Are you familiar with Michael Graziano and Attention Schema Theory? I think that is a better "substrate independent" formulation of the objections Ted Chiang is expressing here.
I work at Meta, on a key system in one of the main products.
I think when I went in, it was too interesting a system/opportunity to not do it. I was open to many roles and interviewing, and I just really wanted to understand how it works.
I don't touch ads, I don't touch integrity, or any of the "dodgy" stuff. I used to hate Facebook (and then Meta), and not have accounts on any of their platforms (bar Whatsapp), until I joined. I care about doing good and making a positive impact in the world (don't think I'll do much at Meta though). I'm probably the closest to a 180 on this you can imagine.
And... I don't have a good answer to why I still work there? It's an interesting anthropological exercise? My everyday is working with great people on a facet of a product that is entirely wholesome and inoffensive? When I came in, I found that my coworkers (locally, in my team/sister teams) were extremely talented, hard working, and cared a lot about the systems being good. Yes we are all pissed off by the recent changes, a couple people left (not mainly due to these changes though). I mean, the people just seem entirely normal? I don't imagine it's so different to working elsewhere. People are not obsessed with money or in any kind of dire situation, they are not grappling with hard moral questions about the value of money versus corrupting the world.
I guess I just feel like I'm not contributing to the awful stuff? I think you tend to get used to your everyday life and see the stuff around you in your little bubble. I guess if my part of the product gets better, Meta sells more ads and then has an incentive to do bad stuff, I suppose?
Anyway, yeah. Open to other convincing opinions about why I should feel awful for what I do and quit my job, and the right way to think about this (genuinely!).
I'm on a worse situation, wife has disabilities, father has cancer, I have glaucoma and dual labrum tear. My job is at risk and I've been building apps and SaaS tools for a year and couldn't make any money.
i CAN'T even post my new tool here.
my x account got suspended;
my comments got permanently banned on Reddit.
my posts got removed from Reddit.
I'm curious what these tests are measuring if you say your reading comprehension is only 50%. Your comment here is completely articulate and sensible so you are obviously fluent in English.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
Seems like a slippery slope argument to forestall any practical positive change which doesn't directly immediately benefit you.
What's actually going to happen though, is every principled parasite at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect every principled right they have while for example the health care, infrastructure, and institutions decline, and they will happily support a fascist demagogue rather than give up those rights (on principles of course! Not on pesky reality).
This is not the first time around. Wealth concentrating policies rely on appealing to the middle class' fear that someone, somewhere will get a benefit that I won't. So principled!
And it works.
C.f. the discussion in Australia right now over whether increasing capital gains tax is 'fair'... The right is talking on principles, conveniently ignoring the massive tax breaks and regulatory capture that have resulted in huge measurable increases in wealth concentration, and justifying those spuriously as overall productivity increases. Principles for thee, pragmatism for me.
You have probably convinced me to give it a try, to be honest.
It's just that, to cut a long story short, I am currently recovering from a level of burnout so severe that twelve months ago had me fully convinced I was actually in early-onset cognitive decline (I am a bit over fifty).
Only a little over two months ago I was still sure I'd have to quit IT and find a slow job because I was so out of the loop; this whole industry shift even in just the last few months is so shocking and strange.
So I have to be a bit cautious about how many indirections I add, if that makes sense. But I am compiling bigger projects than llama.cpp so I will give it a go.
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Update: turns out that when you run the app it installs a hook to run every time you start a session, submit a prompt, or agent ends a turn on all your coding agents / platforms. Zero notice was given, pretty shady. I get it, you want to ingest data, but installing things onto my system without being transparent isn't great.
For personal or casual use it honestly a pretty good product ngl. The AI email reply is also a cute feature. Although my own personal project does this and more, still happy pewds product came to fruition tho. It was a long journey. my.blackbear.app
It’s interesting how easy it is to tell ai was used to write this despite it having none of the obvious mannerisms. I wonder what I would have thought of this article before 2022, or if I just don’t like this style because of overexposure or something
I don't have the energy to build stuff all the time, that's a rabbit-hole side tunnel I don't really want to get into. I have larger concerns in my life that are more urgent than developing that side of things.
But I've moved on from Ollama for the time being, though I am mainly interested to see what the Gemma 4 MTP speeds are like on my M1 Max, so I may test it.
I am quite impressed with the tools in LM Studio, which is also a beautiful app, but it is not open source (which challenges my personal strategy somewhat) and I dread its inevitable enshittification.
Nevertheless the GUI has been very helpful while I learn, and I will probably use it until something else presents or my usage pattern settles down from experimentation to something a bit more routine.
I will try oMLX, too, but judging by the LiteRT page I may soon be able to just use that for the larger models if I end up settling with Gemma 4.
Looking at this thread, I think women have an obligation for the future of humanity not to procreate with people who deny consciousness or cannot experience it themselves.
If you are trapped in a tech bro relationship, think of humanity and cuckold your partner.
I don't think it is unreasonable to say both will happen, is it?
In the long term, tokens will fall in price. Obviously. (If "tokens" continues to be the unit)
In the short to medium term, for the IPOs to succeed, people have to start actually paying for what they are using, so the price will go up, and is going up, quite a lot. Once their value is set they will slowly fall from that point (or some point maybe halfway, depending on how much the market is willing to continue to subsidise).
I am an AI cynic, but I am now an informed cynic; I am learning agentic tools so I know where they are useful and I know my enemy.
I think the "fad" here is cloud-based, metered AI being a dominant work mode.
Nothing, so far, has suggested to me that any other outcome is likely than edge- to local-scale, on-device, on-laptop, on-prem models getting good enough to the point where people use them by default and use the cloud models only when they need the extra oomph.
I cannot believe that there is anything other than an enormous incentive for companies like Uber to find local, small model and on-premises solutions to their problems, not least while pricing is so changeable and people are getting nasty surprises.
Betting on OpenAI and Anthropic being around over the long term in the form that they are now, that feels like valley hopium. Utility monopolies essentially always derive from physical/geograpical limitations, don't they?
