Most of what I've been reading on either side of the argument is reductive. It's possible to have a take based on one's perspective and experience but it's impossible (at this time) to generalize things more broadly. I think what most people feel is multi-faceted: efficiency expectations from "leaders", job change inevitability (perceived or real), economic impact (should things not go well), loss of identity (am I a programmer, engineer, manager of things?), and several others. The discussions on the multiplicative effect of LLMs are being framed as a false dichotomy when it's far more complicated and nuanced.
Life is stressful (in some respects, overly so), but we’ve dealt with this for millennia by having a strong support system. Not to be reductive over the multitudes of problems people face today, but most can and should be solvable by having a good support system. Family and good friends with whom you can speak frankly can do wonders. It doesn’t solve the affordability or job problems, but having someone to talk to, someone that you can trust and has lived experience, can go a long way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve solved “problems” or at least lessened their impact, by consulting family and friends.
Indeed. I think better "built environments that are conducive to community" are important, and can help things like this. ie things to reverse the "bowling alone" type trends.
I always find this characterization baffling. Why does it matter if it's a 24 year-old vs 30, 35, or 50? Many aspects of life that we hold near and dear were created by very "young" people.
I just want whoever is next in line to make Siri perform reliably and consistently. Not 70% of the time of even 90% of the time, 100% of the time for the limited uses cases that most (perhaps just me?) people use it for:
- Call "person"
- Call "business" (please don't say "I don't see so and so in your contacts" and on a second try, work)
- Find "place" (while driving)
- Define "phrase or word" (please don't say I found this on the web)
- Set a timer or alarm
- Check the messages (in a sane way)
- Set reminders (this one surprisingly works well)
- Use intents correctly (I just want to be able to say "play 99% invisible in Overcast")
It doesn't need to do all the fancy things they show-cased last year. It just needs to do the basics really well and build from there.
An underrated and oft understated rule is always have backups, and if you're paranoid enough, backups of backups (I use Time Machine and Backblaze). There should be absolutely no reason why deleting files should be a catastrophic issue for anyone in this space. Perhaps you lose a couple of hours restoring files, but the response to that should be "Let me try a different approach". Yes, it's caveat emptor and all, but these companies should be emphasizing backups. Hell, it can be shovelware for the uninitiated but at least users will be reminded.
Most importantly it would actually reveal the lie they are all trying to sell. Why would you need backups if it's so useful and stable? I'm not going to ask it to nuke my hard drive after all.
Good thing this is not an average user then. This is someone programming a computer, which is a skill that requires being more than simply a user.
I'm sorry, but how low is the bar when "make backups" is "too difficult" for someone who's trying to program a computer? The entire point of programming a computer is knowing how it works and knowing what you're doing. If you can't make backups, frankly, you shouldn't be programming, because backups are a lot easier than programming...
I might be grouchy, but I don't want any ads to be useful. A useful ad is just a successful ad. The endgame of the most successful persuasive ad is mind control. If some ad genuinely convinces me to buy a thing, while I may really be glad I bought that thing, I still have this feeling of being used and would prefer it didn't happen.
(when I've seen a useful ad for something I really want, I've often been able to find nearly the same thing from someone else for less. They can afford to charge less since they're not paying for ads)
are they going to turn down money from borderline scammers peddling cheap chinese products with bogus claims? if not, then they can only show so many high quality ads before they start showing the same garbage Facebook does.
It makes it easy for me to find additional commentary for things I’m interested in, and I appreciate that. There’s no policing going on. If you find it off-putting, that’s your problem.
Every time I see artifacts like these I can’t help but think whether we are producing artifacts that will be discovered 10000 years into the future, and still be in a robust state.
Oh a LOT will still be around in ten thousand years, especially if climate change causes a lot of desertification. The oldest Egyptian papyrus is almost 4,600 years old and that’s just papyrus, an organic material that doesn’t survives very long in more humid climates.
Ten thousand years isn’t very much in geological timescales, not enough to bury everything and crush it to dust so anything that gets left in a landfill (and not harvested in the future) has a chance of surviving. Anything made of noble metals like gold and platinum especially, so it’ll mostly be a question of how much is thrown away versus recycled.
The generative aspect might be slightly oversold, but I’m interested in the practical applications being targeted by DeepMind and similar labs. AlphaFold’s ability to predict protein structures for disease treatment is very exciting.
