What rules can you possibly have that distinguish the expert and the manipulator in all cases, without abuse?
I think free speech comes from the same base as universal vote: any selection mechanism would be corrupted and in the end cause more harm than good. That is why the solution is to let everyone speak / vote. If you have some uncorruptible people or mechanism for selection, just use that to make policy decisions directly.
I think the solution is to elevate critical thinking in the populations, so people can be less vulnerable to psychological warfare. Otherwise you're just picking a different manipulator - whoever writes or enforces the speech limits.
I think the solution is to elect a commission of experts to be deciding this. Term limits. Separate independent institution from the government - no meddling.
Critical thinking even in those capable of it is a limited resource. I can't spend all day every day critically examining every single statement the internet flings at me - it's mentally exhausting and wears one down.
Elect by the people at large? People who voted for Trump and such? What's the point in an elected institution separated from the government - the government is already elected, and people will mostly vote for candidates from the same parties in all elections.
Besides, "elect a comission of experts" is a contradiction. Experts are not elected. Expertise is not determined by voting. You want to appoint or select a comission of experts, or elect a comission of politicians. These are the choices. Appointment or selection will be done by someone else, likely politicians too.
You just hope some incorruptible competent people will get there by magic. They will not.
If you could do this, just elect a comission of experts to run the country, instead of this "truth comission" that makes sure people are well informed to vote correctly in elections for the real government, which will in turn run the country. Why do the indirection? There is no reason, if you could "elect" good people, but you can't.
So who gets to decide? Someone who is above influence? Who is that?
There has to be a lot more nuance. I clearly see that both Putin and the CCP do a lot of things predicated on the exact claim that their respective populations can not be left to decide for themselves. "People left free would make bad decisions, we the rulers are morally obligated to force them into a good path". I think this is the ostensible meaning of "freedom is slavery".
There has to be nuance yes. But the nuanced position starts with accepting the reality that a ton of people are indeed having their brain turned to goo. Just go outside of the bubble of somewhat tech literate highly educated young people and look at what 60+ year olds consume on Facebook.
There's AI generated content with tens of millions of views that is as fake as ancient aliens on the history channel but nobody seems to realize it. If you comment here there is a high chance you did not grow up among people with 8 years of basic education who haven't read a book in 20 years and believe quite literally everything they see. That is what a decent chunk of any population is like. The biggest blind spot of well-educated internet libertarians who taught themselves how to code at 15 is that they in all likelihood have no concept of how the average citizen navigates the world.
The problem with Putin isn't that he thinks a country needs intelligent and wise leaders, Plato would have told you the same thing. It's where he's steering it that's the issue and that the country's leadership is no more capable at the top than it is at the bottom.
It sounds like it takes you at least 10 minutes to just write the prompt with all the details you mentioned. Especially if you need to continue and prompt again (and again?).
Not the OP but, easily. My tasks are usually taking at least that, but up to hours of brainstorming and planning, sometimes I’ll do this over days in between other tasks just so I can think about all and pros and cons. Of course this has always been the way, but now I have an ongoing Claude session which I can come back to at any point, which is holding the context along with my brain. It’s much easier to keep the thread of what I’m working on across multiple tasks.
> I’m writing some (for me) seriously advanced software that would have taken me months to write, in weeks, using Claude and ChatGPT.
Do you understand the code?
What was the speed up from months to weeks? You just didn't know what to type? Or you didn't know the problem domain? Or you found it hard to 'start' and the AI writing boiler plate gave you motivation?
In my experience with AI tools, it only really helps with ideation, most things it produces need heavy tweaking - to the point that there is no time savings. It's probably a net negative because I am spending all of my time thinking how to explain things to a dumb computer, rather than thinking about how to solve the problem.
The main advantage is I can run it in parallel and iterate often.
The speed up is also avoiding looking up reference manuals endlessly just to produce some Qt Widgets.
I’m a fairly recent convert, I only started “vibe coding” a couple of months ago, after hearing how good Opus was. I had been a skeptic until then.
I am a decentralist by nature and prefer open standards and self hosting. I’ve had my own *nix servers since I was twelve (nearing forty) so it really pains me to admit how good it is to use these corporate products.
I am not a programmer by trade.
I use it to write software for my domain of expertise. The value of what I am creating is enormous.
Both ChatGPT and Claude produce good code, in my opinion.
For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem. That is I guess the point the person you were replying to was trying to make.
It's also not really weird for a job to become such a big part of your identity, when people spend most of their time at work or at home thinking about their work.
A couple years ago a friend of mine mentioned that he had known another mutual friend of ours for many years, much longer than I would have guessed. I asked him "what does he do?" and he thought for a moment before saying "you know ... I have no idea, it has never come up".
I don't know if this is acceptable in the US, but I always found it distasteful when people ask about your job 30 seconds into meeting you. I think it's much more polite to talk about generic stuff until jobs or skills come up naturally. Sometimes, they just never do, and that's fine. Need to know!
>For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem.
That's only 1/2 of the dynamic. People also like to assign an identity to others.
For example, if I say, "I'm semi-retired." ... the follow-up question is always "Oh, so what did you do before that?" ... which is polite coded-speak for, "Did you inherit money or what work did you do for money that put you in the position to do that?"
People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc. Having a "no identity" stance isn't really a satisfactory answer for many listeners. They want to know more.
EDIT to replies: I do understand the harmless "small talk" aspect. I should've added more to re-emphasize the "people assigning identity" aspect.
Once I reply to the followup question with "Oh, I used to do consulting for finance" what then happens is others then introduce me as "And this is jasode -- he was a consultant for X". My ex-consultant life that I last did over 15 years ago is now part of a tagline/subheading associated with my name even though I never intended it.
The point is other people have this irresistible urge to "fill in the blank" with an identity -- especially an identity that is tied to how one earned money. I'm not complaining about this and it's just an observation of what humans naturally do.
It's also a low risk topic that can generate lots of follow up questions. It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life? Sure, you're not your job or your career, but it's also a very normal part about getting to know someone and I'm not sure equating it to some way of gauging success levels is necessarily to right way to think about it.
>It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life?
Having a natural ebb & flow to conversation is all true but that's not the issue. Let me restate it differently.
It's ok and natural to ask what people do/did for work. It's also natural to respond and share what was a significant aspect of their life.
The meta-observation is: others then like to compress whatever life narrative they hear into a "shorthand" or "identity" -- even if the recipient never intended it to be his/her identity. Several parent comments mention "their work being their identity is the problem". My point is that the identity we get tagged with is often outside of our control and we didn't create the problem of work being our identity.
My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant". For that identity to change, I'd have to do something new that was significant enough to override that ... such as... get into another career, open a restaurant, become founder of a startup, etc.
How does one have "no identity related to their job"? Sometimes you can't unless one wants to be evasive about what one does to earn money.
> My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant" … How does one have "no identity related to their job"?
The obvious answer is to have some other identifier that supersedes the job. Do you have some other interest or hobby that you spend your time doing? That you talk about all the time?
People get associated with their job because it’s probably the thing they spend the most time on and it’s also a common topic of conversation. If every time someone asked you about your job you said, “it’s good” and steered the conversation into a story about your latest epic ski trip, you’d probably be the “guy who skis” instead of the “ex-consultant”.
Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).
The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.
But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
You can often politely dodge probing questions about your employment. When someone, for the purpose of small talk, asks me what I do for a living I just say I'm an exotic dancer or a runway model. It's funny and breaks the ice a little. Then I'll ask them about their watch or something. If they insist "no, really, what do you do for a living??" I'll politely say I work with computers and again try to move on. Very rarely I'll get someone who won't drop it "come on, WHAT COMPANY???" and at that point I know they're really not interested in talking--they just want to stack rank me in terms of importance or salary or whatever and I politely dip.
In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.
It is not just about assigning identity to others.
I am probing for topics of mutual interest, or topics that make other people passionate, to learn more about them generally.
In some people, this is completely orthogonal to their careers, but most of the time, there is an overlap. Like, I haven't yet met a railway engineer who wasn't a raging railway nerd at the same time.
> People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc.
I definitely find this more true in some cultures. e.g. silicon valley, it seems people want to know where you're at on the "hierarchy". Many parts of Asia too, you get treated differently if you're a low level worker, regular worker, executive etc.
Well, the "I'm Marcus" part is saying "I would like you to call me Marcus" I guess.
You're right, it is easy to say. But there's an identity and professional pride and all sorts of stuff wrapped up in the job title that isn't so easy to let go of.
It also leads on to questions like "and what are you doing now?" which get to "I'm lazing around doing nothing because my mental health took a hammering while I was IT Director", and so on. It's all so much easier and tidier with the job title.
Sounds really sad. I am not a director of anything, I probably make almost nothing compared to you, and yet I know who I am outside of my job. I have friends who value who I am, regardless of my job or even between jobs. I would not trade places with you for all the money in the world. I would not have any use for all that money then.
I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other that did web ads.
The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.
The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).
The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.
So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.
And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.
Feels like we are able to build software solutions for much more challenging problems than "only download the part that the user needs instead of everything and the kitchen sink". The explanation you provided doesn't make me feel even a tiny bit better about the problem. It just details how it came to exist.
Maybe there should be a setting for hiding such short replies or something like "shadow ban", you can write "thanks" or "This." and only person posting it will see their own "thanks".
Downside is that there is still some cost to it, like writing "please" and "thank you" to LLM...
Something is missing here. Once you get two moonshots done, you have free pass to claim anything any number of times with zero results? I cannot agree.
> the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up
> didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow
Aren't these statements contradictory? I think "grow up" means problems are unavoidable and the adult thing to do is expect them and accept them, and then you say you didn't have to worry, as if problems never happen.
To me it sounds like you just got lucky on your Christmas trips. Two trips on time hardly prove a rule that there's never trouble, and in any case you directly state there's trouble sometimes and that's something to accept.
Now I don't know the stats on problem frequency, which of course matters. But that's different from "don't have to worry". Opposite really. "Here's how much you should worry".
I think free speech comes from the same base as universal vote: any selection mechanism would be corrupted and in the end cause more harm than good. That is why the solution is to let everyone speak / vote. If you have some uncorruptible people or mechanism for selection, just use that to make policy decisions directly.
I think the solution is to elevate critical thinking in the populations, so people can be less vulnerable to psychological warfare. Otherwise you're just picking a different manipulator - whoever writes or enforces the speech limits.
reply