Not the person you replied to, but I think you’re both “right”. The ridiculous hype bubble (I’ll call it that for sure) put “AI” everywhere, and most of those are useless gimmicks.

But there’s also already uses that offer things I’d call novel and useful enough to have some staying power, which also means they’ll be iterated on and improved to whatever degree there is useful stuff there.

(And just to be clear, an LLM - no matter the use cases and bells and whistles - seems completely incapable of approaching any reasonable definition of AGI, to me)

Not the peepeeholefish :(

Weird, that one went so far in the wrong direction it circled back around and I kinda like it.

Mine’s even slightly weirder - I’m trash at navigation in a car, on streets. Even if it’s somewhere I’ve been a bunch, once GPS became commonplace that part of my brain seems to have basically switched off or decayed somehow.

But outside, backpacking or even less demanding stuff, I have a great sense of direction. Plenty of successful solo trips, etc., very rarely feel turned around or confused. There’s probably a contribution caused by the differing level of effort, but it’s hard to put into words how my subconscious automatically provides a ton of help in the latter situation and zero in the former.

Worth mentioning (even though yes the post asks specifically about deaths) - the harm caused is far greater than just the deaths that needn’t have happened.

The amount of chaos and misery inflicted on the suffering as they and their families have to fight the insurance companies while trying to fight whatever illness…these companies make the worst moments of people’s lives much, much worse. The deaths are just the tip of the iceberg, truly.

That’s a great point. And truly, it speaks to what may be the root of the problem - skin in the game. Skin in the game shapes how we solve problems. When leaders make it plain they have none, people notice and reasonable problem solving falls apart.

At some point, I personally blame Jack Welch at GE decades ago for pioneering & normalizing this (thanks Behind the Bastards) - companies shifted from prioritizing outcomes for stakeholders to only prioritizing outcomes for shareholders. Historically I think that was because better outcomes for all stakeholders was seen as the primary driver of better outcomes for shareholders. Jack Welch realized they aren’t nearly as coupled as everyone thought - over the short term only, a crucial distinction! To be fair, someone else would have, too, if he were never born.

For an example, he pioneered the tactic of closing profitable manufacturing plants that were not as profitable as he wanted - and despite the net loss of profit, and the sudden deep trauma to a town full of human lives - investors liked it. It’s the origin of “line goes up”.

Oversimplifying a complex issue of course because I don’t want this to get any longer, but that behavior really does make two different systems of inputs and outputs that are often in competition with each other. One system for investors, and one for everyone else. And a growing number of people see it, see the different outcomes, and are rightfully enraged.

With that said, angry people are easy to manipulate and abuse, which is counterproductive and bad, and I’m not so much disagreeing with you as offering another point of view. Cheers!

It was just a variant of “woah!”, in response to what you posted. I apologize if it came off as something different.

I appreciate your measured takes and inside point of view, more of both are always welcome (not that you need my invitation lol, you’re basically famous around here).

The problem I see, though, is all the most morally defensible and procedural fixes require the healthy functioning of institutions that have been weakened, dismantled and / or perverted and turned against us. And a frightening number of us see that now and feel that normal channels for change are closed. I’m not at quite that point myself, but I know how bad it is for so many and I don’t blame anyone who reads our current situation that way.

Our institutions no longer fix our problems, and that’s growing worse, not better - the deck is getting stacked more and more heavily against us as time goes on.

I’m not advocating mass violence. What I am saying is that executives who create conditions like these, for people suffering under an increasingly-dysfunctional and hopeless system like this, should absolutely expect their lives to be in danger on the daily - out of just pure pragmatism. I’m not putting a value judgment on that, I’m saying it is flat out inevitable.

CEOs frequently measure any and all human events as costs to be managed. Especially these insurance executive pieces of shit. I don’t see why a certain number of fairly predictable CEO murders resulting from their hideous behavior should be any different.

Just indicating that the steps taken that you mentioned are far beyond what most people would imagine as expected behavior for encrypted messaging software. Assuming your quote was published somewhere, as being about WhatsApp. I might’ve misunderstood.

Fucking woof…

I think the idea is that it’s like the Global Seed Vault but for knowledge (and it’s physically close, too). Maintain copies of important things in such a way that they are designed to survive ~any catastrophe.

But don’t you see?! Those increased expenses will just be passed along to the scammed!

(No actual point here just thought it was funny to compare to the logic we hear for not punishing other abusive businesses)

Lol ay! This is how we do things at our house, sleeping arrangements are up to each individual each evening. Might sound really weird for folks who’ve never done that, and it does have some things to watch for (can accidentally drift toward a more roommate like relationship dynamic if we don’t put attention toward avoiding that at times).

But sheesh the freedom to just go get a solo night’s rest at will with no hurt feelings? Took some careful communication (and some accidental hurt feelings along the way, to be clear) to get here but it is GREAT, we both love it. Really reduces friction in other areas of life when better rest is an option.

Argh, okay gotcha. Someone needs to start a Framework, but for IoT devices. This is bullshit lol

I do understand what you mean, but I think you’re probably significantly overestimating the difficulty of using the tool. One of its major strengths is its ability to just understand you, like you’d talk to anyone human, with the benefit that you can even instruct it to use a style you prefer. Just say “I’d like your answer to be terse, let’s see if we’re on the right track before getting into details”. Just as an example.

With all that said you know what you want and need better than anyone else, that’s all I’ve got to say on it, cheers!

Just throwing this out there, but the problem you’re describing sounds like a good fit for an LLM I’ve been using for similar purposes, Claude.

I’ve found it to be really good at helping me slog through what would be a burdensome and wasteful amount of reading, in order to answer specific questions OR to get a baseline understanding of a thing.

It’s a bit hard to know how much value comes from my engineering background and my tendency to “know what I don’t know” and thereby ask focused questions, but it’s definitely worth a shot. I have found it to be surprisingly sophisticated and much better than slogging through the wasteland of bad search results + too much unrelated but real info.

A topic like this where there’s a tremendous amount of legit docs, articles, and forum activity - it’s really the exact use case where it’s very difficult for a human, and very easy for an LLM to effectively digest that info.

Some caveats I’ve noticed:

• it sometimes is overly agreeable / “friendly” when it should be more direct
• it does sometimes hallucinate or say BS with casual confidence, which sucks because the more you need the info the less well you can spot that. It hasn’t hampered usefulness too much for me, but then again I’m usually able to spot the mistakes even in ~unfamiliar subjects
• they’ve moved the free tier back to a less capable model at the moment…most of my good experiences are with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but Claude 3 Haiku (present free tier) is still good

If you’re really curious but the volume of reading and documentation to get started is presenting a big barrier, try using Claude to see how quickly you might be able to clear that obstacle. It’s been removing those exact barriers for me very effectively lately.

Edit to add: a particularly useful way I can imagine folks in your shoes using this - as a “companion” while you try to follow a guide in an article somewhere. It can answer questions about terms you don’t understand, even reasoning behind doing certain steps or what to do if it goes wrong. In fact, you could almost certainly just feed it the written procedure itself (telling it that you’re doing so) and really get it to reason about the process with you. Just help get you through whatever implementation.

Argh, this is exactly the scenario that I’ve anticipated and has kept me away from similar (home automation as well).

That’s what I want, high reliability, local only storage, remote view of some kind, and minimal (ongoing) fuss. Sounds like you did not quite land on that if the thing you bought grosses you out? Or do you mean something different?

Oh man, that’s hilarious. “Our business model doesn’t actually even work where we live. But I know what we’ll do about that, we’re going to do it exactly the same in a place we don’t have a clue about!”

The hubris, lol. It’s delicious.

Lol ah yes, the “fork me daddy!” camp weighing in

When did they add blackjack and hookers?! That’s a hell of a feature update