How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
You’re extremely confident about this just based on your experience of it not happening to you. It’s good that it hasn’t driven you into a house but that doesn’t mean it can’t fail in a way that does drive someone else into a house.
Well, I’ve seen it very confidently and correctly navigate rural unmarked roads, and drive around rocks and logs across the road and things like this. I find it hard to believe it would drive through a huge stationary object like a house, which I imagine is definitely in the training data.
I guess I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I think at this stage it’s improbable.
Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.
It’s a tax. So the government wouldn’t be buying anything. OpenAI (for example) would need to issue 100% new shares and give them to the government to hold in this new sovereign wealth fund. This the new sovereign wealth fund holds 50% of the company.
I don’t know how you decide what companies are targeted though. OpenAI/Anthropic are pure AI plays. But what about an AMZN or AAPL that have AI as only a part of their business.
This would be an incredible $1,800 from each taxpayer sent overseas to the Iranian regime. On top of what’s already been spent and the inflation caused. In any other time in history just this alone (ignoring all the other scandals) would lead to something like a landslide 100 seat swing in the house. The fact polls show we’ll be lucky to see 10 seats switch shows how incredibly broken our information environment has become.
Sustained flooding the zone and abject denial over multiple years really is an unmatched cognitive warfare strategy isn't it. It's incredible how so many of us are tricked by something so primitive.
It looks like when you sum up: the cost to generate information using an LLM + the cost to actually verify the information, the result on average is the same as not using the LLM. That does not mean some times it isn’t faster and cheaper. It just means other times it’s slower and more costly. This along with different people’s tolerance for accuracy explains why we see such diverging experiences with it.
So in order to make it pan out the forces at play are trying to make everyone believe we now have to accept wrong, even dangerous results.
NZ is even worse than Australia on the housing tax vs shares tax front. No housing taxes. Yet they have what is effectively an annual wealth tax on shares (FIF) even on their pitiful retirement savings schemes. This discourages saving in shares and encourages putting money in real estate.
Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.
That is pretty much my existence at $MAJOR_TECH_COMPANY now. Inexperienced security engineers running bots against my codebase and sending me pages long tickets with their "findings". There might be a couple of interesting nuggets here and there but by and large the reports are just noise. This churn is actively taking away from my ability to actually respond to customer-impacting issues because "security is always our top priority".
Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.
They're getting paid to encode some inane prompt into paragraphs of text, and then they're getting paid again to summarize that back into something with even less value than the original prompt. And they're making money hand over fist because people are happier to play that game rather than just pushing back on the jerks sending them pages of generated garbage in the first place.
I would agree with you, except right now the walls of text come from people using the free or very cheap versions of ChatGPT, et al. So there's not even anyone making money off of it.
Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence.
We're so close to realizing the answer was with us the entire time.
midwit meme template
guy on left: katie u want meet 3pm discuss project
midwit: Hi Katie, I hope this message finds you well and that your week has been off to a productive start. I wanted to reach out and proactively touch base regarding an opportunity to align on some of the ongoing project-related workstream...
guy on right: katie u want meet 3pm discuss project
Agreed that just step 1 or step 1 and 2 would be depressingly pointless, but step 3 and 4 make this the equivalent of sending someone a let-me-google-that-for-you kind of link, does it not?
Caught out like this I imagine many people will kind of get the fact that you'd rather have their direct inputs..
Worse still, the person that is the most egregious about doing this seems to appreciate it and responds with "Yes, that's right!" and just ignores (or has no idea what I'm talking about) when I ask for the original prompt.
I simply ask for a positive affirmation of the summary so that I can act on that, instead of other things.
The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input.
And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them.
I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet.
Oh I know. In the past month I’ve moved several thousand dollars in spending away from companies that turned their support into a useless understaffed AI program.
The disease has spread to six figure enterprise contracts hallucinating about their own APIs.
My employer already records every scrap of communications, I'm running everything on corporate infrastructure, and they sent the information to me.
Giving the AI knowledge of the org chart, who works on what, how they prefer to communicate, what their goals/biases are, is no different than what every ape implicitly collects in their own head.
As these products improve, one person sending the output and not the prompt will remain useless. The prompt captures the intent and level of real consideration of the person sending it, the receiver can augment that with additional information if they want to.
Professional communication has a completely different goal than a student essay, and it's weird you conflate the two. A student paper is useless as an artifact, the actual value is for the student to learn how to write the paper. If a coworker sends me a long email for me to read it should provide some actual value.
I'm arguing against people who essentially say that running the LLM is useless; just send the prompt.. Obviously that is true if the person does zero additional value add, but then that person probably sucked as a colleague before LLMs anyway. When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise. Especially if the agent is automatically fed your personal context.
An essay states a hypothesis and then uses first and second party sources to validate it. I'm not conflating anything, it's just a good abstract example of the type of knowledge synthesis work, which is why we make kids do them.
A business strategy proposal is nothing more than a specific type of essay where the research sources are internal research results, market trend analysis, etc.
A technical design doc is an essay about the best way to implement a feature.
An "executive summary" is just an abstract, and the MBR puts the latest research citations and raw results in bullet points.
> When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise.
So send me the prompt and the three extra paragraphs that you wrote. The improved LLM will generate the additional context for me if I need it. But heck, maybe I wrote that context myself or have read it many times and don't need it parroted back to me.
> I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet.
have you asked these people how they feel about this? have you asked them for permission, for their consent to do this with their communications to you?
what you’re doing sounds incredibly creepy. like, meta/facebook kinda of creepy. granted, it’s at a more limited scale, but it’s still creepy af dude.
fwiw, if i was your colleague and you asked me how i felt about you doing this with me, i’d be seeing about getting HR involved.
Um, I absolutely expect my colleagues to update their internal model of me every time we communicate, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much that communication deviates from their expectations, or how much new information it contains. In fact, that is essentially the purpose of communication.
Do you think you are not constantly being "influenced" to do what people want from you?
What do think happens during a peer review or promotion decision?
What do you think the pile of data in SharePoint / GDrive represents?
You think HR will care about someone taking prolific detailed notes at work?
I did phrase my comment in a glib way to draw out this type of reaction. But this type of stuff is what "intelligence augmentation" will include, and the corporate panopticon is already alive and well anyway.
their mental model. the human being’s mental model. the one in our private head. not some model on a corporate server, some secret “dossier” on every interaction you’ve ever had with them. you’re basically creating your own black book / surveillance tool on everyone you interact with dude.
just because the corporations do this to us doesn’t make it okay to do it to each other. just because your employer does it doesn’t mean it’s okay to do to your co-workers. like, there has to be a degree of trust between colleagues dude.
compiling a record of every single thing anyone has ever said to you, an individual human being who is not a corporation or a machine, all for the purposes of “it makes my emails better” is just plain fucking creepy.
i think you might need some time away from the screen. seriously.
> i did phrase my comment in a glib way to draw out this type of reaction.
maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to take a bit of time to seriously think about why being glib about this super creepy thing you’re doing is not a good thing.
bit of self-reflection. the thing us humans are supposedly still capable of doing and the machines are not.
does that make it morally okay to do with your colleagues?
like, jfc, these are fucking people were talking about building “dossiers” of. people the person works with where a degree of trust and bonding is necessary. people they probably spend at least a quarter of their waking hours interacting with.
and your defence for it is “well, google does it”.
the best engineers know what not to build. they don’t build every single thing under the sun because they can.
also, don’t you have to explicitly agree to google’s terms for that stuff to use their services?
Nice article!
I wrote something similar this year too after seeing the 5-bullet-points of information stretched out with AI homologous slop too many times.
> What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism.
To me it felt we were slowly making the world better for all. Progress was happening and would continue to happen.
Now it feels like we are rapidly on the path to a dystopian Elysium like future. A dystopia for everyone but the sociopathic ultra wealthy that want to rule over us. And they’re not even hiding their intent from us anymore.
This is where the media (or your media bubble) failed you. Trump was always this way. In his first term he significantly increased the amount of bombs dropped and number of countries bombed over previous presidents.
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