If the whole point of starting your own business is because you want to get out of the ‘rat race’, doesn’t it need to at least pay your bills? Otherwise, you are still in the rat race, just with even less time.
I don't see all businesses as a rat race. Tech is. The business that I've been building skills towards starting is a fun hands-on product, which involves a bit of artistry and a fair amount of labor and materials costs, and brings people joy. Tech can keep paying my bills, unless my side project gets bigger than I foresee. And if I lose money, I made some nice art along the way and had fun learning new skills.
Sure, but then I am confused as to why the mention of 'the rat race' at all. If your business is a fun hobby, then it is unrelated to you having to still be in the rat race. It would be no different than taking up reading or photography as a hobby. You are still in the rat race, you just also have a hobby.
This continues to be the most tiring response to any criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens, we're guaranteed the same output...
Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow.
That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.
I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.
> they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well.
And unfortunately a lot of people will say it’s their reports’ fault for not properly utilizing it (even as they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn’t a fair take, the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are generally not what is measured, but rather “are you using it?”
I’m just glad I work at a company that has more reasonable expectations and has been very slowly, thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company and assessing what is and isn’t good for. They are interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in video production to be perfectly honest the use case for Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don’t write a lot of scripts and I already have bespoke software for organizing/maintaining footage that isn’t on a subscription basis. The work I’m also doing doesn’t call for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it’s high volume. Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.
I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it’s nice to be able to do that without somebody saying “why aren’t you using it?” every meeting.
I have been a programmer for 30 years and have loved every minute of it. I love figuring out how to get my computers to do what I want.
I also want Star Trek, though. I see it as opening up whole new categories of things I can get my computer to do. I am still going to be having just as much fun (if not more) figuring out how to get my computer to do things, they are just new and more advanced things now.
> In other words, she doesn’t have taste; she has a reflection of collective human taste, filtered through what makes sense for this store. And this is the way these models work.
Well, it really depends on what you mean here. Models aren't 100% deterministic, there is random chance involved. You ask the exact same question twice, you will get two slightly different answers.
If you have the AI record the random selections it makes, it can persist those random choices to be factors in future decisions it makes.
At that point, could you consider those decisions to be the AI's 'taste'? Yes, they were determined by some random selection amongst the existing human tastes, but why can't that be considered the AI's taste?
IQ is negatively correlated with reactive violence, but positively correlated with premeditated violence, per the evolution of our species. Despite our greater emotional regulation and lack of reasonable contextual circumstances to support the need for violence, we're still killing people all the time just like our ancestors.
>Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”
I agree the country has rampant corruption, but I disagree that the US DOJ should be pursuing insider trading on these markets.
Why should my tax dollars be spent on helping a bookie run their gambling business? Insider trading laws and prosecution in the financial markets makes sense, because the fair and impartial enforcement helps all of our economy, and allows capital to do its job investing in productive ventures.
These prediction markets are not that. They aren’t sources of investment for a productive enterprise, it is pure gambling.
Why should the US government spend money making sure people can gamble? If people want their gambling to be fair, they can pay for their own enforcement.
I like the idea of insider trading running rampant on these platforms. Once people realize that the other side of their bet knows the outcomes in advance, maybe they will stop betting their money on these platforms and they can just die.
> Why should my tax dollars be spent on helping a bookie run their gambling business?
I mean, current laws do exactly this. The FBI has done investigations for major sports betting sites related to players throwing or fixing games, etc. If you commit fraud on a sportsbook you absolutely can go to jail.
This is assuming that ChatGPT had everything needed to do the work. If the plumber was asking specific questions, based on their previous experience and knowledge about what needed to be done, the sister might not have been able to get the same result from her use of ChatGPT that the plumber received.
Experts look things up all the time, because no one can hold all the knowledge of a field in their head. Being an expert means being able to know what to look up and how to use the information retrieved from looking something up.
In the plumber example, ChatGPT is going to tell them to do things using the terminology that plumbers know, and tell them to do tasks that plumbers know how to do. The sister would have to continually look up more and more things about how to do basic plumbing tasks, rather than just looking up particular novelties.
As much as the result for consumers sucks, is this just a result of the quality backpack business not being a very profitable business to be in anymore?
The reason they were able to buy all those backpack brands is because each of those brands were not making much money running a backpack company selling quality at a reasonable price. The purchaser makes some money leeching value out of the brand reputation, but then that brand value falls because of the crappy product, and they sell the brand because they leeched all the value out of it.
This is only possible because you can’t make much money selling quality for a good price. Consumers will pick lower quality for the cheapest price every time.
It's much more likely to be a result of the modern drive for companies to keep growing. This leads to a need to maximize profit endlessly, which in turn leads to cutting corners as much as you think you can get away with, or just ballooning prices. And this problem goes up and down the supply chain, of course - even if you want to run a non-growth business manufacturing quality backpacks, if your suppliers want to run growth businesses, they will eat up your margins and force your hand.
This obsession with ever increasing revenue is a major source of our worse and worse consumer economy.
One silver lining is that backpack industry doesn't have a huge moat. New companies can get started relatively easily as the older ones sell out and decay.
The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.
The onslaught of far east imports is also a factor. They weren't very relevant 30 years ago outside of discount merchants. Now you pop on to Amazon and choose something that looks appealing from dozens of mystery meat brands.
That's not going to change though. Cheap asian manufacturing and wall st efficiency maximizing changed industry in America. Maybe there could be changes to how public markets are regulated to change BigCo incentives, but it will be hard to change consumer behaviour if they like buying cheap disposable crap for the lowest price.
There is still plenty of competition in the backpack market if you just visit an outdoors store instead of walmart. That's a higher end market though, which is where most high quality small/medium businesses flourish.
In theory, competition is what prevents this. If these small companies can sell products that provide more value then consumers buy the alternative.
I think the problem today is that it's extremely difficult to tell when you're buying quality or a brand. If there's a 40$ and a 100$ backpack, often the 100$ version does not actually have meaningfully improved quality - just better marketing.
The same goes for tons of products - brands nowadays are something companies build while they're young and relentlessly smash into the ground as they age because the value you're destroying isn't obvious. Shareholders get good results, and objectively it's probably the correct financial decisions for the company - doesn't make it any less shit.
I don't think it's actually that hard - 5 minutes of skimming on Reddit will do a lot. You can also usually see Wirecutter's recommendations (even if they paywall the full article). People just don't care upfront but complain later.
Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.
This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.
As easy as it is to blame customers, I don’t think it is irrational to just buy the cheapest. So many times the more expensive one isn’t any better and you are paying for branding and marketing, and just wasting your money.
At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.
It also doesn't help that for school backpacks, the buyer and the user are different people. There is less incentive to take care of stuff, and when it breaks, parents are more likely to blame a bad backpack than to blame their children.
The high cost of labor has nothing to do with reusable parts of the washing machine. If it was all standardized, you could do a lot of repairs yourself.
It actually plays a pretty large role in the problem. This is like when people complain about not having enough small cars in America, they simply don’t sell well. Similarly, the average consumer does not want to be doing their own repairs. A lot of appliance repairs are already pretty darn easy.
When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.
Was revisiting the thought and it’s like the Framework laptop. There is absolutely a market for it but it’s far from the dominant market. Consumers on average simply don’t care.
Agreed. You can also say that they are better engineered for most use, nowadays. With the adage that anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall over, an engineering team is needed to build one that has the minimum resources to stay up.
In particular, how durable do people think backpacks need to be? If you are going through them particularly quickly, maybe you are over loading compared to what they were designed for?
That's the end result of capitalism squeezing all disposable income from the people. Wage suppression, rent-seeking subscriptions, shrinkflation. When people barely have enough money to survive, they can't afford to buy things!
I was pretty sure that claude -p would always be fine, but I looked at the TOS and it is a bit unclear.
It says in the prohibited use section:
> Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.
So it seems like using a harness or your own tools to call claude -p is fine, AS LONG AS A HUMAN TRIGGERS IT. They don’t want you using the subscription to automate things calling claude -p… unless you do it through their automation tools I guess? But what if you use their automation tool to call your harness that calls claude -p? I don’t actually know. Does it matter if your tool loops to call claude -p? Or if your automation just makes repeated calls to a routine that uses your harness to make one claude -p call?
It is not nearly as clear as I thought 10 minutes ago.
Edit: Well, I was just checking my usage page and noticed the new 'Daily included routine runs' section, where it says you get 15 free routine runs with your subscription (at least with my max one), and then it switches to extra usage after that. So I guess that answers some of the questions... by using their routine functionality they are able to limit your automation potential (at least somewhat) in terms of maxing out your subscription usage.
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