TonesTones's recent activity
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Comment on Six months into tariffs, US businesses have no idea how to price anything in ~finance
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Comment on Presenting... PrizeForge: a novel crowdfunding model for sustainable open-source and fighting enshittification in ~tech
TonesTones Link ParentThe explanation here didn’t do the idea justice, the video is more true to actual implementation. How they intend for it to work is that if there are two donation tiers, $1 and $100, you require...The explanation here didn’t do the idea justice, the video is more true to actual implementation.
In practice, with such a system the amount everyone is going to pay is just going to be the minimum possible payment, turning a project with 20k contributors - which would be a lot of money on patreon or kickstarter - into at most $20k/yr, which is not even minimum wage in the US.
How they intend for it to work is that if there are two donation tiers, $1 and $100, you require 100 $1 donators for every 1 $100 donator.
I couldn’t explain why this meaningfully changes the power dynamic at all. If I’m an $100 donator not seeing my money go through, I’m just choosing a different platform.
It more begs the question of why randomly introduce a point of corruption when you can... just give the creators the money?
I think their vision is that these delegates are more representative of the interests of the donators than the creators. I just have no idea why that would be true.
This feels like a solution in search of a problem.
100% agreed.
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Comment on Presenting... PrizeForge: a novel crowdfunding model for sustainable open-source and fighting enshittification in ~tech
TonesTones LinkConsider how democratic governments work. People pay their taxes, and representatives decide how those dollars are spent, ultimately hiring people directly or contracting companies to accomplish a...Consider how democratic governments work. People pay their taxes, and representatives decide how those dollars are spent, ultimately hiring people directly or contracting companies to accomplish a goal.
The equivalent to representatives in this case is the “delegate”. This illuminates where the actual power lies; you are not funding the creator, you are funding the delegate.
Consider how much power Google has over Firefox, as Google is their “firehose of money”. The delegate would have the same power as Google in this potential idea. Again, you are not funding the creator, you are funding the delegate.
It’s worth noting that sometimes a similar setup is very useful. Consider a non-profit like FUTO, who primarily just funds other projects and does very little directly. This allows them to coordinate projects with a common goal and increase collaboration in the space. Once more, the delegate is the one being funded.
I think precisely when you want one person or a group of people to have control over a large sum of money, they eventually delegate and become a natural “middleman”, kind of like how politicians don’t implement changes directly. I’m simply pointing out that the delegate isn’t someone who is holding the creator accountable, they are the ones who need to be held accountable (in multiple senses of the word!).
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Comment on Should C be mandatory learning for career developers? in ~comp
TonesTones (edited )LinkI think learning C has a fairly high payoff in terms of developer learning outcomes even if you never use the language. Sure, C has some idiosyncracies that are products of its time, and another...I think learning C has a fairly high payoff in terms of developer learning outcomes even if you never use the language. Sure, C has some idiosyncracies that are products of its time, and another language might be able to teach similar lessons while not being as tedious, but C has the nice benefit of being instructive while also enabling developers to read lots of historic code.
I wouldn’t be surprised if pioneering schools start teaching their systems classes with a language like Go or Rust in the next 10 years with an elective for C.
Ninja Edit: Disclaimer that I’ve not actually used Go or Rust much and I don’t know if they would serve as teaching equivalents in practice.
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Comment on Chinese property giant Evergrande delisted after spectacular fall in ~finance
TonesTones Link ParentI probably should have quoted the piece I was responding to. I was confused because my view was that the “responsible” decision would have been never to lend Ted and Tina the money to buy a home....I probably should have quoted the piece I was responding to.
Ted & Tina still lost their home so Goldman Sachs could do it all over again with other subprime loans.
I was confused because my view was that the “responsible” decision would have been never to lend Ted and Tina the money to buy a home. Seems like your argument that it’s better for them never to have owned a home than to have been loaned it and then lose it? I think I see that logic: moving homes is stressful, the mortgage gives the family a false sense of hope, etc.
I’m not sure the critique of subprime BNPL holds the same weight for me. I don’t mind if someone is able to BNPL a bunch of meals and then declare bankruptcy instead of needing to go on food stamps. They’ll be stressed over bills either way.
It shouldn't have happened because they knew it was irresponsible, and the bailout confirmed you get bailed out if that ship ever sinks.
The point is that the financial losers were still the ones who got bailed out. They sold their assets for way less than they bought them for.
I suppose I don’t have sympathy for the shareholders of these companies looking to get an ROI; the losers will always be the lienholders and investors. Recessions do cause pain for everyone involved, but isn’t that just life?
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Comment on Ted Chiang interview: life is more than an engineering problem in ~books
TonesTones LinkThis interview is fantastic. Ted Chiang is able to pull out the essence of the questions he deals with in such an elegant way. I aspire to do the same thing, but feel like I am able to accomplish...This interview is fantastic. Ted Chiang is able to pull out the essence of the questions he deals with in such an elegant way. I aspire to do the same thing, but feel like I am able to accomplish it so rarely.
Imagine you have some hypothetical AI that is better at accomplishing tasks than humans and that does exactly what you tell it to do. Do you want ExxonMobil to have such an AI at its disposal? That doesn’t sound good. Conversely, imagine a hypothetical AI that does what is best for the world as a whole, even if human beings are asking it to do something else. Who would buy such an AI? Certainly not ExxonMobil.
Such a beautiful way to demonstrate that the alignment problem is not an AI problem. It’s a human problem.
Ted identifies so many areas where we blame AI and technology for a lot of the failings of our society when those tools are just expressions and extensions of the way we behave. I’ve definitely fallen into this trap myself.
Great piece, great title made even better by reading, great stuff all around. Thanks for posting.
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Comment on Ed Zitron: How to argue with an AI booster in ~tech
TonesTones Link ParentWhen I first read this piece, I felt pretty confused because while I’ve seen “AI boosters” around, they just kind of come off as any other software salesperson to someone outside the industry. I...When I first read this piece, I felt pretty confused because while I’ve seen “AI boosters” around, they just kind of come off as any other software salesperson to someone outside the industry. I don’t need a 15000 word essay deconstructing why some company is actually overpitching some product for our business; it happened before AI and will happen so long as sales exists.
I wonder if the people that feel this article is overreacting are in the same boat that I am. From outside of tech, AI just feels like any other tech innovation. Some products work, some products don’t. Everyone says they are the former. It’s just the sales song and dance.
However, if you are working on the software stack, there’s legitimate discussion about what tools go into that stack and how you use AI in your product, and I can see how “AI boosters” could be legitimately harmful to business productivity. That perspective justifies an article like this a lot more.
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Comment on Chinese property giant Evergrande delisted after spectacular fall in ~finance
TonesTones Link ParentI’m not familiar with the structure of these mortgages or loans, but I’m pretty sure people would have lost their homes regardless of government intervention. I suppose the the government could...I’m not familiar with the structure of these mortgages or loans, but I’m pretty sure people would have lost their homes regardless of government intervention. I suppose the the government could have bought every unpaid mortgage and forgiven it, but that would have come at a pretty high taxpayer loss.
Ninja Edit: My impression of the crisis is that banks gave mortgages to folks who probably couldn’t pay those debts back and then sold off the mortgages. So the “responsible” decision would have been never to lend at all.
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Comment on There seems to be something going on with Sydney Sweeney and the media covering her films in ~movies
TonesTones LinkAren’t film costs difficult to analyze because of all the accounting shenanigans production companies are able to get away with? I’ve heard these companies are able to find ways to write off the...Aren’t film costs difficult to analyze because of all the accounting shenanigans production companies are able to get away with? I’ve heard these companies are able to find ways to write off the films as a loss for the financing company while none of the stakeholders actually lose money.
I also think film is a lot like venture capital where financiers are making many projects at an actual loss in service of finding a blockbuster. That makes the analysis more complex because films might be considered successful even if they lose money as long as they beat the expected return.
This might be a “two things can be true” situation where the stakeholders won despite a loss on paper.
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Comment on The crisis of the US university started long before Donald Trump in ~finance
TonesTones (edited )LinkThis seems like an article from a UChicago prof about UChicago that is using a generic title and Trump to get attention (I don’t want to say clickbait since the article is stellar, just much...This seems like an article from a UChicago prof about UChicago that is using a generic title and Trump to get attention (I don’t want to say clickbait since the article is stellar, just much narrower in scope than the title would make you think).
There’s something weird going on with university education in the States. I don’t really have my thoughts gathered right now, but I feel like something in the structure of many of these places is unsustainable. Perhaps I’m just (relatively) young, and institutions have always been the way they are today, just less obviously.
Still, I get the sense that it’s not. I feel like the (somewhat) bygone function of universities as places to gather privileged connection was well understood (albeit unfair), and now they’ve morphed into places trying to maximize metrics at the cost of… something. I think the cost depends on what place you choose to focus on.
Perhaps this is a political question, since universities have become political targets, and perhaps the failure of resistance in some of these places demystifies the reality of the role they actually play. I’m not smart enough to figure that one out, though.
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Comment on How do you manage separate development environments on your computer? in ~tech
TonesTones Link ParentSorry, I didn’t clarify. I use nix-darwin on MacOS. I’m not familiar with the capabilites of NixOS. Re. flake targets that makes sense, but development environments are not sandboxed as far as I...Sorry, I didn’t clarify. I use nix-darwin on MacOS. I’m not familiar with the capabilites of NixOS. Re. flake targets that makes sense, but development environments are not sandboxed as far as I understand. Am I wrong?
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Comment on How do you manage separate development environments on your computer? in ~tech
TonesTones Link ParentSeconding this. I’m a Nix user, I don’t believe Nix is equivalent to a container solution. In my naive understanding, Nix essentially lets you install tools to your system in a way that (a) lets...Seconding this. I’m a Nix user, I don’t believe Nix is equivalent to a container solution.
In my naive understanding, Nix essentially lets you install tools to your system in a way that (a) lets you verify a bunch of things about the installation (e.g., versions of all the tool’s dependencies) and (b) makes that installation declarative. Nix makes it easy to have identical installations on different machines or equivalent installations on different OSs, but not in quite the same way as a containerization tool like Docker does.
Like other comments have mentioned, none of these tools differ that much in terms of security though. I’m not sure what the truly isolated option would be aside from having a VM, but I’m not a cybersecurity researcher.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
TonesTones LinkI think understanding the technical facets of AI and understanding the potential business applications and products that can be generated with AI are different things. I think when you say...I think understanding the technical facets of AI and understanding the potential business applications and products that can be generated with AI are different things. I think when you say “understand anything about AI”, you are emphasizing the latter, but I cannot totally tell.
few people have an active interest into "how it all works", and most of the sector's interest is in the prompting and chaining layers.
I think the training, fine-tuning, and alignment areas are also active sectors of research in labs at universities and private labs, especially in Silicon Valley. I think what you notice is less that people lack an “active interest” in the field and more that anything that isn’t prompting/chaining is really hard.
I consider myself pretty capable as a mathematician, but the techniques needed to make real progress in these poorly understood mathematical spaces are beyond my understanding. There’s a reason those AI PhDs have salaries as high as they do. I think people want to get involved, and the prompting space is the only accessible place. Of course, they will call themeselves an AI engineer regardless if only to demand greater pay or raise more money.
I see plenty of knowledgeable people with no idea of how far-reaching the impact of the work is. Super technical AI people get biased by their own knowledge of the flaws and limitations so as to be blind to what is possible.
I think understand the “impact” of AI is far more societal than technical. Even narrowing our focus to coding, and making the claim that good AI will replace coders, you still need to answer Why do companies hire programmers?. I’ve heard very compelling arguments for why demand for programmers will rise, fall, and stay the same in response to AI developments, because each argument makes different assumptions about what the value-add of a programmer adds to an org.
Or worse, that it has zero positive impact on humanity. I know there's some of those on Tildes - if that's you, hello, you're provably already wrong and I'd be happy to have that discussion.
I’m not sure anyone informed would claim that LLMs have zero positive impact on humanity. The tools are already accelerating research and helping us achieve things marginally faster.
The question is about “net impact”, or more accurately, “projected net impact”, since the discussion largely hinges on What will the companies do when their VC money dries up?. Will they bankrupt and cause a recession? Will they sell their tech to the highest bidder without ethical boundaries? Will the financial incentive to find a use for AI be so great as to compel companies to layoff swaths of employees? Or will people cough up money and everything be fine?
When it comes to these societal questions about the “impact” of AI, I do not think you are wrong. I don’t have strong answers to these questions except that I think many people are taking their assumptions about the world and then believing their conclusions are obvious. I think there remains quite a bit of uncertainty, and so “not understanding anything about AI” seems fairly reasonable to me.
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Comment on Social media probably can’t be fixed in ~tech
TonesTones LinkI’m pretty unconvinced that LLMs are a suitable simulation of human behavior. You can get an LLM (without oversight/safeguards) to say whatever you want given the right prompts. Humans just don’t...So they combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs), essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior.
I’m pretty unconvinced that LLMs are a suitable simulation of human behavior. You can get an LLM (without oversight/safeguards) to say whatever you want given the right prompts. Humans just don’t behave the same way; we tend to more strongly maintain our current views on society. That difference seems fundamentally important to a study measuring how behavior responds to different environments.
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Comment on Open AI announces $1.5 million bonus for every employee in ~tech
TonesTones Link ParentEspecially considering danke’s comment saying it’s only for technical staff, something like this is probably a response to the acquihiring of talent places like Google Deepmind and Meta are doing...Especially considering danke’s comment saying it’s only for technical staff, something like this is probably a response to the acquihiring of talent places like Google Deepmind and Meta are doing to eliminate startup competition (offer order-of-magnitude salary increases to take the talent out from those startups instead of buying out the shareholders).
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Comment on The hater's guide to the AI bubble in ~finance
TonesTones Link ParentGenerally I agree with you. I think Google is the best comparison here. Google was the new king post dot-com. Google won because it became the search engine and became an extraordinarily...Generally I agree with you.
Google was the seach engine and was hurtling towards profitability at record pace.
I think Google is the best comparison here. Google was the new king post dot-com. Google won because it became the search engine and became an extraordinarily high-margin business.
Do people love these AI chatbots so much that they'll be willing to pay $100 or more a month when the pied piper comes to collect on all that capex expenditure? I think it's a fun novelty to most people that will happily abandon it when faced with the real cost of a sustainable product.
I think most investors want the product to stay free. Let me speak from personal experience. I have had clients walk into the business that I work at, effectively ready to sign a contract without even talking to us. They had asked ChatGPT for a set of services and ChatGPT gave an absolutely glowing review of us. Why? I don’t know. I guess our website got lucky.
People trust the chatbots, especially people that lack tech savvy and don’t understand how the models actually function. Its effectiveness as a convincer is so much better than any modern search engine.
I think the product offering will look a lot more like “pay OpenAI to run some fine-tuning on the latest model so that it recommends our business more often” to users. Subscription services suffer because users aren’t the cash cow, businesses are. In that scenario, whoever has the userbase will win, just like Google did.
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Comment on The hater's guide to the AI bubble in ~finance
TonesTones Link ParentI’m talking generally about college kids and the people using “Chat” seem to be anthropomorphizing ChatGPT since in the context of the sentence, “Chat” could be replaced with “Google”. “Let me ask...I’m talking generally about college kids and the people using “Chat” seem to be anthropomorphizing ChatGPT since in the context of the sentence, “Chat” could be replaced with “Google”. “Let me ask Chat.” “Chat told me XYZ.” I’ve heard that use of “Chat” too but honestly I feel like the two uses of “Chat” come from pretty separate communities.
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Comment on The hater's guide to the AI bubble in ~finance
TonesTones (edited )LinkI sincerely appreciate Ed’s in-depth research and financial analysis in this piece. There’s a lot of effort that goes into producing something like this and that’s worth mentioning. I’m an...I sincerely appreciate Ed’s in-depth research and financial analysis in this piece. There’s a lot of effort that goes into producing something like this and that’s worth mentioning. I’m an AI-hater as much as the next guy here on Tildes, but I just get the sense that this article misses the forest for the trees.
Every executive, venture capitalist, C-suite officer, and financial analyst understands we are in a massive, massive bubble right now. They all agree that this bubble will pop, many people will lose their jobs, and some would probably even agree with you if you said that some of these MAG7 companies will go under. They’re not betting on the growth from AI saving their capex, they’re dumping capex so they can be the last man standing when the bloodbath is over.
One has to recognize these people learned their lessons in the dot-com bubble, and are applying the same lessons here. Yes, companies dumped exorbitant sums on (in hindsight) very useless investments and some went bankrupt because of it. Yet the winners of that bubble were not the ones who played it safe and let the new trend bandwagon pass them by. The winners were the ones who dumped the capex, sometimes ran negative for years, and then came out on top: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.
Every investor believes that only a few of these AI investments will pay off, and just aren’t sure which ones will (or they are all-in on one or two horses). But they fully believe that when all is said and done, the bankruptcies and firesale acquisitions over, the costs falling down, then the new kings of the global economy will have been crowned.
Look, I cannot say if I agree with their analysis. But when I go interact with average folk in their day-to-day life, they seem to love these glorified word predictors. They use them to generate emails, to search for recipes, and sometimes to console them through a tough break-up. I spend time in classrooms and students can’t get enough of “Chat”. I spend time with family and they talk about their new use of AI so that they don’t have to make that stupid presentation at work. I see this tech and I see it being popular, at least in the right way.
Fundamentally, that’s why I hate this tech so much. If Ed Zitron’s market collapse prophecy comes to pass, my gratitude might make me a religious man. The gamble paying off is so, so, so, so, so much worse. Imagine the next Google not just having access to your search history and watch history, but a personalized model that they can use to convince you of things. Imagine a product that allows you to deploy subtle biases into millions of personalized chatbots that consumers are using, changing political opinions and market demands at scale. That’s what the VCs see, and they are damn right to say it’s worth risking bankruptcy for. I just pray that vision is a mirage.
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Comment on Would you get sick in the name of science? in ~science
TonesTones Link Parent@papasquat is saying people should not be compensated for permanent changes to their body, but can be compensated for short-term discomfort. That doesn’t mean banning all permanent changes. Under...@papasquat is saying people should not be compensated for permanent changes to their body, but can be compensated for short-term discomfort. That doesn’t mean banning all permanent changes. Under their framework, getting paid to get a tattoo should be illegal, but getting a tattoo in general is fine.
I don’t think that has anything to do with arguments about trans health care except to say people cannot pay others to undergo transition surgery.
Getting paid for organ donation, which you mention, would very much be illegal if this principle were applied. Personally, I don’t know if I’m okay with people being paid for donating their organs.
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Comment on What useful licenses or certifications are surprisingly cheap and easy to get? in ~talk
TonesTones LinkBecoming a notary public can be a simple process depending on where you live. Usually, it’s just a process of taking several hours of courses and taking an in-person exam. After getting your fancy...Becoming a notary public can be a simple process depending on where you live. Usually, it’s just a process of taking several hours of courses and taking an in-person exam. After getting your fancy stamp, you get to certify that signatures are valid (the person understands what they are signing and that they actually are who they say they are) on certain legal documents.
While it is useful per the definition provided by @em-dash, I don’t know how useful the average person would find it. Needing to notarize a document and simultaneously not being a party signing that document just doesn’t happen that often in your day-to-day. The license is easy enough to obtain, so places that regularly need to notarize tend to have some of their staff licensed for convenience. Worst case, you can pay a notary to meet you somewhere, and it probably won’t cost you more than $40 (usually less).
The biggest pain point with this administration’s economic policy isn’t the tarriffs, it’s the uncertainty. The last thing Lowe’s wants to do is agree to buy sinks for a higher price to absorb tarriff fees just before the White House announces more delays or reductions next week.
Any competitors which have not signed agreements can now get cheaper sinks and undercut the competition.
The tarriffs won’t hit all at once, but will be reflected in month-over-month price increases that are slightly higher than before. Businesses are playing a game of increasing prices, but not so quickly that it scares their customers away; having shortages, but not so bad that the customers can’t buy anything.
The actual price increases for these products will reflect companies’ internal analysis of the demand, but especially in highly competitive environments like retail, there will also be a period where the consumer-facing companies try their best to keep prices low despite increasing costs. They know their competitors are under pressure too and it’s a great opportunity to get more customers if they can stay affordable.