Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things (superuserdone.com)
52 points by SuperUserDone 3 hours ago
bilater 4 minutes ago
I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?
AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?
No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.
prakharjain 33 minutes ago
I was earlier of the belief, Oh my god, now nothing is impossible. Ai can market, ai can create video, ai can sell, i can build and make a great product. we will win.
I realized all this was quite wrong, AI just helps people who already know become more efficient. It just gives confidence to people who dont know anything by the sycophantic nature of AI. AI is just a tool for smart people to become smarter.
Love AI and what it allows us to do. But, it does give some superpowers, but the problems that existed before still do and they need to be solved for. with or without AI.
Herring 2 hours ago
The problem is not AI. It's an excellent technology. The problem is there's an underlying power grab (e.g. layoffs). When humans do that to each other they inherently dehumanize/invalidate/insult each other. Implement strong labor protections or basic income and a lot of this dog-eat-dog toxicity goes away.
ttoinou an hour ago
Automating a job is toxic now ?
PedroBatista 40 minutes ago
It can be.
Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ). Just like neurons, if you don't use it you lose it and when the inevitable problems come, nobody knows the why, the how and the what. At that point someone smart would incorporate all those real costs and opportunity loses on the "automating everything" equation. But they usually don't.
Of course automating tasks is a must, but it's very far from being a black and white situation. These dynamics have been happening for centuries by now, nothing new.
ttoinou a minute ago
kderbyma an hour ago
Yes when the sole purpose is to remove the livelihood of people in an attempt to make short term gains for selfish short term reasons....AI is a weapon when you have corporate stooge lackies who have nothing but animous towards fellow humans who dare to work...and try to live. If AI was beneficial, no one would profitize it....but lbr...you know that...
ttoinou an hour ago
jmye 16 minutes ago
overgard 33 minutes ago
Depends on the scale and the technology. If the answer is "all of white collar workers" then I would argue it's very toxic. (I don't think it can do that, but it's hard not to get the impression that it's absolutely the goal). I haven't really heard of a stable society with 50% unemployment and zero social safety net.
super256 16 minutes ago
sublinear 26 minutes ago
jayd16 16 minutes ago
Clearly not what is being said. If you read dehumanizing your workers and equate it with automating a job, then you're already well into the feeling that humans are fungible pawns to be disposed of, no?
Instead, you can and probably should see technology as augmenting you and your coworkers.
ttoinou 4 minutes ago
simianwords an hour ago
Automating _my_ job is toxic. Automating other people’s and being employed as a software developer is wholesome chungus moment.
jmye 17 minutes ago
forgetfreeman 16 minutes ago
When did killing someone else's livelihood stop being sociopathic?
ttoinou 3 minutes ago
orangecat 3 minutes ago
pm90 16 minutes ago
Normies just don’t understand what all is involved in running and evolving a production system. They think all programmers do is write code. Of course they believe that AI could replace programmers.
My in laws smugly asked me what I would be doing for work since AI would take away all the programming jobs and I said its not gonna happen and they laughed in derision.
heikkilevanto 6 minutes ago
... And watch stupid people do stupid things even faster
general_reveal an hour ago
When I think about the typical team composition needed to build a typical app in a lot of companies, well, actually what do I think about? I think, okay, that’s how many people we need to build a typical app. That’s what we should all think … like, what is that “number” of people we need?
So, today, if I think really really really, and I mean, really fucking hard about that “number”, I really really really come up with a number close to 1 (we need one person to type in the instruction at least, maybe two? Maybe three? Definitely not a team … no not that at all).
That means, for everything that we build today, before we even build it, we’ve already mentally replaced people. People be replaced yo, in your mind, in your company, in your reality. That’s it.
It’s a replacement, not a tool. And if you reaaallly think a bit more, you’ll see that it is truly the stupidest possible thing if in your scoping of what needs to be built, you didn’t scope out people. You’d have to be crazy not to scope out people.
Trust me, I never thought we’d get to this point either. I thought it was going to be an “assistant” too.
—-
The layoff numbers still look “normal “ to us. 75k here, 20k there, all numbers we’ve heard before. It hasn’t even really happened yet, the true numbers should be in millions. I didn’t believe the number “trillion dollar company” until, BAM, here’s a trillion dollar company.
Best we can do is kinda get used to the numbers, like the number 0 on one end (how many people you need), and some number N (in millions) that we won’t need anymore. We’ll just slowly get used to these new numbers.
This shit ain’t no tool.
overgard 20 minutes ago
I think if you use AI to automate talking to customers, you're going to stop having customers. If you use AI to do your engineering and deployments, it's up to you to fix it when it goes wrong. If you use it for accounting, you BETTER look at the results if you don't want to be audited. If the AI handles legal, same thing. Basically, if it replaces N people, then you, the one person, need to be accountable for being able to handle N people's roles, because the AI can't take accountability.
general_reveal 12 minutes ago
Right, the one person (Neo?), has to be able to verify the output. Most of us can’t replace the accountant because we can’t really … replace the accountant. We can replace the accountant’s work, but we can’t replace his/her other work which is knowing if the accounting is right.
One programmer can know if the program is right. So N people in that case, can truly be replaced.
I can know the SQL query came back right, I can know the drop down menu looks right, you know what I mean? I can even know if it’s any good. Person(s) of Type N (let’s say N is accountant for now) can be collapsed down to 1 in that case.
simianwords an hour ago
> Anthropic claims AI will replace industry X in Y months
False, Anthropic didn’t claim what was linked in the article.
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speculates that enough AI compute could help figure out how to cure cancer
Idk likely true? What’s so wrong here.
> Elon Musk says there will be no need for compilers as AI will write the binary directly
What seems so off about this? AI can write binary and probably better in a few years. Higher level languages would still be efficient probably.
> Anthropic claims that Mythos is super dangerous, the people can’t possibly handle such a powerful cyberweapo
Well it was?
IndeanCondor an hour ago
> AI can write binary and probably better in a few years.
Assuming you mean an LLM, you'd have to train this LLM entirely on a parameter space of binary tokens. Or are you saying the LLM generating natural language tokens is going to be printing machine language in 3-5 years, because that claim kinda betrays a misunderstanding of LLM functions.
bigmattystyles an hour ago
> > Elon Musk says there will be no need for compilers as AI will write the binary directly
Wouldn’t that make the AI the compiler?
atq2119 an hour ago
Right. There is something interesting here that could be explored thoughtfully. The hard part is that we rely on compilers being correct, and they mostly are.
We have no viable mechanism yet to get the same level of confidence if some LLM-based system writes the binary.
Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.
Though then the question will be whether we've gained anything, or whether we've just replaced the compiler with something massively more expensive that does the same thing.
There's some potential here for the LLM-based system to drive better performance optimizations than a regular compiler could.
Of course this isn't what Elon is actually saying, and we'd be better off if fewer people listened to him.
overgard 17 minutes ago
overgard 29 minutes ago
People love non-deterministic compilers. </s>