[HN Gopher] Playing in the Creek
___________________________________________________________________
Playing in the Creek
Author : c1ccccc1
Score : 323 points
Date : 2025-04-11 05:05 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hgreer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hgreer.com)
| profsummergig wrote:
| Requesting someone to please explain the "coquina" metaphor.
| hecanjog wrote:
| I think that they're saying a little bit of playing around with
| replacing thinking and composing with automated tools is
| recoverable, but at an industrial or societal scale the damage
| is significant. Like the difference between shoveling away some
| sand with your hands to bury the small creatures temporarily
| and actually destroying their habitat by "lobbying city council
| members to put in a groin or seawall, and seriously move that
| beach sand."
| profsummergig wrote:
| I skimmed the Anthropic report and didn't catch the negative
| effects. Did they mention any? Good on them if they did.
| hecanjog wrote:
| Yes, they mention a few times the concern that students are
| offloading critical thinking rather than using the tool for
| learning.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I just hope the educational institutions catch on, stick
| with their principles and don't give them the paperwork.
| The paper / title should be evidence of students'
| learning and thinking abilities, not of just their
| output.
| xmprt wrote:
| My understanding is that the author is this superior being
| trying to accomplish a massive task (damming a beach) while
| knowing that it could cause problems for these clams. In the
| real world, Anthropic is trying to accomplish a massive task
| (building AGI) and they're finally starting to notice the
| potential impacts this has on people.
| jjcob wrote:
| Coquinas are clams that bury themselves in the sand very close
| to the surface [1]. The author worries that while they are
| playing with the sand, they might accidentally bury coquina
| clams too deep and kill them because they can no longer reach
| the surface.
|
| Anthropic apparently is starting to notice the possible danger
| to others of their work. I'm not sure what they are referring
| to.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZUlf7quu3o
| profsummergig wrote:
| > Anthropic apparently is starting to notice the possible
| danger to others of their work. I'm not sure what they are
| referring to.
|
| Are they being vague about the danger? If possible, please
| link to a communique from them. I've missed it somehow.
| Thanks.
| vermilingua wrote:
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-
| ho...
|
| Discussed here yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43633383
| profsummergig wrote:
| Thank you.
| deathanatos wrote:
| As a child at the beach, I would think noticing the clams
| would result in attempting to unearth them. Childhood
| curiosity about why there are bubbles.
|
| Your explanation makes more sense, however.
| ern wrote:
| Maybe I'm not smart enough, or too tired to decode these
| metaphors, so I plugged the essay into ChatGPT and got a clear
| explanation from 4o.
| profsummergig wrote:
| Ah. Should have thought of that. Going to do that now.
| Thanks.
| criddell wrote:
| Are you at all concerned that plugging stuff like this into
| ChatGPT is leaving you with weaker cognitive muscles? Or is
| it more similar to what people do when they see a new word
| and reach for their dictionary?
| adwn wrote:
| > _Are you at all concerned that plugging stuff like this
| into ChatGPT is leaving you with weaker cognitive muscles?_
|
| Couldn't this very same argument have been used against
| _any_ form of mental augmentation, like written language
| and computers? Or, in an extended interpretation, against
| any form of physical augmentation, like tool use?
| criddell wrote:
| You can argue whatever you want to argue.
|
| I make my living with my brain so I do worry about the
| downsides of removing boredom and mental struggle from my
| days.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's almost certainly going to be bad, and almost
| certainly going to be unavoidable.
|
| I can't spell for shit anymore. Ever since auto correct
| became omnipresent in pretty much all writing fields, my
| brain just kinda ditched remembering how to spell words.
|
| buuuttt
|
| Manual labor has been obsolete for at least 100 years now
| for certain classes of people, and fitness is still an
| enormous recreational activity people partake in. So even
| in an AI heavy society, I still strongly suspect there
| will be "brain games" that people still enjoy and
| regularly play.
| criddell wrote:
| We aren't talking about something like spelling or
| digging a hole. We're talking about a fundamental
| cognitive skill: reading eight short paragraphs of text
| and extracting meaning from it.
| profsummergig wrote:
| > eight short paragraphs of text
|
| Fair point. But they are heavily metaphor-laden
| paragraphs.
|
| Textual interpretation is a highly subjective activity.
| Entire careers consist of interpreting, reinterpreting,
| and discussing texts that others have already
| interpreted. Film critics, book reviewers, political
| pundits, TV anchors, podcasters, etc.
|
| 'In 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the
| impact of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he
| replied'
|
| I had my own sense of what the "coquina" metaphor stood
| for. I wanted to see other peoples' interpretations.
| Turns out my interpretation was wrong.
| profsummergig wrote:
| > I can't spell for shit anymore.
|
| This is increasingly happening to me every day. Hope the
| alien overlords don't have spelling tests (as their
| version of IQ tests) to separate the serfs from the
| field-masters.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Me too.
|
| There is another side to this, which is maybe we don't
| need to know a lot of things.
|
| It was true with search engines already, but maybe truer
| with LLMs. That thing you're querying probably doesn't
| actually matter. It's neurotic digging and searching for
| an object you will never use or benefit from. The urge to
| seek is strong but you won't find the thing you're
| searching for this way.
|
| You might learn more by just going for a walk.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| In fact it has been, dating all the way back to Phaedrus.
|
| > If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness
| in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory
| because they rely on that which is written, calling
| things to remembrance no longer from within themselves,
| but by means of external marks.
| ern wrote:
| I see AI like the reading glasses I'll soon need -- not
| because I can't think clearly, but because it helps cut
| through things faster when my brain's juggling too much.
|
| A few years ago, I'd have quietly filed this kind of
| article under "too hard" or passed a log analysis request
| from the CIO down the line. Now? I get AI to draft the
| query, check it, run it, and move on. It's not about
| thinking less -- it's about clearing the clutter so I can
| focus where it counts.
| cubefox wrote:
| Anthropic (Claude.ai) is mentioning in their report on LLMs and
| education that students use Claude to cheat and do their work
| for them:
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-ho...
| doctoboggan wrote:
| This is an excellent essay, and I feel similar to the author but
| couldn't express it as nicely.
|
| However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the advice
| and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. The author
| indicated they stepped away from a high paying finance job for
| moral reasons, which is admirable. But wallstreet continues on
| and does not lack for people willing to play the "make as much
| money as you can" game.
| yapyap wrote:
| > However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the
| advice and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
| The author indicated they stepped away from a high paying
| finance job for moral reasons, which is admirable. But
| wallstreet continues on and does not lack for people willing to
| play the "make as much money as you can" game.
|
| I doubt OP is counting on it, it is moreso expressing what an
| optimal world would look like so people can work towards it if
| they would feel like it or just to put the idea out there.
| dachris wrote:
| The paperclip maximizers are already here, but they are
| maximizing money.
|
| One recent HN comment [0] comparing corporations and
| institutions to AI really stuck with me - those are already
| superhuman intelligences.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580681
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I could imagine a Star Trek episode where someone says "I
| always assumed the paperclip optimizer was a parable for
| unchecked capitalism?"
| bitethecutebait wrote:
| > those are already superhuman intelligence(s)
|
| ... only because "unsafe" and "leaky" are a Ponzi's best-and-
| loves-to-be-roofied-and-abused friend ... you see,
| intelligence is only good when it doesn't irreversibly break
| everything to the point where most of the variety of the
| physical structure that evolved it and maintains it is lost.
|
| you could argue, of course, and this is an abbreviated
| version, that a new physical structure then evolves a new
| intelligence that is adapted (emerged from and adjusts to) to
| the challenges of the new environment but that's not the
| point of already capable self-healing systems;
|
| except if the destructive part of the superhuman intelligence
| is more successful with it's methods of sabotage and
| disruption of
|
| (a) 'truthy' information flow and
|
| b) individual and collective super-rational agency -- for the
| good of as many systems-internal entities as possible, as a
| precaution due to always living in uncertainty and being
| surrounded by an endless amount of variables currently tagged
| "noise"
|
| -- than it's counterpart is in enabling and propagating a)
| and b) ...
|
| in simpler words, if the red team FUBARS the blue team or
| vice versa, the superhuman intelligence can be assumed to
| have cancer or that at least some vital part of the force is
| corrupted otherwise.
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| Corporations certainly have advantages over individuals, but
| classifying them as superhuman intelligences misses the mark.
| I'd go with a blind ravenous titan instead.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| A finance job is a zero-sum game. Most tech jobs are negative
| sum, in that they make the world worse. You have the wrong
| takeaway here. Companies like Amazon and Google and OpenAI and
| the like are not-so-slowly destroying our planet and companies
| like Citadel just move money around.
| unwind wrote:
| Ah, this [1] meaning of tillering (bending wood to form a bow),
| not this [2] (production of side shoots in grasses). The joys of
| new words.
|
| [1]: https://www.howtomakealongbow.co.uk/part-5-tillering
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiller_(botany)
| defrost wrote:
| As I recall tillering is more about the _shaping_ of the bow to
| achieve an optimal bend and force delivery on release.
|
| It's an iterative process of bending and shaping, bending
| again, and wood removal in stages.
| axpvms wrote:
| My backyard creek also had crocodiles in it.
| seafoamteal wrote:
| Florida?
| tilne wrote:
| No they've got a little place on the Nile
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| That was a well written essay with a non-sequitur AI Safety thing
| tacked to the end. His real world examples were concrete, and the
| reason to stop escalating easy to understand ("don't flood the
| neighbourhood by building a real dam").
|
| The AI angle is not only even hypothetical: there is no attempt
| to describe or reason about a concrete "x leading to y", just
| "see, the same principle probably extrapolates".
|
| There is no argument there that is sounder than "the high
| velocities of steam locomotives might kill you" that people made
| 200 years ago.
| luc4sdreyer wrote:
| > the high velocities of steam locomotives might kill you
|
| This obviously seems silly in hindsight. Warnings about radium
| watches or asbestos sound less silly, or even wise. But neither
| had any solid scientific studies showing clear hazard and risk.
| Just people being good Bayesian agents, trying to ride the
| middle of the exploration vs. exploitation curve.
|
| Maybe it makes sense to spend some percentage of AI development
| resources on trying to understand how they work, and how they
| can fail.
| ripe wrote:
| > This [steam locomotives might kill you] obviously seems
| silly in hindsight.
|
| To be fair, many people did die on level crossings and by
| wandering on to the tracks.
|
| We learned over time to put in place safety fences and
| tunnels.
| Gracana wrote:
| People thought that the speed itself was dangerous, that
| the wind and vibration and landscape screaming by at 25mph
| would cause physical and mental harm.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > _Warnings about radium watches or asbestos sound less
| silly, or even wise. But neither had any solid scientific
| studies showing clear hazard and risk._
|
| In the case of asbestos, this is incorrect. Many people knew
| it was deadly, but the corporations selling it hid it for
| _decades_ , killing thousands of people. There are quite a
| few other examples besides asbestos, like leaded fuel or
| cigarettes.
| iNic wrote:
| The progress-care trade-off is a difficult one to navigate, and
| is clearly more important with AI. I've seen people draw
| analogies to companies, which have often caused harm in pursuit
| of greater profits, both purposefully and simply as byproducts:
| oil-spills, overmedication, pollution, ecological damage, bad
| labor conditions, hazardous materials, mass lead poisoning. Of
| course, the profit seeking company as an invention has been one
| of the best humans have ever made, but that doesn't mean we
| shouldn't take "corp safety" seriously. We pass various laws on
| how corps can operate and what they can and can not do to limit
| harms and _align_ them with the goals of society.
|
| So it is with AI. Except, corps are made of people that work on
| people speeds, and have vague morals and are tied to society in
| ways AI might not be. AI might also be able to operate faster
| and with less error. So extra care is required.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Parents: you know how every day you look at your child and you're
| struck with wonder at the amazing and quirky and unique person
| your little one is?
|
| I swear that's what lesswrong posters see every day in the
| mirror.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical
| thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this
| conviction that many people share is even remotely true?
|
| To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response
| people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that
| status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase
| math wizards, the television did not replace books and so on. It
| just made us better, faster, more productive.
|
| Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured
| out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of
| entertainment and social media), but things will balance
| themselves out eventually.
|
| Some people may go full-on Wall-E, but I for one will never stop
| tinkering, and many of my friends won't either.
|
| The things I could have done if I had had an LLM as a kid... I
| think I've learned more in the past two years than ever before.
| iNic wrote:
| I don't think you got the point of the article? It is saying
| that we as wise humans know (sometimes) when to stop optimizing
| for a goal, due to the negative side effects. AIs (and as some
| other people have pointed out corporations) do not naturally
| have this line in their head, and we must draw such lines
| carefully and with purpose for these superhuman beings.
| dsign wrote:
| > Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths
|
| I don't think that's the argument the article was making. It
| was, to my understanding, a more nuanced question about if we
| want to destroy or severely disturb systems at equilibrium by
| letting AI systems infiltrate our society.
|
| > Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't
| figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain
| types of entertainment and social media), but things will
| balance themselves out eventually.
|
| One can zoom out a little bit. The issue didn't start with
| social media, nor AI. "Star Wars, A New Hope", is, to my
| understanding, an incredibly good film. It came out in 1977 and
| it's a great story made to be appreciated by the masses. And in
| trying to achieve that goal, it really wasn't intellectually
| challenging. We have continued in that downhill for a bit, and
| now we are in 16 second stingers in TikTok and Youtube. So, the
| way I see it, things are _not_ balancing out. Worse, people in
| USA elected D.J. Trump because somehow they couldn 't
| understand how this real-world Emperor Palpatine was the bad
| guy.
| Tistron wrote:
| I would expect people today to be quite a lot worse at mental
| arithmetic that we used to be before calculators. And worse at
| memorizing stuff than before writing.
|
| We have tools to help us with that, and maybe it isn't a big
| loss? And they also bring new arenas and abilities.
|
| And maybe in the future we will be worse at critical thinking
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484224), and maybe it
| isn't a big loss? It is hard to imagine what new abilities and
| arenas will emerge. Though I think that critical thinking is a
| worse loss than memory and mental arithmetic. Though, also, we
| are probably a lot less good at it than we think we are,
| generally.
| hacb wrote:
| > The calculator did not erase math wizards
|
| The major difference is that in order to use a calculator, you
| need to know and understand the math you're doing. It's a tool
| you can work with. I always had a calculator for my math exams
| and I always had bad grades :)
|
| You don't have to know how to program to ask ChatGPT to build
| yet another app for you. It's a substitute for your brain. My
| university students have good grades on their do-at-home exams,
| but can't spot a off-by-one error on a 3 lines Golang for loop
| during an in-person exam.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| This is incorrect. You very much need to know how to program
| to make an AI build an app for you. Language models are not
| capable of creating anything new without significant guidance
| and at least some understanding of the code, unless you're
| asking it to create projects that tutorials have been written
| about. AI in it's current form is also just "a tool you can
| work with".
|
| Like with the calculator, why would you need to be able to
| calculate things on paper if you can just have a machine do
| it for you? Same goes for more advanced AI: what's the point
| of being able to do things without them?
|
| Not to offend, but in my opinion that's nothing more than a
| romantic view of what humans "should be capable of". 10 years
| from now we can all laugh at the idea of people defending
| doing stuff without AI assistance.
| hacb wrote:
| Of course, an AI will not "magically" code an app the same
| way 10 developers will do in a year, I don't think we
| disagree on this.
|
| However, it allows you to do things you don't understand.
| I'm again taking examples from what I see at my university
| (n=1): almost all students deliver complex programming
| projects involving multi-threading, but can't answer a
| basic quizz about the same language in-person. And by basic
| question I mean "select among the propositions listed below
| the correct keyword used to declare a variable in Golang".
| I'm not kidding, at least one-third of the class is
| actually answering something wrong here.
|
| So yeah, maybe we as a society agree on the fact that those
| people will not be software engineers, but prompt
| engineers. They'll send instructions to an agent that will
| display text in a strange and cryptic language, and maybe
| when they'll press "Run" lights will be green. But as a
| professional, why should I hire them once they earned their
| diploma? They are far from being ready for the professional
| world, can't debug systems without using LLMs (and maybe
| those LLMs can't help them because the company context is
| too important), and most importantly they are way less
| capable than freshly graduated engineers from a few years
| back.
|
| > 10 years from now we can all laugh at the idea of people
| defending doing stuff without AI assistance.
|
| I hope so, but I'm quite pessimistic unfortunately.
| Expertise and focus capabilities are dying, and we are more
| and more relying on artificial "intelligence" and its
| biases. But the future will tell
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Isn't it irrelevant that students do not have the answer
| to a basic quiz though? In a real life situation, they
| can just _ask an LLM_ if they need to know something.
|
| I don't believe having this option will make people a lot
| less functional. Sure, some may slip through the cracks
| by faking it, but we'll soon develop different metrics to
| judge somebodies true capabilities. Actually, we'll
| probably create AI for that as well.
|
| As a professional, you hire people who get things done.
| If that means hiring skilled LLM users, that do not fully
| understand what they produce, but what they make
| consistently works about as often as classic dev output
| does, and they do this in a fraction of the time... You
| would be crazy _not_ to hire them.
|
| It's true that inexperienced developers will probably
| generate a massive tech debt during the time where AI is
| good enough to provide code, but not good enough to fish
| out hidden bugs. It will soon surpass humans at that
| skill though, and can then quickly clean up all the
| spaghetti.
|
| Over the last two years my knowledge on how to perform
| and automate repetitive and predictable tasks has
| gradually worn away, replaced by a higher level
| understanding of software architecture. I use it to guide
| language models to a desired outcome. For those that want
| to learn, LLM's excel at explaining code. For this, and
| plenty of other subjects, it's the greatest learning tool
| we have ever had! All it takes is a curious mind.
|
| We are in a transitionary time and we simply need to
| figure out how to deal with this new technology, warts
| and all. It's not like there is an alternative scenario;
| it's not going to go away...
| fragmede wrote:
| > The calculator did not erase math wizards
|
| But it did. Quick, what's 67 * 49? A math wiz would furrow
| their brow for a second and be able to spit out an answer,
| while the rest of us have to pull out a calculator. When you're
| doing business in person and have to move numbers around,
| having to stop and use a calculator slows you down. If you
| don't have a role where that's useful then it's not a needed
| skill and you don't notice it's missing, like riding s horse,
| but doesn't mean the skill itself wouldn't be useful to have.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| It's a nice article. In a way though it kind of bypasses what I
| see as the main takeaways.
|
| It's not about AI development, it's about something mentioned
| earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can". The
| problems that we see with AI have little to do with AI
| "development", they have to do with AI marketing and
| promulgation. If the author had gone ahead and dammed the creek
| with a shovel, or blown off his hand, that would have been bad,
| but not _that_ bad. Those kinds of mistakes are self-limiting
| because if you 're doing something for the enjoyment or challenge
| of it, you won't do it at a scale that creates more enjoyment
| than you personally can experience. In the parable of the CEO and
| the fisherman, the fisherman stops at what he can tangibly
| appreciate.
|
| If everyone working on and using AI were approaching it like
| damming a creek for fun, we would have no problems. The AI models
| we had might be powerful, but they would be funky and disjointed
| because people would be more interested in tinkering with them
| than making money from them. We see tons of posts on HN every day
| about remarkable things people do for the gusto. We'd see a bunch
| of posts about new AI models and people would talk about how cool
| they are and go on not using them in any load-bearing way.
|
| As soon as people start trying to use anything, AI or not, to
| make as much money as possible, we have a problem.
|
| The second missed takeaway is at the end. He says Anthropic is
| noticing the coquinas as if that means they're going to somehow
| self-regulate. But in most of the examples he gives, he wasn't
| stopped by his own realization, but by an external authority
| (like parents) telling him to stop. Most people are not as self-
| reflective as this author and won't care about "winning zero sum
| games against people who don't necessarily deserve to lose", let
| alone about coquinas. They need a parent to step in and take the
| shovel away.
|
| As long as we keep treating "making as much money as you can" as
| some kind of exception to the principle of "you can't keep doing
| stuff until you break something", we'll have these problems, AI
| or not.
| noduerme wrote:
| This is such a well-written response. There's something
| intentionally soothing about this post that slowly turns into a
| jarring form of self-congratulation as it goes along.
| Congratulations for knowing there's a limit to wrecking your
| parents' property. Congratulations for being able to appreciate
| the sand on the beach, in some no doubt instagrammable moment
| of existential simplicity. Congratulations for being so smart
| that you _could_ have blown up your hand. And for
| "Leetcoding", whatever the fuck that means. And for claiming
| you quit a shady job because you got bored (but possibly also
| grew a conscience). And then topped off by the final turn:
| "This is, of course, about artificial intelligence
| development". I'd only add one thing to your analysis: We've
| got a demo right here of a psyche that would prefer love to
| money (but mostly both), and it's still determined to foist bad
| things onto the world in a load-bearing way, as a bid for
| either, or whatever it can get. My parents used to call that "a
| kid that doesn't care if he gets good or bad attention, as long
| as he gets attention." I think that's the root driver for
| almost all the tech billionaires of the past 20 years, and the
| one thing that unites Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, Dorsey, Musk... it's:
| "Look dad, I didn't just _take_ your money. I 'm so smart I
| could'a blown off my hand with all those fireworks you bought
| me, but see? Two hands! Look how much money I made from your
| money! Why aren't you proud of me?! Where can I find love?
| Maybe if I tell people what a leetcoder I am and how I could be
| making BAD AI but I'm just making GOOD AI, then everyone will
| love me."
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to these feelings either. I
| want to do good work and I want people to love what I do. But
| there's something so... so fucking nakedly exhibitionist and
| narcissistic about these kinds of posts. Like, so, GO FUCKING
| LAY WITH CLAMS, write a novel, the world is waiting for it if
| you're really a genius. Have the courage to say you have a
| conscience if you actually do. Leave the rest of us alone and
| stop polluting a world you don't understand with your childish
| greed and self-obsession.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've often wondered how, with billions of dollars, do you
| know someone actually loves you and not your money?
|
| Complicated!
| noduerme wrote:
| I've got a particularly strong view on this, because I've
| got a brother who tried to get wildly rich in some
| seriously unethical ways to impress our father, and still
| never got a single word of praise from him. And who's
| miserable and unloved and been betrayed by the women he
| married... who married him for his money. He's so desperate
| for someone to come admire his cars and his TVs, to just
| come hang out with him. He pays for friends.
|
| Me, I don't have billions of dollars, but I might be in the
| top 10% or something. And I just cringe when I see guys use
| their money and status or job title, or connections, or
| cars or shoes or... anything they _have_ as opposed to who
| they _are_ as a way to impress people. (Women, usually). I
| understand this is what they think they have to do. Like, I
| understand that 's how primates function, and you're just
| doing what apes do, but do they seriously think they'll
| ever be able to trust anyone who pretends to like them
| _after_ that person thinks they 're rich?
|
| Maybe I'm just lucky I got to watch it up close when I was
| a teenager. Lol. My brother's first wife, at his wedding,
| got up and gave a speech... she said, "my friends all said
| he was too short, but I told them he was taller when he was
| standing on his wallet". Some people laughed. I didn't.
| After fifteen years of screaming at each other and drug
| abuse, she committed suicide and he got with the next
| secretary who hated him but wanted his money. Oh well.
|
| My answer has always been to appear to be poor as fuck
| until I know what drives someone. When I meet a girl, I'll
| open doors and always buy dinner... at a $2 taco joint. And
| make sure she offers to buy the next round of drinks. I'll
| play piano in a random bar, and make her sing along. I'll
| order her the cheapest beer. I'll show her a painting I
| made and tell her I can't make any money selling 'em, is
| why I'm broke. If anyone asks me what I do, I don't say SWE
| or CTO, I say I'm a writer or a musician between things.
| And I'll do this for months until I get to know a person.
| Yeah, it's a test. The girls I've had relationships with,
| the girl I'm with right now, passed it. She doesn't even
| want to know. She says, whatever you got, I could've been
| with someone richer than you but I didn't want that life,
| so play piano for me. I'm not saying I've got the key to
| happiness, or humility, and maybe I'm a total asshole too,
| but... at least I'm not an asshole who's so hollow they
| have to crow about their job or their money to find "love"
| from people who - let's say this - can not, and will not
| ever love them.
| bombcar wrote:
| One of the things I've heard, and found to be true, is
| that if you don't love yourself it's going to be terribly
| hard for others to love you
| munificent wrote:
| It tickles me that this quote came from a YA novel of all
| places, but in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Chbosky
| writes "We accept the love we think we deserve".
|
| If that isn't one of the deepest aphorisms on psychology
| out there, I don't know what is.
| cafard wrote:
| During most of my single days, I didn't have to pretend
| to be poor as fuck. On the other hand, I didn't really
| need to impress my father.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > she said, "my friends all said he was too short, but I
| told them he was taller when he was standing on his
| wallet". Some people laughed. I didn't.
|
| Hey, as long as they are both up front and clear about
| what they are getting out of their relationship. They're
| grown adults after all. I knew someone who proudly would
| admit he was a "sugar daddy" and both he and his
| "girlfriends" would fully agree that their relationships
| were transactional and contingent on the money flow. I
| knew someone in college who was very open and
| unapologetic that her plan was to find and marry someone
| rich. There's no right and wrong.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| > But there's something so... so fucking nakedly
| exhibitionist and narcissistic about these kinds of posts.
|
| You've precisely defined why nobody takes LessWrong
| seriously.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> As soon as people start trying to use anything, AI or not,
| to make as much money as possible, we have a problem._
|
| I noticed that, around the turn of the century, when "The Web"
| was suddenly all about the Benjamins.
|
| It's sort of gone downhill, since.
|
| For myself, I've retired, and putter around in my "software
| garden." I do make use of AI, to help me solve problems, and
| generate code starts, but I am into it for personal
| satisfaction.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Well you certainly extracted enough wealth from the system
| you now hate. Good for you!
|
| (Self reflect on the fact that your whole existence was for
| your "personal satisfaction" so nothing has changed.)
| hobs wrote:
| Are you jealous or mad that they didn't do more for you?
| Neither is a good look really. What have you done for me
| lately?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| This is a typical response of the sociopath. They cannot
| understand that I could be upset for people who are not
| myself so they make it about "me".
|
| I am mad that the tech industry is full of apologists
| that increased the separation of wealth in this country
| by working for these companies, taking their share, and
| now boast about how moral they are by leaving when their
| life is secure while millions go hungry in "the richest
| country on earth".
|
| I am disabled, homeless, living in a minivan. In the
| summer I help build tiny homes for the homeless in the
| Pacific Northwest. In the winter I help people outfit
| their minivans so they can have a shelter in the SW
| desert.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. Not our fault, and it won't make your
| life any better to be bitter about it. It certainly
| doesn't help you, in the least, to be attacking folks in
| a public professional forum.
|
| You're also not the only one doing charity work.
|
| Just sayin'.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I'm not bitter, I'm angry upset. You want me to be bitter
| because that's the only thing you can understand. I don't
| care if it helps me, but that's all you can think about
| being a sociopath or a partial sociopath, is how it
| affects you, not how it affects the larger society around
| you.
|
| I'm not afraid to express my true feelings and an open
| public forum because that's what being genuine is about.
| It's about not being afraid to do something based on your
| principles, not based on the fear of "what it can get for
| me" or "what will I lose".
| sepositus wrote:
| Do you think this style of argumentation is constructive
| and beneficial for the broader good of society? I can't
| think of a single person I've met who would respond
| positively to being labeled a (partial) sociopath after
| being able to only express a couple of paragraphs of
| thought.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yes, I do, because I'm never going to change his mind,
| maybe I will, but probably not, but other people reading
| this can take sides and think about it in a non-direct
| way.
|
| Jesus turned over tables when they were trying to profit
| inside the church. His movement seemed to turn out pretty
| good.
| sepositus wrote:
| Fair enough, but I would be concerned about the people
| who think that making (offensive) psychiatric diagnoses
| over the internet is a good thing that should be
| promoted. In the best case, it only confirms people's
| biases and does nothing to move the needle towards unity
| rather than continued division.
|
| > Jesus turned over tables when they were trying to
| profit inside the church. His movement seemed to turn out
| pretty good.
|
| Applying this story to posting anonymous comments on an
| internet forum seems like a stretch. There are hardly any
| meaningful consequences for your decision to write in
| this way, whereas Jesus very much became a target after
| that demonstration.
| dvaun wrote:
| Have you considered socratic questioning and other forms
| of conversation, in order to affect more change?
|
| See https://www.streetepistemology.com/ for content about
| this. It is possible to guide discussions in a healthy
| manner and with positive goals in mind.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Other people reading it will (hello) also are unlikely to
| take your side if you call random commenters here
| sociopaths.
| babelfish wrote:
| Have you tried following the dao, instead?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm retired as well, dislike what we have for the internet
| these days.
|
| In reflecting on my career I can say I got into it for the
| right reasons. That is, I liked programming -- but also
| found out fairly quickly that not everyone could do it and
| so it could be a career path that would prove lucrative.
| And this in particular for someone who had no other
| likelihood, for example, of ever owning a home. I was
| probably not going to be able to afford graduate school
| (had barely paid for state college by working minimum wage
| jobs throughout college and over the summers) and
| regardless I was not the most studious person. (My degree
| was Education -- I had expected a modest income as a career
| high school teacher).
|
| But as I say, I enjoyed programming at first. And when it
| arrived, the web was just a giant BBS as far as I was
| concerned and so of course I liked it. But it is possible
| to find a thing that you really like can go to shit over
| the ensuing decades. (And for that matter, my duties as an
| engineer got shittier as well as the career "evolved". I
| had not originally signed up for code reviews, unit tests,
| scrum, etc. Oh well.)
|
| Money as a pursuit made sense to me after I was in the
| field and saw that others around me were doing quite well
| -- able as I say, to afford to buy a home -- something I
| had assumed would always be out of reach for me (my single
| mother had always rented, I assumed I would as well -- oh,
| I still had a modest college loan to pay off too). So I
| learned about 30-year home loans, learned about the real
| estate market in the Bay Area, learned also about RSUs,
| capital gains tax, 401Ks, index finds, etc.
|
| But as is becoming a theme in this thread (?) at some point
| I was satisfied that I had done enough to secure a home,
| tools for my hobbies, and had raised three girls -- paid
| for their college. I began to see the now burdensome career
| I was in as an albatross around my soul. The technology
| that I had once enjoyed, made my career on the back of, had
| gone sour.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| It went sour for the same reason that you were "satisfied
| that I had done enough to secure a home, tools for my
| hobbies, and had raised three girls -- paid for their
| college"; Money and selfishness. You were looking out for
| you and your little group.
|
| You got yours. Now what?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If you're trying to convince me that I was somehow part
| of the problem, it's not reaching me. I was as low(ly) as
| you can get in the "tech industry stack". While I still
| had some measure of agency as an engineer I added a
| crayon color picker to MacOS, added most of the PDF
| features people like in MacOS Preview. That was as much
| "driving the ship" as I was allowed -- until I wasn't
| even allowed that.
|
| I could have skipped sooner maybe?
|
| Once I had kids though I found I had a higher tolerance
| for a job getting shittier, a lower tolerance for
| restarting in a new career. So I put up with a worsening
| job for them.
|
| I quit the moment my last daughter left for college.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| I don't think they're blaming you per se, they're saying
| the reason you didnt enjoy it is because you did it for
| money.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Hmmm... Is it _because_ I came to tolerate it for the
| paycheck that it sucked or is it possible it began to
| suck first?
|
| I get it that money coming into the industry made the
| whole industry suck. Honestly, Apple was a much more fun
| to place to work at when there was no money to be made
| there (no more than a paycheck anyway). Others may
| disagree, but I found its success made it increasingly a
| shittier place to work. (Others though, as I say, may
| have enjoyed the wider reach the platform enjoyed with
| its success.)
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > added most of the PDF features people like in MacOS
| Preview.
|
| I'm not religious, but for this alone you deserve a life
| of blessings and happiness. The fact that I never ever
| have to fuck around with Adobe PDF apps to juggle PDFs is
| one of the load-bearing things keeping me sane in an
| insane world.
| wulfstan wrote:
| Yes. I used these features in Preview several times
| today. You have made my life easier on many occasions.
| For that, sir, I salute you.
|
| May you enjoy your retirement tinkering in your software
| garden.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| For tax season alone! I'm in and out of Preview
| constantly, looking at PDFs, sorting the pages out,
| flipping scans. Utterly indispensable software. It feels
| crazy that it just comes free with the OS.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I second [third?] this.
|
| I can't stand Adobe Reader, and use Preview, all the
| time.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make
| as much money as I can".
|
| I think it's a little deeper than that. It's the
| democratization of capability.
|
| If few people have the tools, the craftsman is extremely
| valuable. He can make a lot of money without a glut of
| knowledge or real skill. In general the people don't have the
| tools and skills to catch up to where he is. He is wealthy with
| only frontloaded effort.
|
| If everyone has the same tools, the craftsman still has value,
| because of the knowledge and skillset developed over time. He
| makes more money because his skills are valuable and remain
| scarce; he's incentivized to further this skillset to stay
| above the pack, continue to be in demand, and make more money.
|
| If the tools do the job for you, the craftsman has limited
| value. He's an artifact. No matter how much he furthers his
| expertise, most people will just turn the tool on and get good
| enough product.
|
| We're in between phase 2 and 3 at the moment. We still test for
| things like algorithm design and ask questions in interviews
| about the complexity of approaches. A lot of us still haven't
| moved on to the "ok but now what?" part of the transition.
|
| The value now is less knowing how the automation works and
| improving our knowledge of the underlying design, but how to
| use the tools in ways that produce more value than the average
| Joe. It's a hard transition for people who grew up thinking
| this was all you needed to get a comfortable or even lucrative
| life.
|
| I'm past my SDE interview phase of life now and in seeking
| engineers I'm looking less for people who know how to build a
| version of the tool and more people who operate in the present,
| have accepted the change, and want to use what they have access
| to and add human utility to make the sum of the whole greater
| than the parts.
|
| To me the best part of building software was the creativity.
| That part hasn't changed. If anything it's more important than
| ever.
|
| Ultimately we're building things to be consumed by consumers.
| That hasn't changed. The creek started flowing in a different
| direction and your job in this space is not to keep putting
| rocks where the water used to go, and more accepting that
| things are different and you have to adapt.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I don't agree. "Capability" is a red herring. It's not about
| what we _can_ do, it 's about what we allow ourselves to do.
| praptak wrote:
| If there's money to be made, there will always be someone with a
| shovel or a truckload of sparklers who is willing to take the
| risk (especially if the risk can be externalized to the public)
| and reap the reward.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| The author seems concerned about AI risk -- as in, "they're going
| to kill us all" -- and that's a common LW trope.
|
| Yet, as a regular user of SOTA AI models, it's far from clear to
| me that the risk exists on any foreseeable time horizon. Even
| today's best models are credulous and lack a certain insight and
| originality.
|
| As Dwarkesh once asked:
|
| > _One question I had for you while we were talking about the
| intelligence stuff was, as a scientist yourself, what do you make
| of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of
| human knowledge memorized and they haven't been able to make a
| single new connection that has led to a discovery? Whereas if
| even a moderately intelligent person had this much stuff
| memorized, they would notice -- Oh, this thing causes this
| symptom. This other thing also causes this symptom. There's a
| medical cure right here._
|
| > _Shouldn't we be expecting that kind of stuff?_
|
| I noticed this myself just the other day. I asked GPT-4.5 "Deep
| Research" what material would make the best [mechanical part].
| The top response I got was directly copied from a laughably
| stupid LinkedIn essay. The second response was derived from some
| marketingslop press release. There was no _original_ insight at
| all. What I took away from my prompt was that I 'd have to do the
| research and experimentation myself.
|
| Point is, I don't think that LLMs are _capable_ of coming up with
| terrifyingly novel ways to kill all humans. And this hasn 't
| changed at all over the past five years. Now they're able to
| trawl LinkedIn posts and browse the web for press releases, is
| all.
|
| More than that, these models lack independent volition and they
| have no temporal/spatial sense. It's not clear, from first
| principles, that they can operate as truly independent agents.
| tvc015 wrote:
| Aren't semiautonomous drones already killing soldiers in
| Ukraine? Can you not imagine a future with more conflict and
| automated killing? Maybe that's not seen as AI risk per se?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| That's not "AI risk" because they're still tools that lack
| independent volition. Somebody's building them and setting
| them loose. They're not building themselves and setting
| themselves loose, and it's far from clear how to get there
| from here.
|
| Dumb bombs kill people just as easily. One 80-year old nuke
| is, at least _potentially_ , more effective than the entirety
| of the world's drones.
| ben_w wrote:
| Oh, but it is an AI risk.
|
| The analogy is with stock market flash-crashes, but those
| can be undone if everyone agrees "it was just a bug".
|
| Software operates faster than human reaction times, so
| there's always pressure to fully automate aspects of
| military equipment, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
|
| Unfortunately, a flash- _war_ from a bad algorithm, from a
| hallucination, from failing to specify that the moon isn 't
| expected to respond to IFF pings even when it comes up over
| the horizon from exactly the direction you've been worried
| about finding a Soviet bomber wing... those are harder to
| undo.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| "AI Safety" in that particular context is easy: Keep
| humans in the loop and don't give AIs access to sensitive
| systems. With certain small antipersonnel drones
| excepted, this is already the policy of all serious
| militaries.
|
| Besides, that's simply not what the LW crowd is talking
| about. They're talking about, e.g., hypercompetent AIs
| developing novel undetectable biological weapons that
| kill all humans _on purpose_. (This is the "AI 2027"
| scenario.)
|
| Yet, as far as I'm aware, there's not a single important
| discovery or invention made by AI. No new drugs, no new
| solar panel materials, no new polymers, etc. And not for
| want of trying!
|
| They know what humans know. They're no more competent
| than any human; they're as competent as low-level expert
| humans, just with superhuman speed and memory. It's not
| clear that they'll ever be able to move beyond what
| humans know and develop hypercompetence.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The LessWrong-style AI risk is "AI becomes so superhuman that
| it is indistinguishable from God and decides to destroy all
| humans and we are completely powerless against its quasi-
| divine capabilities."
| miningape wrote:
| If anything the AI would want to put itself out of its misery
| after having memorised all those LinkedIn posts
| ben_w wrote:
| A perfect AI isn't a threat: you can just tell it to come up
| with a set of rules whose consequences would never be things
| that we today would object to.
|
| A useless AI isn't a threat: nobody will use it.
|
| LLMs, as they exist today, are between these two. They're
| competent enough to get used, but will still give incorrect
| (and sometimes dangerous) answers that the users are not
| equipped to notice.
|
| Like designing US trade policy.
|
| > Yet, as a regular user of SOTA AI models, it's far from clear
| to me that the risk exists on any foreseeable time horizon.
| Even today's best models are credulous and lack a certain
| insight and originality.
|
| What does the latter have to do with the former?
|
| > Point is, I don't think that LLMs are capable of coming up
| with terrifyingly novel ways to kill all humans.
|
| Why would the destruction of humanity need to use a novel
| mechanism, rather than a well-known one?
|
| > And this hasn't changed at all over the past five years.
|
| They're definitely different now than 5 years ago. I played
| with the DaVinci models back in the day, nobody cared because
| that really was just very good autocomplete. Even if there's a
| way to get the early models to combine knowledge from different
| domains, it wasn't obvious how to actually make them do that,
| whereas today it's "just ask".
|
| > Now they're able to trawl LinkedIn posts and browse the web
| for press releases, is all.
|
| And write code. Not great code, but "it'll do" code. And use
| APIs.
|
| > More than that, these models lack independent volition and
| they have no temporal/spatial sense. It's not clear, from first
| principles, that they can operate as truly independent agents.
|
| While I'd agree they lack the competence to do so, I don't see
| how this matters. Humans are lazy and just tell the machine to
| do the work for them, give themselves a martini and a pay rise,
| then wonder why "The Machine Stops":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
|
| The human half of this equation has been shown many times in
| the course of history. Our leaders treat other humans as
| machines or as animals, give themselves pay rises, then wonder
| why the strikes, uprisings, rebellions, and wars of
| independence happened.
|
| Ironically, the lack of imagination of LLMs, the very fact that
| they're mimicking us, may well result in this kind of AI doing
| exactly that kind of thing _even with the lowest interpretation
| of their nature and intelligence_ -- the mimicry of human
| history is sufficient.
|
| --
|
| That said, I agree with you about the limitations of using them
| for research. Where you say this:
|
| > I noticed this myself just the other day. I asked GPT-4.5
| "Deep Research" what material would make the best [mechanical
| part]. The top response I got was directly copied from a
| laughably stupid LinkedIn essay. The second response was
| derived from some marketingslop press release. There was no
| original insight at all. What I took away from my prompt was
| that I'd have to do the research and experimentation myself.
|
| I had similar with NotebookLM, where I put in one of my own
| blog posts and it missed half the content and re-interpreted
| half the rest in a way that had nothing much in common with my
| point. (Conversely, this makes me wonder: how many humans
| misunderstand my writing?)
| turtleyacht wrote:
| State of the Art (SOTA)
| lukeschlather wrote:
| The thing about LLMs is that they're trained exclusively on
| text, and so they don't have much insight into these sorts of
| problems. But I don't know if anyone has tried making a
| multimodal LLM that is trained on x-ray tomography of parts
| under varying loads tagged with descriptions of what the parts
| are for - I suspect that such a multimodal model would be able
| to give you a good answer to that question.
| groby_b wrote:
| No, the LLMs aren't going to kill us all. Neither are they
| going to help a determined mass murderer to get us all.
|
| They are, however, going to enable credulous idiots to drive
| humanity completely off a cliff. (And yes, we're seeing that in
| action right now). They don't need to be independent agents.
| They just need to seem smart.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| "It was only once I got it that I realized I no longer could play
| the game "make as much money as I can.""
|
| Funny, that is what my father taught me when I was 12 because we
| had compassion. What is it with glorifying all these logic loving
| Spock like people? Don't you know Captain Kirk was the real hero
| of Star Trek? Because he had compassion?
|
| It is no wonder the Zizians were birthed from LW.
| appleorchard46 wrote:
| Could someone explain the metaphor? I'm struggling to see the
| connection between AI and the rest of the post.
| ido wrote:
| That AI is dangerous and the closer we get to the danger zone
| the better it would be if the companies developing these
| technologies understand it might be better to slow down and
| make sure it's safe vs pushing ahead at maximum speed.
| appleorchard46 wrote:
| Thank you.
| migueldeicaza wrote:
| Vonnegut said it best:
|
| https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/we-are-here-...
| broabprobe wrote:
| huh, I wonder if he has relayed this story multiple times, I'm
| only familiar with this version,
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12020560-talking-about-when...
|
| "(talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an
| envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know,
| why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put
| them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go
| out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a
| good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot
| of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine
| goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman
| what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of
| the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of
| course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the
| computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're
| dancing animals."
|
| -- Kurt Vonnegut
| Thorrez wrote:
| He ignores his wife's suggestion because, among other things,
| he wants to see some great looking babes. Maybe this isn't a
| guy whose philosophy I want to follow.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Looks like you're completely missing the point of the quote
| and instead rat-holing on one word that you don't like. HN
| in a nutshell.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| I love Vonnegut and this specific piece you link, but not sure
| it's really talking about the same thing as the main link.
| Isamu wrote:
| >After I cracked the trick of tillering
|
| Guide to Bow Tillering:
|
| https://straightgrainedboard.com/beginners-guide-on-bow-till...
| red_admiral wrote:
| The story of playing at damming the creek or on the sand at the
| seaside is wholesome and brought a smile to my face. Cracking the
| "puzzle" is almost the bad ending of the game, if you don't get
| any fun at playing it anymore.
|
| People should spend more of their time doing things because
| they're fun, not because they want to get better at it.
|
| Maybe the apocalypse will happen in our lifetime, maybe not. I
| intend to have fun as much as I can in my life either way.
| bogdanoff_2 wrote:
| The solution to this problem is to choose a "game" that you 100%
| believe will positively impact the world.
| ziofill wrote:
| This is a tangent, but I would love so much to be able to give my
| kids memories of playing in a creek in the backyard...
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