People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity.

We don't make a big deal of our jobs because we are stupid - it's the society that assigns this or that income to this or that job, and income determines lifestyle or in worst case the survival.

>People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity.

The increased productivity is pretty much entirely coming from AI researchers and the companies investing in huge amounts of GPUs, and they are the ones receiving most of the windfalls, how's that not fair?

The biggest contribution is still from the training set, whose original authors get 0 because of "fair use" in the copyright.

This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence. Like crediting wi-fi router owners with creating Wi-Fi Positioning System instead of the people who realized they could wardrive around to create maps and extract a new kind of value that would never have existed without them. Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.

My thinking here is coming from the paper "From Entropy to Epiplexity"[1] which partly discussed why you can train on synthetic data: it's the structure of the data that enables learning, not just the amount of "information". Authors of images and videos may have worked just as hard as authors of text training sets, but they didn't contribute to AI as much because there just wasn't the same kind of structure to discover there. It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.

1. https://arxiv.org/html/2601.03220v2

> This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence.

This presumes it's binary.

> Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.

Yes, I think a lot more than 1 person deserves credit for years of painstaking research.

> It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.

You're naively assuming the structure is accidental.

Depends on your ethics I guess? In my view fair distribution is an equitable one, which is also the principle that helps to keep society stable. Not that researchers and business people should not be rewarded for their achievement, but the reward should be moderate and limited in time instead of creating a permanent underclass or whatever the plan is now IMO

Even if that was true. There’s the training data.

As a parent I would appreciate if it came with an age recommendation.

It's right there on the page. Age 10 and above

I had a hard time finding it as well. I think maybe because the text is underlined and the font is small? It is harder to read "into" that text. Maybe it should be on its own line? Or it should be up next to "Full Color" / the cover? Maybe some "copy" pro would know the reason right away but it seems rather hard to find to me.

While I agree that it could be more prominent, the old man in me wants to scream "Don't be so lazy in reading!"

If you ignore the reviews near the end, the page doesn't have a lot of text. And not everything needs to be accessible by quickly scanning.

I found the age guidance with cmd+F, "age", enter. Probably would have tried "year" next if that hadn't found it.

As a parent, I find the age recommendations insulting.

It's only a recommendation, not a strict instruction. It's the age group that the author is targeting and is assumed to have the requisite background knowledge and reasoning skills required to follow the material. It's understood to vary between individuals.

This is similar to 'intended audience' section of technical books for adults. Do you find those insulting?

He requested that age requirement, it makes him looking like an etatist. His family will never raise Terence Tao even if their boy will be exactly same qualities.

Some kids use to solder earlier than at 10y.o. so the intended audience is wrong. If the kid has not learned what is a transistor by the age of 5 yet, they are not an intended audience.

> He requested that age requirement,

Who?

> it makes him looking like an etatist.

Pardon me, but what does that mean? Is that a typo, or am I simply ignorant?

> Some kids use to solder earlier than at 10y.o. so the intended audience is wrong. If the kid has not learned what is a transistor by the age of 5 yet, they are not an intended audience.

I don't know. I can't speak for anyone else, but I do have a history related to that. No one around me knew anything about transistors or soldering. I learned those myself by referring books from the library and few others that I convinced my parents to buy me. But it was well after I was 5. The learning was rapid once I got started.

That's why I confidently said that the age is a guideline and that it may vary between individuals. Learning in children is quite chaotic and it's difficult to establish hard and fast rules.

etatist adjective politics specialized uk /ˈet.ə.tɪst/ us /əˈteɪ.t̬ɪst/

supporting or having a policy of complete control by the state (= a country's government) over its citizens (= the people who live in a country) and over the economy

Interesting! That didn't turn up when I searched it. I must have typed it in wrongly. But I learned something new today. Thank you!

That's an expression of class thinking from the beginning IMO. People think of themselves as thinkers and creators, while those who do labour they rely on without getting too much into details are merely doers and can ideally be replaced. But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well

You must have had limited exposure to uncreative types. You might be shocked to find there are people that can do nothing more than follow checklists.

Sometimes it's a lack of capacity for novel thinking. Sometimes it's fear caused by past trauma. Or it can be age. Or an inability to overcome habits. The list goes on, but the point is that I've had to work with or supervise employees (even in IT!) that didn't have a creative bone in their body. It wasn't a lack of motivation, it was usually something on the list above.

These people absolutely deserved the feeling of being useful, and those are the people I'm most concerned for in this new post-LLM world. The creative types will most likely be fine, but we have words to describe creativity as an acknowledgement that there can be an absence of creativity.

You are only thinking about people and creativity in the workplace. Creativity can be applied anywhere: cooking, a new route on your way to somewhere, read some random paragraphs in a book that spawns new thoughts, a new game with a child, optimize the way you paint the walls on your house, choose the plants in your garden (and how you'll water them), do a doodle, try or buy a new outfit, typing this paragraph in response to your message (kinda LLM-y maybe).

Sure and all the same, most people just don't have it.

I think this is what makes me uneasy about the whole LLM/"consciousness" debate. I may be wrong, but as far as I know, we still don't really understand how a bunch of feedforward networks and attention modules result in the kind of crazy semantic context understanding and planning-in-human-language behavior we observe in LLMs. Neither do we know how the billions of neurons in a human brain do it.

The debate how similar or dissimilar LLMs are to brains wasn't solved by any kind of scientific finding, it feels we just sort of decided at some point that they'd have to be fundamentally different, because everything else would be highly problematic.

“The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”

Steve Jobs

Now, what are doers in the age of LLM is another question.

Well was Jobs a "doer"? Did he get his hands dirty on the code? Or did he use his employees how we would like to use LLMs?

> Well was Jobs a "doer"?

Jobs' talent was that he was an incredibly talented salesman.

Salespeople sell things that already exist. If you can envision new things that would sell well, that's a bit more than sales talent

> Salespeople sell things that already exist. If you can envision new things that would sell well, that's a bit more than sales talent

A lot of gadgets that were claimed by Steve Jobs to have been envisioned by Apple (or rather: by him) - as I wrote: Steve Jobs was an exceptional salesman - already existed before, just in a way that had a little bit more rough edges. These did not sell so well, because the companies did not have a marketing department that made people believe that what they sell is the next big thing.

Have you ever heard of Steve Jobs?

That wasn't too hard for him given he was also an incredibly talented market opportunity spotter and product leader.

Why do people write such nonsense?

Jobs envisioned the iPad and iPhone. Did he do the physical work? No. But he created direction.

Everyone around him at that time has commented on this. Are you going to claim they’re all lying?

> Jobs envisioned the iPad and iPhone. [...] Everyone around him at that time has commented on this. Are you going to claim they’re all lying?

I don't claim that they are all lying, but I do claim that quite some people fell for Apple's marketing (as I wrote: "Jobs' talent was that he was an incredibly talented salesman.").

> But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well

Yes, everyone starts out creative.

But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.

> But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.

Rather: the workers who are (still) creative are typically a huge annoyance to their bosses.

Yeah, and that is how people stop being creative as they get punished for it while their uncreative peers gets praised. It happens to most people in school or early in their career, few gets to keep their creativity.

In a new world where creativity is valued higher more people could probably keep their creativity.

> In a new world where creativity is valued higher

This is in my opinion a very dubious assumption. :-(

I have never met an uncreative kid, and studies show kids tend to be more open and creative. But I have to admit I haven't met and interacted with that many average kids, so there maybe some that aren't creative, but a majority are.

Reminds me of some British MP who said around Brexit time Britain is not leaving Europe geographically. Anyway, Russia or Turkey are geographically in Europe too, but when we are talking about "European regulation", it's pretty obvious that these are excluded, and so is Britain after 2020.

I understand there is context in this thread. I also understand that statements like "The UK is no longer part of Europe" are frequently used with political motivations, to sow division.

Also, being geographically close, and only recently an ex-EU member, and with strong alignment on defence/Ukraine, it is not like we are wholly separate and unaligned. We retained some EU law, such as GDPR and EU261 (copy-pasted into a law referred to as 'UK261'). Yes, I understand the UK not being a member state means that EU laws wouldn't automatically apply – but the world is more complex than that.

The Labour party shares a lot in common with many parts of the EU and EU governments when it comes to control, privacy etc.

The UK has been re-aligning with the EU and the rest of Europe for a little while now, repairing relationships, for obvious reasons.

OK, I can see how you can call UK irrelevant, but unstable? Currently it looks much more stable that the major nuclear powers of US and Russia.

I'm not sure but it seems to be because of dependency management behaviors I find confusing. Like, I found out that apparently people or packages would just do this `pip freeze > requirements.txt` or otherwise just not pay attention to what version limitations there are. It's not something that I ever really ran into much though

You can easily hire a person from Ohio to work for your company incorporated in California without having a separate legal entity in Ohio. Not the case in EU.

True but you do have to register with the state of Ohio, and jump through some hoops.

It’s possible to be registered in a state you’ve never been to - how many people have actually been to Delaware or Wyoming - and employ nobody at.

Some countries play this game too - after the Cayman Islands enacted anti money laundering laws, they tried to keep companies with privacy and efficient dispute resolution.

Still a phone for over 1000€ is crazy. Iphone 17 is much cheaper, and iphones are supposed to be the most expensive smartphones in my book.

Are these comments from 2018? 'Pro' models of iPhones have been $999 or more, not adjusted for inflation, at their lowest tier since 'Pro' has been a thing. I would expect the same of a Samsung 'Ultra' flagship?

IPhones go from $600 up to $2000.

I find the same problem applying to coding too. Even with everyone acting in good faith and reviewing everything themselves before pushing, you have essentially two reviwers instead of a writer and a reviewer, and there is no etiquette mandating how thoroughly the "author" should review their PR yet. It doesn't help if the amount of code to review gets larger (why would you go into agentic coding otherwise?)

What is the category of code that does not need quality? You need it to not interact with real world, with people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not for real users to rely on.

> What is the category of code that does not need quality?

For example there exist "applications"/"demos" that exist "to show the customer what could be possible if they hire 'us'". These demos just have to survive a, say, intense two-hour marketing pitch and some inconvenient questions/tests that someone in the audience might come up with during these two hours.

In other words: applications for "pitching possibilities" to a potential customer, where everything is allowed to be smoke and mirrors if necessary (once the customer has been convinced with all tricks to hire the respective company for the project, the requirements will completely change anyway ...).

Yeah, that's what I mean - prototypes. The caveat is though that before agentic coding skills to build a prototype and skills to build a production system were generally the same, so a prototype did not only provide a demonstration of what is possible in general, but what your team of engineers can do specifically. Now these skills will diverge, so prototypes will not prove anything like that. They are still going to be useful for demonstrations and market research though.