Adam Dalliance
@pre@boing.world
Working on an interactive #vr #scifi story, that involves lots of #programming and #animation and #art: @starship
I sometimes talk about #left #politics and #anarchy.
There's also the tarot show: @wordcloudtarot
And you can follow my links feed: @linkbot
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[CW]
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re: AI Economics
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re: AI Economics
I mean if human-capable AI is here now that doesn't mean we just say the AI companies have won capitalism and they get to be the new feudal lords now!
Does it?
If they have won capitalism then now is the time to start a new game!
Dismantle capitalism and turn the power and effort of the economy towards environmental recovery and human general flourishing instead!
[CW]
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Interesting and enjoyable read. Anything this specific can't be true, obviously. But maybe plausible i guess?
I reckon there's bubble in them their markets, but that even the size of the bubble is probably over-estimated because the gain from these machines is over-estimated because they're good enough to fool people.
Glad I'm closer to retirement than to the start of a career tho. And worried somewhat about that.
[CW]
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For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. Capital was abundant (or at least, replicable). Natural resources were finite but substitutable. Technology improved slowly enough that humans could adapt. Intelligence, the ability to analyze, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate, was the thing that could not be replicated at scale.
Human intelligence derived its inherent premium from its scarcity. Every institution in our economy, from the labor market to the mortgage market to the tax code, was designed for a world in which that assumption held.
We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium. Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks
Which is what saves us from this scenario I guess? Because the machine likely isn't really a substitute for human intelligence.
🤞
[CW]
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re: Migration UKPol
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re: Migration UKPol
The case of my parent's church might be quite illustrative actually.
A pretty small one sometimes described as a cult (it isn't really, except to the extent all churches are).
They sent missionaries out to preach the word to the world and set up sister-churches wherever they could back before anyone left alive was born.
They had some success in Iran.
Now my mum's church in the UK has become like 60% Iranian refugees. 😆
Mostly this has been good at reducing my mum's anti-imigrant prejudices. She sees them as human people not just as headlines. She noticed the difference.
But is certainly causing some issues with the space in the building and the language of the services.
[CW]
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re: Migration UKPol
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@cjd Lots of migrations have connections to the UK. Many of the ones my parents see come because they are connected to the particular church that went out and preached to their grandparents.
Outward emigration has increased but is not anything close to the main cause of net migration going down, a drop in an ocean.
[CW]
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Migration UKPol
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Migration UKPol
People are saying the public are massively uninformed because they think migration is going up even though actually net migration has gone down so much it's frankly a threat to the economy.
But the people don't think the way the statisticians think. When they are asked "Is migration going up" they say, "Yeah, sure, lots of extra migrants are turning up every year."
And they are NOT wrong. Net migration is still a positive number. The number of immigrants in the country is still increasing.
The idiots correctly think the press is just pulling a fast one. Doing some numbers trick to pretend the number of immigrants is going down when it is in fact still going up.
The idiots are wrong about whether immigration is good or bad, they are wrong about the reasons they want it to be lower, it is terrible news that net migration has dropped so high.
But they aren't wrong about the press trying to pull the wool over their eyes and trying to trick them into thinking it's going down when in fact it's just going up slower.
Richard Murphy has a good story here about why the coming crash will be the biggest ever, and caused by OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX.
Because these 3 IPOs are about to happen, and be massive, they will immediately and right away take up a large fraction of the S&P and Nasdaq stock indexes.
That means all the fund managers who run funds tracking the S&P and Nasdaq will have to buy enough of those 3 companies to make them a large fraction of the funds. Selling everything else to buy OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. Pumping their prices further.
Now the valuations of those companies is based on them being able to do all the jobs really. Which they can't. Because there isn't enough water or power, even if they do have the compute.
So they have to crash back down to something that isn't this fund-inflated price, isn't this overvalued price where you assume there's infinite water and power, but is a realistic price much much lower.
And that tanks everything so much they rich will be begging for bailouts because they continue to use to much margin.
[CW]
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The Occupy Silicon Valley movement has been emblematic of wider dissatisfaction. Last month, demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Anthropic and OpenAI’s San Francisco offices for three weeks straight. Their numbers are growing, and the demonstrations have drawn more media coverage than the unemployment data that prompted them.
It’s hard to imagine the public hating anyone more than the bankers in the fallout of the GFC, but the AI labs are making a run at it.
Dunno that the public hated the bankers nearly as much as they ought to have. Outside Iceland were any jailed? Did any even lose their job?
[CW]
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The federal government’s revenue base is essentially a tax on human time. People work, firms pay them, the government takes a cut. Individual income and payroll taxes are the spine of receipts in normal years.
Indeed. Collapse in the labour economy causes a financial state collapse when the state is funded by a tax on labour.
Productivity is surging, but the gains are flowing to capital and compute, not labor.
Which would ideally mean you tax compute and capital but how's that work when compute and capital own the government already?
The output is still there. But it’s no longer routing through households on the way back to firms, which means it’s no longer routing through the IRS either.
[CW]
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In the US, we weren’t asking about how the bubble would burst in AI infrastructure anymore. We were asking what happens to a consumer-credit economy when consumers are being replaced with machines.
This is pure Marxist, exactly how Marx said capitalism would eat itself.
I wonder if there's room for a kind of AI accelerationism? Encourage the robots taking our jobs so that we overthrow capitalism all the sooner?
Flower framework to deal with ai engineering work transition
Juliette is a game dev who was excited by ai then , oh, its disruptive and can software dev be ending?
So she made a model for thinking about the impact on teams and engineers.
It activities:
What is the work that might be affected? She has a list of things too long to read.
Define how each is done, standard best practice etc. How outputs of each are inputs to others.
Claude builds skills based on that.
Ai capabilities:
Can si do those things? Can it ever?
Probably not for many.
So what is the impact going to be?
If its all done by ai the job is thinking about the product not coding. That plus working out the odds its done it right. More importantly, philosophy! The job is to define what good software is and have the robot implement.
So sounds like she thinks were heading to the job being thinking about systems then wrangling robots.
But only if its reliable and cheap and not regulated away.
Which might not be the case.
Buy her book for the full list and analysis.
All the talks in sync at 30 minute intervals. This is too short really. They either have to dive in with jargon I don't get to explain in depth, or barely manage to summarize before the time runs out. No time for Q&A at all which leaves you wondering why not just watch it on youtube?
There's a hall full of stands from corporations of varying evilness giving out useless tat with trademarks on it. People go mad for the loot. Seems to make people quite excited to get a pair of socks or a fidget toy. I leave them to it. Don't like talking to salespeople even if you get free socks with trademarks on them. I don't wear logos in general anyway.
The AI bootsterism is strong, but not omnipresent. Plenty of talks on team management or deployment or progress in non-amazon cloud systems or whatever. Even if they can only be quite surface-detail and lacking depth due to shortness.
It's like being in school really. Flowing from lesson to lesson. Mostly being taught things that will be irrelevent or are boring or are unlikely to ever really come up.
Short break before street party now.
Day two, and a much earlier start. Now Kevin Lewis from apify is here to tell us about how http 402, payment required, has been pointless till now but now maybe AI agents will pay when people couldn't.
Giving ai a wallet.
Dollar payments too slow and expensive for agents paying a penny for a page. Days for payment clearance. Kyc means every payer has to be human even.
X402 then instead. Stable coins on blockchain. Programmable , fast settlement. Pay in millionths of a dollar.
Or l402 to pay with bitcoin lightning.
Server sends bill and specifies payment details in 402 reply. Agent making request settles on chain then retries request with payment reciept.
Agents will want to evaluate if its worth the money within budget and etc. Give agents only limited wallet with disposable funds.
There's a mech for paying unpredictable prices. Over pay and refund whatever the excess .
He shows a demo. On how to pay a web scraper to scrape Instagram for you. For a dollar his service will give you 400 scraped profiles.
Paying for questionable services eh?
Not clear why an agent would pay another agent to scrape a website instead of just doing it itself.
No indication of how the agent can be prevented from leaking its private keys to injection attacks.
Saravanan talks to us about making greener tech.
Everyone else is burning fuel for ai like mad but Saravan wants to make things greener instead.
3% or so of greenhouse emissions are from IT. More than flying.
Cloud providers claim to be carbon neutral but this is changing with ai centers and often software written for them aren't used most of the time.
Green Software Foundation thinks software can be greener and offers courses and a profiler to tell you the carbon footprint of your code.
We can write for carbon efficiency. Electricity and hardware manufacturing included.
Power usage effectiveness can be calculated. How much is wasted on cooling vs compute, say.
Do your compute when solar is in excess instead of during times the power network is burning oil. Or do it in countries with greener grids.
Support older user hardware. Extend the life of end user devices.
Can't help feeling like these efforts are going to be drowned out by everyone else here burning tokens like there's no tomorrow. Which maybe will ensure there is indeed no tomorrow.
Opening ceremony involves speaker asking the crowd individually why they are here. Mostly they seem to want to know how to use ai. And not lose their job.
Didn't ask me so didn't get to say that I'd like to learn how to defensively fight ai and prevent it spamming up the web.
The man from Oracle says they are making databases more AI. Support for vectors in the db and systems to ensure secure access for agents.
He wants to encourage us to use one big (Oracle) db instead of lots of caches and nosql databases. The ai prefers thst, he reckons.
Oracle is like a smart phone. It can do everything. No need for separate devices for music and notes and whatnot. It can even do json now. And vectors.
Data privacy is often done at the app layer, which means a rogue ai could generate SQL to bypas that. So do access control in the db direftly. Which is probably better even without ai honestly. This 'deep security' might work well.
Ai is happier , according to the man from Oracle, if it just has one Oracle db without competitors software at all.
Fancy that.
Amsterdam, I am in you. I'm high as hell. Ten stories on this hotel 😆
There's a Dev World conference starting tomorrow. I was told it'd be all about software development but seems to be mostly about ai.
We will see I suppose.
[CW]
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WordPol Iran Talks
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WordPol Iran Talks
Sounds like the negations to unblock the Strait of Hormuz have gone even worse than you'd have expected.
The number of countries blocking the strait has doubled, as America joins in blocking passage to even more vessels.
At this rate, with the number of countries blocking that sea doubling every month, every country in the world will be blocking the Strait of Hormuz by the end of the year.
@stux Not really sure either should exist at all, but if they must then keep them apart for sure. 😆