As it just so happens, I was struggling with this in Python recently and this post describes a better solution than what I came up with.
> Essentially, if this is a feature you must have, Python seems like the wrong language.
While I don't disgree in the absolute sense, there are constraints. You can't just switch language or change the problem you're solving. If you have the need for more type safety, then this is a price worth paying.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.
I don't think it's common for people to wait for flow to come in order to get things done. You can set up the conditions for it and likely reliable trigger it, but getting things done (or concentrating on a problem) is how you get to flow in the first place.
You might be in the flow state without knowing. :)
> Let me be more clear: individual programmers are improving AI for its intellectual amusement, but organizations use it for its disruptive powers. Two different groups of people, with a bit of an intersection.
That's clearer, but I still take issue with it. You can say the same about any software project or maybe even most work in general. As software engineers (I assume that's your profession too), we automate things that could have kept hundreds of people employed. There isn't that much different with AI - as long as there is money spent on the problem, there will be people willing to work on it, especially at the forefront of technolgy.
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I agree with your second point. With that said, climate is way clearer distructive behavior, while also being more of a nuissance, a side effect of growth. AI has enormous potential and could, in the most optimistic outcomes, lead us to a utopia. Obviously, we all know that will not happen.
Also, the reason why AI progress will not be halted - we cannot allow our adversaries take the lead on this. It's really that simple.
There were plenty of people 'complaining' about Copilot and there are plenty 'complaining' about Devin.
However, what can you really complain about? Technological progress? We can't just decide to ignore AI. Just to play devil's advocate, if there really were clear signs of this impending distruction, there could be some sort of international agreement to halt progress. Realistically, this will never happen.
> All along, we are incrementally improving AI because it is an intellectual amusement
You're contradicting yourself here. Is it just 'intellectual amusement' if this technology is as disruptive as you claim?
If what you were saying was accurate and taken at face value, then we would see companies and products simply crumbling every few years, for seemingly unknown reasons.
There is definitely some amount of truth to this but, by definition, it cannot be as bad as you portrey it.
As with everything else, it's all about incentives. If well-crafted software made more money, then all we'd have would be craftsmanship. But it doesn't.
There is plenty of software which has to be reliable and without surprises, and that is where you will find craftsmanship. Except that doesn't usually make as much money as "big tech", so it won't pay as much and that is the problem. People want to have their cake and eat it too - spend countless hours on problems that tickle their intellectual curiosity and sense of achievement, while also being paid handsomely.
David Grusch is supposedly in the process of writing an op-ed in which he reveals more about his actual knowledge. He was not allowed to talk publicly about his actual involvement.
As to "for the sake of national security", I am really not buying this angle. There are plenty of scarecrows to use for increased spending - Russia, China, Middle East, North Korea. The media has not covered this topic at all. You would expect more engagement if this was really a push for more money.
Whatever the truth may be, we now have people testifying in Congress - under oath - that the UFO phenomenon is real. David Grusch has gone through the official whistleblower process in order to make this happen, and there have been private briefings with the ICIG and members of Congress, who have given credence to his claims [1].
So while it's difficult to know what the truth is at this point in time, it's either that aliens are real or there are a lot of nutjobs in the US government.
> You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.
And that's great, but your specific example is not what we are discussing here. We are talking about averages, not particular examples.
> My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".
Hmm, I think we can agree here, I don't think I've said anything that would suggest otherwise.
> You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work"
Because I'm not sure it's worth it. However, your example with the guitar is good and actually fits exactly into what I'm trying to say.
Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.
Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".
In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.
> It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.
Not all of them. I'd be perfectly okay with having to explain my stance on the accomplishments of Bin Laden. However, yes, I do find it axiomatic that working harder is correlated with more wealth.
> The rich also tend to have the power to write the rules themselves, for their own benefit.
This is correct, and the 'poor' do the same, within the limits of their abilities.
> This is not true at all. Individual businesspeople vary vastly in their ethics. I don't actually try to maximize my income...
This is the Internet and saying this is free. Even so, I don't care about you specifically, I am talking about the average behaviour at the level of the society. There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.
Typical employees (the 'poor') have way fewer levers to do this, as well as less financial education, due to the way the system is structured, but the desire to keep more of your earnings to the detriment of everyone else is the largely the same.
> It's unfortunate that you appear to have such a limited imagination, an inability to comprehend the possibility of other people rationally disagreeing with your beliefs.
> Why do you present a false dichotomy? There could be little or no correlation, as opposed to an inverse correlation.
In retrospect, it is true that I presented a false dichotomy since I never considered that your defense might be "there is virtually 0 correlation".
I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.
> you're not necessarily even in the majority.
I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.
> Have you considered, for example, that I don't necessarily view them as "progress"?
Yes, I did, but then you are simply wrong.
> Musk is already the wealthiest person in the world. To say "I'm sure there are better avenues" to making money just seems ridiculous to me.
You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term). So Musk is greedy and vain. After he got his 100+ millions from the sale of PayPal, would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth? Probably not.
> In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.
Finally, we agree on something. This is exactly it. The problem is the system, which I am happy to change. The people who get rich are simply playing by the rules the system allows.
Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.
> To me, it's not an axiom.
I struggle to understand why anyone would think this. So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money? That would be an incredible statement to defend.
> The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike?
If you have subjectively decided that Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI are not impressive, then I'm afraid we simply view the world differently. I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress.
The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures. I can.
> Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler?
Anther clue that we simply think very differently. Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example. Imagine if this same amount of work, ingenuity, scrappiness was applied from 'good'. Then we might have had two rich entrepreneurs that you'd find just as despicable simply for being rich.
> Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.
Back to what the real problem is - the system. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.
I don't think you're stupid or a liar, but there are two strong trends I'm noticing recently - playing the contrarian and a hate for the rich.
To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth. What you've done in previous replies is a typical reductionist approach, which is to pretend that a multivariate problem, with those variables on various continuums, can be presented as "Elon Musk doesn't work harder than someone stocking shelves with shampoos". I honestly do not understand how someone frequenting HN could genuinely think that this is a valuable argument.
In simpler terms, if you exclude all the obvious counter-examples like inheritance, crypto pump and dumps, lottery winners and so on, it is empirically true that richer people work harder than poor people. Before you give some example of how some billionaire simply got lucky, I did say about that this is a multivariate equation. There are many, many things that go into it, and luck is one, hard work another.
The simple logic is: you work harder -> your productivity is higher -> you make more money. You may find some exaggerated counter-example, but this is the truth.
If Elon had just been involved in the PayPal business, yeah, he would be some forgotten rich dude living his life on some island. It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.
There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.
Look, to be honest, I just think we have vastly different opinions and views on the world and how it works. There is absolutely nothing in your message that gave me any pause, and I think we start from irreconcilable positions.
> I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.
I do think that there is probably too much inequality for it to be healthy for society, but I am not of the opinion that "billionaires should not exist" or that anyone rich is some version of evil.
I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output. Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.
> I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here
In previous replies you associated hard work with physically strenuous work. I think they are orthogonal concerns. Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities. By your definition, someone shovelling bricks for 8 hours is working harder than someone working 8h in an office. By mine, that is not necessarily true.
Also, even if your definition was true, paying someone purely on how 'hard' they work would still not be a good idea.
> Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.
This sentence does not sound as good as you think it does.
Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".
> I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds
Me neither, but have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX, in a field entirely dominated by national agencies. No matter which way you cut it, SpaceX has ushered in a new era in space exploration. I won't even bother arguing more about this, this is honestly ridiculous.
> Essentially, if this is a feature you must have, Python seems like the wrong language.
While I don't disgree in the absolute sense, there are constraints. You can't just switch language or change the problem you're solving. If you have the need for more type safety, then this is a price worth paying.