Honestly? I don't think we really understand consciousness. So it's kind of hard to say something is or isn't conscious.

Could anything be more ironic, the employees that work to track every person in the world are now being tracked themselves :)

I'm trying to have sympathy for those who work there and are opposed to this, but the irony is so thick that it's a struggle.

I don't think they deserve your sympathy. I don't think there is an employee there that couldn't find another great job somewhere else.

Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.

I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.

These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.

I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.

Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???

I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...

All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.

And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...

If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...

If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...

If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...

Etc...

If you look at idioms, human nature has never really changed. Most of our culture and outlook was defined by the Sumerians.

"You reap what you sow".

Just like all those drones we use on our adversaries. The next American civil war will definitely be fought with drones.

I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.

I know someone who was a DBA and became an electrician and now retired after about 10 years doing that. By all accounts he loved it, spent his days doing odd jobs for old people while chatting with them over many cups of tea. However (here in the UK) you do have to obtain and keep up with certification.

Kinda buggy, but impressively nonetheless. How long did it take?

It took 50 minutes, would be ~$20 in API costs (I'm on a Pro sub).

(Correction: I'm on a Max ($100/mo) sub. Realized the mistake too late, so can't edit my comment.)

But it was trained on ad spam wasn't it?

And consistently quotes information from them, yes. They quite like showing reddit and news icons while searching, but expand the references and it paints a rather different picture, especially for common searches which are flooded with junk. Niche stuff seems more likely to reference decent sites, but have massively worse hallucinations.

People are afraid for their livelihood. What do you expect?

Well yes, but there is a choice being made here and I would love to believe we can do better. The rational response to being afraid about your livelihood isn’t to spend time filling every HN thread on LLMs with embittered negativity. Not to mention all the flat denials that LLMs can do mathematics and write decent code, which is almost a self-contradictory position if you are worried they are going to replace you.

There are a lot of big issues at stake here and just because a person is interested in what AI can do and curious to discuss it does not make them uncritically positive about it’s effects on society, the economy, and the world. Yet that is often the assumption and it leads to battle lines being drawn, on every AI discussion, over and over again. It means the serious discussion gets swamped and that makes me sad.

Exactly. And when one's life is threatened, what are we to do if not fight?

Fight! Fight! Fight!

I mean a lot depends on your life circumstances. Do you have a family to support? Do you have any money saved up? How old you are? It's tempting for me to quit and work on something I've wanted to work on for years but... The risk feels too high cause I feel like if I fail, it will be impossible to find a new job where either I made as much as I had before, or a job at all.

I have been conservative forever from a financial perspective. I feel comfortable enough to be out of W2 for a year or two.

but there is a real opportunity cost to leaving a w2 and jumping into an idea like this. Plus the fears that you stated as well are things I think about also.

I had to buy the copyrighted material before reading it... Meta apparently operates in a different legal system than me. That's my issue with it.

Yes, I have no objection to that part. It's the arguments that training itself is the problem.

Sarah Silverman as the most prominent example.

I mean the act of reproducing the copyrighted material is what is illegal. LLMs I've used for coding has outputted exact copyrights for code verbatim into my code before. When that happens it feels kind of fishy to be honest.

Yes. I agree. But many people argue that training itself is a copyright violation. That's the position I'm countering here.

> I went all in on AI coding tools and became incredibly productive. Then I lost my job and could not write a for loop.

After I read that, I couldn't even bring myself to read the article.

I'm assuming it's hyperbole, and software developers aren't a good audience for that sort of literary device:)

Nevertheless, I too stopped reading. I had to wonder if you forgot how to code so quickly whether he knew how to code to begin with

It's really good!