It’s not going to go back to pre LLM times, it’s also not going to go to a generative ai utopia where we can turn off our brains and a model will understand every nuance of human existence without some from of defined guidance.
Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same thing will happen with language models.
I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.
And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might make some coin for Spotify. But are people going out to those non-existent tours, or are they instead listening to Confessions II and praying nightly that Madonna tours again?
And, Madonna, if you're reading this: please go on tour. Please.
Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc.
Personally, I’d be knitting and crocheting things for other people with most of my day if I didn’t have to worry about money, or I’d help my neighbor with the website she wants for her business venture, or I’d teach kids how to code. These are things I’d like to do, that I can’t readily do while having the overhead of a full time job unless I run myself ragged and tbh, I’d rather not.
I think the sentiment comes from people that just don’t find pleasure from working/mastery. The incentives have changed so much with llm-enabled development, but not which ones people respond to.
I’m still in the mines but I don’t know for how long. Part of my performance evaluation for the year will include a section on using AI, so I’ll be biting the bullet and using copilot for glorified autocomplete like I did when it was still in beta.
I’m also perusing for shops that aren’t necessarily “anti-ai”, but where lack of using it isn’t seen as a negative
Biologically, life is an effort-minimizing machine. Our brains have a whole system of habit-forming to minimize the enormous amount of energy it takes to think.
Whatever people say, give them a way to think less, and they will necessarily prefer it unless they literally are a Buddhist monk, seeking to be aware over every action and thought.
Our brains also have evolved rewards for performing life-continuing behaviors, and then evolved to rewarding proxy behaviors, instead of the actual life-continuing behavior. This is perfectly in line with what you are saying, but now we are rewarded for spotting enemy snipers in CODBLOPS, rather than spotting lions/snakes/crocodiles.
We have gotten very good at hacking this reward function. It has reached a point where a thinking-minimization engine will pay a significant amount of resources to, say, Paradox Studios to do what is effectively the opposite of not thinking.
They want to be challenged in such a way that they perceive to be enriching to their life. The reason people use AI at work and don't blink, but then won't listen to AI artists on Spotify, is that they see one as enriching, and the other as menial.
Optimizing the menial is the end-goal, optimizing fun and humanity and expression is not desirable. It's just not, and we're seeing that over and over again.
“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.” A. N. Whitehead
For myself it was learning what a limit is in calculus, then learning about vector spaces, then learning about metric spaces and then learning about different topological spaces.
Then I had to relearn how a limit worked.
From a proof with epsilon delta inequalities.
To a proof with showing for some n dimensional metric spaces that has all the properties needed to converge does in-fact converge. Finally to a proof that for any space that is metric there is an isometric function into that metric space that also converges.
And that does touch measure theory, functional analysis or set theory. So there’s still so so much more for me to learn.
So that is kind of the point of studying maths right?
Why something in unsolvable or undecidable can be as important as the output of a theorem.
Questions like these, fields medal level problems or Karp’s 21 NP-complete problem are problems working mathematicians are interested in.
Will LLMs help as an human assistant in the future? Probably.
Will LLMs answer these questions themselves, provide insights and bounds to these new mathematics and teach other mathematicians why this new math they create is true?
Will these models have phds and take candidates teaching them how to apply and think about the maths problems they are interested in?
it can operate at the level of a mere mathematics professor, who everyone knows are barely conscious, basically automatons. wake me up when it's Einstein
At the same time if you imagine a machine that can associate different maths. Would said machine encounter undecidable statements more frequently?
Would the rules of said machine have statements they themselves cannot prove by parameters set in their ‘programmed(by humans, machines, or other machines)’ assumptions?
It’s not that. Consider the definition of the limit. The idea existed for a long time. Newton/Leibniz had the idea.
That idea wasn’t formally defined until 134 years later with epsilon-delta by Cauchy. That it was accepted. (I know that there were an earlier proofs)
There’s even arguments that the limit existed before newton and lebnitz with Archimedes' Limits to Value of Pi.
Cauchy’s deep understanding of limits also led to the creation of complex function theory.
These forms of creation are hand-wavy not because they are wrong. They are hand wavy because they leverage a deep level of ‘creative-intuition’ in a subject.
An intuition that a later reader may not have and will want to formalize to deepen their own understanding of the topic often leading to deeper understanding and new maths.
If you are in the US. Proportionate representation stopped completely with the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929.
Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves.
This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corporate capture for coming up to 100years. Last time there was push back from congress we got the Powell memo. That memo reinforces and defends corporate power in American politics.
The 3/5 of slave population vote were given to the slaveholders. It was not proportional, it was giving structural advantage to pro-slavery side of it.
There’s a bit of a double edged sword here. Removal of taxes leads to more coupled private/government relationships. Where external interests fund politicians to protect their own monopolistic interests. That money needs to come from somewhere. Wealthy people don’t want to pay taxes. But they sure do like to pay money to members of the government to further their own interests. Remember it was about taxation without representation. Wealthy people pay a lobbying ‘tax’ and get representation. In this way they are just paying a tax in a different way, where they get benefits and you get very little to nothing.
There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can work.
For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be introduced by some other members who have met you in real-life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that brand.
If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the forum in read-only mode.
It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
It's international too: people do travel and they organize meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does work.
Yes but I think bots can be very good, and many people have legitimate online-only relationships. It gets hairy quickly, with real users getting culled and bots slipping through.
Also, if the bots are smart, they'll add real people too and take them down with them.
Yeah that’s the trade off of this implementation. Lobste.rs already uses this implementation
https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
The comments are considerably better. I’m not even a member but get more out of reading those comments than hn, and I’ve worked at multiple YC’s. This place is not what it used to be.
I'm assuming there's tracking on the invites. So a recursive kick on X and all who X invited would still do the trick. If an IP address appears more than 5 times in an invite tree, ban the /24 or ASN if not from a friendly country for 10 minutes or other reasonable timeframe.
Getting unique IPs in any country you want is trivial for anyone but people building toy bots.
How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned.
Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts
That's fine. If it is understood that you might be permanently banned because someone you invite starts doing bad stuff, maybe you'll be careful about who you invite.
Inviting people who invited bots chould also hurt your "social credit" score in various ways.
Your tree could for instance be pruned - you can still invite people, but the people you invited can no longer invite people.
There are not a lot of sites which have tried this and failed. Those which have tried to be even a little bit clever about it, have succeeded pretty well (Advogato was a really early example).
What there have been, are sites which rejected such restrictions after a while, because they would rather have a big number to show to investors than real people. Many have even run the fake accounts themselves (e.g. Reddit).
>Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get access.
Bittorrent trackers, as absolute retarded as they are, have performed this experiment for us and the lesson we're supposed to learn is that this does not work. Someone, somewhere, has an incentive to invite the wrong sort eventually, which because of the social network graph math stuff, eventually means "soon". Once that happens, that bot will invite 10 trillion other bots.
Absolutely. If anything, private torrent trackers and NZB indexers are proof that it works overwhelmingly well.
The few I'm part of all have a real community (like in the net of old), civil conversation, and verified, quality materials being shared. Almost everybody behaves and doesn't abuse the invite system, because nobody wants to lose their access to such a wonderful oasis among the slop web. It's a great motivator to stay decent and follow the rules. When things go bad, it's usually not because of malice, but because someone got their account stolen. Prune the invitee tree and things are mostly under control again.
Entire trees of invitees, going back months and years, are pruned. Mercilessly, indiscriminately, and self-servingly for the few people privileged enough that they are above suspicion. And if you're unlucky to be on the wrong side of it, there's nothing like an appeals process.
>and doesn't abuse the invite system
That's wild.
>When things go bad, it's usually not because of malice,
I never said it was malice. It's because the system itself is pathologically flawed and there's no way to make it work.
Compilers can never be error free for non trivial statements. This is outlined in Rices theorem. It’s one of the reasons we have observability/telemetry as well as tests.
Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same thing will happen with language models.