Absolutely true. But China’s industrial dominance is also the government immiserating its people, just in a different way. Domestic consumption in China is famously low, work culture is famously bad (996,etc). And this is because of what their government, not the people of China, have chosen to do.
This is why capital accumulation, of the extreme kind we see today in the USA, is wrong. Not because greed is a sin (although, it is, and most of these guys are going to burn in hell), but because it turns the country into functionally the USSR bureaucracy. We are basically doing central planning in huge swathes of the economy and surprise surprises, it’s not working.
I went on a backcountry camping trip last year and was stargazing as one does. Kept seeing satellites. Was cool at first (used to be a rarity) but it got more and more annoying.
And for what? So that we can have more internet? Oh that’s just what we need. To spend even more time online. I’m sure Elon is quite excited for all of us, no matter where we are, we can be plugged into X just like him!
For the general consumer, they were basically right though. Most people don't use laptops except for work. The primary computing device is the phone, and phones have basically become become mini-ipads in form factor since that ad aired.
Ah, but you forgot private equity, that's about $2473 of profit per ride that needs to be accounted for. This high cost is what we must pay to keep our economy dynamic and efficient.
I like this reply. I think you and I use AI the same way and probably have a lot in common. But I read things more cynically than you do. Things to ponder:
Read the GPT Live announcement. Why do they want to make it more life-like, if not to encourage the pathological engagement? Why does the model say "thank you for that insightful question"?
It is not "just a tool", that is not the goal. It is designed to be a replacement for people. Even in the most charitable "LLMs are just a tool" reading. The value proposition is to have fewer people (dramatically fewer: the "one person unicorn" with fleets of AI agents!) and for those people to spend more time talking to bots. Replace your junior employees with bots. Replace your customer service people with bots. Replace a bored teenager behind the Wendy's counter with a servile golem whose smooth plastic face can easily be wiped down when spit on.
Their metric is engagement, it is how engaged are you and how long do you spend using the application. They will do absolutely anything to get that number up. Remember, after the GPT-4O debacle, when Altman talked about implementing sex bots? That's a shark, smelling blood. Something like 30% of under 18's have used AI chatbots for "companionship," a big subset of those for ERP.
> Would be just weird.
I was a weird kid who spent 10-12 hours a day on the computer, back when computers were primarily low-res screens and boring text. Now everyone is spending 10-12 hours a day on the computer. These things change in a single generation and I'm sure you know as well as I do that boy does it happen fast.
You sound like me: an older, healthy, well-adjusted person who can understand what's going on when the model says "that's a really insightful question!" Most people are not. They will not understand when it's an AI video clone of Chris Helmsworth.
> there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad
Human beings require interaction with other human beings to identify the self. It is impossible to live without others. Read up on solitary confinement sometime - enough time without human companionship will drive any human being (except the schizoaffective) completely insane.
The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be like when society is fully baked with this shit. You're talking to AIs all day at work. You're talking to AI's when you use social media. You're talking to AIs for therapy. You're talking to AIs on dating apps.
If your answer is "well I'll simply touch grass" I agree. But most people won't which is why this is tech is immiserating and, I would argue, evil.
Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings. Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.
Safety critical embedded just doesn’t need as many lines of code. Your typical embedded codebase is small and long-lived, and if you’re spending a fortune to do verification and validation on a piece of code, the bottleneck is not the programmer.
A code change at my role recently, the diff was 6 lines, and that took at least 10 hours of combined writing documentation, figuring out which tests to run and then running them, pre-work for me, to propose the change and describe the behavior of the SW. So AI helps in all these processes, but having the agent write the code vs having me write the code makes no difference at all. I think most safety critical systems are like that.
I have read this article already and "reality has a surprising amount of detail" has become a phrase for me. But, I read it again today because the writing is so good. This guy is a gifted writer.
I'm not a Marxist, far from it. I think the best possible thing is the free market. The problem here, is that the wealth is concentrated so much that the markets are no longer free.
I have 20 veterinarians in my town. That means, if my pet gets sick, I have options. One vet has Elvis posters on the wall; I can't stand Elvis, but I have options. Some veterinarians suit me, some suit my neighbor. Life has a richness to it.
Now, Walton comes in and buys out 50 percent of the vets and makes them all into Walmart. It's all above-board; he has the means, they're all legal transactions. The veterinarians can hardly object, they made out good. But now, half the vets I go into are Wal-mart. The richness of that sliver of my life is gone. And on top of this, Walmart can now throw its weight around in the city council. Extra licensing to open a new vet. Mandatory Elvis posters by law.
See how this is a problem? It's not a Marxian "it's unethical to have accumulation" view. The surplus is not the issue; it's the accumulation.
I hate all of these tech people. I hate the way they think, I hate who they are, I hate their values and their taste. I hate how they raise their children and the media they like and the way of life they promote. Fleets of AI agents in every workspace! phones in every classroom! creepy cameras tracking you! Scan the QR code to see the menu!
But they own so much of society, they are so powerful, that there is _no alternative_. The richest man in the world is turning all of society into X. I wouldn't care if he owned 3 nail salons and turned them all into the "epic cyber meme palace of nails" but he owns like 1.5% of my retirement fund and dropped a quarter million dollars to elect the president of my country and that's just one of these fucking guys!
I am with you on NIMBY zoning (that's the one thing that I think will meaningfully change in my lifetime) but that is pretty far down the list of things that suck.
From TFA.
> The technique is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks
"Somehow." Indeed, it is a mystery. 0.01% of the population has direct control over something like 50% of society's resources. Society moves to enrich them, at everyone else’s expense. Curious that.
"Writing specs" is the essential complexity of programming. What you're saying is that there's no silver bullet. Agents or no agents, punchcards or interpreters, programming is programming at the end of the day.
mlsu.io
msutherland (at) fast mail dot com
meet.hn/city/32.7174202,-117.162772/San-Diego
Socials: - mlsu.at.hn
Interests: Robotics, Hardware
---