Productivity is not the most important thing to me— because it’s too easy to get the wrong things done.

It’s not really about productivity. Consider productivity an unintended benefit of the medication.

Extreme ADHD is a constantly shifting quest for volatile stimulation. This results in poor diet (extreme sugar cravings all the time), short term memory loss, failure to achieve basic tasks, obsessive behaviors, poor social framing, and more. For these extreme cases medication provides clarity that allows for more rational control of basic cognitive decisions.

My son is on such medication and he swears by it.

I suffer from ADHD, probably-- enough that I wrote a book about how I couldn't abide school and can't force my brain to think about arbitrary things. I developed ways of dealing with it. I don't want to take any drugs for it, because I like being me and it is part of me.

I’m surprised that someone who claims that formal education is so important would make such a clumsy, unsupported argument.

A big problem with the notion that a university degree is necessary for success— apart from the obvious counterexamples that are all around you— is that university education is such a small percentage of your career as a learner. Another problem is that a degree can be acquired without doing much actual work. Another problem is that degrees are poorly aligned with the needs of industry.

Having been in the industry 43 years, I also have experience. I wouldn’t tell anyone to “stay in school.” I would tell them to relentlessly study their craft and achieve excellence in it. That’s why, in my field of testing, instead of quoting textbooks, the textbooks quote ME.

You just did.

Boooom! Headshot!

More like developers are now testers and nobody is doing QA.

Interesting that the phrase “words do mean things” is ambiguous: it either means “words actually have meaning” or “words can hurt peoples’ feelings.”

I’m impressed with how vapid a post can be and still find success on Hacker News.

They got rid of test managers. Then testers. The industry said everyone should be responsible for testing— which means no one is.

Now AI tests? Except not really. It claims to perform testing. It’s still up to us to review and remediate.

That’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves.

We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.

Slaves in the US were legally declared non-people.

It is a fact that humans are able to de-humanize each other. This is bad.

But that is not an argument or reason for anthropomorphizing every inanimate object. And if you want to draw the line somewhere, so that only some inanimate objects are people, then we have to argue about where to draw the line. The "but slavery..." argument only deals with actual humans, so it doesn't tell us that LLMs also get to be considered to be people.

Human slaves are embodied, and have a continuous consciousness from birth to death. LLMS have no bodies, cannot meaningfully be killed (to erase one is analogous to it leaving a particular location... it can still be in many other locations at the same time), do not experience pain, do not have emotions, and do not experience time (when you ask one a question it wakes up for a moment and then goes to "sleep" again after replying to you). You can't even meaningfully identify an LLM as an individual, since it was trained on the collective utterances of all humanity, and any little change to it makes it a different entity.

The slaves were sentient at that time. AI, as it stands now, is not.

Getting there. Chess, done. Go, done. Poker, done. Turing test, done. Walking, done. Running, done. Driving, done. Clothes folding, done. Discusses own sentience, done. Does not want to die, done.

Not done. I can write a BASIC program that says “PRINT ‘I do not want to die’” This does not mean it is an entity that does not want to die.

But that does not matter anyway. We cannot allow informational entities to attain the same status as people, for exactly the same reason that we don’t allow people to hack voting systems to give themselves 1000000 votes. It would obviously completely destabilize human society.

“Slavery was so ingrafted into the policy of the Southern States, that it could not be eradicated without tearing up by the roots their happiness, tranquility, and prosperity; that if it were an evil, it was one for which there was no remedy; and, therefore, like wise men, they acquiesced in it.” - Jefferson

Yes. Also, LLMs are not people. They are not going to be people. And the only people who think they SHOULD be people either don't care about the destruction of humanity (they must want total war?) or can't be bothered to think about the consequences of treating sock puppets as if they had agency.

Yes, so what? Rocks are also not people. I declare it. But you think there is some problem with calling rocks not people?

The fact of declaring something a non-person does not prove it is a non-person. But in the case of LLMs we do know them to be informational structures that are in fact not people.

Women are real? What does that mean? They are real what? Real womeny? Womenesque?

This has nothing to do with creativity ending. It sounds like those videos were utterly unremarkable, and the author is telling the story of people with low standards.

It’s as if two guest brought food from two different hamburger chains, enjoyed the food, noticed how the hamburgers were similar, and then announced the end of fine dining.