domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1d ago
Some how tech has the ability to radically change how people work and provide people with amazing tools without boosting productivity much. We went from type writers to Word to cloud services that allow us to share documents instantly across continents. We really haven't seen a matching boom in productivity. The amount of office workers wasn't slashed with the propagation of Email, excel, google search or CRM-systems.
I am willing to entertain claims that official statistics are distorted, but nevertheless someone should make the point: real GDP per capita has more than doubled since 1980s and typewriters. I never understood properly Total Factor Productivity, but it had respectable growth from 1980s to 00s.
The amount of office workers wasn't slashed with the propagation of Email, excel, google search or CRM-systems
I am too lazy to look-up the statistics, but qualitatively the office work functions has dramatically changed. There used to be significant pool of people whose job function was answering phone, typing documents on paper, managing the paper documents, managing someone's calendar and it was needed for the business to function. Secretaries and mail room jobs have practically disappeared.
I am amenable to argument that most of these efficiencies have been wasted (they enable more work to be done, but not all of the new work is productive).
odd_primes
1d ago
Did you do any searches or view any articles about HIV or gay issues while writing that comment? That's more likely to be the cause.
Corvos
1d ago
you can run Qwen3-30B-A3B at ridiculous speeds on medium-end gaming rig
How are you doing that? Qwen3-30B-A3B-Q5_K_M.gguf is 21.7Gb, are you running it at 1it/s slowly swapping off the SSD or is your idea of a medium-end gaming rig a 3/4/5090?
I mostly gave up on local models because they hit such an obvious intelligence barrier compared to the big ones, but would love to give this a shot if you explain what you're doing. I have 16Gb VRAM.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
Maybe this is just the consequentialist in me, but it seems like love for humanity and the enabling of their salvation has to be the overriding one. Suppose that you literally had to pick one:
1: God will get glory equal to saving all of humanity, but you will not be gloried, and humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell
2: God will not get glory (at least, not any extra from your decision), but you will get glory from God as if you had saved humanity, but humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell
3: God will not get any additional glory, and you will not get any personal glory or credit, but humanity will be saved (or at least, have the ability to repent and be saved if they so choose)
Setting aside the inherent contradictions (because it would be unjust for God not to glory you or himself for saving humanity) for the sake of the thought experiment, it seems to me that the actually most good action would be 3: save the people. And this is in line with everything else Jesus preached. You do good works, even at the cost of your own material well-being, and then this automatically glories God and yourself automatically as secondary effects. But you have to actually do good.
Now, in reality all of these are inextricably linked: God only gives commands iff they are good iff they benefit people iff they glorify Himself iff they glorify the person who does them. I think that on a fundamental level there isn't even a meaningful distinction between "doing good" and "glorifying God", otherwise God would have said different things until they became the same thing. So I strongly suspect that Jesus had all of them as equally strong motivations because they're all the same thing if you have true understanding (which he did). But in-so-far as you consider them to be distinct, I think the saving of humanity was the primary motivation (but this might just be my perspective as a selfish human who loves being saved more than I love glorifying God)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
How about proofreading a long document? You can get LLMs to go through page by page and check for errors like sate instead of state, pubic instead of public, dependent vs dependant...
That has to be most boring and obvious application. There are heaps more.
Or how about making making cartoons? These aren't too bad: https://x.com/emollick/status/1920700991298572682
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
Interesting, especially the variability in response. What I'd give to have an OAI non-reasoning model that was as high quality and fast as Sonnet 4.
The correct comparison here would be a non-diplomatic foreign government official from a friendly country. A good comparison here is actually the Harry Dunn case in the UK. An American government official without diplomatic immunity killed a motorcyclist while driving on the wrong side of the road. She was released with the expectation that she would show up to court. It turned into a big diplomatic mess because the US government smuggled her out of the country on a military plane and tried to retroactively claim diplomatic immunity under a highly questionable legal interpretation.
The expectation especially among friendly countries is that foreign government officials who are charged with a crime will respect the laws of their host country and show up for court. This is especially true among first-world democracies with trustworthy legal systems.
MedicalStory2
1d ago
Would this have even been a crime in Israel? Quick Googling shows that the age of consent in Israel is 16, but I didn't find any information about the age of the person Alexandrovich was contacting.
I ask because I don't think it's too uncommon for any allied country to exert pressure on behalf of a citizen or even for local officials to allow flight from jurisdiction when the sex crime in the US isn't a crime in the home country. I can't find anything to confirm the pattern, but I do remember a local case a couple decades ago in Colorado involving a Swiss citizen.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
(I did use AI to write that script!)
Self licking ice cream cone, electric boogaloo. ( the previous one was DEI commitments/forced personal pronouns in e-mail signatures.)
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
I dunno if I'll get dinged for this but this is exactly what a low trust society looks like, they are importing their slacker ethic from their own society and clashing with the anglo-saxon way of doing things. There are exceptions, but on the average anything touched or god forbid managed by them turns to shit real fast. For a good example of what happens when the middle managment gets infiltarted look at the apocalypse that was Microsoft's Skype.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
(the US doesn't officially recognize dual citizenship, but I assume Israel still considers her a citizen unless she formally renounced it, but unless you prove she still has an Israeli passport you're just speculating)
That's like the worst kind of rules lawyering. One's personal convictions don't evaporate just because the US doesn't recognize dual-citizenship. It's not the piece of paper that drives a man/woman to choose their own ethinc group for favoritism.
Personal anecdote, we had an order from the higher ups that we must use LLMs, and that they will be tracking how often we use them.
In Europe the push for AI is absolutely bonkers. On top of stories like yours, I've seen academics shill like they were sales reps for their field to adopt it, the public sector incentivizing it's workers to dip their toe in the water and start using them, etc. There was an entire infrastructure of workshop providers ready to go within weeks of when GPT-3 was announced, and it was aimed at some of the most calcified sectors of society.
The mundane theory I have is that this is (another one of) Europe's ill-conceived attempt(s) at overtaking the US in terms of innovation. The conspiracy theory is that they really really want to automate surveillance ASAP. Quite possibly it's both, but either way someone high up had a bright idea, and they'll be damned if they don't see it through.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
I can definitely see some marvel story telling tier potential shenanigans for the KCU, awww she privated her account.
SnapDragon
1d ago
I'm in software too, and my productivity is boosted hugely by ChatGPT. However, there are caveats - I'm an experienced developer using an unfamiliar language (Rust), and my interactions consist of describing my problem, reading the code it generates, and then picking and choosing some of the ideas in the final code I write myself. My experience and judgement is not obsolete yet! If you just treat it as a personalized Stack Overflow, it's amazing.
On the other hand, in my personal time, I do use it to rapidly write one-off scripts for things like math problems and puzzles. If you don't need maintainable code, and the stakes aren't too high, it can be an extremely powerful tool that is much faster than any human. You can see the now-ruined Advent of Code leaderboards for evidence of that.
SnapDragon
1d ago
I don't find the statement so ridiculous, unfortunately. As @ThomasdelVasto and I posted before, the corporate market may be in an irrational but metastable state. Far too much of white-collar work is just "adult daycare", and society has been built around the idea that this is how you keep people occupied. It's possible that, at some point, the whole edifice will collapse. But hey, I don't have a bird's-eye view and I could be wrong. Let's hope so!
Diplomatic immunity is the legal fact, but there's also a layer of diplomatic discretion underneath it. Sometimes you sweep things under the rug to keep your friends happy. If anything it's more effective as a gesture because you didn't have to do it. "Sure thing Benny old chum, I'll take care of this as a personal favor to you."
'Guy with connections gets off with slap on the wrist' is a story as old as law itself. It happens all the time and needs no special explanation.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1d ago
Claude Sonnet 4 non-thinking also one-shot this when I tried it with a very short addendum to the prompt of
Strip the flavor text from the above, rewriting the problem to preserve only concrete observations. Then answer the rewritten question.
Rex
1d ago
I work in the accounting field and there is this concept of “independence”. We cannot be seen to give or take favors from our clients, in practice or appearance. We go through great pains to do this as one might assume we allow our clients to cook the books in return for other consideration.
An honorable Jewish Israeli judge would throw the book at this guy because they wouldn’t even want the appearance of impropriety. But that really doesn’t happen.
Yeet_far
1d ago
I'm totally agreed with "Humans do have an enormous capacity for learned associations and behaviours, but only so long as etc." -- not everyone has the same capacity for the same worldview.
But for any given person, there are tons of people (some which are closely related and some which are not) who do have that capacity. And within that group, memetic effects are far stronger than genetic ones.
But yeah, happy to pick this up again in a few sections/weeks!
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Assuming AI use is kept up (whether by compulsion or voluntarily), 1.5-2.5 years (70% confidence interval), maybe?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
we had an order from the higher ups that we must use LLMs, and that they will be tracking how often we use them
And absolute dipshittery like this is why 95% of LLM projects (whatever that actually means) fail, not because LLMs are stupid, but because the people using them are
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Training a model to operate robotics for conventionally "hard" problems
This is really hard and if current models could easily be trained to do it they already would have
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
We really haven't seen a matching boom in productivity.
Or the current march of productivity increases throughout the 2000s is as a result of shit like cloud software tools, and in a counter factual world where tech stagnated, productivity would be much lower than our actual world?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Most office work is fake email jobs.
This is a ridiculous statement. If you think so, you should post your short positions.
Or, you should start up competing white collar companies and undercut all the companies you think have massive amounts of fake email job deadweight. As you'd have a much leaner cost structure.
I’m not predicting a permanent or final collapse, although it’s a tail risk. But I think a lot of people will rush for the exits if only because a lot of their other assets will have plummeted in value, they may have lost a job or other additional income and need to liquidate, and if you’re one of those people you may end up selling at the trough.
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