This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
AIAIAIAI
AI is going to maybe doom the world, but first it's going to doom the SaaS industry. We've all seen every company bumrush to build Generative AI into their tools whether it's useful or not.
But I am now dealing with the next wave. Everyone is pushing their AI agent. The thing is, there's an arm race between dedicated agents, and generic agents. Browser Agents can't yet make redundant specialized in tool agents, but it's not looking like a particularly long roadmap.
I think building / selling an AI agent offering is a fundamentally losing proposition. As I have been thrown several different demos over the last few weeks and manage a team to be buying some of these tools, my biggest perspective is that none of these companies can be trusted for long-term partnership.
These folks are building sandcastles on the beach while the tide comes in. It's not just a bubble, the pace of change has already gone faster than buying and implementation cycles.
The age of SaaS solutionsis going to cannibalize itself inside of the next 12 months even if AI stalls today.
My greatest fear at the moment is that we will reach a stage where people start designing UI for AI agents and not humans anymore, and from computers become truly incomprehensible.
Keen observers that hang around these parts know that of course, this process has already started and Elsagate was just the tip of the iceberg of algorithm induced mass psychosis, but still, it's not insultingly obvious yet.
I'm having discussions right now about using AI to maintain abandoned FOSS libraries that people still depend on, it's only the beginning.
REPENT! Sacrifice your hamburger menus on the altar of simplicity or face the cruelty of the machine gods.
...my greatest fear is they're gonna make helpful but still jailbreakable AI and we get Covid 3.0, this time very lethal courtesy of some death-cult using an AI to supplement their insufficient talent at virology.
Real risk with DS, but seems likely that it doesn't have cutting edge virology knowhow so even if someone self-hosted it offline it'd not be that abusable.
The danger of knowledge is a different problem. In practice I find that less compelling because the requirements of enforcing secrets on the public domain too easily turn to tyranny.
In practice we'd just adapt some new political order for this, the loss of the capacity to communicate on a large scale seems more catastrophic to me than even mass death.
Losing all knowledge of nuclear physics seems worse to me than giving every Joe Schmoe a nuclear weapon. But I understand I'm in the minority.
Nuclear weapons are absurdly hard to build and limited in scope. Viruses..
No, gun-type uranium bombs are almost trivial to make if nobody stops you from getting uranium and gas centrifuging it. They never even tested them before dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima, because absolutely no-one had any doubts that the thing would go off.
Luckily uranium is fairly rare and easy to keep track of because it's radioactive.
Not to mention, gun type bombs are not that destructive.
Plenty destructive... but that's all besides the point, the original argument was about jailbroken LLMs helping talentless death cults. Danger of knowledge, ect., which I argue isn't an issue for nukes. The knowledge isn't the hard part.
Nukes aren't a problem because, at worst, you could cause a nuclear war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link