> My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad.
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
The interesting thing about AI v. other disruptive technologies (like the internet, steam engine, etc), is that AI has been personified both by the manufacturers of it (Anthropic being the most blatant by using a human name for its product) and users.
That makes it way more likely that people blame AI (doesn't make it right by any means, but does mean that the actual blame gets diffused even more).
How is that a problem? That makes it far worse for companies, after all. If an employee of a company makes a mistake then the consequences are:
1) employee was willingly sabotaging the company: employee gets jail time plus fine, employer is on the hook financially
2) employee was involved either in accident or just made a stupid decision: employer is on the hook financially
So if that's the case, then employers are financially responsible for everything the AI they use says. That's the rule for employees.
Note: this is different from, say if a company uses a car and it just starts by itself and drives into the next door warehouse setting it on fire (ie. some sort of designed-in decision/issue)
: in that case the maker of the car is responsible, both financially and criminally, even if an employee or even the boss/owner/everyone at the company were involved.
Of course, guaranteed that governments will change this the first time a court makes this obvious connection. Why do I think that?
Well, for example, the UK government changed the rule when it turned out the post-office's written software (written by contractors, under post office and thus government responsibility and accountability) decided to cause incredible damage by blaming innocent people for stealing. Then, a special law was voted that in that specific case it didn't apply, and the government department, nor any of it's employees, were responsible.
Just like, for example, Pennsylvania changed the rules for unwittingly-but-directly aiding criminal activity when it turned out half the Pennsylvania government was complicit in the kids-for-cash scandal (because in that case, normally, you wouldn't be criminally liable, but you WOULD be liable for any financial damage you do)
Regarding "how is that a problem" it has nothing to do with the financial obligations (I agree with your take that the company is on the hook either way). It's about being able to learn and improve.
In order to learn and improve you have to know what went wrong, with AI being personified and pulled into the pool of entities that may be at fault, it makes it harder to figure out what actually went wrong and learn. Not impossible to figure out, just harder.
Also goes to show how hard it is to predict anything that is a massive change - these levels of changes are so infrequent that we can't rely on priors to predict the future.
pretty sure Krugman himself said his prediction was intentionally pessimistic to counter the hyper-optimism of his peers. and in fairness, he wrote that at the height of the dot-com bubble.
actually, thinking about it more, I wonder if we'll see something similar with LLMs where, the bubble will eventually pop, but the technology won't disappear, and we'll see it quietly improve and integrate further into our lives over time. probably not that wild of a prediction to make, but I do wonder still
Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
I definitely enjoy Wrapped. But also something that keeps me in Spotify is the social aspect. If I want to make a playlist for someone, 95% of people I know use Spotify, so I need to have Spotify.
Yeah this is a good point. They also have a feature that lets you build and mix playlists together with others, not my personal speed but adds to the stickiness.
I also enjoyed wrapped, but at some point they made it only viewable in the app. It was previously available in the browser. That was the last time I thought about it.
Good point. Regrettably, newer phones have eliminated external SD cards. I preferred upgrading my phone storage on demand and having external card for stuff like MP3s and videos and manually doing large data transfers directly on my computer.
I carry my entire music library on my phone in Opus format. Smaller than a similar quality MP3 and good enough for the times I’m likely listening offline (working out, riding transit, on a plane).
I don't disagree with anything said here, but it sure would be nice if Meta (and any other companies building social media applications) focused more on what's right for children, both short and long term, than the math of what is profitable.
The problem is that "what's right for children" should be better parental controls, and better enforcement of treating self-declared ages under 18 separately. Instead, the New Mexico AG and other assholes believe it means we need more mass surveillance, mandatory age verification, bans on encryption, and other insanity.
It's a bit of a tangent, but Meta actually really annoys me
Is the general war on encryption bad? Yeah
Meta? Meta forcibly upgraded people on Messenger. Now chats are broken. First they took away your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 and then they REALLY took away your friends, by doing this
If nothing else, the timing is suspect given the attention and press open weight models are getting over the last few weeks. The releases of Kimi and other models is getting open weight models enough attention that the US government, perhaps pushed by OpenAI and Anthropic, to think about taking action against these models for security concerns.
Good to see that more neutral companies (Microsoft and Meta to name two) are pushing back against US government involvement:
Yeah came here to say the same thing on the lack of absolute units.
Speaking as an older vinyl collector myself, with kids who have also gotten into it...it would surprise me if the total unit numbers were even within 2 orders of magnitude.
Vinyl just feels different. The feeling of holding the cardboard cover and the weight of the album on a turntable can't be replicated at all with CDs.
Agreed and it's unlikely to slow down that descent into slop coding until there are some visible issues with it. The market (i.e. companies) are going all in on AI coding because everyone else is doing it and the concern (understandably) is that if a company doesn't join that race they will lose because they never even entered the race.
The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn.
The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.
> There's a world of difference between managing a dozen or so individual contributors vs managing senior managers / directors.
I agree, but in my opinion, your point about needing to know how things work still holds. It's less relevant as you move up to managing managers and larger orgs, but it never goes to zero if you're going to be successful.
I think it holds true throughout if you scope it to knowledge about your reports’ domain. If you’re managing managers you should have a good handle on what a manager does and different ways to do it.
Will it be is a different thing though. And if it’s not, who exactly is accountable?
With funds and portfolio managers that run them, there’s a clear accountability model (if the fund sucks, the manager loses their job and the company loses credibility)
With AI agents doing the management, who is accountable when the fund sucks? If it’s the customer, we’ve moved accountability from someone who at least in theory, knows what they’re doing to someone who has little to no clue.
You have to be accountable for what you have the model do on your behalf. I hear what you're saying, but there are also issues with the hedge fund accountability model. There are certainly swaths of fund managers who are only there because they got lucky or had the right pedigree, and more that are better traders but never became a fund manager because they got unlucky or had other passions.
An individual investor can invest with their risk appetite on their time horizon and not be subject to Citadel's "5% draw down in a quarter and you're fired" culture which can be toxic to returns over time.
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
Thank you for the statement!
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