Taking Gebru's word seriously here is reason to discount the entire argument.

Gebru is a part of a clique that is devoted to an entirely different set of ideas around AI Safety.

The two basic movements here are: 1. Be very scared of AI development, then do capabilities research but feel bad about it. 2. Demand AI research comes with locks in them that make sure the AI can't write a tweet that would make a San Franciscan Activist uncomfortable. Achieve very little in terms of manipulating AI, but get lots of book deals.

Neither of these groups should really be trusted for hard data about the other, and more importantly - missing that piece indicates that the author is not even attempting to convince the unconvinced.

Exactly, I've read and listened to a lot of people being overly dismissive of chat gpt. And I've also used it. It's obviously not perfect but it clearly does lots of cool and useful things that go a bit beyond just echoing what wikipedia and stackoverflow say.

A pattern that I see a lot with the debate around this topic is people leaning a lot on their reputations rather than hard arguments. I was listening to a few podcasts on this topic and they all featured a dr of this or that with a lot of books pontificating about their version of the truth and how others were clearly wrong. A lot of these 'experts' are parroting each other as well (chat gpt would do a great job of making their arguments for them). You get a lot of "he said that she said" type argumentation and name dropping. Not going to name names here but I just don't find this line of argumentation very convincing or productive. There's a lot of extrapolation and interpreting that is done by these people that is based on a basis that just isn't that great.

ChatGpt obviously happened and that seems to excite, worry, or upset lots of people. However, that cat is out of the bag now. OpenAI's results are being replicated by countless third parties. No amount of legislation, self censuring, pleading, magical thinking, etc. is going to change that. So, I don't buy into the whole Luddite attitude. I just don't think it is productive to think like that or insist that others think like that. The only debate worth having is how to improve the technology further and how to deal with the inevitable abuse that will happen.

Also, this is obviously not an AGI yet. Whatever that is. And obviously some people are trying to inch closer to that goal. And there's a lot of debate about what is the right approach for getting there with many competing points of view. That's a much more interesting debate. Interesting time to be alive. So much progress in so little time. And I'm not even 50 yet. The debate that this cannot be allowed to happen or is impossible is a lot less interesting to me.

Admin tools, particularly federating admin actions in a distributed team - will never not happen. Their shape may change, but devoting time to building the first version will give you the harness you need.

Source: I am writing three services at this point that are mostly Middleware to deal with the lack of native federation for certain services we use.

This is encouraged by the incentive structure, ship and gtfo is the way to advance.

You will never be punished for shipping, and always punished for not-shipping.

I've never seen somebody get fired for too often being late to ship, but I have seen someone get fired for shipping changes that too often break customer workflows.

You think of it that way, the customer doesn't.

What do you mean?

This thread started off with my customer complaint that Windows stops me from using my PC to play games.

HN posters are not my example of a typical customer.

The typical customer does not understand what an OS update is, or what it entails.

They know "man, my computer freezes" and "man, I keep hearing about this vuln/oh no I got my hard drive ransom'd"

Those are the people Windows primarily has to appease, otherwise they have the problems that Linux does.

Coinbase is a double exception, they didn't just ask for regulatory approval for their lending product, they asked for permission to file the application.

Can't wait for the next round of crypto hype, excited to see mew use cases along with new scams.

Don't forget crime and startup business.

I ordered equipment for a company from a European seller , and because I wasn't a VC backed technology startup, instead focused on physical goods- there was no army of people to help me set up an international bank for my company. So what I did was drop them some bitcoin. Just getting the wire approvals would've taken longer.

The surprise over the $3 fee indicates just how many tricks of the light are used to hide exactly how bad finance is, then make dishonest comparisons to crypto markets.

There's an element that all the silliness of the LAN party was technically necessary for the production, and as a grassroots thing the hardship added to the buyin and culture.

Part of the reason this was all acceptable in the LAN party era was that you were having fun together with friends while dealing with the annoyances. You could curse, you could laugh, and you could eat pizza together while you were wrestling with the faulty ethernet hub (remember those?) or whatnot. I remember I once accidentally blew a transformer at my friend's home while getting set up, and we all had a good laugh.

Nowadays, you play a game over the internet and you would be lucky to have even a friend next to you watching enthusiastically and intently.

More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.

So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.

Prior to the pandemic we would play Diablo 3 in my home office with four people once a week, all night. Takeout food. Six plus hours of gaming after work. It's an "online" game, but we're effectively just playing a LAN game with friends. Since the pandemic we're down to three people in the home office, with desks and big monitors setup, but we still get together and play regularly.

More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.

So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.

Smart, well adjusted drug people will frequently point out that most common drugs they use (LSD, MDMA, MDAA, psilocybin, etc) have an orders of magnitude better risk profile than smoking or drinking. The latter is essentially socially ubiquitous.

That community has an ongoing bitterness about this double standard.

Usually though, people making this point are not advocating for heroin or meth (although there's a reasonable argument there that the drug is not what does most of the damage in those situations - krokodil is just heroin manufactured with an extremely dirty process. It's perceived as being much worse, but what's "much worse" are the impurities from using gasoline as a solvent.

MDMA and LSD in particular have the advantage of no fast, cheap ways to synthesize at the expense of safety or purity.

I think the reality with LSD in particular is the normal way of making it is fast & cheap anyways. I'm sure you _could_ cut some corners. But why? We're talking about a drug used in microgram doses. Synthesis several kilograms and you have basically created an annual supply for an entire continent.