No sarcasm: play a different game. If you play their game, of course you'll suffer. But if you play a game they're repulsed by, you can win a life they'll never have access to: one filled with people who love and respect you and an environment where your best self and life can emerge.
The parent comments are talking about how the game is negatively impacting society. Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them. One of the many problems with that suggestion is that it's hard for your best self/life to emerge in a bleak future.
I think it's possible to "pick and choose" to some extent. I've found most of the bleak future stuff goes away if I turn off my phone, but since I need it to contact people in 2026, I try and give things their due, and, to the best of my ability, ignore the more unpleasant aspects of modern life. I think the landline telephone is a good example. It was fun to chit-chat with friends on the phone, but when a telemarketer called, I either hung up immediately, or said "stop calling," then hung up. It can be the same way in modern society. Weight the conversations with warm-bodied people higher, and stop scrolling as much (to put it overly-simplistically).
It’s done wonders for my free time and mood by deleting my Reddit account and restricting HN to toilet time. Instead of reading rage bait American news I do a daily scan of BBC. All those are sources of negativity and stress that bring nothing of value to your life. I invest my newfound time and energy into my family, hobbies, and health.
That's not what I said. I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant. Simplified: if they're going West, you go East.
The more "small time" people reject this narrative that we need a bunch of elitist white guys shoving their mediocrity down our throats, the faster we rebuild a society they're barred from accessing.
I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant.
Can you explain how to do that without either drawing attention to them via discussions like this or leaving society altogether? I don't personally fund a16z, but my taxes do. Calls to coordinated action to stop giving them money also count as attention.
Leave Babylon behind and go build local businesses and communities in what they refer to as "flyover country." That's what I'm doing. Easy? Fuck no. But does it take their relevancy away from them? At the scale of everyone who isn't a coastal barnacle: big time.
They view the rest of this country with disdain and indifference. I'm suggesting that others quit looking at these people as lords and sages to be placed up on a pedestal. Most of them are quite incompetent, skill-less, and frankly, not cool enough to want to hang out with (why they're making "jokes" about there only being two jobs left in the world in the future: Anthropic employees and hookers for Anthropic employees [1]). I'm sorry but I'm not taking direction from a bunch of dorks who can't get laid without paying for it. And I'd take a wild guess that given the climate, the lion's share of America is with me.
What does flyover country have to do with the present discussion? Kalshi is just as big a problem (or bigger even) in Nebraska as New York. Taxes going to Anduril happens whether you live in Malibu or Missouri.
You can, of course, distance yourself from their world and work on things they would never see as valuable. However, you can't check out of the most grand game we're playing, the game of life and existence. Those people desperately want to toy with things that could eventually prevent you from being able to live a life where you still have food, water and shelter. You can ignore it while they're still not all-powerful, but as their wealth and influence grows, you will eventually have to confront it.
Then so be it. Hopefully they've considered all of the angles and can defend themselves against people being radicalized to the point of hunting them down.
Turns out their obsession with moats was prescient.
That’s a cop-out. It’s the most powerful “players” who are making the “game” what it is, and they make the rules be whatever benefits them.
It would be pretty reasonable to hate the player who brings a machine gun to a stadium, kills every opponent to start scoring and when people complain says “Nothing in the rules says we can’t kill other players to score. If I didn’t gun everyone down, the opposing team would’ve. Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
That is like hating a hacker who hacks into your vulnerable server that is outdated and allows ssh password login. If there is vulnerabilities in the system someone will eventually exploit them, sure not you or me but there is always someone out there that will.
That same hacker can choose to responsibly disclose the vulnerability through the proper channels, or take advantage of it to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Which one they choose objectively determines the quality of person they are.
“That is like hating a thief who robs your home which has an old lock and a window you forgot open. If there is an open window in the house someone will eventually climb through it, sure not you or me but there is always someone out there that will.”
It is perfectly reasonable to hate the person who robbed your house or hacked your server. “If that someone hadn’t, another someone would” is in no way a defence. It is not OK to actively harm someone just because they didn’t protect themselves.
Yes. My point is that until you learn to lock your door, thief will enter and steal your property. You can hate them all you want, that wont change the facts or magically lock your door.
Unfortunately the thief has introduced legislation that bans any better locks, and they have a magical veto that allows them to strike down any attempts at changing said laws.
I prefer to live somewhere where I can be relatively sure that forgetting to close my windows doesn't get me robbed. That means punishing those who take advantage of open windows. Turns out deterrence can be quite effective.
Security is always about tradeoffs and in a functioning society you don't need to have perfect security (and pay the extreme cost required for it) because we do indeed put blame on individuals that abuse the system.
It’s not the players we should hate but the ones who make the rules of the game. Specifically not the ones who make the rules for the greater good but for themselves.
“Also, I have no intention of acknowledging that not all people have an equal chance at winning the game, nor doing anything about it for that matter.”
Allot of people claiming it's because of increased load from AI. If that's true why do their systems sometime take hours to come back online, just restart the servers and you're back online, it's not like a nuclear reactor.
That was mostly Bayesian probability filters, followed by SPF and more recently DKIM.. Maybe you could consider the Bayesian filter databases being trained as ML, but I feel it's a far way from our typical AI/LLM surge
Not really, though. Sequences of tokens are predicted as {spam, not spam} via training on pair sets. It's like a token predictor where the output vocabulary is two tokens.
Well, I just said that. Since what is predicated is one of two tokens <is-spam>, <is-not-spam>. Since spam is not made out of those tokens, it doesn't generate spam.
(Even spam could be encoded into those two tokens via binary or whatever, it still wouldn't because it's predicting a classification, and not the next sybmol; i.e. not simply the next bit in a after a string prefix, but a 0 or 1 value indicating whether the bit string is spam, which comes from an asserted external judgment.)
It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
You did say that. And then despite that you reached a conclusion that I don't see as compatible.
There is a massive qualitative and quantitative gap between the two. Even if you had a real token predictor for the word spam, you would need a thousand of these to touch LLM capability. But it's not a real predictor. It's not locational. It's something vastly weaker.
> It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
Now you made it even worse. If not for the word 'trained' this would be every program. If two programs fall under the umbrella of machine learning in any way, that kind of logic treats them the same. What would you consider a "different kind of AI"? Your definition there fits basically the entire field.
It's true however I do feel that when talking about scams AI can be used offensively way easier. Using it for things like the prevention of phone scams seems quite a bit more difficult to me to get accurate.
I think you are taking that line of reasoning a little too far. The point of a scam is to trick people out of their belongings. There may be certain advantages of targeting and filtering for gullible people, but it's not the point itself.
"proper scam"; if you get too many hooks, you're not going to be able to reel them in. I'm not defining a scam; if you create a really convincing scam, your problem becomes both having too many people and drawing to much attention.
The main fuel is the "need" to have browsers that can execute code, coupled with the ability to transfer money via the internet. JavaScript was a mistake, e-commerce was a mistake, and so is everything else that came after.
Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"
Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)
Douglas Adams put the source of the rot a bit further back:
> This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
> browsers that can execute code, coupled with the ability to transfer money via the internet
But those are completely unrelated topics. You don't need a hint of JavaScript to do online banking.
And you don't need online banking to send someone your credit card details or banking information. Any kind of communication can turn into a scam. You can steal money over the phone or by mail.
This is not surprising. Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot. Humans assign quality relative to themselves.
A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how strong the bots are. Humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
> Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot.
The latter, of course, which is why that's what I own. Aside from that, this is an absurd and grossly dishonest analogy -- that's not at all the choice here.
Some of the most fascinating games are between Stockfish and Leela. (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_84B_VwayU -- this is narrated by National Master "Jerry", one of the most respected chess narrators on YouTube.) People who don't know this know nothing about chess. (And only immature clueless fish respond by challenging someone to a game. Lack of knowledge of chess was already established by their ridiculous claim. BTW, he has radically changed his response , which is now very different from his original claim. It's not my misunderstanding, it's his bad faith.)
Some of the most stupid things I have ever read are from those suffering from radical anti-AI hysteria, and it is becoming a primary means by which I judge people's intelligence. ("radical" is a key word here -- there are numerous legitimate reasons to be critical of numerous aspects of the AI boom.)
I think you misunderstood what I said. Let me rephrase.
Would you rather watch a chess tournament between two of the best human players in world, or between two of the best bots in the world?
I know that chess is deeper than this, its about the positions that are reached and what each game adds to the existing knowledge and in that case it doesn't matter if its a human or bot. I understand very well that there is allot a Grandmaster can learn from games between two strong bots.
But here I am talking about human nature on how we value things, if a human can do something that I can't do than I value that more, I know Usain Bolt is faster than me, I know he is extremly fast compared to myself and other humans.
I dunno which I’d rather have, but I do know the only kind I’ve ever bought is the factory-made kind. So if the aim is appealing to a wide audience, you’re arguing involving robots in the production process is key?
There is a view where developers think of a forge as a place where they host their code.
Than there is another view where the forge is where you go to get code others have written, and this is where GitHub shines. Because of the collective audit.
Learn JavaScript/Dart and Rust/Zig. Have a mono repo of all your code modules, never rewrite code, as you switch between projects.
Because AI is trained on the web, expect the fundamental building blocks of Software Engineering to not change in the next decades. Git, Linux, HTML, JavaScript etc etc all the abondoned code on the web. Familiarize yourself with these fundamentals and you'll always be relevant.
