It also results in more money going to Youtube/Google LLC/Alphabet Inc.
There are many wonderful videos and video-makers on youtube - but I think the platform has been a net negative for creativity, and for humanity, in many ways. Hence I personally would never support them with my money.
We haven't ever ran the counterfactual, and maybe there's some reason we can't or won't. But I would absolutely love to see youtube without youtube - no middleman, direct payments to the video-makers.
I'm not proposing a technical discussion here on what such a platform might look like or whether it's feasible - I just mean culturally, I'd love to see what videos we would come up with if we weren't constantly adjusting to suit the all-powerful and unknowable "algorithm".
I think this pressure to conform to the algorithm, to always chase more views, subscriptions, and comments, to frame every choice around that, has probably been much more prohibitive on creativity than we are able to imagine.
Why do you think the platform is a net negative?
You claim it is a net negative for humanity. Yet most how tos are in you tube. Plus there are tons of learning materials. Seems like a positive to me.
Creativity? Seems like there is a lot of creative content as well. So I'm not sure why you think that is also a negative.
Yes it sucks when the framework wants to make money. But the framework is expensive. Now maybe more needs to go to the content creates. But the underlying framework deserves to make money as well.
I'm not saying I want them to run the whole service free of charge, I'm saying I'd consider it a gain for the species if the business closed down. I look forward to alternative ideas (with e.g. no middlemen, and direct payment) being tested out.
The TV era held some promise but steadily declined, and the Youtube era has went similarly. The audiovisual onslaught continues. Technically competent people on here are innoculated against the realities of the average usage on these platforms, which equates to brain-rot of the lowest calibre.
this sounds amazing but it can’t be done. no one is going to 79 websites to watch things from 79 different artist. the middleman are core evil part not just in this area but many others but I can’t see how this kind of society we have built can function without it
It wouldn't have to be 79 websites, obviously - there's RSS, for example. But there's also ten other things that already exist, and probably ten other things that don't exist that neither of us could imagine.
I know that if you live in one place, in one time, and everyone does one thing around you and acts like it's the only thing that ever existed, that it's really (really, really) tempting to think it's the only thing that could exist. But it's completely false. Loads of obvious seeming things are totally false, and this is definitively one of them.
Not only is it possible that we'll have a totally different society one day, and maybe even one where we have no to extremely few middlemen, but since Pascal and de Fermat we've known it to be roughly 100% likely! You can completely depend on the fact it will happen!
I have entertained a similar notion when imagining the direction industries that make software might go from here. There's a possible future where some sizeable percentage of companies goes extra hard in the direction of "LLMs in, costly programmers out", and end up getting completely smashed when the LLM systems fall apart.
There might even be a couple of months of "gains" as (pointless) metrics go up, and then we might see a proper crash when stuff stops working. Especially for software which businesses rely on, surely there must be a point where they'll say enough of this crap?
Maybe not, too. Capitalism is a very surprising system, capable of absorbing shocks and morphing itself seemingly endlessly.
It is quite heartening to see so many people care about "good code". I fear it will make no difference.
The problem is that the software world got eaten up by the business world many years ago. I'm not sure at what point exactly, or if the writing was already on the wall when Bill Gates' wrote his open letter to hobbyists in 1976.
The question is whether shareholders and managers will accept less good code. I don't see how it would be logical to expect anything else, as long as profit lines go up why would they care.
Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users, we're cooked, as the youth say.
Bad code might be bad, or might be sufficient. It's situational. And by looking at what exists today, majority of code is pretty bad already - and not all businesses with bad code lead to bad businesses.
In fact, some bad code are very profitable for some businesses (ask any SAP integrator).
This is fun to think about. I used to think that all software was largely garbage, and at one point, I think this _was_ true. Sometime over the last 20 years, I believe this ceased to be the case. Most software these days actually works. Importantly, most software is actually stable enough that I can make it half an hour without panic saving.
Could most software be more awesome? Yes. Objectively, yes. Is most software garbage? Perhaps by raw volume of software titles, but are most popular applications I’ve actually used garbage? Nope. Do I loathe the whole subscription thing? Yes. Absolutely. Yet, I also get it. People expect software to get updated, and updates have costs.
So, the pertinent question here is, will AI systems be worse than humans? For now, yeah. Forever? Nope. The rate of improvement is crazy. Two years ago, LLMs I ran locally couldn’t do much of anything. Now? Generally acceptable junior dev stuff comes out of models I run on my Mac Studio. I have to fiddle with the prompts a bit, and it’s probably faster to just take a walk and think it over than spend an hour trying different prompts… but I’m a nerd and I like fiddling.
> Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users
Corporations create great code too: they're not all badly run.
The problem isn't a code quality issue: it is a moral issue of whether you agree with the goals of capitalist businesses.
Many people have to balance the needs of their wallet with their desire for beautiful software (I'm a developer-founder I love engineering and open source community but I'm also capitalist enough to want to live comfortably).
I wonder if it's merely some language or cultural difference, and I don't mean it as a snipe at all, but may I just say - software products have "features", human beings have traits! Maybe it's a confusion based on the fact that human beings as well as traits also do have "features", but that refers to things like having tiny ears.
Having a very strong liking for sitting reading books for long periods is a lovely trait, but it certainly is not a feature (I would say!).
Maybe one day I'll get used to people people putting pictures and videos of their 3-year-olds on the internet, but that day has not yet come. I see it there and can only think, oh the poor kid. It even says he's shy at one point in the article.
More on-topic - I recommend Grace Llewellyn and John Holt on learning, to anyone. Truly life-changing material. Finally got around to John Holt recently, and am very happy to eventually read his work.
You can't get back the years made painfully lesser by the school systems we put people through - myself included - and you probably can't undo all the damage done, either. But you can face the absurdity of the situation, and try to improve your own mental life, and that of the people in your life.
If the business school is silly enough to accept people based partially on the idea that they climbed Everest, perhaps he was right to treat the task of getting in to the place as essentially theatre.
Isn't most business success about convincing people to buy expensive tulips while you (legally) walk away with the money and leave them holding the bags, then rinse and repeat? Seems like he'd be the right person for the job.
And then you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground. What's the point of ethics and hard work if those who just lie their way into much better opportunities will out-earn you by orders of magnitude? Granted, it's a bit more complicated than that, often those people also have connections, but the feeling still stands.
Not sure if meritocracy has been on a decline, or that we're now just more aware of it due to the internet.
I walked away from a full time job making $180K a year for 2 hours a day because the consulting company renting out my time wanted me to put 8 hours. I felt like I was helping them somehow fleece the client, even though the client probably had over a trillion dollars under management. In retrospect I was very foolish.
In the free market you have to learn sales, to do well. And most sales techniques are about making people realize they may need something (called “building the gap”) and then offering your solution. But your solution usually isn’t any good unless you raise money first.
In my case, I was too honest to overpromise to investors, or create fake volume for tokens, etc. So most investors walked, and it took years for me to build the products. Now I have them. But I am far behind those who overpromise and raise money fast, or create appearances of momentum, and act as if — they fake it til they make it. (Doesn’t need to be all the way as bad as Elizabeth Holmes.)
I have discovered a lot of ethical hacks over the years involving group dynamics, but in the meantime I had taken on hundreds of thousands in debt and repaid it. All for what… because I was too honest to stretch the truth too much.
If I was willing to do it, though, people downstream of me would have been much happier. And people diwnstream of you include your employees and your family and friends. It is a dog eat dog world out there… I have learned that total honesty has a price — you cannot overpromise to people downstream of you, either, otherwise they’ll be left holding the bag. It is better to overpromise to people upstream of you if you have people relying on you. It’s just not a perfect system.
I would have much rather been in a society which has UBI, free association and everyone has some discretionary income and isn’t always just trying to survive. Much more honest. And they wouldn’t even have to fake stuff to stay on disability or qualify for means tested stuff.
Most business is about providing value by delivering goods or services that people want and are willing to pay for. Visit your local shops, how many of them are convincing people to buy proverbial tulips and leaving their customers holding the bag? Look at the most valuable companies in the world; they all do or make stuff people happily pay for because they actually find value in it.
Certainly there are people who succeed in business by doing what you say, but it’s not how most success happens.
But there is a real magic that happens in the process there.
When two people make a deal, voluntarily, at least rationally (unless it is charity) both expect to be better off.
The magic of the businessman is to connive his way into getting the largest slice of the 'better off'. He generally can't legally make a deal without generating value, but if he can capture it to the point the customer is only one iota better off he is a good businessman and no one has been defrauded.
Customers also tend to try to get the largest slice of the "better off." That's not special. Do you take less pay than you could get because you don't want to be greedy? Do you voluntarily pay more than the listed price when purchasing items? Of course not.
In a properly functioning market, the limiting factor is competition. A business can't capture 99% of the "better off" because the guy down the street will undercut it by only capturing 98% and all the customers will go there. A customer likewise can't capture 99% because the business will decide it's not worthwhile and sell to customers who capture less. Somewhere in the middle is found equilibrium.
Bag-holding is different, it means there's some sort of trickery and the other side doesn't actually benefit from the transaction. And this does happen, but it's not the norm. Again, go take a look at your local shops. Which ones are engaging in this?
There is a 'human' process 'somewhere in the middle' as you say.
I'm not anti-capitalist, I just acknowledge this as a fundamental part of the human process. It might even be the case the businessman's incentive don't fully align with the stockholder/owner's incentive, in many case the businessman can profit at the expense of the company by capturing higher commission with side-effects that the company won't understand.
A clever businessman will get the better end of that, while still leaving his customer better off than if he hadn't transacted at all, as many witness at the car dealership.
My point is that most business is in that middle. A typical business transaction ends with both sides getting a decent chunk of the value produced. Abusive transactions happen but they're not that common, certainly not the majority as the other comment said.
Optimally, suppliers/vendors/customers would like to grow together. If the companies I'm the vendor for are only getting a tiny sliver of value from what I'm selling them then they might not grow in their market, and my business with them also won't grow.
There's a lot of narrow-sightedness in this zero-sum model of transactions.
Unless you take the skeptical view that the US administration does not represent the people but rather merely the administration and its ilk, who stand to profit immensely if they are in cahoots with corrupt import/export smugglers or are trading for gains in some of the few winners, or even just shorting the losers.
you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground. What's the point of ethics and hard work if those who just lie their way into much better opportunities will out-earn you by orders of magnitude?
Unethical people tend to get themselves better opportunities regardless of how society is organized.
Example here in Canada and Toronto in particular. There were plenty of independent pet clinics and they used to charge somewhat reasonable prices. Now nearly all of those were bought by big companies / investors. Prices went through the roof, competition is down, and the only thing they want to discuss with the customer is how to squeeze the most money disregarding of results.
Yes I do want those assholes burned at the stake.
Similar story happens in many other areas. People are being squeezed from their money on all fronts. North American IT persons are rare exception of an ordinary person who can still make the ends meet and still have some healthy chunk left to enjoy life.
This is just exhibit 8345346 that this type of "free market" doesn't result in lower prices for consumers, but this grift has been going on for a long time now. Free market now means private investors are free to take over entire markets and monopolize them and bribe/lobby the government regulatory agencies to look the other way at best, or enact regulations that act as moats to defend their position against competitors at worst.
The current state of Canada (stagnating wages, exploding CoL) is what's coming everywhere in the west. The US seems to be most resilient to this, probably due to its status as the world reserve currency and a larger, more competitive economy.
There is nothing even remotely close to a 'free market' in pet clinics.
A free market would be me with a sign in the corner, offering to perform surgery on your dog, with my engineering degree printed on a piece of paper and anesthetics I manufactured in my basement.
North America has severely limited the number of veterinarians and regulated the care, the monopolistic elements are likely largely a result of government intervention.
>>Not sure if meritocracy has been on a decline, or that we're now just more aware of it due to the internet.
As an Indian, let me tell you, to accept something is wrong, and then just being fine about it, and just adjust your life to bad situations is how the fall of societies starts.
Eventually everything becomes fine and acceptable, and you learn over time to adjust yourself to everything, like every bad thing ever.
> And then you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground
That's not why, particularly. They do so for various reasons:
- they compare the reality of capitalism with a nonexistent nirvana, rather than the reality of the alternatives. They haven't run the real counterfactual
- they gravitate to any philosophy that they're familiar with instinctively: most students are young, and they conceptualise "fairness" in terms of a loving parental figure with resources meting things out to them, and they think of the government in a similar way
- they believe countries they have heard are nice to live in, normally Scandinavian countries, aren't capitalist
- they don't know the realities of real non-capitalist countries such as the USSR or pre-capitalist China, or present-day Venezuela (not truly non-capitalist, but the central planning around their oil is their main problem), or East Germany, or Cuba
- they have gone to university, the only place where bad ideas can survive and be propogated out into the world
> they have gone to university, the only place where bad ideas can survive and be propogated out into the world
Let's not leave out think-tanks and orgs like the WEF that seem to exist only to launder the opinions of billionaires. And mainstream news publications like the New York Times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
While I don't disagree with many of your points, we shouldn't kid ourselves that we live in the best of all possible worlds for most working or middle class people.
Well, that is a similar place. If you have plenty of money sloshing about coming from some commercial process you probably disagree with, whether you're a SV day-in-the-life-of employee or a social sciences professor, you probably can have plenty of ideas that are never disproven because you're so insulated.
The automotive industry has historically been the most important in both the United States economy and even the world's. It employed millions upon millions, in high-wage jobs. Some large fraction of marketing was for the automotive industry. Even today, having a new luxury car is a status symbol (all the more so if the youngest generations are basically cut out of that). If Tesla can plausibly promise to keep that going forward in an era where no one tolerates burning fossil fuels, then how could it be anything other than a good investment? Of course the "how could it not" could easily crumble (and has already started doing just that).
I don't mean to be facetious here. It's just that if GitHub doesn't end up going through the usual enshittification process, it'll be quite the anomaly.
Now, maybe it'll be an anomaly, exceptions to rules exist. But it just seems to be an endless cycle, trusting these companies, getting burnt, trusting again, getting burnt again. Is there no end to the cycle? Is there some new pressure on these companies to behave better that was not there before, and therefore we should all give them (yet) another chance?
I don't see why we would, personally. It even seems obvious to me that we shouldn't. Like in an abusive relationship, no matter the regret and the promises, eventually you've to say enough is enough, and ideally sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, it's very common practice for people who appear at least superficially like smart people to trust these companies a second, third, fourth time.
Either these apparently smart people know something I don't, or they like getting paid large amounts of money so much that they'll stay quiet and use the popular services and simply use their tech savvy to jump to a new thing quickly when the shit hits the fan. Or maybe I just prefer being cynical, and it's a personality thing. Someone, educate me here.
One of the main reasons I pick GitHub issues for this is that they have a very stable, reliable API that I can use to get my data back out again - or use to run continual automated exports, should I ever get around to doing that.
I wouldn't trust any system for my notes that doesn't have this.
I don't think it will settle things even if we did manage to train an 1800 LLM with sufficient size.
LLMs are blank slates (like an uncultured primitive human being - albeit LLM comes with knowledge built-in, but builtin knowledge is mostly irrelevant here). LLM output is purely a function of the input (context), so agentic systems' capabilities do not equal underlying LLM's capabilities.
If you ask such an LLM "overturn Newtonian physics, come up with a better theory", of course the LLM won't give you relativity just like that. The same way an uneducated human has no chance of coming up with relativity either.
However, ask it this:
```
You are Einstein ...
<omitted: 10 million tokens establishing Einstein's early life and learnings>
... Recent experiments have put these ideas to doubt, ...<another bunch of tokens explaining the Michelson–Morley experiment>... Any idea why this occurs?
```
and provide it with tools to find books, speak with others, run experiments, etc. Conceivably, the result will be different.
Again, we pretty much see this play out in coding agents:
Claude the LLM has no prior knowledge of my codebase so of course it has zero chance of solving a bug in it. Claude 4 is a blank slate.
Claude Code the agentic system can:
- look at a screenshot.
- know what the overarching goal is from past interactions & various documentation it has generated about the codebase, as well as higher-level docs describing the company and products.
- realize the screenshot is showing a problem with the program.
- form hypothesis / ideate why the bug occurs.
- verify hypotheses by observing the world ("the world" to Claude Code is the codebase it lives in, so by "observing" I mean it reads the code).
- run experiments: modify code then run a type check or unit test (although usually the final observation is outsourced to me, so I am the AI's tool as much as the other way around.)
Business emails, other comments here and there of a more throwaway or ephemeral nature - who cares if LLMs helped?
Personal blogs, essays, articles, creative writing, "serious work" - please tell us if LLMs were used, if they were, and to what extent. If I read a blog and it seems human and there's no mention of LLMs, I'd like to be able to safely assume it's a human who wrote it. Is that so much to ask?
There are many wonderful videos and video-makers on youtube - but I think the platform has been a net negative for creativity, and for humanity, in many ways. Hence I personally would never support them with my money.
We haven't ever ran the counterfactual, and maybe there's some reason we can't or won't. But I would absolutely love to see youtube without youtube - no middleman, direct payments to the video-makers.
I'm not proposing a technical discussion here on what such a platform might look like or whether it's feasible - I just mean culturally, I'd love to see what videos we would come up with if we weren't constantly adjusting to suit the all-powerful and unknowable "algorithm".
I think this pressure to conform to the algorithm, to always chase more views, subscriptions, and comments, to frame every choice around that, has probably been much more prohibitive on creativity than we are able to imagine.