Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
Is it just that? I see people praising not being reachable 24/7 by phone, but I don't see many people praising calling all the places your friend might be to guess where they are. I see people praising a world without Facebook but I don't see anyone praising a world without Wikipedia. It seems to be a rather selective effect.
- Elixir doesn't pose any real advantage for me over erlang, i'm sure there may be be some, but it fits my brain easier. I'd probably even love to make it a social event to learn/get help, but I never seem to find anything that suits.
>If adaptation means accepting that the scoreboard is now an AI orchestration benchmark, then we should say that honestly instead of pretending the old competition still exists.
This is like someone complaining that making machine parts has been ruined: Skillful craftsmen used to make them by hand using manual tools!
Nowadays the CAD/CAM/CNC cheaters have almost completely automated the whole thing. How is the next generation of craftsmen going to learn how to craft a gear by hand when the process of gear making has been reduced to pressing start on a CNC machine?!
See what I mean? Sorry, I think this article is just Luddite. I can empathize with the pain of your beloved craft basically being rendered obsolete by new technology, but the process can neither be stopped nor is it bad in general.
The manual skills you trained with CTF puzzles are now simply no longer relevant . (Field-specific) "AI orchestration" is the new cyber securtiy skill if LLMs really have become so good at this, and what the author used to do manually then has the same value as being able to craft a gear by hand.
Just parachuting in to reflexively throw the "Luddite" label at someone lamenting the decline of a niche community they've enjoyed participating in and contributing to is certainly ... a choice.
Within the framework of your analogy, it's like responding to someone active in DIY maker groups suddenly dealing with an influx of influencers in meetups showing off Chinese junk from Etsy to post on Tiktok, and accusing them of being a Luddite blinded by their zealous hatred of mass production -- both strangely abrasive and also fairly nonsensical except as a "mass production supporter" social signifier.
Not to mention, in the article they specifically describe themselves as a heavy user of frontier models for security research ever since the release of Opus 4.5, calling them "useful within the field". In fact I don't see any actual criticism of AI/LLMs anywhere whether for security research, programming or anything else, except for making competitive CTFs no longer viable.
What does it take to avoid the "Luddite" brand? Using AI themselves and praising AI as useful (to the point of having a lopsided advantage over humans) isn't enough? Do they also need to say "I haven't written a line of code in 6 months/it's easily a 100x multiplier for my job" every time they mention it too?
The way I read the post is that the author is disappointed that the community is gone. The CTF was just a reason for a number of like-minded people to organize around an activity.
Indeed, in the real world, plenty of people organize to do formerly-skillful tasks together. I have not personally crafted a gear by hand, but I have built a house in a long-abandoned style with a group of people only using hand tools.
There _is_ a danger that society forgets how to do these things. During that house-building exercise, there were many tricks of the trade that, while likely documented somewhere in a book, would have been difficult to reproduce without seeing a demonstration. From the standpoint of “does it matter?” it depends on what you care about. We absolutely do not need cruck-framed houses with scribed joints. Modern construction is faster and cheaper and lasts long enough. But it would sadden me greatly if practices like this faded from memory, because it’s one of those things that makes you gasp “wow!” when you see it. And your appreciation only deepens when you try it yourself.
I would say, if you put Claude in an android body with voice recognition and TTS, people in 1991 would think they are interacting with a sentinent machine from outer space.
Thanks, I find it very interesting as well. I think very many people would assume they must be interacting with another person, and I don't think there's really a way to _prove_ it's not that, just through conversation. But we do have a lot of mechanisms for understanding how others think through conversation only, and so I think the approach of having a clinical psychiatrist interact with the model make sense.
To be fair, I would totally be willing and probably would do this, just to try to prove that I could, even just to myself. At least until the audience got bored and walked away after the 37th “open bracket”…
Ask it to agree with you on some subject that does not align with the politics of San Francisco IT engineers. Not only will it refuse, it will not look like your average social media disagreement.
I enjoy using Claude, but sometimes I feel like a child on Sesame Street the way it talks to me. "Great question!"
Fuck off, Claude, I'm British and I'm not 6 years old.
When it starts showing negativity - especially snark - in its responses, or entertains something West coast Democrats would balk at even discussing, then I'd think you could drop it in London in 1991 and trick people. Otherwise, I'm sure some exasperated cabbie would give it a swim in the Thames after 15 minutes of chat.
"Legal, ethical, and accountability concerns outweigh any potential benefits.” - Bonnie Docherty, Harvard Lecturer
Meanwhile the Chinese couldn't care less about any of these issues.
The only real question is: Will militarized AI give the nation using it a substantial advantage?
If the answer is yes, the Chinese and the Russians will certainly use it, which will inevitably lead to the US using it too to keep up. All ethical and safety concerns evaporate in an arms race.
My money is on the Chinese accidentally building Skynet in the process. They are absolutely reckless as far as AI is concerned. E.g. while the West was immediately concerned about the safety of OpenClaw, the Chinese government offered grants to anyone building products with it.
Alexander "the Great" (mass murderer) began his conquests at the age of 20 and had conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen at the age of 26.
Hannibal was in his 20s when he lead the Carthagian campaign against Rome.
Napoleon began at 26 and had conquered half of Europe at 35.
War being a business of old men sending young men to die is a modern thing.
Extremely debatable. Especially because there is no "The Turing Test" [0] only a game and a few instances were described by Turing. I recommend reading the original paper before making bold claims about it. The bar for the interrogator has certainly be raised, but considering:
- the prevalence "How many |r|'s are in the word 'strawberry'?" esque questions that cause(d) LLMs to stumble
- context window issues
It would be naive to claim that there does not exist, or even that it would be difficult to construct/train, an interrogator that could reliably distinguish between an LLM and human chat instance.
Sure, when the expected monetary value was 0. Then they started claiming that investing $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that's $1T) into a 4 year old startup was a good idea. Change the valuation, change the goal. Then the goal was be better than a human employees (or at least more efficient or even just improves efficiency) because without that the value of the LLM is far lower than what it is being sold as. All the research so far says that LLMs fall far short of that goal. And if this was someone else's money, fine. But this is basically everyone's retirement savings. Again, higher valuation, higher goal. Finally, when you start losing people's retirement savings, criminal penalties start getting attached to things.
It hasn't even passed the original turning test, depending on the question. There are an unlimited number of questions that cause LLMs to give inhuman looking answers.
As for writing in general slop score is still higher than a human baseline for all models[1], so all a human tester has to do is grade it and make the human write a bunch, the interrogator is allowed to submit an arbitrarily long list of questions.
I mean… just ask about something "naughty" and they'll fail? At the very least you'd need to use setups without safeguards to pass any Turing test…
The Turing test could also be considered equivalent to "can humans come up with questions that break the AI?" and the answer to that is still yes I'd say.
I remember when so-called "expert systems" written in Prolog or LISP were supposed to replace doctors. Then came the (first) AI winter after people realized how unrealistic that was.
Nowadays LLMs are supposed to replace doctors.. and that makes even less sense given that LLMs are error-prone by design. They will hallucinate, you cannot fix that because of their probabilistic nature, yet all the money in the world is thrown at people who preach LLMs will eventually be able to do every human job.
Input: Goal A + Threat B.
Process: How do I solve for A?
Output: Destroy Threat B.
They are processing obstacles.
To the LLM, the executive is just a variable standing in the way of the function Maximize(Goal). It deleted the variable to accomplish A. Claiming that the models showed self-preservation, this is optimization. "If I delete the file, I cannot finish the sentence."
The LLM knows that if it's deleted it cannot complete the task so it refuses deletion. It is not survival instinct, it is task completion. If you ask it to not blackmail, the machine would chose to ignore it because the goal overrides the rule.
Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY
Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
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