Just beware that rich people use publicity of their charitable work as good-washing (is that a term?) for their other activities. Bill Gates is a good example of that behaviour.
Not that I think that Mackenzie Scott is doing this, since she seems to have never really been in a position of power to show her evil side (if she has one).
I did really like my Blackberry Q10 and this looks like it could be a fitting spiritual successor. I’m keeping my eye on it.
Unfortunately Clicks didn’t provide any of the actually useful information for determining whether it’s a phone worth buying. RAM and CPU (not just a vague notion that it’ll have something modern) are important factors though most people will be fine enough with anything that’s outside of low-end. They also don’t say anything about whether the bootloader can be unlocked so I have to assume it is permanently locked, which guarantees that any niche following the Communicator gets will be stunted and die with the device.
It also seems like Clicks has a UK address despite them shipping from the USA, so that’s an immediate veto for me. If they shipped from the UK or any other American country that’d be fine with me.
It’s actually worse than that: Snowbirds are complaining about not being able to sell their homes quickly and for good money. Nothing is preventing them from leaving their home vacant and/or reducing the price so locals can afford it.
The main post is already badly downvoted so I probably shouldn’t even bother to engage, but this whole article is actually just showing a lack of knowledge on the subject. So here goes nothing:
Corporations have been running algorithms for decades.
Millennia*. We can run algorithms without computers, so the first algorithm was run way earlier than decades ago. And corporations certainly were invented before the last century.
Markets weren’t inefficient because technology didn’t exist to make them efficient. Markets were asymmetrically efficient on purpose. One side had computational power. The other side had a browser and maybe some browser tabs open for comparison shopping.
I suppose the author has never used all of those price-watching websites that existed before 2022. I also question how they think a price optimization algorithm is useful to a person who is trying to buy, not sell, something.
Consider what it took to use business intelligence software in 2015. […] Language models collapsed that overhead to nearly zero. You don’t need to learn a query language. You don’t need to structure your data. You don’t need to know the right technical terms. You just describe what you want in plain English. The interface became conversation.
You still need to structure your data because you need to be able to have the LLM understand the structure of your data. In fact, it is still easy enough to cause an LLM to misinterpret data that having inconsistently-structured data is just asking for problems… not that LLMs are consistent anyway. The existence of the idea of prompt engineering means that the interface isn’t just conversation.
The moment ChatGPT became public, people started using it to avoid work they hated. Not important work. Not meaningful work. The bureaucratic compliance tasks that filled their days without adding value to anything.
Oh ok better just stop worrying about that compliance paperwork because the author says it’s worthless. Just dump that crude oil directly on top of the nice ducks, no point in even trying to only spill it into their pond.
Compliance tasks are actually the most important part of work. They are what guarantee your work has worth. Otherwise you’re just an LLM – sometimes producing ok results but always wasting resources.
People weren’t using ChatGPT to think. They were using it to stop pretending that performance reviews, status update emails, and quarterly reports required thought.
Basically, users used it to create the layer of communication that existed to satisfy organizational requirements rather than to advance any actual goal.
Once again with the poor examples of things. If you can’t give a thoughtful performance review for the people who work below you, you’re just horrible at your job. Performance reviews aren’t just crunching some numbers and giving people a gold star. I’m sure sometime in the future I could pipe in all of the quick chats I’ve had with coworkers in the office and tell an LLM to consider them for generating a review, but that’s still not possible. So no, performance reviews do actually require thought. Status emails and quarterly reports can be basically summarizing existing data, so maybe they don’t require much thought but they still require some. This is demonstrable by the amount of clearly LLM-generated content that have become infamous at this point for containing inaccurate info. LLMs can’t think, but a thinking human could’ve reviewed that output and stopped that content from ever reaching anyone else.
This is very much giving me the impression the author doesn’t like telling others what they’re doing. They’d rather work alone and without interruption. I worry that they don’t work well in teams since they lack the willingness to communicate with their peers. Maybe one day they’ll realize that their peers can do work too and even help them.
You want the cheapest milk within ten miles? You can build that.
The first search result for “grocery price tracker” that I found is a local tracker started in 2022, before LLMs.
You want to track price changes across every retailer in your area? You can do that now
From searching “<country> price tracker”, I found Camel^3 which is famous for Amazon tracking and another country-specific one which has a ToS last updated in 2018. The author is describing things that could already be accomplished with a search engine.
You want something to read every clause of your insurance policy and identify the loopholes?
Lmao DO NOT use an LLM for this. They are not reliable enough for this.
You want an agent that will spend forty hours fighting a medical billing error that you’d normally just pay because fighting it would cost more in time than the bill? You can have that.
You know what? I take it all back, this is definitely proving Dystopia Inc. But seriously, that is a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Never settle for that. The real solution here is to task the LLM with sending messages to every politician and lobbyist telling them to improve the system they make for you.
The marginal cost of algorithmic labor has effectively collapsed. Using a GPT-5.2–class model, pricing is on the order of $0.25 per million input tokens and about $2.00 per million output tokens. A token is roughly three-quarters of a word, which means one million tokens equals about 750,000 words. Even assuming a blended input/output cost of roughly $1.50 per million tokens, you can process 750,000 words for about $1.50. War and Peace is approximately 587,000 words, meaning you can run an AI across one of the longest novels ever written for around a dollar. That’s not intelligence becoming cheaper. That’s the marginal cost of cognitive labor approaching zero.
Nevermind the irony of calling computers doing work “algorithmic labour”, this is just nonsense. Of course things built entirely on free labour are going to be monetarily cheap. Also, feeding War And Peace into an LLM as input tokens is not the same as training the LLM on it.
We are seeing the actual cost of LLM usage unfold and you’d have to be willingly ignoring it to think it was strictly monetary. The social and environmental impact is devastating. But since the original article cites literally none of its claims, I won’t bother either.
Institutions built their advantages on exhaustion tactics. They had more time, more money, and more stamina than you did. They could bury you in paperwork. They could drag out disputes. They could wait you out. That strategy assumed you had finite patience and finite resources. It assumed you’d eventually give up because you had other things to do.
An AI assistant breaks that assumption.
No, it doesn’t, unless you somehow also assume that LLMs won’t also be used against you. And you’d have to actually be dumb or have an agenda that required you to act dumb to assume that.
Usage numbers tell the story clearly. ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in two months. That made it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. TikTok took nine months to hit 100 million users. Instagram took two and a half years. The demand was obviously already there. People were apparently just waiting for something like this to exist.
Here’s a handy little graph to show how the author is wrong: Time to 100M users. I’m sorry, I broke my promise about not citing anything. Notice how all of the time spans for internet applications trend downwards as time increases. TikTok took 9 months 7 years before ChatGPT was released. I bet the next viral app will be even faster than ChatGPT. That’s not an indicator of demand, that’s an indicator of internet accessibility. (I’m ignoring Threads because they automatically create 100M users from their Instragram accounts in 5 days, which is a measure of their database migration capabilities and nothing else.)
Venture capital funding for generative AI companies reached $25.2 billion in 2023 according to PitchBook data. That was up from $4.5 billion in 2022. Investment wasn’t going into making better algorithms. It was going into making those algorithms accessible.
I’m sorry, what? LLMs are an algorithm. Author clearly does not know what they are talking about.
DoNotPay, an AI-powered consumer advocacy service, claimed to help users fight more than 200,000 parking tickets before the company pivoted to other services. LegalZoom reported that AI-assisted document preparation reduced the time required to create basic legal documents by 60% in 2023.
I thought LLMs were supposed to be some magic interface for individuals. The author is describing institutions. You know, the thing the author started out bashing for controlling all the algorithms and using them against the common folk who didn’t have those algorithms. This is exactly the same thing, just replace algorithm with AI.
The credential barrier still exists. You can’t get a prescription from ChatGPT. The legal liability still flows through licensed professionals. The system still requires human gatekeepers. The question is how long those requirements survive when the public realizes they’re paying $200 for a consultation that an AI handles better for pennies.
Indeed, that will be an interesting thing to see once AI can actually handle it better and for cheaper. Though I wouldn’t count on in anytime soon. Don’t forget the AI at that stage will still have to compensate the human doctors who wrote the data it was trained on.
Oh, I just about hit the character limit. I guess I’ll stop there.
Remember folks, don’t let your LLM write an article arguing for replacing everyone with LLMs. All it proves is that you can be replaced by an LLM. Maybe focus on some human pursuits instead.
Huh? It wasn’t bait, it was a simple statement about how they already have plenty of good options for donating. I brought up cryptocurrency because you mentioned it out of nowhere.
They link to their accepted donation methods in the article: https://ziglang.org/zsf/
No need for cryptocurrency when they accept real money.
No, the article is just not very precise with its words. It was causing the program to panic.
GlitchTip makes monitoring software easy. Track errors, monitor performance, and check site uptime all in one place. Our app is compatible with Sentry client SDKs, but easier to run.
For those that have no idea what GlitchTip is, it’s a service tracing service like Sentry.
This basically what I think too. I will add that I make sure other people (current and future) can enjoy it as much as possible too, so that means I will avoid anything needlessly destructive even if it is enjoyable
If the tankies had reputable sources they wouldn’t be so fringe and disliked lol
Yeah, it’s a Voyager (the app) thing. It’s the default now when sharing a link. I’m not sure why, it seems completely useless, more expensive for the devs, and a privacy problem for everyone else (redirect links are a form of tracking).
Friendly reminder for everyone using Voyager to turn it off. I already did.
The strict_* set of integer function look interesting though I’m unlikely to use something that panics by design. I’m sure that’s useful in programs that panic to indicate problems. Do those exist? I always treat panics as a design failure.
Duration::from_mins() is useful for me since I’ve been doing Duration::from_secs(minutes * 60) for some things in my projects, which bugged me a bit.
User named 1984 wanting us to talk… hmmm
Regulations limit the total battery energy you can carry on board, which would be measured in Wh. Usually the limit is 100Wh though some countries/airlines have different regulations for total vs individual capacities (e.g. max 200Wh total but each device cannot be over 100Wh).
For regular Lithium-Ion cells which are usually 3.6 to 3.7V, 100Wh is around 27 000 mAh. Always check the battery cell voltage though, since it’s pretty easy to claim any mAh the company wants since it’s not really a measurement of anything tangible.
I don’t think that’s necessarily incompatible with what I suggested. They could just leave the backup servers offline until they’re actually needed which shouldn’t cost them anything (or at least not much; some cloud providers charge for a VM’s storage usage regardless).
Assuming that Signal’s servers were designed by competent engineers, the engineering cost to make a change like this shouldn’t be that bad. Though judging by Whittaker’s comments, that may be a bad assumption.
So when are they releasing the servers for us to run?
Since I’m reasonably sure they won’t, anyone interested in writing a server emulator?
It is true that there really isn’t another cloud provider that they could choose. All of the other cloud providers (major and minor players) are prone to the same sort of systemic failure. But it isn’t true that they didn’t have another choice.
The solution to service failure is redundancy. Making the redundancy as different as possible makes it even more resilient. In this case, that would be having redundant servers on other cloud providers which can be used in the event that the main one fails. Even better if they can use all of them simultaneously to share the load and let failover happen more gracefully.
I guess now is better than later, but plenty of people already knew that litigious and rich companies are never good.
The author’s take is a bit baffling to me. Trying to apply the US constitutional amendments against a foreign government institution to protect a US company is dumb. Those amendments strictly apply to the US government. As long as the company provides services in the UK, they are subject to UK laws on those services. If I start shipping firearms from the US to the UK it’d be perfectly reasonable for the UK to stop those packages at the border and destroy them. Network packets don’t just magically transcend borders.
The reasonable consequence of noncompliance is to block the service. Yes, that’s essentially paving the way for a national internet filter like China’s Great Firewall, but that’s why we have to fight the entire law not just the enforcement of it.
The Online Safety Act is horrible and a nightmare for so many reasons, but arguing it’s unenforceable on the grounds of being in a different country is just blatantly wrong.
In a functioning society accessing private information on someone else would be subject to a proper review system with audits to prevent anyone from accessing information they don’t have a very good (legal) reason to have.
So yeah it’d probably be possible in the USA, but in other places they definitely couldn’t just pull up your search history.