I call it pissing in the pool.

I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.

Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )

The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.

But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.

Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.

I did contract work so I could stay traveling and lived on money I made in previous full time jobs. It was a very nice way to live compared to the 9 to 5 even though I made less money.

Having enough money to live the way you want is all you need. Hostels are fun.

But in the free time I had, I did end up making a SaaS that set me up very comfortably for the rest of my life.

Cynicism will keep you in your 9 to 5.

Models get confused by who said what - especially cluade models. They get confused by negation (don't do something versus do something). Compartmentalization is hard.

You can either solve compartmentalization completely, or just not tell the model to do things that must be compartmentalized at high stakes.

A lot of SaaS companies change their API in subtle ways throughout the months probably too rapidly. GraphQL schema changes, splitting apart one api endpoint into 2, changes to authentication method required. A thousand little cuts.

This used to be my biggest time waster. Now it's barely on my radar. Life changing for me. I guess your mileage may vary.

Concurrently, the writing is on the wall for us SaaS product providers - lower margins, and more competition for the same reasons. I welcome it. More quality and choice at a better price for everyone.

One great thing about the rise of AI is that now it's super easy to make and maintain integrations. This is a place where AI coding uniquely shines due to the points being well defined and mostly quite standard.

This is going to hurt the monopoly power of software companies. But it'll be great for allowing the proliferation of smaller companies, open source, and home grown solutions.

I'm already seeing the pendulum swinging back to local first instead of cloud services.

Metrics can only capture short term value.

They also let us make unethical decisions with the data taking the blame.

It is fundamentally dehumanizing. We are no longer treating others the way that we would like to be treated when we make software.

AI is a printing press or a steam engine. It's not a weapon.

The framing is important. Much like 'distillation attack'. These framings are an attack on the narrative.

Printing presses at the time were seen as extremely dangerous too. For many of the same reasons cited about AI.

In both cases, the technologies were used to destablize existing power structures. And, after some hardship, make a better world for most people.

Even calling these things 'dual use' is a weird framing. Books are not 'dual use technologies' unless you want to sell fear.

No one is sold on a dystopian hellscape of fear, surveillance, and control. Each one of these would be required for a select group to effectively enforce AI safety.

Inflicting fear on society has never lead anywhere good. Please stop.

New technologies have always been scary. But humans have adapted. I believe in humanity. Do you?

But that same AI could cause those companies to no longer exist.

The AI I'm happy about allows people without much tech knowledge create small apps to do exactly what they want. And, for those that know just a little more, use it to help them extend open source software for their niche use case.

This makes computing more personal and gives back agency to the computer operator.

Mix that with the rise of much more competition in much more custom software, and you'll see that a future can exist, if we want it, where software becomes more personal and humane.

The software vendor will capture less value, though - the margins will be thinner. Instead that value will be captured (in non-money terms) by the end users.

That also means that software companies, unable to capture so much value, must shrink and become more boutique. The software that contributes to our centralized world would lose a lot of power.

That's the future I can see. The only way it doesn't happen is if a cynical narrative wins out and manages to lock it out through regulatory capture so that only licensed operators can use or provide AI. The anti-AI narrative helps the cynics.

People started hating tech right around the time metrics became popular. I don't think it's a coincidence. AI just accelerates the trend.

The problem is the misidentification of AI as the issue. As long as we don't understand the real issue, we won't solve it. AI is just a tool. It's being used in a way that denies human agency.

Our cultural values need to shift away from safetism that demands centralization. And shift toward valuing human agency. That starts with talking about the core issue.

I know Dwarkesh Patel was interviewing Elon and brought up the fact that power cost for data centers is only 20%. The number I could find is 7-18%? GPUs are the majority of the cost. I don't think Elon responded directly to that.

There's the argument that licensing to build these things is cheaper in space. But earth has a lot of space in the middle of nowhere that no one would object to. That seems cheaper than space.

And the heat dissipation argument against it seems like a good one but I don't know if it's actually just a small engineering problem that can be solved cheaply or more fundamental.

On the plus side, you could say there is better connectivity in orbit. But if you're running inference, you'd probably want to talk to the same server that has your context cached. As it whips around earth, your latency would vary a lot, right?

I'd love it if someone could point me to a better analysis. It's an interesting question in general. Not just because one of the highest valued companies in the world is based entirely on its feasibility.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48949913

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It's true that in a project, a novel idea undeclared as such will be shaved off quietly by an llm. You really need to be explicit about wanting to keep it.

You will get pushed into the mean.

However, I'd say 90% of making something (that is useful) is repeating the old thing. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Or at least we should. Getting there can be difficult for most of us.

I say this as someone who chronically re-invents things. I then later get stuck and find someone already thought through my problem and solved it better.

I don't believe being unique in all the ways is useful. You need to be unique in the important ways and not unique in the other places.

There's also a cultural coherence angle that (my) unique things often fail at. Stuff has to look like other stuff enough for people to understand intuitively what it is and how it works. Here the mean is your friend.

I am able to explore more unique spaces because I no longer deal with the minutia of getting the things that should be the same correct. So paradoxically, this has made my output more unique.

People have a particular lens they see things through. And they forget that there is detail there that matters.

The last 15 years of metrics driven decisions has hollowed out what made most things good.

It’s a fundamental problem of scale. Decision makers that have a large amount of power can only see the map.

The solution is to decentralize power. The more successful organization would either be smaller or allow more control for smaller participants.

This is good because humans also tend to be happier when they have more localized control.

Now, with AI, software becomes less able to demand the margins it once did.

Meanwhile, the history of low margins of hardware have created a situation where there are so few players able to demand now software-style high margins.

Hardware has always been valuable but was unable to capture it's value. Those days might be over.

I hope this encourages people who would build software companies to look to hardware. A lot of fun challenges there. Deeply technical, interesting ones. And now solutions will pay.

Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.

Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.

Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.

The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.

Europe should do the one thing it knows how to do: regulate. For once, it is the answer. Do it only there. The rest of the dominos will fall.

Making a european branded humanity poisoner is not the answer.

Specifically, regulating against silent signals like watch time and comment count. Upvotes/likes can serve a purpose and would not cause the situation we're in now.

We need to get specific about the real issue.

There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.

To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.

Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.

Maybe we've had different experiences.

But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.

So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.