What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
> What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
> There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.
Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.
> Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs.
Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.
There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.
> Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new.
"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.
That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.
"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”
Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
> "Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).
> If I create a messaging app…
Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.
I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.
> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.
> The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share. People act like Apple was just miraculously granted market share over Blackberry and that they didn’t create a competitive product to earn that spot.
Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.
> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.
"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."
Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.
This isn’t permanent. We see the rise and fall of plenty of brands overtime (Nike, Mitsubishi, etc).
If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
I thought about this in a different context many years back. A friend lent me a GP2X, a Linux based handheld game console. I already had a Nintendo DS, with one of those homebrew cartridges (which I used for the officially advertised purposes, rather than the wink-wink-nudge-nudge purposes). That got me to thinking whether locked down platforms were okay, that they may actually provide opportunities for developers of open systems.
The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.
I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is
The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.
And AT&T shouldn't allow you to connect other phones, or modems at all. You should only be able to get a phone by renting it monthly from AT&T - everything else should be illegal.
lol. what an android user comment. “Simply install LineageOS! All you have to do is extract this tarball…”
A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.
When I first switched to Android, I was shocked to see Google's Photos app send me an ad for buying printed printed framed photos. After turning that off, I haven't noticed many ads.
Google Photos is always trying to upsell storage beyond 15GB: "(you're going to lose your pictures), turn on backup?". Even pressing the "Search" button got me that prompt once, with some blah blah that AI-assisted search only works when the photos are on the cloud...
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it
It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.
Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.
Which Android though? AOSP doesn't have ads. But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services (McAfee VPN, McAfee security scan, OneDrive, etc.). I heard that Chinese phones are similar. Even Pixel pushes Google One in places.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
I have used several models of Sony Compact phones, until Sony discontinued that line of products, then ASUS phones.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.
> What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
We're on HN. If you're on Android and seeing ads then you're doing something wrong.
I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here
BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made
> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
It's worse than that. Google Photos sends push notifications telling you to buy photo books and prints unless you opt out. Play Books also sends push notifications telling you to buy particular books; it's also opt out. I'm semi-certain other built-in apps like YouTube and the Play Store do the same.
However, once you turn all that junk off, the Pixel experience is pretty good.
Why would you even enable notifications on these apps?
I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.
My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.
In math a lot of the spectacular results have been made by finding a counterexample or worming their way toward a proof that is very well defined.
There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?
But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"
But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.
This gets interesting.
One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.
Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.
IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.
I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.
Yea, when you start digging into intelligence/learning/creativity/language you realize that you're talking about more information on these topics than a human could ever learn in their lifetime, and you learn just how much we don't know about ourselves and these processes.
Whenever I hear "AI can never" I know I can disregard them as an unserious person when it comes to anything around AI, learning, or philosophy.
I think of the extent of human knowledge as a circle or cloud shape, and true expert thinking happens just inside the edge. And creative thinking that leads to knowledge breakthroughs happen when you are thinking in that edge area, but also make a connection way around the circle to some other location. And my guess is there’s absolutely no reason why AI can’t learn to do that too.
Any good crypto library will have a solid secure random source that usually combines entropy from multiple sources with a provably secure hash based mixing scheme.
Hardware RNGs can be one source, but no single source is trusted, and they're all combined in a way where even an intentionally malicious source is lost in noise and cannot actually determine output.
Yeah, this comes off as a “they already are on the wrong side of the secure hatch” kind of attack. A malicious hardware device with physical access to a victim’s computer can do a lot more than generate malicious entropy.
It’s like the attacks I occasionally see which are like “once we have administrator, we can attack the process because of this insecurity”. Well, yeah, but once we have administrator, we can read the entire memory of the “vulnerable” process and completely control its output too.
I’ve seen in the real world attacks where things were insecure because the PRNG wasn’t given enough entropy (CVE 2008-0166, Coldcard, etc.). I’ve never seen real world attacks where a PRNG was insecure from getting too much entropy.
That's exactly the challenge though: "any good crypto library" - there is a long history of meaningful security breached (like stolen crypto tokens) due to bugs in an upstream library, especially when using things like embedded code, alternative operating systems, newer programming languages, etc.
The value of the iterated hashing method is that it is dead simple and has little dependency on potentially buggy upstream code; it works even in very lightweight environments designed by engineers with no experience in security.
I think the question of technical possibility answers differently from the question of organizational feasibility. Starlink is optimizing costs because they have a financial incentive to do so. The less each satellite costs, and costs to maintain, the more income they make. I fear incentives are not so direct in governmental orgs. Outside contractors performing most of the work have outsized influence, and incentive to inflate costs. Budgetary decision makers all want to see investment in their own districts.
I think Starlink and cubesats have definitely proven the approach can reduce costs.
The engineering does not seem as challenging to me as figuring out how to get such a policy approved and pushed through all the administrative and decision making layers without watering down and budgetary inflation.
Maybe if we launched 30 Starships carrying 30 rovers each. With only 30 units, the prices would likely be similar to current commercial satellites, which are already built on standardized platforms.
I'd go even more radically low cost, and kit the first lander out with wifi, and a half dozen each of every commercially available robot dog, humanoid, and wheeled or tracked robot of any interest. Rumble in the Mars Robodome. Bit of publicity for the existing manufacturers who may be willing to pay for the privilege, and who will undoubtedly learn valuable things about how their designs fail and can be improved. And you figure out in one stroke if there's a COTS platform you can buy for $30k that gets you 80% of what you need. If any of them function for any period of time, you use them to prepare the space for future landings. Rinse, repeat. After a few iterations, you have a half dozen manufacturers with commercially produced platforms with a few strategic modifications to which you can bolt your science instruments.
All I can think about now is a bunch of e-waste littering Mars. At some point, other visitors will show up to investigate Mars and come to the conclusion that the Earthlings are just so trashy their trash even started filling another planet.
The surface of mars is roughly the size of Earth's dry landmass. They'd have to spend quite a lot of effort looking for it to find it. And at that point it'd probably look more like a treasure trove of useful thermoplastics, refined metals, magnets, and other useful things otherwise difficult or expensive to source on Mars directly.
Even before AI we were trending toward an economy with very few entry level jobs anywhere. AI is supercharging this, and I can easily now imagine a future where there's basically zero (good) jobs for anyone who isn't an expert.
So how do we get the next generation of senior professionals then?
This, I think, is a civilization-scale problem we will need to confront in the next 20-ish years.
That’s what happened in US manufacturing. It’s now 20-30 years down the line and the economically important US manufacturing sectors, like defense, are scrambling to hold onto institutional process and trade knowledge as the final remnants of the old industrial system retire. We all know how useful someone with a fresh comp sci degree and no experience is in a real dev environment is. Imagine the leads showing them the ropes graduated two years prior?
The problem is, if we don’t confront it now, what will happen to this generation? We are cosy in our experienced bucket, but we should not let it happen, even if it pragmatically gives us more safety. I honestly think expertise should be less relevant with AI. The point of entry level was never just about them building expertise. It was also about them bringing fresh ideas, fresh culture -as annoying as it is sometimes - and challenge the establishment. We are moving towards a stagrowth of incremental “improvements”. Not 20 years. This year. When everything moves fast we cannot afford to have this Damocles sword hanging.
Education needs to adapt. Currently CS graduates barely compete with Gemma-4 26b in programming while seniors are feeding tons of expertise at armies of frontier AI agents. The market now needs junior employees good at "using AI like an expert". Once employers see that junior armed with AI can replace senior at half the salary, we're back where we were 10 years ago.
Senior (now):
- AI build me an app that uses a graph DB that will deploy in the edge. Batch DB requests to keep costs low. Oh, use good cache + memoization to reduce hits. Write great tests, some logging and implement hot-reloading for a great dev-to-ops workflow that is also resilient. Man, before I had to do this all by hand, this is a godsend!
Junior (now):
- AI build app please.
Email from boss: Junior! Whatever it is you've deployed, it's making 1M reqs/min to the DB and ate up our quota 2h ago. Shut it down now!
Junior (future):
- AI1 design for cost. AI2 eval for performance. AI3 align for business goals. AI4 criticize AI1 and AI2 using top standards. AI5 set up a competing swarm. AI6 here's a budget, spend on real users and action on telemetry and their feedback.
> Junior (future): - AI1 design for cost. AI2 eval for performance. AI3 align for business goals. AI4 criticize AI1 and AI2 using top standards. AI5 set up a competing swarm. AI6 here's a budget, spend on real users and action on telemetry and their feedback.
Ugh, please no, why isn't these instructions in the system prompt of the harness if they are so valuable to the junior's work...?
The skills to drive AI are much the same as they were for business analysts in the old days. Domain knowledge, insight into user requirements, knowledge of modern UI paradigms, ability to write detailed, consistent requirements docs/ design docs.
There is a deep bench in the industry of these senior-ish people. Many have left to become baristas, dive instructors or hobby farmers, scarred by the pain of building large complex software systems using human labour and absurd Agile rituals. But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.
AI development is the new waterfall. Its just that the lower level that the BA hands off to, which used to be roomfuls of devs, is now a superhuman who can implement those designs at lighting speed and come back hungrily for more.
But if by senior you mean someone who is just a junior with more experience, someone who's not really in touch with the business's needs and who just works off stuff fed to them by PMs or the like - then yeah, agreed.
Another thing is that orgs will want to keep around somebody who 1) can be held responsible when things go wrong 2) has a reasonable understanding of the system that's their domain end-to-end 3) can reliably diagnose failures and fix them, regardless of how the code was written.
That's not a role that can reasonably be filled by a junior and management armed with agents doesn't really fit either.
> But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.
Yeah, not quite. There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.
9 months ago I was comparing it to running a dev team, but now it has changed and there are practices and processes that are unique to managing agents.
e.g. a team of software devs have the self-awareness to not take a single marginally-relevant point in a spec document and spend 20% of their team effort to build an entire subsystem to meet it without checking. The process and rituals that we used to use to make sure that a software dev team was making progress and would hit the project deadline are now largely useless, but we need new ones to make sure the agents are not heading off into unnecessary rabbit holes.
I'm not saying those ex-seniors would not be able to get back in the saddle. I'm just saying there's been more change in the last 9 months than there has in the last 30 years, so it may take a period of adjustment.
But I don't think the things that burned them out before will have changed. Dealing with non-tech executives was always the worst part of the job, and LLMs can't help with that, and are even making it worse ("ChatGPT says this should only take a couple a hours and you're using Typescript instead of Go! Why? Fix it!").
The "a ton to learn about how to control an LLM" is remarkably similar to learning how to work with a new team of humans, perhaps easier. LLMs though eccentric are far more predictable than most humans.
What I love most about AI development is the lack of pushback when you see a completed new feature, realise it was a dumb idea and just pivot hard to something different.
A human would (rightfully) call you out for wasting time and resources. AI slurps up your feedback and dives in again with the same vigour.
> There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.
So? The experts have a only few months of experience anyway, gained the slow way (via experimentation). It's not like someone can't pick up those skills in a week.
No worries, obviously the AI will cure aging so we will be able to run civilisation with the current experts forever.
...at least, until they accumulate enough stocks to retire on.
...however, for each one that retires and cannot be replaced due to the no-upcoming-juniors problem, evidently, the value of the companies they own goes down. So they won't be able to retire, or at least not all of them. So there's no problem!
> This, I think, is a civilization-scale problem we will need to confront in the next 20-ish years.
Humans will have to redefine what it means to "earn", to "deserve", to "succeed", to be "responsible", to exist...
We should have confronted this when computers and factory robots first appeared, but we keep putting it off and kicking it down the road until it won't be possible anymore.
Hell we should have addressed this during the Industrial Revolution, but instead we added minute hands to clocks so workers would have to work more for less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q "So this is progress - Terry Jones 1991"
We have a remarkable tendency to believe that our particular technological moment is somehow unprecedented. Locke's labor mixing never required kinetic effects. Talent, skill, judgment, creativity, effort, and, more importantly, time; were always part of the concept.
Perhaps the mistake is not that technology ever changed what is valued, but that we have.
this is a good point. Similar to minimum wage, if the value of a young hire is zero, then working for free to gain experience is probably necessary (otherwise no one will hire).
We have other structural issues in society that make this difficult now. For example the fact that without a large pay check, few young people will be able to live near the place where jobs are available, afford essentials, and will have no health care.
But yes, if we returned to a culture of "children live with parents until married" and "apprentice at a company until your work is valuable", and companies returned to "hire what you actually need, then invest heavily in employee growth for the long term", and reducing churn of employees (so that employees and employers have incentive to do this), then it might be possible.
So how do you solve the problem of the company investing in their employees to make them more valuable and then the employees go to another company to get paid more (because that company does not spend on developing employing employees) or the employees leave to start their own company to compete with their original employer?
It's moot, because it will never happen. The apprentice system worked because they could perform actual useful work, if only sweeping the floor and such. An apprentice would only slow me down. A Keurig and a Roomba would be far more useful.
I assume those are non-batched. I think the M series GPU can do 4X to 8X depending on model quant, which means if you can batch queries you'll get almost 4X to 8X performance.
I'm deeply skeptical of AI doomer stuff, but I've been struggling to exactly articulate why. I can think of it in my brain and can try to explain but so far none of my explanations have seemed fully coherent to me.
I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence.
Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.).
I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world.
I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers.
The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism.
Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows.
It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.
Yes, the doom crowd thinking comes directly from the Rationalist community, which takes a very religious view of AGI and intelligence. That sort of merged with the Effective Altruism crowd, resulting in that whole idea that we have to reach AGI as fast as possible and contribute literally all our resources to it, because it’s the only rational way to save as much suffering and lives as possible. Sounds incredibly stupid but it’s how AI leaders justify working on something they believe will be a machine god that might doom humanity.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are from that world, where Rationalist doesn’t mean you’re a rational human being, but instead that it is rational to believe that AGI will be created, thus that they should be the ones creating it. It’s a doomsday cult.
If you start looking at the links between prominent rationalists and effective altruists you see how that whole doom prophecy came about. It’s also how they got so much capital in the early days, SBF literally invested into Anthropic as part of his Effective Altruism effort foundation, and both Amodei siblings are deeply into that whole world
It's amazing that apparently the best way to save as much suffering and future lives as possible involves giving them obscene wealth and ignoring the very real problems we are dealing with today.
Once again, I've said it elsewhere here, I think we could have nipped this thing in the bud if when the first "effective altruist" started talking about the EV of saving billions of "future lives" vs dealing with today's real problems, someone looked at him, cocked their head to the side, and said "That's fucking ****".
All of those magical future people do not get to live if we bake the Earth today. The best way to take care of future people is to take care of people today. And if they were truly serious about taking care of future people, that's what they would be doing. But it's not, they're just collecting resources. I don't know how the fuck Sam Altman owning a Koenigsegg Regera today helps save 20 quintillion lives in 40,000AD. Deeply unserious people.
I think Altman is closer to a sociopath who is taking advantage of the situation, he’s the only one I cannot see as a true believer (and investors like Andreessen who are just here for the money). I believe he will just say anything to gain power and influence. But yeah, unfortunately mixing EA/rationalists + SF monoculture + infinite money + a media ecosystem that acts more as a PR department resulted in one of the worst cult-like phenomenon possible.
Yeah I read some of that stuff, like some of "the sequences," and I have never been impressed by it. It's very weirdly dogmatic and full of magical thinking.
I still can't believe anyone ever took Roko's Basilisk seriously, but people did... to the point of freaking out about it.
The groups themselves are a little cultish too, or a lot cultish depending on which one you're talking about. Some of them are full-on cults.
> I still can't believe anyone ever took Roko's Basilisk seriously, but people did... to the point of freaking out about it.
If you've spent much time in US Christian circles you've probably encountered people suffering from apocalyptic thinking. The Roko's Basilisk folks seem like the atheist version of the same crowd. It's hard to take them seriously when they're always seeing portents of the end times, and their thinking is clearly clouded by anxiety and fear and not based in reality.
Interestingly I think I am coming at it from exactly the opposite angle. Viruses and bacteria aren't intelligent at all (in my opinion), and don't need to be to wreak havoc. Whether or not LLMs are "intelligent" is one for the philosophers, but they are absolutely able to exploit electronic systems today if their starting state has been set with that as a "goal". Given that alarmingly few physical control systems are really air-gapped, and also that I can today set an agent off to find a voice, clone a voice, and make a phone call, I think the only protection we had today is that the most capable models have been trained not to, and nobody's kicked off a sufficiently malicious task yet.
Viruses are intelligent. Not much, but their replication rate gives them a very rapid rate of evolutionary learning. Evolution is intelligent, but in a very different way from neural networks.
Bacteria and up are full of gene regulatory networks that are absolutely intelligent and share some features with neural networks. Bacteria learn, cooperate, signal, react, seek goals, and that's in addition to evolutionary learning which is also fast for them given their reproduction rate.
Evolution in nature isn't just zeroth order either. Look into a topic known as "the evolution of evolvability." Evolution does meta-parameter search on itself, more or less, and invents adaptations to improve its ability to adapt. Sexual reproduction is the most significant and largest example but there are others. There's environmentally dependent tuning of mutation rates, genome self-editing that we still don't fully understand (this is also how our immune system works), lots of epigenetic stuff we are still learning about, and so on.
If it's alive it's intelligent. All life is constantly learning.
Interesting, before Yudkowski was patient zero for AI doom he was a nanotechnology "grey goo" doomer. That was even more obviously absurd to me. Grey goo already exists. It's called biology, and it's been trying to maximize its footprint on Earth for 4.5 billion years. The miraculous instant "foom" grey goo thing is magical and likely violates conservation laws.
What gets me is that I haven’t heard a reasonable explanation of exactly what the AI will do besides: nukes and biolabs we already have
& ofc AI is making climate change worse, some of the Amazon datacenters are using fossil fuels to generate a country’s worth of power, but that’s never part of their calculations
Viruses against humans, viruses against livestock as an attack against humanity's food chin, plant diseases, half of humanity feeds on three plants maize, wheat, rice. Attacks against infrastructure like water, internet, electricity.
Which one of these would it be? All of them in parallel? Or something we wouldn't think of. If I were to play chess against Magnus Carlsen, I wouldn't know with which piece he will checkmate me, but I know that I am going to lose.
The more you know about a subject the better you can prompt AI, steer it toward the correct path, and recognize when it hallucinates or strays. Current generation AI is an automated memory-enhancement and thinking-accelerator tool, not a substitute for understanding or something that eliminates the need to think. A "mech suit for your brain" is the best analogy I've heard.
This is why good programmers get better results when vibe coding than non-programmers or poor programmers.
They're pretty basic and hallucinate a lot. There are some hard limits to how good you can get on a model that fits on a phone.
Qwen3 and Gemma level models that run on mid-high end laptops and desktops can be pretty good. Not frontier grade, but shockingly competent for something that runs on a single PC. But the hardware you need to run those fast is at least $1000-$2000. Cheap hardware can run them, but slooooooow.
Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...
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