Why haven't you stopped watching _all_ corporate content - broadcast TV, cable TV, whatever the DSS dish companies are doing, Amazon, Netflix, blah blah blah

I hope you're not _paying_ for any of it...
And I hope you're not consuming very much of it...

It's bad for you. The people who make it are idiots, but they are crafty idiots. They know how to hurt you even if they don't know much else.

The idea that we have to watch their content is just baked into the cake, and nobody can escape it.

I was talking to a mechanic once. We were complaining about the news, and how it was all fake, they were all liars, etc.

I asked, "why not stop watching it?"

He responded: "but then I wouldn't know what's going on"

I replied, "you just said they are lying to you. So how does watching them tell you whats going on?"

(then everyone clapped)

He didn't answer. But I don't think he changed his habits.

Next, lets talk about Americas insane addiction to a Sportsball industry that regularly abuses us...

>not [seeking] an argument

Oh! Oh! I'm sorry! This is slashdot, in Room 12. This is Abuse!
For arguments, you want 12A, next door!

>people don't hire on merit
>Which candidate would you feel most comfortable working with for 40+ hours a week?

Why do you think "merit" and "works well with the employees I already have" are unrelated?

>Of course the candidate with a similar socioeconomic profile as your own would be preferred:

I suspect that's often true, but certainly not universal.

For example, allegedly, some people want slaves and want to lord themselves over their slaves. So they would never hire people like themselves, SES wise; they would only hire people where it was clear (in their own minds) that there was SES or other status daylight between themselves and their "underlings" So I'm not sure there's a universal law of hiring. I agree that "hiring someone like me" is a common -- but not universal -- pattern.

(Oddly enough, in the USA in 2026, I think you'll find that white males are the _least likely_ to use the "someone like me" hiring strategy - if for no other reason than decades of targeted enforcement against that that group for appearing to employ that strategy. Eg the Indian preference for hiring Indians, or the female preference for hiring females, is stronger than the white-male preference for hiring white-males. Maybe not in terms of hidden preferences, but in terms of actual hiring outcomes, yes, that's what the data will show)

Back to the non-universality of hiring strategies: A friend of mine with a tech business intentionally tries to hire mid-field performers. He doesn't want a rapid climber, because he cannot afford to keep them on staff once they understand what they are worth. He wants mid-field performers who are going to do solid, reliable work, and be content to work for him for a long time. So he doesn't hire on "merit" - he hires for "good enough, low turnover"

Other businesses have other strategies.

> but "not understanding cost" is a dangerous assumption to make.

One of the best, most succinct phrases in this discussion. Thank you.

We don't have to wait for AGIs to develop their own agency and build terminator robots. Industrial robots with no agency and with auditable and deterministic programming already kill humans. The industrial robot doesn't understand there's a human in the safety cage with it. It doesn't understand that moving through space occupied by a human has a cost. It doesn't know there's a human there and it doesn't know what a human is.

Designing automation that can never kill a person is already an unsolved problem with standard, non-intelligent technology.

I don't know if AI makes it harder or easier. On one hand, AI behaves, in effect, non-deterministically (even though at some level it is deterministic, it's not observably so).

OTOH, in organic intelligences, adding sensors, adding alignment, giving feedback - tend to produce humans who accidentally kill less frequently. So maybe something like the 3 laws will conceptually be part of the System Prompt of future AIs, and they'll figure out how to avoid HAL 9000 problems.

Thanks for the interesting response.

The strongest man today; the hardest workers today... are not 10x or even 2x as strong or as physically productive as the best in human history. Depending on what you think about ancient man, we are possibly weaker and dumber than some of our ancestors.

The transmission of new ideas across memory, time, and place is the extra term in the equation of human achievement, civilization, and prosperity. It's not that labor doesn't matter. It's that ideas are like compound interest. Labor adds principal to our civilizational account balance. But Ideas compound it.

In the long term, ideas are all that matter.

I have the same reservations you do - powerful people will continue to want to corner and concentrate their power.

It's unclear how well they will be able to do that, however. The capability lag time between a paid frontier model and a self-hostable open-weights model is months.

The ability to train a good-enough model will also be commoditized. In my youth, we had distributed crypto challenges.... to get super-computing work done on mass democratized hardware of like-minded individuals. So in the future, we can fall back on analagous distributed model training efforts if some better alternative doesn't exist.

I am skeptical about a post-scarcity society and I am skeptical about man's "labor" ever going to zero. Of the infamous twelve possible AI outcomes, I am somewhere in middle. For biblical reasons, I believe the extinction of man is not going to happen, and I believe the utopia of man is also not going to happen.

Control of other people's speech is always about asserting power.

It's never actually about "reducing harm"; it's about asserting power.

Talking about it in "harm" terms is a clever hack: ... because most humans are sensitive to harm/harm reduction along their moral reasoning (see: Jonathan Haidt)

But "Never hurt my feelings" is an impossible bar, and it doesn't scale across a civilization. It cannot be a basis for law.

The attempt to abuse the "harm receptors" of political enemies is contributing to the mutual dehumanization across faction lines.

After all, women go for more decidely female-related professions such as female doctor, female surgeon, female attorney, or female director.

Of course the AI versions would get paid less.

We use Hubspot. Here's what we use it for:

- the "live chat with support person" bubble on our web application
- single funnel for incoming/outgoing support tickets & support communications with our customers

Adopting it was an old decision.

We would love to not use hubspot; the service delivered vs. the ongoing costs seem like a bad deal now.

At some point, we'll get around to migrating to something else.

I don't think that makes the document any less your own than having a human copy editor conduct a similar review which has been done since forever.

Which is what I've been saying as well. If all you're doing is asking for suggestions to something you have already written, using AI is no different than using a human editor. It's your work. It's been written. You're just looking for advice on how to improve it.

This is completely different than people who tell AI what they want and it does all the work.

That nightmare scenario actually did play out not long ago near me. A woman from out of state was falsely ID'd by an AI camera of some kind and was detained for months and it wrecked her life.

My sentiment is that the process was wrong and that the officers and other parties involved in this should all be fired, and the woman compensated.

None of that is what normally happens; that is not happening "millions of times". That's why it was newsworthy when it _did_ happen.

The original comment was philosophically open ended.

I made the example in my response very specific because arguing about hypothetical generalities is usually not productive.

The difference is this: it's difficult to ascertain if someone is guilty or innocent without arresting them. YOu don't arrest people via a random statistical sampling; you arrest via a biased selector: You arrest people you have high odds of beleiving are likely to be guilty. And you arrest them because you cannot ascertain their guilt via non-destructive observation. Without arresting them, they are allowed to simply walk away while you are trying to ascertain their status.

An arrest rate of 10% of all humans would be ridiculous.

A false positive rate of 10% _among the population of people you arrest_ is acceptable.

So the applicable comparison isn't "your cell phone doesn't work 10% of the time", the applicable comparison is "when your cell phone wasn't working, the tech support team guessed correctly as to the root cause 90% of the time, but guessed incorrectly 10% of the time"

IOW, 90% success rate with a 10% FP rate amongst a problematic cohort.

>No I maintain it would be pathetic performance by LEO if they were willy nilly arresting people hoping to bag the perp.

Nobody is advocating for that.

The cops should only be arresting people they have a plausible reason to arrest. If it turns out that 10% of the time their guess was incorrect, that's acceptable. They are not performing random arrests and getting a lot hit rate. They are doing targeted arrests and getting an ultra high hit rate.

>AI is being forced inappropriately into peoples lives with no opt out *everywhere*

I agree with you, and I also don't like that, and I think stopping that via market choices and legislation, as appropriate, is the right thing to do.

In my mind that's totally separate from what I am talking about and commenting on.

That said, you can make legislation so that you're not forced to use it (or be spied on by it), but you cannot make a law that stops AI development. If nothing else, the law won't reach beyond our borders. And eventually a nation hostile to you will develop ASI and then they will impose it on you (and worse)

I've been a professional software engineer for 30 years.

AI has changed everything for software engineers.

I wrote a line of code by hand saturday (client blocks AI) and it was weird. I hadn't done it in months.

I don't have a crystal ball. I cannot say for sure whats coming.

But I would say this: if the scope of your ambition is small, e.g. the possible amount of value you can add as a business (or as an employee) is fundamentally constrained by something, then having a machine do that thing way more efficiently than you is a problem.

Machines will take an increasing share of your fixed pie.

Lots of software isn't that.

Lots of software is trying to make the pie bigger.

We're doing things now that we never would have tried. The incremental cost of writing code goes to zero. Software engineering changes. What assumptions about what you do and how you spend your time and what value you provide change when the cost of writing code goes down 10x or 100x?

For all of human history, the speed of acheiving every goal has been limited by available high-IQ-hours. At every moment in human history, there was unimaginable value not being created because it didn't make the cut compared to everything else that also needed doing - the brains capable of doing it didn't have the remaining hours to do it.

Artificial intelligence is changing the math on that. Unbounded level of available hours at what appears to unbounded level of IQ.

You are trapped in a prison made of your own lack of imagination.

(I'm not saying I'm not, by the way)

I don't understand your point. Can you explain it for me?

I assume you have never tried making an AI model of the type we're discussing (near-frontier LLM), and you have also never tried making a printing press.

Neither have I.

However, knowing a bit about how LLMs work, and knowing a bit about model training for non-LLM models, and having done a bit of word working and metal work, I assume it's actually easier now to make an AI model at home than it is to make a printing press at home.

My response included assumptions which might not hold.

If the way that police work actually worked was "we pick 100 names randomly out of the phone book, arrest them all, and 10 were innocent" ... the biggest problem would _still_ be that of a random sample you have a 90% guilty rate. That's actually not even civilization. Nobody actually trapped in a "society" like that would object to being detained and released.

So the way to think about it is, "we detain 100 people for whom we have probable cause - we believe a crime was taking place, and we believe they were proximal or involved in that crime.. and we have only a 10% false positive rate"

That's really quite good.

So for instance, if you have a riot and you arrest 100 people, and then later you find out that 90% of them are actually criminals, but 10% of them actually didn't break any law, and release that 10% - I'm fine with that. It was completely reasonable to arrest all 100 of them in the first place - they were, after all, in physical proximity to a riot, and they looked and acted enough like the 90% of actual rioters that the police (correctly) detained them.

A fine way of not getting arrested in this scenario is to stay the hell away from riots. And when "protests" become riots, _leave_.

If revolution, anarchy, and violence are the goal, fine. But then don't expect due process.