Wrong. I specifically stated I hold myself to a higher bar than I held anyone else. I took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did.
> Wrong. I specifically stated I hold myself to a higher bar than I held anyone else. I took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did.
This is not what I was trying to say.
First let me state the assumption I made: You think that working at Anthropic/OpenAI is morally bad because that's the parent thread, and you made a comment about how somethings are good enough and other things are too bad to tolerate.
So yes, you hold yourself to the bar of I should not work at Anthropic/OpenAI - but the point is that this bar is convenient to hold yourself to.
Did you "took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did."
Or did you simply never work there, maybe never even had an offer to work there.
I wasn't particularly commentating on specific companies. The scope of my reply was strictly responding to a claim that voluntarily choosing to contribute to an evil organization is the same as being physically coerced to do it.
That said, I do hold myself to professional standards that are 'inconvenient' as well. User surveillance, manipulative dark patterns for maximizing engagement and monetization, and just about everything else big tech does is antithetical to the way I live my life. I strive to develop software that I myself am happy to use and that my users are delighted to use. My career certainly got off to a slower and less lucrative start than it otherwise would have if I had no scruples about how I made a living. I could've made much more money if I harvested my users' data and sold it. And yet, I chose not to. That is a choice you can just make. If you were in a position where you were facing homelessness, I could understand taking any job you can get, but the people chasing $300k+ TC jobs at $evilcorp aren't usually in that position.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is, and you're basically accusing the individual of "sour grapes". It isn't clever, it's plainly transparent, and about the easiest way to trivialize someone else's moral convictions. Shame on you. Be better.
> easiest way to trivialize someone else's moral convictions
Did not trivialize it at all. Regardless of what's "right" or "wrong" we are definitely in the territory of "advanced ethics" and not "trivial/beginner ethics"
Personally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment.
Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101.
It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"
YMMV but my experience tells me that the more cliché something looks, the more likely it's bad/cheap.
I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent.
Meanwhile, the best restaurants I know have, at best, a flag or some kind of small drawing to give a clue about their nationality, but otherwise they look like a regular local one.
Right, but the best restaurants are not most restaurants. The best high end events are not most events. Most events and restaurants could be improved a lot by AI already
More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
You just don't know what it's like to live in a place where art and culture is truly valued. Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them. The food looks a little prettier, their packages are just a bit neater, their technology is cute, they put little doodles on everything, aside from new-age products or architecture everything has a little bit of personal touch and care. This is because there is some tradition of taking pride in small details and not reaching for the most obvious solution.
A society that values culture is taking the extra 3 minutes to think of or look up some Japanese iconography that would make the poster a bit more interesting than a sakura even if brainless "average" people cannot figure out how it is relevant to Japan, the hope being that all of us learn and appreciate these things a bit more.
> Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them.
I've been to Japan. How would you comment on the aesthetic of this "Little Texas" bar in Tokyo: https://www.littletexas.jp/
Do you think they are valuing the true culture of modern Texas? Because in my opinion this bar is filled with the most basic Texas cliches I can think of: cowboy hats, longhorn skulls, etc. Probably a lot more egregious than putting a sakura on a poster.
I said new-age products are an exception, the bar was opened in 2005. It also kind of proves my point, once Western culture ingratiated itself into Japan the art culture got a bit worse.
It is because you know this and you continually choose to keep using it.
It’s be like if your 2001 BMW car was super fuel efficient, and then for whatever reason the 2028 model guzzled gas and you chose to buy it anyway
Just because the thing you did once upon a time was efficient, does not mean you have a lifetime pass to engage with it no matter the updated circumstances
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
This is not the bar for societal adoption, and we can already see a demonstration that it is false.
A waymo is basically an industrial strength robot. It operates among inherently unpredictable humans already. There is no guarantee that it will never, ever hurt a human.
And yet in many cities around the world, you can call a waymo and ride it and society accepts it.
I think that's not a bad point but it ignores the different safety standards that most people accept when it comes to a) driving and b) their toddlers. Like a household appliance that kills 20-40k toddlers every year would be a major scandal, but it's OK for automobiles.
I feel like people who have high EQ should actually grasp the infinite depth and complexity of even the median human.
Just imagine, there’s a woman Alice who cleans your home once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight with her husband this morning on (something completely unrelated to you).
Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad vibes while she is moving around your house?
That's the point: passkeys, and even 2FA, address rare and unlikely threat scenarios, while defeating most common use cases (delegation by sharing credentials), and making people vulnerable to most common threats (like, losing or breaking your phone).
That is not a rare threat model. Many people use iPhones and Windows computers. Fortunately, Apple has released iCloud Passwords which lets you access passwords and passkeys from a Windows computer.
What the law says and enforcement of the law are sometimes 2 different things, but generally employees should not be shorting their own stock, lock up or no lock up.
The issue is that this creates a conflict of interest.
In the worst case scenario, as an employee, you can literally do a bad thing to cause the stock to go down. E.g. An engineer can make a bug which blows up a rocket.
So then you could short the stock, bug a rocket, and become super rich.
It's the same issue with athletes betting on their own team - it's trivial to throw the game.
> Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?
To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples
1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase.
2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini
Here are the problems I traversed:
- How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule?
- how much sun vs shade?
- when do I move seedling to the ground outside?
- Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim?
- [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?
I also have one anecdote - I (think) I understood basics of quantum mechanics intuitively for the first time. Of course it's probably superficial and maybe not 100% correct, but it is better than every time I tried to understand it before.
It definitely wasn't a single prompt, but two hours of back and forth, with a lot of time spent thinking (me, not LLM) in between. There were multiple times where I misunderstood something, so if I just read a book I'd probably get stuck many times.
Do you retain that information? Or are you just constantly relying on having access to an llm to re-look things up. The amount of information I retain when using llms to learn is far less than other methods, not sure why, you'd think it would be just as effective as reading a book, but it's definitely not. Probably for the same reason that learning math and always using a calculator does not make you great at math.
I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.
I definitely retain it. In the case of the gardening - I pretty much immediately go outside and practice it.
In other words, how I get the info doesn’t matter (book, video, llm) because I’m locking in the skill by doing the thing in the garden.
And sometimes it is kinda wrong/suboptimal, but not more than e.g. asking a friend for gardening tips. Usually this is based on lack of context, like eg im growing cherry tomatoes and the AI assumed I had full size tomatoes
I dont think you are getting the topic - sure if knowledge gleamed from llms is immediately practiced repeatedly, it stays, why would anybody question that.
Now add 30 or 50 or 100 other topics you dip into on any given day. No way in hell you do same technique of repetition till you learn it. This is gist of problem to me. Most students these days fall into this category and the amount of time/energy to properly learn something has stayed the same or even increased (due to distractions and pushing through mental barrier of 'I know it well enough')
> Now add 30 or 50 or 100 other topics you dip into on any given day.
In a world without YouTube/LLMs, you weren't going to learn these things anyway. Today, you also don't learn them. So how can you argue that something is lost?
> the amount of time/energy to properly learn something has stayed the same or even increased
The whole point of my post is that LLMs, YouTube, and other internet resources which are easy to access have lowered activation energy to where learning something is at least possible.
I can tell you for sure I would never even try to learn a second language if I had to go to a class physically, or carry a book with me in my pocket to translate as I traverse the real world.
I think it depends on how much time you spend learning something and "engaging" with LLM.
I have many times asked it something I was slightly curious about, got the answer after the first or 2nd-3rd prompt, spent 3 minutes in total and forgot it after 15 minutes probably.
But a few times I've spent an hour or more on a topic, asking many questions, thinking between responses, and I actually learned something.
For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has.
Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.
I'd add that this is also how it used to work with Google search too: there's been facts that would show up as the first result, then you'd just forget it 10 minutes later and have to re-google it. I know this happened to me many times.
For better or worse, there's less friction now for seeing an answer to a question you have. You can ask in more arbitrary ways than Google required, and something will still come up. For looking up factoids, it's much faster. For picking up more complex topics, I'd say it's more or less the same, because you still have to spend time ruminating on the topic.
You should beware that you've rationalized everything you do as good enough, and everything that other people do is morally questionable.
Have you set the bar for what is 'reasonable' to be extremely convenient for your own circumstances?
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