It seems that a certain kind of person cannot separate the following things:
1) I dislike AI as a technology
2) I dislike the people and companies that profit from AI
3) I think AI is useless
These are three completely separate positions to have. You can think AI is incredibly useful and also dislike it because it will, for example, reduce your relative status in society. You can love the tech but think that Sam Altman is a dishonest person, etc. But for some reason, most anti-AI commentators feel compelled to present all three arguments.
Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged. Of course, I don't really believe that they think it's useless. I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige, though, and they're just hoping beyond hope that somehow everyone will one day "wake up" and share their belief that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" with no utility, despite the fact that people are using them every day and can watch in real time as they improve.
> ... the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged...
Except that in the process of the markets finding out, things will not go back to normal if everyone's retirement is tied to the market. And in the process of finding out, things will not go back to normal if the hype cycle disrupts traditional hiring/firing decisions.
If it's as bad as some of us believe, then when it falls apart, a lot of people get hurt as collateral damage.
The market eventually found out about Bear Stearns, but a lot of innocent people lost their homes in the process.
Tetraethyl lead is not useless; in fact, it was hugely useful to the petrol engine economy throughout the 20th century! It just happens to cause nonobvious brain damage throughout societies.
In some ways things that are both useful and harmful are the hardest to deal with. And this isn't just "prestige", it's the already-decaying post-truth infosphere and the already-overheating CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
AI is useful in cases where you can automatically catch errors. Programming is uniquely suitable for this, because we have already got all our machinery of type systems and CI tests to catch human errors. How useful it is in other cases depends on how cheap it is to catch errors and how much they cost - and whether the cost of errors is inflicted on other people.
> Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal
People who are against AI don’t care if it’s useless, they care it’s harmful. And you can’t systematically cause harm then say “oops, our bad” and have everything return to how it was with a snap of the fingers. The consequences of harm don’t go away when the source does.
> I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige
Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.
> > I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige
> Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.
Meanwhile, the prestige to be gained/lost from supporting/doubting the big mainstream thing is immense, and the incentives are actually in completely the opposite direction...
Anyway, on that topic The Line Goes Up video covers the arguments about prestige far more extensively and far more elaborately than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
But it's very much not the doubters who are worrying about prestige in crypto and NFTs, and probably not with AI either.
I see plenty if I care to look outside my usual echo chamber. There’s lots of ‘it’s just the next token prediction’ (in 2026 still!), but there are more sophisticated arguments like ‘it can’t be creative’, ‘it doesn’t think’, ‘it’s just pattern matching’ etc. They might even be true for today’s models, but linearly extrapolating an exponential trend is a classic mistake.
> Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal
And in that period where the markets are irrational people are losing their jobs, hardware is being priced out of consumer markets and the rich are trying to embed themselves so hard that we get to pay for it when the market corrects itself. I think your take is highly indicative that you live in a shrinking bubble unaffected by those things.
* shoved in the back while facing the door, and told it’s their own fault for getting screwed over.
If you want to know what the future holds for the software dev field, look at copywriters and concept artists. The tech world has been so coddled for so long that many developers think their high salaries, cushy work conditions and clout come from their inherent worth as people rather than persistently high demand for their professional skillset. They’ve got another thing coming.
I'd argue that a lot of knowledge workers in general are about to experience a similar rude awakening. To the clear benefit of society as a whole, who are spared rents, but it won't be fun for the entitled.
> I'd argue that a lot of knowledge workers in general are about to experience a similar rude awakening.
Hard Agree. That’s why I picked up a trade after 15 years of solid knowledge work, mostly in dev roles.
> To the clear benefit of society as a whole
Hard disagree.
The problem is that a disproportionate part of the benefits will simply get transferred to the people who are already rich. I’d be gobsmacked to see anything beyond moderate benefits for everybody else, while moving the middle class demarcation farther up than it’s already risen. Our society seems to be set up to transfer wealth to the rich almost as ruthlessly as imperialism.
Longshoremen didn’t largely become unemployed in 5 years, and the ones that remained were unionized, so their salaries didn’t plummet. Developers have no such protection and we’re about to have way more developers than we need. I’m glad I jumped ship a couple years ago.
I started my career in finance, and I used scroll lock constantly. When you're spending twelve hours a day in Excel, moving around quickly with just the keyboard starts to matter.
Even today, my keyboard remap file swaps it with "insert" to put it in easier reach (it's also far less potentially destructive when pressed accidentally).
This is literally what's happening to Apple right now. Instead of focusing on innovation and research, they're just skimming their 30%. Works out great for the share price until something like LLMs come along, and oops you have no innovation muscle left.
Not every company needs to participate in making llms. It isn't like apple consumers are going to ignore the smell that keeps them from android and pc and samsung headphones currently.
Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.
For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.
I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.
Yeah, considering how poorly it went and how much market share they lost I also always thought it was outrageous... Also so many people laid off and projects shut down. I don't have any insight, and I could be way off, but it always felt like the company was captured by bureaucracy and drained as long as it was possible. Again I could be way off, as I don't have any personal connections to it. I was a regular user until around 10 years ago, but Chrome just leapfrogged them and that was it. There was at one point nothing left other than nostalgia.
edit: I still remember using Mozilla which was this "good thing" but somehow clunky, and then getting so excited when trying Phoenix for the first time, which was then renamed to Firebird, and lastly Firefox. It was so "obviously" the right thing to use.
heh I really enjoyed reading this because I went on a RPI-fueld CEC deep-dive about a year ago when we put a gym in our house. I wanted a simple media center control for the TV/Receiver we had in there. An RPI sits at the center of the thing, and by reading the CEC bus I can respond to various remote commands to launch the media center, bring up security camera feeds, switch the receiver to Bluetooth, start Spotify Connect, etc.
It works well, but CEC most definitely is the buggiest part of the setup. It's a reasonably elegant system, but it's just not implemented very well by most electronics. I ended up putting in a lot of retries: stuff like "send active source command; wait five seconds and send it again." Still, if you're willing to dive into the weeds, you can do some nifty stuff.
I'm libertarian, but I have to say watching the EU torment Apple has been delightful and one of the stronger arguments for muscular regulatory action.
The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient.
Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU).
Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.
Apple made major contributions to USB-C and adopted it a decade ago in their MacBooks. They were committed to lightning for 10 years starting in 2012-ish, so usb-c was likely inevitable in iOS devices.
However I would preferred a backwards compatibility lightning 2.0 upgrade. Cleaning a usb-c port is a huge pain and they are more prone to pocket lint clogging than lightning.
While I really like the convenience of not having multiple different cables to charge my devices when travelling, I agree with you on cleaning the usb-c port. In that respect, the lightning design was a lot more elegant and made more sense for a pocketable device.
I've never had an issue with this with Samsung. Hell, I don't think I've even cleaned out lint once on my current S24U over a couple years. Idk how you other people are brutalising your phones tho.
If you put your phone in your pocket, little bits of lint get in the port. Just tiny little bits. Then, when you use a USB-C plug, those tiny bits get compacted. Over time this results in a thin layer of compacted lint in the bottom of the port. Eventually this layer is thick enough that the USB-C cable won't positively lock onto the port. It'll still work, but it'll disconnect if you move it sometimes and just start to feel finicky.
I have to clean my port maybe once a year or so. I wait until the cables aren't locking and then I clean it out. The dental pick makes it easy and you are just dislodging that compacted mat of lint and removing it. Conversely, my wife never has the problem. Her phone never goes into a pocket, just her purse.
Haven't encountered that yet. But I always try to be extra careful and also look for the thinnest ones I can find. Seems like a product niche right there. Rigid, thin, non-conductive picks.
Careful on what you wish for. The same regulatory action can be (is) being used for Chat Control (that dropped off the main page for some reason). Ultimately neither power center acts for the general interest.
> The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing
It made all the iPhone docks/speakers/etc. obsolete. The last time that happened, when Apple swapped the old 30 pin connector for lightning, it pissed off a fair number of customers.
This time they could blame the EU which was likely a huge plus.
iPhone docks and speakers were already obsolete. They had a moment during the 30-pin era, but its been long since Bluetooth, Carplay took over in any mainstream use.
You're a libertarian but regulatory intervention made everything about the market better and a better world for everyone involved with a relatively small change that was being stubbornly refused by a company for a small marginal benefit to themselves?
Or... You know... We also like watching one giant corporation that benefits from distinctly authoritarian policies get wrecked by another authoritarian entity to the benefit of better competition in the market.
But apparently unless you're a suckup to the authoritarian entity that you like is now a LINO.
Left libertarianism is compatible with such views.
Basically, libertarian on social issues paired with a preference for a decentralized economy, as opposed to a "tankie" (Stalinist) style centrally planned economy.
What is “left libertarianism” supposed to look like? I find this concept baffling. The end result of libertarianism is nothing like what the left is supposed to support.
Sure, because I think that, ultimately excessive regulation stifles innovation. I mean, heck, the EU is looking to effectively dismantle GDPR because they're worried that it's going to cause them to miss out on the AI boom.
My point was just that Apple is such an outrageously bad actor (and the USB-C and Airdrop rules so beneficial) that these rules were getting even a very pro-market person like me to at least be open to the idea of regulating some of these out-of-control giants.
“Excessive regulation stifles innovation” is pretty much a tautology. The point of argument is what constitutes “excessive.” Libertarians generally consider almost any amount to be excessive. What you’re describing just sounds like being aware of tradeoffs, which should be true of anyone paying attention.
Your last paragraph doesn't really make you come off as a libertarian at all. If Apple is truly a bad actor, then the libertarian response isn't to have the EU force them to use USB-C on iPhones, it's for people to move away from iPhones to other choices, which means Androids.
They're also literally just not pushing code to AOSP anymore. QPR1 still isn't available. It probably will be, eventually, but this year it's two months late, next year it's six months late, then nine months, then "eventually" and then finally only to OEMs.
I don't think Google looks at any of these forks as threats; they just don't care.
because everyone here didn't care when bigtech was killing gpl. heck, most people here will still defend mit/bsd while crying that google is taking their linux device to themselves.
