Yeah but everyone involved in the LLM space is encouraging you to just slurp all your data into these things uncritically. So the comparison to eval would be everyone telling you to just eval everything for 10x productivity gains, and then when you get exploited those same people turn around and say “obviously you shouldn’t be putting everything into eval, skill issue!”

Yes, because the upside is so high. Exploits are uncommon, at this stage, so until we see companies destroyed or many lives ruined, people will accept the risk.

This administration has not been operating the DoJ in good faith. One only has to look at the buffoonish attempts to push through charges on Comey, James and other political opponents to see that.

Treating the investigation in good faith is not being neutral or unbiased. Expecting more of the same is.

Because it is very clear to most people - you excepted, apparently - that this is not a normal case but one that is solely predicated on putting pressure on someone who is not acting on Donald Trump's whim but based on their job description. If Powell would have reduced the interest rates further this would have never happened.

The DOJ is now weaponized as a political tool, rather than that it is used for its real purpose. If you refuse to see this that's on you, not even on Donald Trump. The FED is independent for a reason, you are seeing that mechanism in action and so far no US president has every made a move like this.

How is it clear? Have you seen all the evidence?

I’m being serious. You seem quite confident of your opinion, so I’m asking what it’s based on?

There’s no question about the independence of the DoJ. Its independence is undeniably gone and it is full on working as Trump’s enforcement arm. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is a clown.

Case in point, you’d think by how things are reported that Trump brought down inflation. But inflation was down when Biden left office and Trump has done nothing to improve it.

#2 is happening a lot more than people think. It’s incredibly hard to quantify tech debt in software and so as a result productivity measurements are pretty inaccurate. Even without AI there is a trend of devs writing a barely working system and then throwing it over the wall to “maintenance programmers”. Said devs are often rated highly by management as being productive compared to the “maintenance devs,” but all they really did was make other people deal with their garbage. I’ve seen these sorts of systems take months to years to be production ready while the original dev is already off to their new gig (and maybe cluelessly bragging on HN about how much better they are than the people cleaning up their mess).

To get an accurate productivity metric you’d have to somehow quantify the debt and “interest” vs some alternative. I don’t think that’s possible to do, so we’re probably just going to keep digging deeper.

> Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Yes.

I don't see how "We couldn't do this cool thing if we didn't throw away ethics!" is a reasonable argument. That is a hell of a thing to write out.

> The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.

Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.

> did I write that paragraph?

No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.

What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.

You may as well ask for a person that can walk to be able to compete in a marathon using a car.

I’m all for using technology for accessibility. But this kind of whataboutism is pure nonsense.

The intention isn’t whataboutism, it’s about where do you draw the line? And your example betrays you…

Forgive a sharp example, but consider someone who is disabled and cannot write or speak well. If they send a loving letter to a family member using an LLM to help form words and sentences they otherwise could not, do you really think the recipient feels cheated by the LLM? Would you seriously accuse them of not having written that letter?

If you buy a hallmark greetings card and send that to someone with your signature on it, did you write the whole card?

Your arguments are verging on the obtuse.

Read the article again. Rob Pike got a letter from a machine saying it is "deeply grateful". There's no human there expressing anything, worse, it's a machine gaslighting the recipient.

If a family member used LLM to write a letter to another, then at least the recipient can believe the sender feels the gratefulness in his/her human soul. If they used LLM to write a message in their own language, they would've proofread it to see if they agree with the sentiment, and "take ownership" of the message. If they used LLM to write a message in a foreign language, there's a sender there with a feeling, and a trust of the technology to translate the message to a language they don't know in the hopes that the technology does it correctly.

If it turns out the sender just told a machine to send their friends each a copy-pasted message, the sender is a lazy shallow asshole, but there's still in their heart an attempt of brightening someone's day, however lazily executed...

I think maybe you missed that my response was to this comment:

> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

I already said in other comments that the OP was a different situation.

Do you think that spam letters are generally considered to be a good use of resources?

No, but it counters this point "a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans."

I don't think it does unless you ignore the context of the conversation. Its very clear that the reference about "letters" being made wasn't "all mail."

Writing personal letters has other dangers as well. Remember how George Costanza's fiancée got killed.

They do the same thing with the i in “doing” in another post. It seems like just a typo this person sometimes makes.