen two cases up close now where a relatively stable code base was wrecked inside of 6 months by juniors posing as seniors. In one of these the actual seniors left and now the company has a bit of a problem. I've declined to help fix it, I suggested they re-engage with the people that left, double their salaries and allow them to roll back to when things were still stable but they're not having it, so I don't think it is going to end well for them. You can use AI responsibly, and it will definitely help with some tasks and as long as you are able to contain what gets produced and pace it to the speed at which you can review. But there is a cadre of people that are 'all in' on this, they only see velocity, they don't see the approaching wall. Impact is a given.
It’s like trying to create a new type of imposter syndrome, but instead of referring to complex data structures and architectures, it’s the most effective esoteric inactions to chant at the Jira ticket resolving machine.
Others have capably pointed out why their technology cannot be much of this valuation. I submit that “the ability to grab attention in the AI room” is what is being valued this highly.
If you brought down prod and deleted customer data and told them Claude did it, you’d still be the one in trouble. So they do know how to hold people accountable for actions taken by AI.
Has this actually been put to the test yet? If a company has officially sanctioned, or maybe even encouraged, AI agent usage I'm not sure the employee can be held completely accountable. I doubt any of these companies are providing training of any kind. It would be like if a factory suddenly replaced all the machines with ones without safety features and said "well, it's your fault if you kill yourself or your workmates".
Who is taking anyone to court just to fire them? The test you’re describing seems implausible, I think you’ll have to look for other forms of evidence you find convincing, because you’ll be waiting indefinitely for this one.
Oh, I'm thinking more if an action caused damages outside of the company, like compromising a client's data or even breaking the law etc. Something that would get the courts involved. Say, for example, a vibe coded medical software made it to production and a patient received the wrong dose. Would it be the employee's fault for not using the tools correctly, or the company's fault for recommending the use of said tools?
Makes sense. It might be possible to develop a codec that, in addition to being constant-time, has the property that every prefix of the bits encoding a unit (e.g., a frame or block within a frame) encodes an approximate version of that unit, where the longer the prefix the more faithful the approximation is. Then each unit could be output in full to storage, and the "output file pointer" could then be wound back to a point dependent on how many bits are actually required to represent it accurately -- so keeping the full amount for a full scene change, or just a few bits for the "same as last time" common case.
Oh, that is fascinating - I think a scheme like that could very well give you constant-space as well as constant-time, while calculating and preserving the desired compression information for use in transmission (which itself could separately be made constant for detectable channels).
Sorry if it sucks for their competitive advantage or profit margin or whatever but people are literally going to put this stuff in their bodies to sustain their existence so you have to say what’s in it. If you want to keep your product composition a mystery go make SaaS and put it behind an API.
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