It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products.
Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.
Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc)
Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up
It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.
Right. It seems then that all these "elite" engineers on HN aren't as smart as we thought (and yeah, I include myself in that bag).
It's deeply sad to see how our most beloved work (those side projects we pour ourselves into purely for the joy of it) will, at the end, be the very reason most of us lose our jobs (not all of us, but the majority). Openai/antrhopic/etc and others simply took all of that and turned it to their advantage. It's capitalism, sure, but it's heartbreaking... I wouldnt mind be out of job for another reason, but not for that one pls
All is not lost though is it? We can invest our efforts into local models and frontier competitors.
I'm not blind, I have Claude pro (not max) and Cursor subscription. But I'm really hesitant to go balls to the wall on the most powerful models because it isn't sustainable; I don't want it to be. So how much can I get from the older models, the smaller, cheaper ones that will hopefully inevitably be commoditized. I think the harness improvements are making headway. I continue to think Cursor Composer 2 is more than adequate.
Then again if one believes it's a race to the singularity, then that's another story. I don't.
The most concise answer as of now is because AI has no "will".
LLMs are objectively smarter than any one person so in some definition we've already created super-intelligence. The problem is they just sit there. They have all the answers already, if you think about it. Whenever we ask it something it gives us the answer, it's amazing, we can even say it can synthesize new information. We can agree with all the claims.
But what does it do with that super-intelligence? Nothing. It can't. it doesn't have will. Or interest. Curiosity? Biological imperative. Who knows.
So we create loops and introspection and set them free. Does giving AI a goal make the AI conscious? That's easily silly if you ask me.
(I'm trying really hard not to make this philosophy. I really like the philosophy aspect, but this is my 30 second answer to the question)
It's no more conscious than running that cron job to send you today's weather. That's as far as I understand what this link is. The agent is posting blog updates and such. Because it was told to. It has no will. LLM generative output is incredible. It's also not conscious.
As if Claude and Instagram are remotely similar products. But again, these products make it incredibly easy to cancel. If work requires that you use it, make the next job you get not require it or just use it on the job.
I see engineers addicted to Claude the same way non-tech people (friends of mine) are addicted to instagram. At the end it's all the same: making multibillion dollar companies richer every day
>These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees).
I'm a mid programmer at best, like compared to top guys in the industry, who built stuff like OpenClaw or those prodigy 16 year-old coders who became millionaires, and yet I don't fear the LLM assisted coding future. I'm at peace knowing that I will adapt to the LLM programming world using my knowledge in my favor, or adapt to a world where I will no longer be a SW engineer, but something else.
Also I find it ironic and poetic how some SW devs here want us to rise up and fight LLMs and the companies making them for disrupting this profession, when the SW dev profession was so well paid precisely because the SW products they wrote, disrupted other peoples' professions, moving the savings from labor costs into the pocket of employers, who used SW to optimize processes and repetitive labor and not have to hire as many people, yet they never saw an issue with other people losing their jobs. "Learn to code" eh?
With hindsight, it's always easy to say anyone could have done it too, but there's more to product success than just coding and shipping an app out the door.
The first iPhone was built using COTS(commercial off the shelf) parts that Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola also had access to, and SW tools they also had access to, yet Apple won and buried the other companies because their end-product was way more popular with the customer base. I'm sure engineers from Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola also said "we could have done exactly the same thing with the right leadership" when they saw that.
I also say "I could have done that" when I see how the maker of Flappy Bird became a multi millionaire, or how any other top 100 AppStore slop app has 100+ million downloads.
Coding skills are dime a dozen these days. A lot of people can do 95% of these things now. The differentiator between failure and success, comes with the 5% rest: network effects, market know-how, promotion, timing, outreach, UI, UX, luck, etc.
I agree it was a good idea and there’s more to product success, but you were specifically talking about coding skill level.
There are some things I could easily say I (and many others) could not build even in retrospect. Solidworks, for example is beyond a lot of people’s skill level and very difficult to build.
It's frustrating to see this response so often, as if it weren't blindingly obvious.
After years of near monopoly status these companies have a lock on many people's social lives. To give up Instagram is akin to giving up text messaging. "Just stop using it" isn't helpful advice to those people.
If Instagram disappeared tomorrow it would be different, because everyone would be in the same position. But preaching personal responsibility in an area subject to network effects doesn't work.
Give me a break. No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally. There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed. From inside the company that _makes the product_.
Now, would it be inconvenient to stop, sure, but people need better self control. Put that cookie down!
> No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally.
That's a straw man argument. I never said they were.
> There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed.
What percentage of the population do you think are in the habit of reading academic studies about the effects of the products they use?
It all feels reminiscent of cigarette smoking. The damage was very well known yet people continued to do it. It took extensive government regulation to wean people off their addiction, not a "buck up, chump" motivational message.
I don't believe the above user is here to have a well thought out discussion, they just want to tell the world how much better they are than the social media addicts.
You can and should do that, but it's not sufficient to individually avoid harm. You still have to live in a world where most people have their behavior manipulated, and that will impact you. Even from a purely selfish perspective you should support efforts to stop this sort of control broadly with legal action.
exactly. I did all of OPs suggestions, decade ago (never had TT to begin with) and still live in a sick society surrounded by the influence of these platforms
> It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted
Would you place all the responsibility of drug addiction on drug dealers?
Yes, their practices are predatory, but it is essential to remind the addicts that ultimately change comes from within themselves. They need to change something.
That’s pretty insensitive to people suffering from mental illness. To compare sitting and doomscrolling on social media with something that’s chemically out of balance in a persons body is… a choice.
yeah but that's a way they want you to behave in order to set up a control group within the target group that continues to behave as expected. the questions to be answered are not which parts of that control group, and how, nudge which parts of the target group slightly off the predicted and/or confirmed results. they answered that way back when. the question is, how can we react to the unexpected results that we ourselves forced. they can't just go on doing the opposite of what's good for them and bad for the users or vice versa, they have 50 years of data on that, some of which, should be noted, was accidently burned or bombed with a bunch of incriminating evidence shortly before investigators arrived ... which should make even the last sus person understand, it wasn't on purpose
Yeah I just really don’t see the issue in that (not saying you do or don’t either). If it were me and I were them I would have contracted with artists because it’s only a few images and it would avoid controversy. However I also use image generation tools for fun non-commercial pieces that I never would have done without the tools.
Does that make me more creative or less? I’m not sure.
Because wealthy suburbs have said "not here, move your filthy industry somewhere else" since forever.
When the places that aren't swimming in jobs, the local government isn't swimming in property tax revenues and frankly probably can't even enforce the rules they're federally compelled to have without destroying everything says "take that somewhere else" it means something entirely different.
Take it from someone who lives in the St. Louis area, Festus is by no means a snooty suburb. It's a small town that has become a distant suburb of St. Louis due to sprawl spreading south into the adjacent county over the past 20 years.
For comparison, an upscale suburb of similar size (Town and Country, Missouri) has a median household income of $202,974, as compared to $59,041 for Festus. The average person you meet in Town and Country is likely to be a doctor, attorney, or executive. In Festus, the average person likely works in a factory, farm, or lead mine.
Good question. This is targeted more at smaller chat server use cases that put the admins in the drivers seat. Compaction operations and rebuilding indexes can happen during a maintenance window.
I plan on scaling up the number of messages the bot system generates to see where the breaking point is.
