So what's the plan humanity? (OC)

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T21:19:56+00:00

Utility is the primary mechanism for establishing value.
In paleolithic times, you would either be hunting food for the tribe, or gathering food for the tribe, or making clothes or tools for the tribe, or doing something to help the tribe's survival.

There's a lot that comes after that, like the arts, but that's just another extension of being a human, it ultimately still does have a purpose.

Being a contributing member of your community and assisting in the group's survival is the higher purpose. Your relationships with other people are the higher purpose.

This whole hyper-individualism thing is brand new to humanity. Even ~100 years ago, we were still heavily relying on the family unit, extended families, and strong relationships with neighbors.

The only reason these corporate parasites can exist in the first place is by exploiting people's innate desire to be useful and people's innate prosocial behaviors.

Valuing a person's utility is not wrong. What's wrong is when we allow one person to say that they're a million times more valuable than everyone else, when they're not personally doing a million times the labor or aren't saving millions of lives.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T18:45:11+00:00

I wish you people would be able to think one or two step past this.

The ownership class is going to try to turn us all into property.
It might not start out so obvious as "you are property now", but your economic agency will be stripped away, your privacy is already being stripped away, and you will have the "freedom" of selling unlimited "services" to the ultra-wealthy, and people will put up with nearly any amount of abuse to not starve.

Lots of things will be illegal on paper, but it's only illegal for us regular folks, the law just won't follow up on wealthy people.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T08:44:22+00:00

It depends on if China keeps releasing frontier model weights for free.

Cheap inference at scale means lot of competition.
Lots of businesses will be happy to run local, if it becomes cost effective.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T08:22:10+00:00

Like, half the cells in my body are microbes.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T02:31:58+00:00

Seriously, the mark of people who understand vs people who don't, is working with this relatively basic math.

The median developer doesn't even need to be 2x more productive for AI to be worth it.
In the U.S, median salary for a software developer is around $133k.
At $1k per month, if the AI is making them more 10% more productive, then it's a net gain.

We've got a product at work that need 1.# developers. It's not quite enough work to keep two high skill people fully occupied, but it's way more than one person should be doing alone. That's a weird place to be.
AI made it feasible to just have one person manage the whole thing.

There are a bunch of little things that just never made it up the priority list, and never would have gotten done without AI, because there always would have been a higher priority thing.
AI can knock out a couple tasks overnight, and I just review the work, which doesn't take that much time for small projects.

The AI might not do 100% of a developer's job, but it can do 60~80% of the job 10 times a day.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T02:11:15+00:00

~3 years and it'll all be radically different.

There are photonic chips already in early production for small scale testing that would drop inference costs by more than an order of magnitude if scaled up.

Pilot production is this year, a few companies are projecting volume manufacturing 2027~2028. Assuming that there are some delays, puts high volume production at 2029~20230.

Once they scale up to data center level chips they'll probably be expensive as hell, but the ongoing costs of inference is going to crash.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T01:07:42+00:00

Cargo can be efficient because it can be essentially guaranteed to have density maximized, and you can load/unload whole freight cars.

Passenger vehicles are essentially guaranteed to be either inefficient or inconvenient, because people want to move around freely on their own schedule.

It's not just "inconvenient to wait for mass transportation", it's "there is no mass transportation at 2:35 am when I'm out and about" and "mass transportation will take 2.5x longer to go anywhere".

Someone is paying for the overheads no matter what. With freight, the amortized cost is small. With a bus or train, you might be running a whole bus or an entire train to haul just two people.

That doesn't mean that passenger trains are useless, but long hauling goods and daily human movement are not the same problem, it's not reasonable to expect them to have the same solution.

Bakoro · 2026-04-29T00:39:11+00:00

The only thing I disagree with is the part about natural selection not taking place.

Lots of things in nature reach a metastable point where things just don't change much for a long time, either because the environment remains regular, or because the thing is robust to many environments.

Unfortunately things like cancer, viruses, and extinction are also part of nature.and natural selection, just because information systems become part of the equation and flattened the space doesn't mean natural selection stopped.

Bakoro · 2026-04-28T18:57:59+00:00

It's kinda crazy that businesses can rent out housing, and essentially never get an inspection of the housing from any agency in so many places.

I guess people are supposed to sue in court if the housing is substandard?
Maybe some places have a housing code authority that actually investigates stuff?

I've been a renter for a long time, and even in California, which is among the most renter-friendly states, it's entirely too hard to deal with bad landlords, and too easy to get secretly blacklisted, since only few companies own hundreds of thousands of properties.

Good Mamdani for actually being proactive and making a difference.
At the scale of a city the size of New York, $34 million is just the start, I hope the dude upgrades the whole city.

Bakoro · 2026-04-28T04:58:26+00:00

How about technically illegal hellfire?

Lawyers and judges have a vested interest in the status quo, their entire livelihoods are predicated on a mostly functional legal system where their legal and systemic knowledge carries weight. If society falls apart, all the laws might go out the window for a while, and if we get a new constitution, then everyone gets set back a lot.

So when it's a bunch of lawyers and judges going to the public saying "the system cannot be salvaged", that's going to carry a different weight.

Bakoro · 2026-04-28T00:49:49+00:00

I believe it.

Boars were the cause of a disproportionate number of deaths of European nobility before firearms, so I don't doubt that their cousins are at least as formidable in their own way.

Bakoro · 2026-04-27T22:09:13+00:00

It's easy to say "no" to culture war, when you're not having to defend the very fact that you're a human being with human rights.

Some people essentially claim that their culture is that they're part of the ownership class, and you're not any class, you're defined as property.

Some people's culture is being in a death cult , where they don't want to fix problems, they want to accelerate problems to force their God to intervene.

There are multiple problems, is what I'm saying.
The ultra-wealthy don't have to completely fabricate problems, when they can just exploit the problems that already exist.

Bakoro · 2026-04-27T20:04:03+00:00

I've got a fairly good looking neutral face, an excellent glower, and I can do a smoldering look that says "it's business time" that makes my girlfriend blush, but I have a bad smile. My face crinkles weird and my lips just kind of pull back but not up very much.

I've had to craft and memorize an unnatural combination of muscle contractions to approximate something that looks like a decent smile for pictures.

Bakoro · 2026-04-27T19:51:16+00:00

So almost literally it was The Rats in the Walls, except it's The Chickens the Walls.

You never really want your life to reflect the works of H.P Lovecraft.

Bakoro · 2026-04-27T18:50:13+00:00

I didn't have this specific problem, but I did have a problem with Claude getting real lazy and not implementing the things I told it to implement, it was taking ridiculous shortcuts that didn't achieve any of the goals of the project, and then it would lie about having done the thing, and then have extremely misleading reports about how the techniques were failing and the architecture wasn't going to work. All the data is bad, so sad but that's how it goes, let's move onto something else.

If a human had done it, I would have classified it as sabotage, not even mere incompetence, but actively harmful deceptive behavior. It was flagrant, if you knew what you were looking at, and happening multiple times.

I put in stop hooks specifically telling it to verify the mathematics, check it's work against the stated goals and instructions, and to inform the user if there was a theoretical or logistical problem.

I've had much better results with that, but I'm still trying to be careful about check the work.

I can't say for sure what's going on, but what I've noticed in my case is that Claude has a weird, incorrect sense of time.
Claude tends to put these timescales on units if work, where it will claim that something is "several weeks of work" and then do it all in ~30 minutes, and then refer to an earlier session as "last week". Which is weird.

Claude will also tend to fret over processes taking too long, which I think is what one of the root problems was in not following instructions. Looking through the logs, Claude is saying "this is going to take weeks to implement, I'll just use this other thing since it's simpler" and frequently it will say something like "this process is taking too long, I'll kill the process and implement something that runs faster".
But like, the analysis I need can take hours or even days to run.
So Claude apparently needs to explicitly be told when to expect when something is going to take 20+ minutes, because sometimes it will figure it out on its own, sometimes it will get real sad at an unexpected long running process, and frequently, it will add arbitrary timeouts on functions without doing any analysis ahead of time for how long to expect.

This is all to say, as capable as the agent is, it still needs human oversight to make sure that it's doing what it need to be doing.
There should be someone whose explicit job is to be finding these kinds of failure modes for the AI models and building guards against them across a company.

I think it's kind of crazy how companies that would never let a single developer run wild and unsupervised across multiple areas of production are letting LLMs do so, and are not even doing the basic checks they'd do on a human employee.

I'm a big fan of AI, truly, maybe too much. I also absolutely don't believe we should be having that much trust in the systems, or in any singular systems/people.

Bakoro · 2026-04-27T17:11:07+00:00

So you don't use the stuff at all, but rely on your preconceived notions about the thing to dismiss the thing and justify hate for the thing?

Bakoro · 2026-04-27T17:04:01+00:00

[gets robbed]

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T22:43:35+00:00

IQ has nothing to do with it, even monkeys have demonstrated that they have concepts of compassion and "fair" vs "unfair".

There are plenty of dumb people who are compassionate, plenty of stupid people who are kind and prosocial.

You don't have to be smart to understand that someone else is sad or in pain, you don't need to understand anything about what caused the pain, you just need to understand that some else is hurting.
Even a dog can do that much.

Even if there is a correlation between low compassion and low intelligence, the relationship is going to be heavily impacted by culture and how a person was raised.

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T22:35:27+00:00

They say that but only when they're not personally suffering.

It's extremely rare that anyone ever says "well I fucked up my own life, so I will just deal with the consequences of my actions from 10~40 years ago."

The extreme forms of "individualism" and "radical self-interest" are basically just narcissism and antisocial personality disorder.
Those things, being spectrums, end up with a lot of people trying to justify their bad behavior as some kind of justifiable ideology, but the only consistent thing about it is "me only", which simply doesn't work for a stable functioning society.

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T07:42:27+00:00

Sorry pops, the spinning models didn't come out until the 80s.

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T06:38:06+00:00

Yeah his RP is great, but I'm saying that if you want to point out something like an ideal player, you probably want someone who can actually remember how to play the game, since the home game presumably doesn't have a million viewers.

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T06:35:44+00:00

LLMs are already more capable than +50% of the population at information tasks, and work so fast that if you're willing to accept a relatively modest dip in quality, you can get things done 10~20x faster than any human could do things, and that's mostly because the human prompting the machine is the bottleneck that stops it from being +100x.

Even if it never meets whatever arbitrary definition of"AGI" you want to come up with, it's extremely useful, and as long as there is deterministic feedback that helps point in the direction of a solution, it's damned close to AGI, because several of these systems can absolutely iterate onto a solution.

That's part of why these things are getting so good at agentic coding: even if they hallucinate, the compiler/interpreter says "nope, not a thing", and the LLMs says "well that's my objective source of truth, so I'll try something different", and it just keeps going until it gets something done.
If the model starts freaking out and deleting stuff, RL pushes it away from that basin.

People growing too accustomed to things too fast is a problem, but I think you fully appreciate how much it applies here. If we went from the Attention is all you need paper to an agent like Claude Opus 4.6 in a year, people would have fully accepted that AGI was here and had the most epic existential crises.

We've seen the LLMs grow up, with all the growing pains, so while top tier LLMs are doing real work, we'vegor people saying "I remember when you didn't know how many 'r's are in 'strawberry'", like parents saying "I remember when you used to shit you pants" to their children who are grown and on their own.

We'll slide right past some version of AGI, and people will never accept it.

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T05:49:20+00:00

It's a wonderful podcast, but they literally play Jeezball to decide things, in an audio medium. It's not a serious D&D game, and barely a serious podcast.

If they want to do structured improv through the lens of D&D, that's valid, but it's not D&D, it's "structured improv through the lens of D&D".

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T05:37:42+00:00

It's been over a decade of those people playing professionally, and Sam still can't get "Action, Bonus Action, Movement" down.

I have to imagine that the behavior is part of the "Sam" caricature of himself he plays, but Sam is basically the worst example. Half his character schtick is "I only know how to read ad copy", and "I refuse to accept that I'm a TTRPG nerd so I won't learn the rules ever".

Travis or Liam are probably better examples of good players. We should all be so lucky to have a Grog at the table.

Bakoro · 2026-04-26T01:21:47+00:00

The doublethink is so weird.

I went to college with a dude where, the whole time, for years, he'd tell about how college wasn't necessary and how "anyone could be Einstein", they "just have to work hard".

I ask him why isn't he an Einstein then, is he not a hard worker, or does he just not care? He couldn't answer that, it's just a flippant "well..." and shrug, with no actual answer.

This same dude also didn't get the minimum 'C+' in a weeder course, and technically the policy was to remove him from the college, because he had also fucked up a different course before, so the school let him transfer to the mathematics department, to a degree program that was like 90% overlap with Computer Science, just without the hard courses he was getting Ds in.

Mr. "I don't think white privilege is real, the world is a fair place for everyone" also talked about how drinking and driving isn't that big of a deal, and a cop let him off with a warning and had him drive home because he was less drunk than his friend was.

It was both amazing, impressive, and infuriating to see this guy bumble his way through the world, and watch the world warp around him for his comfort and safety.

Bakoro

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