I agree. Also, it's not like the whole internet will be under ID check. One can still opt out and don't use the main stream social media? My hope is that ID check is targeting never ending feeds of crappy content.
That said, I am very concerned about how things work privacy wise today (even without ID check).
While I see the point, I think I more often encounter the opposite. Duplication, but not exactly duplication.
Then the "sunk cost fallacy" is not an issue but there is huge maintenance cost and no-one feels like refactoring it. I'd rather refactor bad abstraction than 10x duplication.
but those are exactly the cases where the distinction matters. when you have a situation where you can't duplicate the code exactly, then you really have to look carefully if this is actually the right place for a shared abstraction. i tend to wait and see if i can refactor one or the other to get them to be exact duplicates and only then see if i can fit in a common abstraction. and yes, finding that i later need to make the same change in both places is a sign that a common abstraction is probably the right call.
> The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.
I love the post. I feel generating AI content is like doing informational compression (weirdly enough, by bloating up the size).
When giving it a prompt, the "normalized AI brain" guesses the intent based on what's the most plausible. All the diverse human brains get filtered, bucketed, here you go, this is the "standard artifact".
And yes, it is a compression because real life is not one shot prompt. If I get an unclear message from my colleague, I ask for clarification. If the message is bloated by AI and some information is added, it already scraped some of the real intent by bucketizing it. Sometimes it may be what the original author meant. Sometimes not.
I don't know what is anyone's motivation in compressing the facts by making text longer and harder to read. This whole.email generation idea is bizarre.
> Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies.
Exactly. A few weeks ago, there was an article about the age limit for social media. And everyone was full of criticism on how it affects privacy. But when there is a post about how browser profile serves de facto as a user identifier, then people are "Of course, what's the problem? We all know that, that's the way it has to be".
I am still fascinated by how convincing the AI slop can be. I saw way too much code and documentation which made no sense. But it's often not obvious. I read it, I don't get it, I read it again, am I just stupid? I can grab some threads from it, but overall, it just doesn't make sense, it doesn't click for me. And that's when I often realize, it doesn't click, because it's a slop. It's obvious in pictures (e.g., generate a picture of a bike with labels). But in code? It requires more time to look at it than to actually write it. So it just slips reviews, it sometimes even works as it should, but it's damn hard to understand and fix it in the future. Until eventually, nothing can fix it.
For the record, I use AI to generate code but not for "vibecoding". I don't believe when people tell me "you just prompt it badly". I saw enough to lose faith.
I'd like to see some examples of when it struggles to do summaries. There were no real examples in the text, besides one hypothetical which ChatGPT made up.
I think LLMs do great summaries. I am not able to come up with anything where I could criticize it and say "any human would come up with a better summary". Are my tasks not "truly novel"? Well, then I am not able, as a human, to come up with anything novel either.
I think there are 2 interesting aspects: speed and scale.
To explain the scale: I am always fascinated by the way societies moved on when they scaled up (from tribes to cities, to nations,...). It's sort of obvious, but when we double the amount of people, we get to do more. With the internet we got to connect the whole globe but transmitting "information" is still not perfect.
I always think of ants and how they can build their houses with zero understanding of what they do. It just somehow works because there are so many of them. (I know, people are not ants).
In that way I agree with the original take that AGI or not: the world will change. People will get AI in their pocket. It might be more stupid than us (hopefully). But things will change, because of the scale. And because of how it helps to distribute "the information" better.
To your interesting aspect, you're missing the most important (IMHO): accuracy. All 3 are really quite important, missing any one of them and the other two are useless.
I'd also question how you know that ants have zero knowledge of what they do. At every turn, animals prove themselves to be smarter than we realize.
> And because of how it helps to distribute "the information" better.
This I find interesting because there is another side to the coin. Try for yourself, do a google image search for "baby owlfish".
Cute, aren't they? Well, turns out the results are not real. Being able to mass produce disinformation at scale changes the ballgame of information. There are now today a very large number of people that have a completely incorrect belief of what a baby owlfish looks like.
AI pumping bad info on the internet is something of the end of the information superhighway. It's no longer information when you can't tell what is true vs not.
> I'd also question how you know that ants have zero knowledge of what they do. At every turn, animals prove themselves to be smarter than we realize.
Sure, one can't know what they really think. But there are computer simulations showing that with simple rules for each individual, one can achieve "big things" (which are not possible to predict when looking only to an individual).
My point is merely, there is possibly interesting emergent behavior, even if LLMs are not AGI or anyhow close to human intelligence.
> To your interesting aspect, you're missing the most important (IMHO): accuracy. All 3 are really quite important, missing any one of them and the other two are useless.
Good point. Or I would add alignment in general. Even if accuracy is perfect, I will have a hard time relying completely on LLMs. I heard arguments like "people lie as well, people are not always right, would you trust a stranger, it's the same with LLMs!".
But I find this comparison silly:
1) People are not LLMs, they have natural motivation to contribute in a meaningful way to society (of course, there are exceptions). If for nothing else, they are motivated to not go to jail / lose job and friends. LLMs did not evolve this way. I assume they don't care if society likes them (or they probably somewhat do thanks to reinforcement learning).
2) Obviously again: the scale and speed, I am not able to write so much nonsense in a short time as LLMs.
It always surprises me when someone predicts that keyboards will go away. People love typing. Or I do love typing. No way I am going to talk to my phone, especially if someone else can hear it (which is always basically).
Heh, I had this dream/nightmare where I was typing on a laptop at a cafe and someone came up to me and said, "Oh neat, you're going real old-school. I like it!" and got an info dump about how everyone just uses AI voice transcription now.
And I was like, "But that's not a complete replacement, right? What about the times when you don't want to broadcast what you're writing to the entire room?"
And then there was a big reveal that AI has mastered lip-reading, so even then, people would just put their lips up to the camera and mouth out what they wanted to write.
With that said, as the owner of tyrannyofthemouse.com, I agree with the importance of the keyboard as a UI device.
Interesting, I get so many "speech messages" in WhatsApp, nobody is really writing anymore. Its annoying. WhatsApp even has a transcript feature to put it back to text.
For chat apps, once you've got the conversation thread open, typing is pretty easy.
I think the more surprising thing is that people don't use voice to access deeply nested features, like adding items to calendars etc which would otherwise take a lot of fiddly app navigation.
I think the main reason we don't have that is because Apple's Siri is so useless that it has singlehandedly held back this entire flow, and there's no way for anyone else to get a foothold in smartphone market.
Just because you don't doesn't mean other people aren't. It's pretty handy to be able to tell Google to turn off the hallway light from the bedroom, instead of having to get out of bed to do that.
They talk to other humans on those apps, not the computer. I've noticed less dictation over time in public but that's just anecdotal. I never use voice when a keyboard is available.
I think an understated thing that's been happening is that people have been investing heavily into their desktop workspace. Even non-gamers have decked out mics, keyboards, monitors, the whole thing. It's easy to forget because one of the most commonly accepted sayings for awhile now has been "everyone's got a computer in their pocket". They have nice setups at home too.
When you have a nice mic or headset and multiple monitors and your own private space, it's totally the next step to just begin working with the computer with voice. Voice has not been a staple feature of people's workflow, but I think all that is about to change (Voice as an interface, not as a communication tool, that's been around since 1876.
Voice is slow and loud. If you think voice is going to make a comeback in the desktop PC space as a primary interface I am guessing you work from home and have no roommates. Am I close?
I, for one, am excited about the security implications of people loudly commanding their computers to do things for them, instead of discreetly typing.
I talk all the time to the AI on my phone. I was using ChatGPT's voice interface then it failed probably because my phone is too old. Now I use Gemini. I don't usually do alot with it but when I go on walks I talk with it about different things I want to learn. to me it's a great way to learn about something at a high level. or talk through ideas.
Honestly, I would love for the keyboard input style to go away completely. It is such an unnatural way to interact with a computing device compared to other things we operate in the world. Misspellings, backspacing, cramped keys, different layout styles depending on your origin, etc make it a very poor input device - not to mention people with motor function difficulties. Sadly, I think it is here to stay around for a while until we get to a different computing paradigm.
I hope not. I make many more verbal mistakes than typed ones, and my throat dries and becomes sore quickly. I prefer my environment to be as quiet as possible. Voice control is also terrible for anything requiring fine temporal resolution.
The only thing better than a keyboard is direct neural interface, and we aren't there yet.
That aside, keyboard is an excellent input device for humans specifically because it is very much designed around the strengths of our biology - those dextrous fingers.
If wizardry really existed, I’d guess battles will be more about pre-recorded spells and enchanted items (a la Batman) than going at it like in Harry-Potter.
That said, I am very concerned about how things work privacy wise today (even without ID check).
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