AIUI, it is a type of factory that produces software.

I think everyone wants the experience of living, but it's not a great one without money, and money commonly requires full-time work until financial freedom. But that point usually comes at 65.

So it's not that only children appreciate life, it's just that adults have to deal with that whole money problem, while children don't.

I take a 8 hour work day over being subjected to more or less random weirdness from "adults" every day. IOW, not everyone has this rose-tinted view of their childhood. I still remember adults saying "you will once look back at your childhood and miss the times". Turns out that was totally and utterly wrong. I even have bad dreams about my school/childhood time every few months. I am sooooo glad that time of being subjected to the will of others is over.

I think the problem is that some people do genuinely have a great childhood, or another phase of life (university is another one), while others have a terrible childhood or another phase of life, and people who have one fail to understand those who have the other.

To add to that I think people can have a rose-tinted view and deny what they felt at the time.

I miss the 70's when I was in high school. I had a great time. It's one reason why I drive a '72 Dodge. I feel like a kid in it every time.

> I am sooooo glad that time of being subjected to the will of others is over.

I mean, I am absolutely glad about that.

I'm not so glad that I'm now subjected to the will of others on a far longer time horizon.

I have no problem with not being on top of a hierarchy. But having no agency at all was a horrible way of existance.

What's the incentive for these manufacturers to do this?

Are they getting paid for the data (e.g. we'll pay you $100M to install spyware), or are they trying to be an ad platform, or is it simply analytics gone out of control?

Because they make higher margins on their ad business, details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

It showed VIZIO revenue numbers ($1B hardware sales at -0.8% profit margin, ~$500M ad revenue at 61% profit margin).

Based on that, it seems to me that TVs are a one-time-sale commodity with low margins, while ads are continual revenue generators with high margins. This makes the incentive extremely clear.

They get to make money off of you for the rest of your life. They'll sell ads to companies, and they'll sell your data to anyone willing to pay enough for it.

Unfortunately, considering that 80-90% of people simply don't think or care about this, I can see the incentive.

I think that people just don't know about it. When directly confronted with it they react pretty strongly. Companies have done a very good job of hiding what they're doing from the public. They know people aren't going to read their 15,000 word EULA written in deceptively phrased legalese, and they wouldn't understand it if they read it anyway. Most Americans can't even read at a 6th grade level. People just have no idea what's being collected or what's being done with their data.

If really you want to see how people feel about being surveilled there's plenty of videos online showing people freaking out at someone just taking photos/video in public. A ton of people are absolutely convinced that the law protects them from being recorded in public. They're not going to imagine that a "respectable" corporation would be allowed to do it to them in their own homes.

That made me double take too, but he must be talking about the software getting better, and thus higher value.

Or fuel prices going up?

I'm so suspicious of this after Opus 5 benchmarks scored it higher than Fable 5, yet Opus 5 was untrustworthy (overconfident, error-prone).

Is this the kind of thing that works when you have a tight domain-specific language, but devolves into natural language (English) eventually?

E.g. A -> B, B -> C so A -> C (works, great). A -> B when A is sort of red and blue, also A is intermittent (what to do now?)

Yeah, philosophy of science & analytic philosophy (especially with Quine) has been down this rabbit hole before.

Formalisms should be in service to higher-level intelligences, not the other way around. It's pretty clear that LLM's are intelligent inherently; the lean doesn't just "prove math itself". (Admittedly, I'm not full blown AGI pilled either - there are some structural constraints that do make me think there is room to be gained in intelligence. And formalism will play a part in that. But it's not the end-all be-all to it).

Sub-humble-wizard here, how do I sign up?

I'll be launching in a week.

"Claude, a business is making $30K/mo converting bank statements!

Use all of my max 20x plan to build a BETTER version. Must have animated per-page progress indicators"

Perhaps – but it's a useful grammatical construct in everyday use, handy for structuring sentences.

And with the prevalence of AI, it rubs off on the smelly humans, who also find it useful and use it more as a result. (I used an en dash here instead of an em one – also valid, easier to type, and shorter).

Nah. I NEVER say the dash pre-AI, at least in commoners writings. Maybe in some books etc. The dash you read today is 99.9% AI generated.

I've used it extensively in English due to learning the language through a lot of older books - but I've never bothered to actually pull out the emdash, I would hope people can see that I'm not trying to subtract one sentence from the other.

Where do you think the LLMs got the emdash from? When I worked as a magazine editor we took good care to discern ndash and emdash in printing. In Germany it is a Bindestrich (which links words, hence "bind") and Gedankenstrich (this is where you have a pause in thinking and continue the sentence afterwards).

Like i said, the dash IS a thing, and only in practice used by "experienced writers", common folk NEVER use it. LLMs stole all the books, so obviously the AI spits out dashed like there is no tomorrow.

You cant argue about this, just looking at github, i never saw dashes used pre AI. Today you see a dashes in code comments, PRs, issues etc EVERY time. Its all AI generated.

On the rare occasions I used Word to write things in the past, it would replace dashes with em-dash.

I normally use dashes when writing, never bothered myself with writing an em-dash properly otherwise.

Huge bloated article that unclearly expresses a simple thought.

It's like the author prompted, "write me a big article on what is and isn't a commodity with AI, and make it confusing"

"If I have a blog with long posts, I'll be a thought leader."

Such pre-LLM thinking, can't believe it's still a thing.