It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".
There is nothing wrong with “inserting yourself in the middle of everybody’s business”. That is how you reduce friction between parties and make optimizations that are only possible by being able to manage both sides of the connection. It’s also a really good way to make money.
When I went to college for CS, I was on a scholarship that required I keep my GPA. To have a little insurance for that, every semester I took a random extra easy intro class. That way, if I was bombing a hard class, I could drop it to keep my GPA while still being a full-time student.
One semester, I took Intro to Sociology and it was a revelation. I ended up completing all of the courses required to get a minor in sociology within a couple of years. I dropped out before I ever got close to finishing my CS major.
I wish more people knew sociology. It affects our lives more directly and profoundly than possibly any other science, but it's mostly unknown by the masses.
Good question. It's been over twenty years at this point, and we skimmed a lot of texts in the classes I took. The one that actually stuck with me was Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life", but I don't know how much that would still resonate.
Emile Durkeim's "Suicide" is famous in sociology because it helped kick off the entire field of study. It was, I think, one of the first works to consider how a profound individual action (suicide in this case) might be largely determined by the surrounding social structures.
I don't know what a good introductory book would be.
Paging through the four of Goffman's books I read a quarter of a century or so ago a day or two ago was a bit of a disappointment for me, personally; not sure if I am attempting to dissuade you, but it always disappoints me to read something years later, after experiencing a good chunk of a lifetime after it, and feel a let down. I remember that book well, though. And I know what you mean about sociology... though I feel like most of the models and almost everything they teach in school now doesn't fit anything people have spent the last ten or twenty years throwing out there. It upsets me (more than I let on). It isn't "only" or even largely AI that makes me sad; AI makes me angry on top of the 'sad', if anything.
Mostly just replying here because I enjoyed your other comments on this thread, and do not want to get too deep into comments. But man; it makes me sad how much the world changed. Most things in the world feel so heavily inauthentic now.
A comment on your other comment here, though: bespoke software will never be like it used to be. I don't know if anyone will FEEL the way it used to feel to program something, even as recently as 25-30 years ago. I mean, I still remember my excitement at buying my first real IDE, and how tickled I was that parts of it reminded me of Smalltalk/ParcPlace. Like, man; the first time I didn't have to make an icon for an exe independently of the software I was coding and compiling in. Or the first time I figured out cc on an old AT&T unix box with no documentation... or essentially grinding my way through learning SQL in the early 90s when books didn't exist... Who the heck would think that was even interesting now? We all have and had the web but even that seems
quaint to the newer people. I am not sure why they code or what they feel they get out of it other than inflated (often poor) attitudes and not always deserved paychecks.
Anyway.
Building actual things with one's actual hands is, indeed, nice. Disagree though about it being in the attic. Sometimes it has every bit as much meaning there as anywhere else. Don't need a reason to create things like that. And not interested in art.
Anyway, not sure I would enjoy it as much as I did the first time, but check out Sissela Bok's writing if you haven't.
There. All my replies to your threads in one place, kinda. Sorry if it is a bit hard to follow.
> It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM [...] can't begin to think about how to make money with one.
I think they can. I think every frontier LLM company in this industry knows exactly how to make money with an LLM and furthermore it's almost bulletproof - they just don't want to say it.
LLMs are going to be the most devastatingly effective ad delivery mechanism that we've ever seen once they start flipping the switches. They're going to load the context up with all your demographic information and preferences and advertising susceptibilities and then tell it to subtly suggest to you all kinds of shit you need to buy.
It's going to be nearly subliminal and so slick that you're not even going to know you're being advertised to. It will be like your best friend gently convincing you over a period of months to buy a new EV, or that you need to refinance your mortgage, or that you should move to Atlanta.
They know exactly how to make money with these things, they just can't be the first ones to say it.
What's funny is that nobody even believes the SpaceX/Tesla fever dream stuff - not even the fanboys. Data centers in space that violate the laws of logistics+thermodynamics? 30 trillion dollars worth of revenue?
No, they only believe that somebody else believes this shit. The entire valuation of Elon's companies is based on greater fool theory. But it notably is called greater fool, not infinite fool; we are going to run out of fools at some point...
Shorting it would only make sense if you believe the stock value is at all correlated to the technical feasibility of the long term vision. I think the entire point of the person you're responding to is that it's fairly obviously not.
I'd love to know what their actual plan is, the one they hope will allow them to manage a soft landing rather than a sudden crash when the music stops.
I mean, they must have one and it must be at least minimally plausible - otherwise the regulatory authorities would have stepped in long before things got to this stage... right?
They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.
They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.
Yes, there are enough people who still think this won't happen despite very conclusive recent history of this exactly happening.
Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves.
Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer.
Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc.
I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".
This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation.
Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
You're idea is well intentioned, but this legislation will be used by the well known platforms to burden the heterogeneous web and kill it with legislation.
What we need is a 2nd renaissance of small discussion forums.
You don't need to use X, Facebook, instagram and the rest of the commercial web. Seek alternative, REAL COMMUNITIES.
What you’re arguing for is essentially a return to pre-1990s enforcement of antitrust laws. Not new legislation, just the pragmatic application of existing legislation.
Yeah, there is a suspicious amount of down-voting of anti-surveillance comments in here. I'd say there's about a 99% chance Flock is paying astroturfers.
But yes, if a system fails to prioritize its continued existence, it doesn't matter what else it accomplishes, it will cease to exist as that system.
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