A lot of my problem with AI writing is that the facts aren’t checked. You get a big cheesy dramatic arc but the core story isn’t factually correct. There’s only so much time in a lifetime, too little to waste fact checking someone else’s work because they couldn’t be bothered to.
I have junior devs submitting huge PRs with multi paragraph descriptions about load baring root causes and "why this works". Then I ask them directly what are the steps to test this and they don't know, they have never run the code.
Rather than entertain the idea of reviewing the code I just send it back to them until they work out how to run it. And almost always they submit a new change because the last one didn't actually work, despite how confident and articulate claude was to them.
A change can pass CI without actually making the change required. The tests test that the code does what it does, not that it does what the user wanted.
AI is really good at making tests that pass even if the change itself is wrong.
Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).
It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.
"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."
And the river's in the canyon and the canyon's in the plateau and the plateau's in the volcanic shield and the green grass grows all around, all around, and the green grass grows all around.
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.
It's because capitalism won the (absurd black-and-white framing of the) cold war, with America as its the biggest winner. We don't even recognize the level of propaganda that has gone into convincing us all that "markets" are the best optimizer ever designed and that profit equals morality--we just accept these as base principles without questioning them. Surveillance produces profit? Well let's have more then.
It's such a bizarre attitude. Like I think this stuff deserves decade+ long prison sentences for everyone involved, and they just don't care. Like imagine if mugging were legal and the people doing it just said "hey, if I don't rob you, someone else will."
They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.
Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made
itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.
OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).
I think the internet in general is a commons and I should be able to browse it without being spied on.
There should be general standards for what individual apps and websites should be allowed to do. There should be an expectation that the purpose of an app is what it does, i.e. a social connection app shouldn’t be an ad platform that suffers users insofar as they provide useful data to sell to advertisers.
I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.
Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.
Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.
Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
Given that many of our current-day subterranean environments are also covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia, can we really say that it played a key role in the rise of the civilization?
All you can really say is that negligence is corrosive to civilization, and maybe that drugs act as an amplifier of sorts for society's illnesses and qualities.
Right, and the elites can deal with it them selves, they have money. They are definitely not directly responsible for the "subterranean environments covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia".
Supposedly there was a time when drinking beer was often safer than drinking water from available sources, including for children. I guess there are levels
Yeah, it's really gross that coffee cups are left all over the place. But yeah, rise in caffeine consumption in place of ethanol is thought to have enabled and fueled the enlightenment, and been a major factor in the industrial revolution.
I know what you meant. But the words you used apply to my reply too. It's a reminder that any attempt at an objective definition of "drugs" includes alcohol and caffeine, and that there is a huge cultural component to "good drugs" and "bad drugs". In fact, coffee was considered one of the bad drugs by many cultures it when first introduced to them - including European culture.
Look up how much the signatories of the constitutional convention drank the night before signing the constitution. Alcohol consumption remained massive during the 1800s by our standards, people just drank we more than we do and probably more than in the 1600s and 1700s because distilled alcohol became cheap and widespread while you only had access to beer and wine before that.
I believe in the US alcohol consumption peaked in the mid 19th century. It was common for alcohol to be provided on the job and for drinking breaks like coffee breaks.
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