AI is missing the part of intelligence which involves insight. LLMs generate language blobs with highly sophisticated correlations. The governing insight in human cognition is essential to intelligence. It prunes the tree. It puts things in context. Everything is important to an LLM because insight intelligence is missing from the technology. The usefulness of LLMs doesn't tell us they are intelligent. It tells us how brilliant an invention language was.
I am not excited about tech anymore. I dread it to be honest. I was an early engineer at a AI company that got acquired. From that and related stock (golden handcuffs) was able to retire a couple of years ago. There were some tech problems that I wanted to investigate and I took a bunch of classes. Fun.
I loved my career.
Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.
There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search.
One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens.
...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.
> Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the companies are doing that, and Anthropic was just the featured company that had someone talk about it.
>The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about.
Wish you the best of luck. But from my honest experience: the hardest part of building community was never the technology.
I don't think the bottleneck was engineering time alone. There is context, brand, customer support, etc. I am not sure big complex products are particularly vulnerable in the way you state. However I have been thinking of a one smallish problem in a niche space that I could easily code for. There will be more of that.
Anyone who is worried about their gum inflammation should consider going on metformin. I had bleeding gums for my entire adult life. In my late 60s I was put on metformin for pre-diabetes. A year later all traces of gum inflammation have disappeared. This is a known side effect of metformin usage. You can look up the studies. It is one reason why metformin is being researched as an anti-aging drug.
"Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been."
Yes -- but. The market is irrational especially in a time of mania or panic. The AI phase we are in has mania, bubble aspects. There is no rational calculation about what is happening to software quality and is that good for customers or the industry (or individual businesses). We are too far into FOMO. It won't stop until it STOPS. Uh oh.
A friend of mine works in a niche software field at a small company. It was recently acquired and the whole technical team was laid off because the new director of engineering determined that they could replace the whole team with AI. All of the people who wrote the product were dumped as well as the whole cohort they had trained. Everyone.
I really noticed this a few years ago to the point that I changed a few things and they have helped.
1. I notice the movement of my attention. I used to default to something like: sit down at my computer to look something up. But before I do that, just check the email. Then I am down some sort of rabbit hole. I did this sort of thing with no awareness or conscious choice. The change is that I notice what I'm doing. Then I can rein it back. I make a choice. (I think scrolling videos gets us into a habit of not choosing what to pay attention to.)
2. Be aware of my curiosity. Try to stay in touch with it. If I get into the space of curiosity I have a lot more juice for sustained attention. Something that helps with this is long form reading, especially fiction (!). I find myself replenished for all my work. The next thing I will try is some group support: silent reading groups where you read together.
3. I have an app on my devices that limits my access to twitter and reddit etc to small windows in the day.
4. Turn off ALL notifications except text messages.
My son has ADHD and I never knew what it meant but this year I made him get coaching for it and I made him get meds. He was living at home for free rent and the condition of staying was to address this. My experience is that getting treatment for this condition helped him a lot. The coach really helped, the meds really helped. He is full of zest for the work that lies ahead. He's off on his own now and while I think he'll have stumbles it's basically very positive.
One thing about ADHD coaching. The coach is a consistent person who helps frame a positive attitude with agency and skills and this takes you away from negative self talk. It's good. I think ADHD folks need this positive support.
Yeah I hear that all the time "someone needs to clean up the slop tech debt" yet in the before times there was plenty of tech debt no one ever cleaned up, why would that be different now.
I was listening to a podcast where the host and the guest were both Black and both had been to Harvard. This was before the Supreme Court ruling. They joked that it was well known that the Black students at Harvard who were descendants of American slaves were about 10% of the Black student body at Harvard. There were a lot of children of Nigerians and 3rd world tycoons and such.
I think there is a good argument for a help up for people whose communities are still impacted by the history of American slavery (and all its ills) but giving these slots to children of the wealthy and often immigrants does not feel right.
If you talk to admissions officers, over drinks, they'll tell you that poor black students from marginalized US communities have abysmal performance at elite schools. The decision to admit rich black students is very deliberate.
There are many reasons why. Schools in the US are locally-funded, and a marginalized community might have 25% of the per-student spending of a rich community (actual, typical figures). Until inequities like that are addressed, there is little elite education can do to help, even if it wanted, which it doesn't.
The point of an exclusive university is to be, well, maximally exclusive. That's the literal opposite of inclusive.
In my state, the poor Black inner city schools have the highest per-student spending in the state (and some of the highest in the country), as the state government funds them heavily. Performance remains abysmal
However, there are *many* such effects. Whack one, and I can point to a dozen others.
Until and unless they're systematically addressed, it's actually very hard to either make progress or even draw good conclusions.
What's needed is a project to address *all* of the obvious ones, comprehensively, ideally on a national scale, but initially, at least on a pilot scale.
There is more to this story. I have heard Harvard (and its ilk) described as a smallish university attached to a massive investment fund. One of the criteria for admission is how much you and your family will be "good for" donations to the university. They much prefer students from rich families, even if they are the children of disagreeable dictators.
what is missing from this is the issue of power. tech companies interpret the rise of AI as empowering management and disempowering workers.
It's the American way to disempower workers. Tech people used to have a moat called expertise and management believes AI has made that obsolete.
Eventually workers in America will need to fight for power, probably through unions. That is the time honored way. There will be a lot of degradation and impoverishment on the way there I think. Fasten your seatbelts.
