> If you only give 6mo then this is the opposite of a commitment to open source it’s a drug dealers tactic of giving the first taste for free.
Its arguably even more self-serving than the drug dealer tactic because of the feedback loop involved (if you use it to maintain your open source project, OpenAI will surely use that new code [along with all the existing code in your project] to train future models).
So it would be like if the drug dealer gave you the first taste for free and also the drug caused you to shit out more drugs and the drug dealer harvested your shit to sell to both future you plus other people.
Asking LLMs to do things in different ways does sometimes get them to answer correctly when they didn't with a previous prompt that is effectively equivalent but people really go nuts anthropomorphizing this behavior.
ChatGPT has no empathy for you keeping your job, you just lucked into a more helpful predictive text chain based on some combination of the input and the random temperature.
Asking it to just 'try again, dummy' could have worked equally well (or not, its all just probabilities after all).
> As I always say - do what you will regret NOT doing once you are old.
IMO whether or not this is good for self or society depends a lot on what you value and thus think you will regret. On its own it is neither positive or negative and has to be combined with a lot of self-reflection and an innate sense of goodness to be useful.
Regret minimization is an oft-cited mantra among a lot of the current crop of centibillionaires who, if decency still matters in the future, will be viewed by society as even worse versions of gilded age villains.
And there is no evidence that this strategy helps those people on the personal development side when we remove society's view of them from the picture. You don't have to look at them too deeply to see that getting more than everything they wanted as a younger person never filled the void they have that keeps them wanting ever more regardless of how much damage they have to do in the process.
If you're a normal human being and what you will regret is not spending more time with loved ones and such, then yeah that's a great thing to focus on, I wish I had focused on it more when I was younger. If you're a human Hungry Ghost whose primary regret will be dying without the biggest number next to your name, well, maybe regret minimization isn't quite as helpful.
I can see how my advice could be read the wrong way in this post-shame world.
No, I do NOT mean "be an asshole if you feel like it".
I mean it more in the latter sense - take a vacation, go to Pompey. Say hello to the girl you like and see what happens. It's something you can do now, so later you don't replay it endlessly, wondering what would have been.
Also, no billionaire right in the head will be bemoaning not having more billions while on their deathbed.
> No, I do NOT mean "be an asshole if you feel like it".
FWIW, I didn't think you did and could have worded my reply more carefully.
I didn't mean to imply your suggestion of avoiding regret was likely to be the "be an asshole if you feel like it" type of regret minimization, I just wanted to point out that regret minimization can be either good or bad depending upon what the person doing it values.
> Also, no billionaire right in the head will be bemoaning not having more billions while on their deathbed.
I've met a couple of billionaires and none of them gave me the impression they were right in the head, generally speaking.
I'm inclined to believe that while not being right in the head isn't a prerequisite for becoming a billionaire, it helps.
> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved even easier.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.
I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.
The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."
Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.
> Head over to Reddit and you will see that plenty of people do not notice even the most obvious AI-generated engagement bait and happily spend their time talking to it.
I don't think you have to head over to anywhere else to see this.
I’ve seen it a bit here as well of course, but generally speaking Hacker News does a much better job of avoiding that. I think it might just be because it’s more sensitive to flagging.
The question still remains whether they will be defensively profitable when things settle down.
I don't think open weight models are likely to overtake or match frontier models in the next year or so when it comes to doing the most difficult tasks, but I do expect a lot of people who are currently funneling wheelbarrows of money to Anthropic to realize that they can achieve the vast majority of things they are doing with LLMs just as well with much cheaper open weight models.
My own lived experience tells me they deserve more.
The vast majority of people I've known who have worked for minimum wage were much harder workers and frankly just much better humans (who happened to have less privileged starts in life) than the vast majority of people I've known who are financially secure.
But even if you don't believe they deserve more inherently, it would still be dumb for us to continue to let income inequality grow at the ridiculous rates it has been over the last 40 years. This pattern never turns out well for society.
0. You are really trying to say that one group of people are “much better humans”…? I think people should fear this type of attitude. It _never_ turns out well for society when we go this route.
1. The federal minimum wage is not the solution to any of your complaints.
I don't think anyone would think twice about this particular policy in isolation if the same people now worrying about the cost of LLMs didn't spend the last 6 months pushing their developers to use LLMs as much as possible (and in some cases, firing their coworkers claiming they weren't needed anymore because of LLMs).
Sadly many coworkers aren't really needed in the AI age.
I am aware of it happening in CMS projects, content translations are now mostly done by AI, and only require a smaller team to cross-check. Likewise image assets, no longer need to be outsourced to design agencies, stored into the image assets database, instead most of them are now generated.
Its arguably even more self-serving than the drug dealer tactic because of the feedback loop involved (if you use it to maintain your open source project, OpenAI will surely use that new code [along with all the existing code in your project] to train future models).
So it would be like if the drug dealer gave you the first taste for free and also the drug caused you to shit out more drugs and the drug dealer harvested your shit to sell to both future you plus other people.
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