I don't know if it demonstrates anything, but I do think it's somewhat natural for people to want to interact with tools that feel like they make sense.
If I'm going to trust a model to summarize things, go out and do research for me, etc, I'd be worried if it made what looks like comprehension or math mistakes.
I get that it feels like a big deal to some people if some models give wrong answers to questions like this one, "how many rs are in strawberry" (yes: I know models get this right, now, but it was a good example at the time), or "are we in the year 2026?"
In my experience the tools feel like they make sense when I use them properly, or at least I have a hard time relating the failure modes to this walk/drive thing with bizarre adversarial input. It just feels a little bit like garbage in, garbage out.
Okay, but when you're asking a model to do things like summarizing documents, analyzing data, or reading docs and producing code, etc, you don't necessarily have a lot of control over the quality of the input.
Someone that makes vibe coding tools would presumably want to have vibe coders on staff? If you're just not into the whole enterprise that's one thing but I'm not understanding what's fishy about that.
It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Maybe I should network better to get "successful". I shouldn't be focusing on writing good code or good enough agents.
All of this is true and none of it is new. If your primary goal is to make lots of money then yes you should do exactly that. If you want to be a craftsman then you'll have to accept a more modest fortune and stop looking at the relative handful of growth hacker exits.
I was also unconvinced by that hand-wavy analysis. Basically, "parking is negative value because I don't like it, look at this graph I made up."
In the US most places that aren't already highly urbanized are based on car culture. The culture isn't going to magically shift to transit if you take away parking, people will just complain and go elsewhere.
The article also completely abandons this angle later when it acknowledges that parking can be financially acceptable for the land owners. It also acknowledges that municipally mandated parking isn't the issue either.
How many parcels in e.g. downtown Syracuse are just vacant? That represents a much lower value than surface parking.
I definitely agree that parking in garages and integrated into buildings is much better but if you're unsatisfied with your downtown area I don't think targeting parking lots is the place to start. The real question is why don't people believe they can get more value out of it with further development? It's a little chicken-and-egg but you have to make the downtown a desirable place for those investments.
Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out. Attack that, not the technology.
Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history' were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands (zero-sum game).
The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to facilitating competition to equalize distribution of existing wealth and should have promoted competition of ideas, but instead, the governments of the world got together and enacted policies which would suppress competition, at the highest scale imaginable. What they did was much worse than doing nothing.
Now, the closest solution we can aim for (IMO) is UBI. It's a late solution because a lot of people's lives have already been ruined through no fault of their own. On the plus side it made other people much more resilient, but if we keep going down this path, there is nothing more to learn; only serves to reinforce the existing idea that everything is a scam. This is bound to affect people's behaviors in terrible ways.
Imagine a dystopian future where the system spends a huge amount of resources first financially oppressing people to the point of insanity, then monitoring and controlling them to try to get them to avoid doing harm... When the system could just have given them (less) money and avoided this downward spiral into insanity to begin with and then you wouldn't even need to monitor them because they would be allowed to survive whilst being their own sane, good-natured self. We have to course-correct and are approaching a point of no return when the resentment becomes severe and permanent. Nobody can survive in a world where the majority of people are insane.
I've encountered resistance to UBI from otherwise like-minded people because Musk and Thiel talk about it or something. When described as gradually lowering the social security age, it clicks. We already have this stuff. It's crazy.
The resistance seems to be the result of certain more privileged people being out of touch with the situation. They don't understand how hard some people are struggling now. This is bad because they won't notice it until it turns into violence... And by that point they'd have lost empathy for them and their struggles. History really does rhyme.
> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already?
Phew, yes I'm with you...
> We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult.
Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
> The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out.
Do you mean that it has nothing to do with how the average person decides to spend their money?
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
We have, yes. If you notice things to be too expensive it's a result of class warfare. Have you noticed how many people got _obscenely rich_ in the last 25 years? Yes, that's where money saved by technology went to.
2 well identifiable classes in western societies are landlords vs renters, where the latter is paying a huge chunk of their income to be able to use an appreciating asset of the former.
This class thing is especially identifiable in Europe, where assets such as real estate generally are not cheaper than in the US (with the exception of a few super expensive places), yet salaries are much lower.
Taxes tend to be super high on wages but not on assets. One can very easily find themselves in a situation where even owning a modest amount of wealth, their asset appreciation outdoes what they can get as labor income.
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
Look at a bunch of job postings and ask yourself if that work is going to make things cheaper for you or better for society. We're not building railroads and telephone networks anymore. One person can grow food for 10,000. Stuff is expensive because free market capitalism allows it and some people are pathologically greedy. Runaway optimizers with no real goal state in mind except "more."
> How? What are you proposing exactly?
In a word, socialism. It's a social and political problem, not a technical one. These systems have fallen way behind technology and allowed crazy accumulations of wealth in the hands of very few. Push for legislation to redistribute the wealth to the people.
If someone invents a robot to do the work of McDonalds workers, that should liberate them from having to do that kind of work. This is the dream and the goal of technology. Instead, under our current system, one person gets a megayacht and thousands of people are "unemployed." With no change to the amount of important work being done.
The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.
I appreciate the elaboration in the second half. That sounds a lot more constructive than "attack", but now I understand you meant it in the "attack the problem" sense not "attack the people" sense.
What I think we agree on is that society has resource redistribution problem, and it could work a lot better.
I think we might also agree that a well functioning economic engine should lift up the floor for everyone and not concentrate economic power into those who best weild leverage.
One way I think of this is, what is the actual optimal lorenz curve that allows for lifting the floor, such that the area under the curve increases at the fastest rate possible. (It must account for the reality of human psychology and resource scarcity)
Where we might disagree is that I think we also have some culture and education system problems as well, which relate to how each individual takes responsibility for figuring out how to ethically create value for others. When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.
E.g. If mcdonald automates their restaurants, those workers also need to take some responsibility for finding new ways to provide value to others. A well functioning system would make that as painless as possible for them, so much so that the majority experiencing it would consider it a good thing.
> The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.
Anything specific?
> When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.
What types of behaviors are you referring to as zero and negative sum games?
I think at the very least we should move toward a state where the existence of dare-I-say freeloaders and welfare queens isn't too taxing, and with general social progress that "niche" may be naturally disincentivized and phased out. Some people just don't really have a purpose or a drive but they were born here and yes one would hope that under the right conditions they could blossom but if not I don't think it's worth worrying about too much.
I would say that education is essentially at the core of everything, it's the only mechanism we have to move the needle on any of it.
This is really interesting because I wholeheartedly believe the original sentiment that everyone thinks their generation is special, and that "now this time they've really screwed it all up" is quite myopic -- and that human nature and the human experience are relatively constant throughout history while the world changes around us.
But, it is really hard to escape the feeling that digital technology and AI are a huge inflection point. In some ways this couple generations might be the singularity. Trump and contemporary geopolitics in general is a footnote, a silly blip that will pale in comparison over time.
There is always some set of people predicting all sorts of dooms though. The saying about the broken clock comes to mind.
With the right cherry picking, it can always be said that [some set of] the doomsayers were right, or that they were wrong.
As you say, someone predicting doom has no bearing on whether it happens, so why engage in it? It's just spreading FUD and dwelling on doom. There's no expected value to the individual or to others.
Personally, I don't think "TikTok will shorten people's attention spans" qualifies as doom in and of itself.
> And "other people in the past predicted doom about something like this and it didn't happen" is a fallacious non-argument even when the things are comparable.
> the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd
It's pretty clear that I'm not defending engaging in baseless negative speculation, but refuting the dismissal of negative speculation based purely on the trope that "people have always predicted it".
Someone who read what they were responding to would rather easily have seen that.
> As you say, someone predicting doom has no bearing on whether it happens
That is not what I said. I'm pretty sure now that you did not read my comment before responding. That's bad.
This is what I said:
> It's then quite obvious that the fact that someone, somewhere, predicts a bad thing happening has ~zero bearing on whether it actually happens, and so the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd.
I'm very clearly pointing out (with "someone, somewhere") that a random person predicting a bad thing has almost no ("~zero") impact on the future. Obviously, if someone who has the ability to affect the future (e.g. a big company executive, or a state leader (past or present)) makes a prediction, they have much more power to actually affect the future.
> so why engage in it? It's just spreading FUD and dwelling on doom.
Because (rational) discussion now has the capacity to drive change.
> There's no expected value to the individual or to others.
Trivially false - else most social movements would be utterly irrelevant, because they work through the same mechanism - talking about things that should be changed as a way of driving that change.
It's also pretty obvious that there's a huge difference between "predicting doom with nothing behind it" and "describing actual bad things that are happening that have a lot of evidence behind them" - which is what is actually happening here, so all of your arguments about the former point would be irrelevant (if they were valid, which they aren't) because that's not even the topic of discussion.
I suggest reading what you're responding to before responding.
> Personally, I don't think "TikTok will shorten people's attention spans" qualifies as doom in and of itself.
You're bringing up "doom" as a way to pedantically quarrel about word definitions. It's trivial to see that that's completely irrelevant to my argument - and worth noting that you're then conceding the point about people correctly predicting that TikTok will shorten people's attention spans, hence validating the need to have discussions about it.
This is like the ultimate version of going back 1000+ years economically and socially. Where a merchant would size up how desperate or rich they thought you were and charged you based on that rather than a reasonable price.
It wastes the time of the poor whom must be willing to walk away without anything when they can "afford it" and further deepens the problems when you are desperate.
Except now they can also spy on you 24x7 and buy information from other spys while they make their decisions and have 100% information asymmetry. Now they also HAVE to charge you more to make back the money they spend spying on you rather than just running a normal business.
You already answered your own question though. It is the peak of exploiting power wealth disparity, there is zero chance of it being used beneficially.
On some level though it does jive with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Do you have an issue with textbooks being cheaper in India?
If we live in a more socialist future where there are mechanisms to prevent corporate greed from accelerating wealth inequality, I feel like it could find a beneficial equilibrium. I think, given the choice, most [non-luxury] businesses would rather have more customers than price out poor people entirely. They would be subsidized.
Put another way, do "one price for everyone" and "customer blindness" benefit rich people or poor people more?
>Put another way, do "one price for everyone" and "customer blindness" benefit rich people or poor people more?
I would say "one price for everyone" has indisputably been proven to benefit the poor more. This is just based on the last 100 or so years of the average persons live quality being raised by astronomical amounts because of the paradigm of customer blindness. Fixed prices are a very recent thing and if you look around it worked out pretty well. This new pricing is 100% predatory. backwards.
> This is just based on the last 100 or so years of the average persons live quality being raised by astronomical amounts because of the paradigm of customer blindness.
If you can point me in the direction of any sources of data or research that demonstrate this specific causation I would be interested to learn more.
This article finds that "tailoring price according to willingness to pay is theoretically sound but culturally still questionable."
I think it's important to separate discussion of the abstract concept from a particular implementation (though both are relevant). "It is important that such segmentation be fair, however, if you want your customers to accept variable pricing."
WhatsApp is a bizarre name, and I think that contributes to it occupying a "lower rent" space than the others (the goofy chat background also helps). But I think most people ultimately gloss over the joke and it just becomes kind of abstract.
With BirdyChat though, it feels like you'll be confronted by its silliness in perpetuity.
