This quote resonated with me: “ Tom Hudson told me, “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.
I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.
Agreed - communication is a bright line for me. I use it (judicially) to learn. I use it (judicially) to write code. I will absolutely never use it to write English for distribution of any kind. To me, that is hideous.
Maybe I would use it to write to a person I have absolutely no respect for. I haven't encountered that use case yet. I have a base level of respect for all people.
Actually the fact that we don’t have immortal mice is what makes me feel like this current optimism with respect to life extension is pretty unrealistic.
I can only guess at the actions of others, but I would guess it’s because your comment is a tangent and at best only vaguely related to the featured article?
The article is really about solving a particular problem with the backend of their infrastructure. Discussion about VMs, Linux kernel syscalls, file systems (virtual, FUSE, etc) would all be relevant.
Your comment is a question about whether and how people use the software itself, which is pretty unrelated to the article.
It’s a bit like an article about Porsche identifying a particular engineering nuance in their fuel injectors, and how things didn’t work the way they thought at a low level, and how they solved it once they realized it. And then you come in with a comment about what people like to do with their Porsches. Like, sure, it involves the same company but what would that have to do with the underlying article on automotive engineering?
Combine that with a growing disdain for the insistence of certain segments of the tech scene to make everything about agentic workflows, (an echo to the constant evangelism of cryptocurrencies or blockchain in the recent past) and you have a recipe for downvotes.
This is pretty common on this forum though. Many times the comments section becomes mostly about things that are not necessarily directly related to the article but remain related to the bigger thing the article is about.
You’re not wrong, and this is speculation, but I suspect you’re just missing the subtext I added in my edit: that some people are burnt out on the evangelism of agentic workflows in the same way they were about blockchain or whatnot.
I disagree a bit with the neuroticism and agreeableness being so obvious. There are many professions I would be TERRIBLE at precisely because I am so agreeable. And, I have real world experience with a business partner that is MUCH higher in neuroticism than I, and much less agreeable. Both sides of that spectrum have their strengths. We often have opposite approaches sometimes, but both can work, and one isn’t obviously better in all circumstances.
And introversion can be a wonderful asset in some professions as well.
However, I do agree that conscientiousness is probably pretty universally better.
I would be genuinely shocked if this isn’t already integrated into the US intelligence apparatus, it just may not be commonly used for domestic cases targeting US citizens, or it currently requires parallel construction to justify how they know things they shouldn’t know. This may just be a way to legalize it or integrate a few new data sources.
Ive had nothing but issues doing that. I think I’ve had a Debian upgrade actually succeed maybe one time? (After some manual intervention to fix some issue other booting on my work server)
For updates, Debian and Ubuntu are great. For upgrades… not so much for me.
Go ahead and have that conversation with the billionaires running a worldwide satellite grid of data centers to power their AI surveillance dragnet and autonomous robot soldiers. See how far it’ll get you.
If they don't have millions/billions of customers to spend koney on whatever they are selling, their riches become irrelevant too.
Money is valuable only as it changes hands for goods/services, and if you want to get rich, on top of having/producing/controlling something everybody desires, you also need as many people as possible to have money to give you in exchange for a piece of that something.
With AI + robots all you really need is the starting capital + land (minerals, energy, etc). The value of land will not decrease when human labor becomes obsolete.
For stuff like this the real answer is if someone’s going to abuse their power and fail to uphold their part of the social contract granting them monopoly, then the people being wronged shouldn’t be expected to either. Let egregious bad behavior be met in kind. It didn’t work out very well for the French aristocracy.
There is no amount of regulation that can keep this level of moral bankruptcy in check. Full stop.
There are plenty of situations these days where we can invoke this specter of the law of the jungle, but I don't think the power grid is one of them. Here the monopolies aren't granted by the social contract but are rather basically natural monopolies (last mile power distribution). And the problem is that the power generators have found more lucrative customers [0], so that market truth doesn't help.
What do you see as a specific type of retaliation? DIY attacks on datacenters that are using too much power? That seems relatively easy to defend against until one gets to the level of improvised explosive drones (ala what recently happened in the Middle East), and even that feels only a few years out until they can be defended against.
[0] or at least they think so, modulo how big of an overinvestment bubble we've got
You don’t think the power grid is one of them? What about your water supply? Your air? Fuel for your car? Where is the line for you exactly if it’s not one of the defining characteristics of the modern world: power for your home?
And those utilities are mandated by building codes so they have benefited from many developers who foot the bill for their infrastructure. The local jurisdiction and private property is undoubtedly littered with easements for their power distribution. This was OBVIOUSLY done under the context of a social contract that they would supply power. No one thought to codify that because no one envisioned someone could be that immoral.
I’m obviously not going to suggest specific forms of retaliation on the internet. But I will say that the people in power are overplaying their hand. They’re telegraphing exactly how they intend to treat you the instant they think they have the benefit of technological superiority and autonomous security.
I think you misunderstood me. I was not arguing about the morality of what you said. Rather I was arguing about the practicality. For some things I think a mass repudiation of the social contract would hurt the people currently abusing the social contract at scale, more than it would hurt the masses. For the power grid it feels like the opposite dynamic. As things stand, the masses derive benefits from the highly organized technological system giving them each comparatively just a little electrical power. Meanwhile data centers can use the grid to bring down their costs, but if that option becomes prohibitive they can also just build on-site generation.
Ah... I understand what you're saying now, my apologies.
In that case though, I actually still disagree, but again I must refuse to elaborate. I will only say that in an asymmetric conflict, creativity disproportionately favors the underdog.
Discussing security vulnerabilities and hypothetical balances of physical power isn't illegal. Or if you're hoping that by not stating what you see as vulnerabilities you won't be helping datacenters (/$whomever) to secure things, I'll point out that the novelty is likely to wear off after a couple uses anyway.
The crux of the matter here seems to be that the masses of individuals need the civilization-reliant power grid much more than an individual data center. And by the time we're considering direct attacks on datacenters, they'll most likely already be off the grid (nuisance noise might still be a motivation though, or general anti-tech sentiment). So we're really just talking about defending a facility from things like drones, which is a generally hot topic these days regardless.
Right but it's famously difficult to cool things in space since you have basically zero convective or conductive heat transfer, so I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive.
In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.
I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.
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