I used Waymo half a dozen times or so when traveling to San Francisco this year.

The experience was actually quite good. The cars arrive within a minute or two, they’re clean and high-end (for what amounts to a taxi), and you can set up the atmosphere according to your mood. The driving was smooth and uneventful.

Unless they raise the prices significantly, I would continue to choose Waymo over human drivers.

This is something travel agent websites do too.

If you’re logged out, they’ll show you a price that’s really attractive. But if you log in with an account that’s got some history, they’ll suddenly say that price is no longer available now you need to pay the higher price.

Agoda.com I’m looking at you

I’m not against ads in principle. The advertisers are paying the bill for stuff I consume. Great.

For that effort, they get a chance at my wallet. And to be honest, making me aware of a business or product is indeed a way to get me interested in what they sell. I do prefer the ads to be relevant instead of always useless.

That being said, it’s currently preferable to use a blocker and let the people who don’t know how to use blockers subsidize my ad-free ways.

Regrettably there are not too many high quality researchers who endeavor to put their names on such studies.

It hasn’t been like that for most of human history, and the standard of working conditions that I am guessing you’re thinking of is not even experienced by most humans alive today.

I think ideal working conditions should be society’s aspiration and would hopefully pay for itself through superior output. But if businesses can compete unfairly this may not be true. For that reason we should break up companies that get so large as to control entire markets and force them to compete again.

Sadly

Unfortunately for labor, absent of regulation, that’s how it’s been since the beginning of time. B2B dealings are similar… Add value in excess of cost or be replaced.

While possibly true, in reality an employer doing this struggles to keep reliable and quality staff. They would likely calculate that hiring and training expenses, poor output, and other issues are a higher cost than the cost of offering 15 minute breaks and some amount of benefits.

At least that’s how it should work.

I’m certain a lot of employees are hanging around open AI until this happens.

Not long until the boats start shooting back

AI companies believe the market will give the best rewards for a winner-take-all strategy.

They believe now is the time to accumulate customers.

Their future financing rounds very likely depend on being able to show growth.

Entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors all know it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be (yet). They hope another few billion in cash will get it there. And hope you don’t notice until they already won the market.

Thank you

I feel like this is pretty much it.

We’re busy AF trying to live and the boomers now have nothing to do except vote.

I was ready gawk at what ads on my fridge would look like, and then this. I don’t know what I expected.

I dislike that the conversation seems to feel like an echo chamber. I’m not saying that it is, just that it has some traits of one.

Commenters who use nuance about how they see AI being used positively get highly downvoted, discouraging further engagement.

Commenters who contribute with name calling or ad hominem get wildly upvoted.

I was at the Canton Fair last week which is a trade show in China where manufacturers display some of their latest technology.

There was a robotics display all where they are showing off how lots of factories, kitchens, another labor-based jobs can be automated with technology.

This doesn’t really have a lot to do with AI or LLMs, but the field of robotics is advancing fast and a lot of basic work that humans had to do in the past won’t be needed as much in the future.

If your argument attacks my credibility, that’s fine, you don’t know me. We can find cases where developers use the technology and cases where they refuse.

Do you have anything substantive to add to the discussion about whether AI LLMs are anything more than just a tool that allows workers to further abstract, advancing all of the professions it can touch towards any of: better / faster / cheaper / easier?

From the article:

“The thing about that farmer,” Altman said, is not only that they wouldn’t believe you, but “they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.'”

I think he pretty much agrees with you.

I think your strategy makes sense for all workers. Being aware of your role in the final solution is more important than the steps needed to get there, and tools merely change the process, often improving it in some way.

A guy with a hammer cant automatically build a house without skills, but it sure helps those who have them. A guy with a nail gun can build a house faster and perhaps with less skill, and few argue that it’s not a worthy improvement.

Some types of photographers may no longer need to operate a camera, but instead transition into someone who can knowledgeably ask for the results from an AI that properly captures the mood and tone required for the end result.

We’re changing how it’s done, but not necessarily what is done.

Fantastic, that vid has 78 views as of now, I’m guessing 76 of them from today hahaha

In the 90s and early 00’s it was really common for Universities (for their students and professors) to arrange Unix based shell accounts for email and storage.

The Apache http server was easily configured to allow per user websites and this was commonly done to give everyone a website. They looked something like a “www.example.com/~username” URL which mapped to a public_html folder inside the user’s home directory. Apache would serve up any files or html that lived inside to the public.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/public_html.html

At the time, a lot of people didn’t worry about anyone finding their obscure files, so put them there freely for family and friends.

Wild times!