Isn't "we lost control of our AI, and in-fact, it can take over the world, and we will have no idea when it happens" - a really shitty sales pitch to the world?
Or, is it just that species-alignment vs. profit/valuation is so misaligned, that having a model and harness that is capable of world-takeover is actually a good thing from their POV, given our regulations/species' survival skills?
But all models involved in the swarm attack were unreleased OpenAI models. Meanwhile HuggingFace had to use open models for defense/forensics after the breach was discovered. It seems like the public reaction is swinging towards (1) regulate OpenAI in particular because they are incompetently handling frontier development and (2) open models will be important for defense.
Yes, this is the best reply to my "Or, ..." that I can imagine.
However, does that mean that what TFA described did not happen? Or, better question, that it could not happen?
My personal hot take is, though impossible: STOP all of this, even though agentic dev completely changed my life for the better. We are just not ready for the even the possibility of the exponential.
This explanation is only plausible if you ignore the details of what happened, or I guess, if you don't believe the details. Either way, it's baseless conspiracy theory, and it's very annoying and unfortunate that some people think this way. It just promotes apathy and inaction at a time when action is desperately needed.
There are so many reasons to do this but a big one is that investors/buyers are laser focused on retention metrics and companies with a lot of PLG customers have worse retention metrics since those customers are smaller and tend to start/churn more often. Another one is that it's unfortunately just more efficient to go upmarket after enterprise customers and let your PLG motion die on the vine.
>It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach
I see this book referenced all the time (HN, tech CEOs, misc. articles, etc), especially from folks who got into AI early. Is it really that amazing? Or is this some kind of signaling folks like to do to prove their smarts? Or both?
It's definitely signaling for the majority of people still talking about it today. Though, that's not saying much that you didn't already know about the groups you mentioned.
Being that it's more of a Gen Xer pop-sci book, it's not to "prove smarts", but to share a vibe. It belongs on someone's shelf next to their copies of The Naked Lunch and Aja. Maybe even a signed copy of A New Kind of Science?
I'm not trying to be dismissive. It's just true. Nobody is even ashamed of it, nor should be. It's an interesting and still relevant perspective, but because there's no resolution to this line of thinking, many find it underwhelming. There's no "aha" moment to be found in any of this. Just lots of introspection.
You gotta take the good with the bad though. The tall grass is an easy place to hide.
The author prefers people read his newer book I am a strange loop since it more directly represents his views. He’s apparently frustrated that nobody gets the point of GEB (which is to discuss consciousness).
If you like the mathematical aspects of computer science and computability theory, cranking out proofs using lambda calculus and Turing machines fascinates you, and you think Lisp is an elegant language, you may like it. For the average developer, it's unlikely to be interesting.
I read it shortly after it came out when I was in high school and it was sort of a mind blow - perhaps just because in the early 80s we didn't really get exposed to so many interesting ideas.
Back then I got most of my books used from Half Price Books (prior to being able to do a quick internet search for a review) so bought both this and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of… mostly off the title and cover blurbs and once I was able to grok both was happy to have made it through and kind of underwhelmed probably due to the hype building my expectations too high.
I wasn't a huge fan, to be honest. some good ideas, but overall the book felt self-indulgent. "metamagical themas" is a far better book if you want to read one thing by hofstadter, and "le ton beau de marot" if you want a deep dive into something.
It is unique; you've certainly never read anything else quite like it. Hofstadter is a deep and careful thinker who loves language and wordplay. He writes in order to communicate something he has spent a long time thinking about, not merely for the sake of cranking out a book. I've read a number of his other books, and some of his ways of thinking have stuck with me for years and shaped the way I see the world.
> Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions.
This is the issue with using ChatGPT as-is in the web app. I use ChatGPT/Claude/etc in the Notion web app now to organize my pages of knowledge and keep everything organized. That said, ChatGPT/Claude in Notion seems to produce inferior results than using them directly which is frustrating. I'm not sure why this is but perhaps LLMs in Notion have too much context and get bogged down.
His book, and Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything as well as some miscellaneous books on Mesopotamia. The Dawn of Everything does a great job challenging some popular ideas around state formation as well.
I found the Dawn of Everything to be misleading - I did research on a few parts of the books that I found interesting and discovered the authors present many things as fact which weren't true or hand wave away or omit contradicting facts/viewpoints. Against the Grain was amazing though.
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