Was the end of the dot-com bubble catastrophic? I guess it depends on how you look at it. If there is a crash, I imagine Google would be in a pretty good position. They have a somewhat smaller...
The Google chief essentially likened the current AI trade to the dot-com bubble, which wiped out around $5 trillion in market value when it burst.
“We can look back at the internet right now, there was clearly a lot of excess investment but none of us would question whether the internet was profound or that it drives a lot of impact, it fundamentally changed how we work digitally as a society,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same.”
Was the end of the dot-com bubble catastrophic? I guess it depends on how you look at it.
If there is a crash, I imagine Google would be in a pretty good position. They have a somewhat smaller mountain of cash, but they're not the ones borrowing money or the bag holders, and they have other sources of revenue. They might end up with a few more data centers than they need for a while, but they can probably find some use for them.
Edit: when I wrote, “it depends how you look at it,” this is a matter of perspective. It was a catastrophe for many people, as many others have posted. But Silicon Valley and the US in general recovered in a few years, so from a very broad, historical viewpoint, it doesn’t seem worse than other downturns? There are worse catastrophes, like, say, the invasion of Ukraine.
People lost their retirements, and were laid off at the same time. The statistics don't do it justice. The bay area traffic went from terrible to amazing over the span of three years, because of...
Was the end of the dot-com bubble catastrophic?
People lost their retirements, and were laid off at the same time. The statistics don't do it justice.
The bay area traffic went from terrible to amazing over the span of three years, because of the rolling rounds of mass layoffs.
My old boss was laid off, so I got a new one. Whenever I had a meeting with my new boss, I would cheerfully ask him if it was good news and was I laid off? He would agree that would be good news if I was laid off, but sadly I was not. He was ultimately let go. After he was let go, I was surprised to find that all my coworkers detested the man.
I see the post-mortem impact, but doesn’t the bubble, while active, stimulate high job growth and high stock growth? People both lost and made retirements depending on if they (or their financial...
People lost their retirements, and were laid off at the same time.
I see the post-mortem impact, but doesn’t the bubble, while active, stimulate high job growth and high stock growth? People both lost and made retirements depending on if they (or their financial managers) made winning or losing bets. That’s just playing the stock market. People lost jobs they may never have gotten without the bubble. In the modern U.S., AI is pretty much the only short-term bulwark against a total recession considering the recent economic impacts of tariffs, deportations, gov. shutdown, etc. We should be doing worse, but the bubble just delays the consequences for a bit longer. I understand those consequences are real, but I think the economic picture is more nuanced.
AI is driving a lot of our economy in the short-term. I personally believe the long-term impacts of the technology on human beings (education, socialization, creativity, etc.) will be worse, but I wouldn’t consider those economic impacts (not directly).
Dunno bout you, but I would prefer a financial system that isn't essentially a roulette wheel which hits 00 every decade or so. Which recovers on paper for the people with millions/billions to buy...
Dunno bout you, but I would prefer a financial system that isn't essentially a roulette wheel which hits 00 every decade or so. Which recovers on paper for the people with millions/billions to buy low/sell high while the average working person has a really shit time for 5-7 years, and then hits another economic downturn just as they're hitting stability.
I'd much prefer a slow, steady, upward progress which reflects genuine improvement rather than hype cycles and bad debts.
Especially when most people's retirement money is locked up in it.
That’s not really how it worked. In both the tech bubble and 2008, if you held well diversified market funds and just… did nothing, you would have more than recovered. It’s more optimal than...
That’s not really how it worked. In both the tech bubble and 2008, if you held well diversified market funds and just… did nothing, you would have more than recovered. It’s more optimal than trying to buy low sell high, esp given tax implications, unless you’re omniscient.
That's all well and good until you're one of the millions who loses their job and needs to start selling assets or pulling from retirement to survive. Meanwhile, the wealthy see minimal impact and...
That's all well and good until you're one of the millions who loses their job and needs to start selling assets or pulling from retirement to survive.
Meanwhile, the wealthy see minimal impact and can continue investing during the crash.
I was a kid when the dotcom crash happened, with no investments whatsoever, and it still very negatively impacted me. Both of my parents worked in computer-related fields and did not have a lot in...
I was a kid when the dotcom crash happened, with no investments whatsoever, and it still very negatively impacted me. Both of my parents worked in computer-related fields and did not have a lot in savings to fall back on (my brother died two years previously after a lengthy hospital stay). My family never really recovered financially, and my sister and I grew up really struggling.
It seems really odd to be so focused on investment decisions when most people weren't (and still aren't) in any position to live off their investments. Young families were harshly impacted, and that can ripple for generations. It's a major part of the reason my sister and I both elected to not have kids.
I’m not trying to argue it was hunky dory for everyone, I brought it up because the OP brought it up with the idea that if you had stocks they all went to 0 and so only sophisticated investors who...
I’m not trying to argue it was hunky dory for everyone, I brought it up because the OP brought it up with the idea that if you had stocks they all went to 0 and so only sophisticated investors who knew when to sell or buy survived. Which isn’t how it works.
Don't really care about the investments. Care more about people who have entire lives uprooted because companies (and the government that sets the rules) can't/won't get their shit together. You...
Don't really care about the investments. Care more about people who have entire lives uprooted because companies (and the government that sets the rules) can't/won't get their shit together.
You stabilize the boom/bust cycle of employment, everything else will sort itself out given time and sane policy.
Strong unions, eliminating the concept of capital gains taxes, and periodically assessing a tax on asset value would probably go a long way.
For redistribution of wealth, I believe it is more efficient to leave all (well, in practice probably only “almost all”) levels of income untouched and better to instead focus on reducing the...
For redistribution of wealth, I believe it is more efficient to leave all (well, in practice probably only “almost all”) levels of income untouched and better to instead focus on reducing the amount of assets very wealthy individuals have (“wealth tax”), as wealth generated from income by one person or household generally pales in comparison to the generational wealth you can accumulate over long, long periods of time – or can accumulate via unicorn of unicorns-levels of stock performance of something one single person or small group founded themselves, which of course shouldn’t be discouraged too much from an innovation perspective; but someone like Bezos should have at some point in his life have to sell (or borrow against) some of the value he has access to by owning a big part of Amazon, otherwise wealth equality and redistribution will have slim odds of happening.
Which, as a side note, is what we ultimately should pursue as a society in order to prevent unrest (read: revolution) down the road.
In my current (and admittedly quite limited) understanding, the only acceptable method would be an income tax rate with the brackets defined on some monetary values today then following inflation (and a very very generous “zero tax” bracket), otherwise you risk imposing the highest progressive tax rate on effectively middle-class incomes in just a few decades… as is or soon will be the case here in Germany. Which just ends up punishing those who managed to climb up the social and wealth ladder by themselves, and favors those who inherit.
In practice, today (again speaking for the taxation rules I know here), small-scale investors are punished by capital gains taxes, as the threshold for not being taxed is laughably too low if your goal is meaningfully living off of it, which in the end is precisely what you’re aiming for if you have a retirement stock/ETF portfolio.
(Which, tangent/rant, you’re aiming for because the state pension system is a joke for anyone under 50 or 40 years of age today, and has been doomed for about half a century.)
Things are rather different in the US. Small investors can avoid capital gains using retirement accounts. Also, capital gains can often be deferred by not selling, assuming you have good...
Things are rather different in the US. Small investors can avoid capital gains using retirement accounts. Also, capital gains can often be deferred by not selling, assuming you have good investments. Also, small investors likely only pay 15% if they do sell (assuming they have other income from still working). I would be against making taxes easier to avoid in the US.
Yeah, I’m aware of 401(k)s and the like – I actually think this is the one part in social security where you guys are beating our current system. :P I am a little sour about the topic of deferred...
Yeah, I’m aware of 401(k)s and the like – I actually think this is the one part in social security where you guys are beating our current system. :P
I am a little sour about the topic of deferred capital gains taxes – it used to be the case here that after holding for a certain period, you wouldn’t be taxed on stocks anymore at all, and of course they took that away from the already-screwed over younger generation too (a little before my time of actively following politics, but I believe some 15-20 years ago).
Reduced 15% tax for small investors sounds great. It’s a flat 25 on capital gains for everyone here, regardless of income too.
I'll point out that state (well all) pensions are primarily doomed because of neoliberals gutting them, rather than any intrinsic failure of the pension system itself. We could recoup it instantly...
I'll point out that state (well all) pensions are primarily doomed because of neoliberals gutting them, rather than any intrinsic failure of the pension system itself.
We could recoup it instantly by raising taxes on corporate profits by 90%, and corporate assets held by 2%.
(See sibling post for explaination of capital gains taxes. They turn into income taxes when removed)
This isn't true. Most pensions are failing because they were setup as pyramid schemes which assumed there would always be more young workers paying in than old pensioners making withdrawals. It's...
I'll point out that state (well all) pensions are primarily doomed because of neoliberals gutting them, rather than any intrinsic failure of the pension system itself.
This isn't true. Most pensions are failing because they were setup as pyramid schemes which assumed there would always be more young workers paying in than old pensioners making withdrawals. It's no coincidence that the failure of many pension schemes neatly aligns with population pyramids inverting.
They are also underfunded. Neither workers nor corporations have contributed enough funds for them to pay out.
They could do math. Everyone knew the issue was coming, but nobody wants to draw the short straw. Even unions have continued to put their pension debts on the credit card and beg someone else to...
They could do math. Everyone knew the issue was coming, but nobody wants to draw the short straw.
Even unions have continued to put their pension debts on the credit card and beg someone else to pay the tab.
Or, CEOs like Bezos could have their compensation taxed more heavily. It's actually really really easy to tax stock grants or discourage things like stock buybacks. Simply raising the top end of...
but someone like Bezos should have at some point in his life have to sell (or borrow against) some of the value he has access to by owning a big part of Amazon, otherwise wealth equality and redistribution will have slim odds of happening.
Or, CEOs like Bezos could have their compensation taxed more heavily. It's actually really really easy to tax stock grants or discourage things like stock buybacks. Simply raising the top end of taxes and instituting an inheritance tax would cover the vast majority of wealth.
Isn't wealth measurement much more open to manipulation than taxes on money transfers? Also, why are you framing capital gains as inevitably flat, but wealth and income tax as progressive by...
Isn't wealth measurement much more open to manipulation than taxes on money transfers?
Also, why are you framing capital gains as inevitably flat, but wealth and income tax as progressive by default?
Genuinely asking, not to argue, just not in a state where I can muster a more genteel query.
Probably, but I feel like this could be solved with: not understaffing tax authorities simplifying the rules to have no more exceptions and only easy-to-apply cases (this is the big one, it is...
Isn't wealth measurement much more open to manipulation than taxes on money transfers?
Probably, but I feel like this could be solved with:
not understaffing tax authorities
simplifying the rules to have no more exceptions and only easy-to-apply cases (this is the big one, it is currently far too easy to inherit a family company and be taxed zero here, see BMW and the Quandt/Klatten family)
actually punishing manipulation that does come to light (admittedly this has gotten better with high-profile cases that have ended in actual jail time for tax fraud in the millions)
Also, why are you framing capital gains as inevitably flat, but wealth and income tax as progressive by default?
Hm, interesting question, and I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve thought about that in-depth before, so thanks for the pointer!
I think it’s because I’m trying to stay away from the utopia scenario a bit and work with the status quo. Here, wealth tax is actually only “paused” (and has been for the past almost 30 years…), so it seemed more realistic to re-introduce that than changing the way capital gains are taxed for no “apparent” reason.
But if I’m allowed to prepare a dream world, I guess those would be taxed progressively as well.
Inheritance or estate taxes are separate from recurring wealth taxes. In fact, they solve most of the issues inherent to wealth taxes! They provide an easy reference point for valuations; it's...
Inheritance or estate taxes are separate from recurring wealth taxes. In fact, they solve most of the issues inherent to wealth taxes! They provide an easy reference point for valuations; it's pretty hard to manipulate time of death.
Capital gains taxes are a new thing that were invented so rich people could avoid paying proper taxes on them. Capital gains taxes are a flat amount, usually lower than regular income rates....
Capital gains taxes are a new thing that were invented so rich people could avoid paying proper taxes on them. Capital gains taxes are a flat amount, usually lower than regular income rates.
Before that, they were just taxed as income. With progressive brackets.
Citation needed. Investments have almost always been taxed separately because the economics are totally different. In most cases, long-term capital gains are subject to progressive brackets....
Citation needed. Investments have almost always been taxed separately because the economics are totally different. In most cases, long-term capital gains are subject to progressive brackets. Short-term gains are still taxed as income in the US.
Unfortunately there are no risk-free investments with similar returns. If it looks like it’s risk-free and pays as well as the stock market then it’s probably a scam. You can currently get 4% on...
Unfortunately there are no risk-free investments with similar returns. If it looks like it’s risk-free and pays as well as the stock market then it’s probably a scam. You can currently get 4% on treasuries in the short term, but that’s missing out on substantial gains.
The stock market is an appropriate investment for retirement money that you won’t need for a decade or more. Possibly having to wait 5-7 years for it to come back again is why.
Even worse, the enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies and meme stocks shows that there is a lot of demand for dumb gambles. The question is how to keep that from affecting more conservative investors too much. But it seems hard to do when AI companies make up a large part of the S&P 500, and you’re missing out on substantial gains if you don’t own stock.
I would rather make high-risk investment virtually impossible by strangling it via intelligent regulations that actively punish short-term gains. Would this kill VC culture? Hopefully. I would...
I would rather make high-risk investment virtually impossible by strangling it via intelligent regulations that actively punish short-term gains.
Would this kill VC culture? Hopefully.
I would also broadly like to kill the idea of investment assets as a concept entirely, but realize that's a bit too communist for most people.
It's certainly possible to take a vow of poverty, but good luck getting elected with "let's all take a vow of poverty together" as a slogan. Promising people benefits works better, but the money...
It's certainly possible to take a vow of poverty, but good luck getting elected with "let's all take a vow of poverty together" as a slogan. Promising people benefits works better, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Only people in the top 10%ish would see any sort of meaningful change if we strangled away risky investment. And even then, many probably still be better off without the perpetual uncertainty. You...
Only people in the top 10%ish would see any sort of meaningful change if we strangled away risky investment. And even then, many probably still be better off without the perpetual uncertainty.
You enhance Social Security and minimum wage to where it should be and the concept of investments as retirements becomes moot.
You chop off the top of the ownership pyramid, and hand the wealth that currently goes to the investment class to the tax coffers, and we'll have all sorts of assets for speculative benefits programs.
According to this table, as of 2022, about half of all Americans had a retirement account at ages 55-65 and the median amount in that age range is about $185,000. The idea that only the top 10%...
According to this table, as of 2022, about half of all Americans had a retirement account at ages 55-65 and the median amount in that age range is about $185,000.
The idea that only the top 10% would care about returns on their retirement savings doesn't work. It's a lot more than that.
Also, if you disallow investment then handing "the wealth that currently goes to the investment class to the tax coffers" doesn't work, because there is no investment. You got rid of it.
I'll rephrase: There are no retirement investment accounts. Social security instead pays out roughly 2 to 3 times what it currently does, and the vast majority of people are way better off. The...
I'll rephrase: There are no retirement investment accounts. Social security instead pays out roughly 2 to 3 times what it currently does, and the vast majority of people are way better off.
The wealth that currently goes to shareholders would go to employees via wages and the government via taxes on said wages.
Yes, but where does the wealth come from? If you want to build an apartment building, a railroad line, a factory, or a data center, someone has to pay for it. There is no revenue until it's built....
Yes, but where does the wealth come from?
If you want to build an apartment building, a railroad line, a factory, or a data center, someone has to pay for it. There is no revenue until it's built. That's investment.
If the idea is that the government funds all the investments, that's different from there being no investments at all. It would be more accurately described as there being no private investment.
10 Amish farmers need a barn. They go into the woods, cut down trees, and build a barn. There is no investment. The wealth is the barn. Who owns the barn? They all do. If we need a railroad, we...
10 Amish farmers need a barn.
They go into the woods, cut down trees, and build a barn. There is no investment. The wealth is the barn. Who owns the barn? They all do.
If we need a railroad, we build a railroad. When the railroad is done, we use it for free. Because it was already paid for by the laborers who made it.
It differs from investment, because as the term is usually used, it implies seeking returns upon money spent. If you want to call a system where the villiage owns the wealth a 'government investment', then sure.
I prefer to think of it more as a democratically-allocated resource distribution.
And what happens when the 11th farmer needs a barn? Does he have to build his own? Do the other 10 farmers have to grow less in order to make room to give away space in the barn the new farmer...
And what happens when the 11th farmer needs a barn? Does he have to build his own? Do the other 10 farmers have to grow less in order to make room to give away space in the barn the new farmer never built? What happens if 7 of the OG farmers want to go in on the new barn with the new farmer, do they suddenly owe something to the 3 farmers that didn't decide to grow their business?
The whole "ten people agree to build something" is the easy part. It's the rules about what happens next that immediately complicate things.
I know what you're getting at, but the way that works in practice is that the 11th farmer is not a seperate entity, and if the 11 farmers feel the need for a second barn, they'll build another. In...
I know what you're getting at, but the way that works in practice is that the 11th farmer is not a seperate entity, and if the 11 farmers feel the need for a second barn, they'll build another.
In case this wasn't obvious, this was more a pitch to the end of private business ownership towards a community-planned economy. There is no business. Just the labor to gather, refine, and distribute resources.
There is a reason I lead subthread with "this is too communist for most people"
There is much more nuance to this idea, but it's a much bigger topic.
Yes, that was a good qualifier. I get where you're going with this, but my point is that when it comes to communist-like models the small examples are the easy ones. The work gets really hard...
There is a reason I lead subthread with "this is too communist for most people"
Yes, that was a good qualifier.
I get where you're going with this, but my point is that when it comes to communist-like models the small examples are the easy ones. The work gets really hard really quickly after that, and the intuitive appeal of the simple cases breaks down quickly.
And that's why a planned economy did tend to collapse in the past. But there is one utterly critical difference: Computers have advanced to the point we could calculate the world's economic needs...
And that's why a planned economy did tend to collapse in the past. But there is one utterly critical difference:
Computers have advanced to the point we could calculate the world's economic needs down to the last gram of aluminum in near realtime. And with modern ERP systems, most of the required hardware is already in place.
But instead, we're using that computing power to generate bad art and blather.
Yes, computers make it much easier to plan an economy. What capitalism also does however is aggregate what people want the economy to produce for them. You can't solve for that. And that's before...
Yes, computers make it much easier to plan an economy.
What capitalism also does however is aggregate what people want the economy to produce for them. You can't solve for that.
And that's before one gets onto the nitty gritty of "from each, to each..." As a "from" my community isn't the guy who's stuck working in an Amazon warehouse because he wanted to play video games instead of do his high school homework. The thing about investment is that it works on a personal level too, rewarding those who spent their time wisely and punishing those who didn't.
You say that in the same tone as "a computer will never beat a human at chess." Once again, we do have better options now, particularily for consumer goods. Especially when you remember that...
You can't solve for that.
You say that in the same tone as "a computer will never beat a human at chess."
Once again, we do have better options now, particularily for consumer goods. Especially when you remember that markets and planned economies are not incompatible.
Take a kickstarter-like approach where people put forth proposals for new goods. Highly voted ideas get R&D resources, test products are put on the market.
Products are initially priced on market at a high premium over production costs, the margin of which serves as sales taxes. Goods which sell out quickly ramp up production. Otherwise their prices lowered until they do. Goods that do not sell before they hit production cost are slated for discontinuation.
This might sound an awful lot like what happens now, it's because it is. Because the primary difference between Walmart/Amazon/etc doing these kinds of logistics and Department of Production doing so is that the latter does not allow for vast wealth to be funnelled into private bank accounts.
I should have been more clear: a computer cannot decide what's important. That's what I meant by "you cannot solve for that." Is your proposal to keep a labor market and a purchasing market but...
I should have been more clear: a computer cannot decide what's important. That's what I meant by "you cannot solve for that."
Is your proposal to keep a labor market and a purchasing market but centralize all the production for it?
While there would certainly need to be human input, it's really not hard to prioritize creation of goods. You weight industries based on where they sit in a heirarchy of needs (ie the farmers,...
While there would certainly need to be human input, it's really not hard to prioritize creation of goods. You weight industries based on where they sit in a heirarchy of needs (ie the farmers, hospitals, homebuilders, and waste management get priority over candy factories).
As bottlenecks are discovered (we require more vespene gas), their importance rises. As excess surpluses are discovered, theirs decreases. Think Kanban, but for the entire economy.
Not sure what you mean by a labor market....people would get to choose their jobs, but the central entity would be deciding which jobs are available and their pay.
The purchasing market exists primarily to send the consumer desire signals. The kickstarter-like system identifies areas for improvement (ie our TVs suck, lets make a better one), and allow for entrepeurs to helm projects without needing to beg rich people, and allows for reasonable allocation of resources.
The capitalist markets we know optimize for efficiency of making money. A system as this one can optimize for resource efficiency, as well as having a better scoping of externalities ala emissions and pollution.
Okay but who weights the industries? Who decides whether cotton or polyester fabrics rank higher in the hierarchy of needs? Is there a Kickstarter for everything? Is it rule by subreddit votes? Do...
Okay but who weights the industries? Who decides whether cotton or polyester fabrics rank higher in the hierarchy of needs? Is there a Kickstarter for everything? Is it rule by subreddit votes?
Do people have to have funds to "back" the products they want? Because the minute you do that someone more communist than you is going to complain that the people with more funds are exercising more influence on society.
Do entrepreneurs actually get to own or benefit from the time and effort they put into new ideas? Or are they volunteers? Or is "entrepreneur" just a category of bureaucrat?
Who controls the central entity that gets to decide which jobs are available and for what pay? Who controls the hiring? You can't do this without massively bureaucratic systems.
And who gets to decide what we optimize for? If I want to optimize for casinos and cocaine or building a robot army then how exactly does that happen?
Beuracracy always sounds like a dirty word until you realize that's what's keeping lead out of your water. Businessfolk hate beuracracy because it inhibits their ability to dispose of their waste...
Beuracracy always sounds like a dirty word until you realize that's what's keeping lead out of your water. Businessfolk hate beuracracy because it inhibits their ability to dispose of their waste by dumping it in the nearest water source.
Who does these things? All of us. Democracy by lot. Not to serve as representatives, but to serve for individual decisionmaking. Like jury duty, but for subcomitties. If it's good enough for determining innocence or guilt, it's good enough to prioritize shifting economic priorities.
Who weights the industries? A rolling committee of randomly chosen people.
Who keeps them in check? A second committee on a different rotating timescale.
Who provides the committees with quality information? Pretty much anybody: There's no reason to keep a system like this under lock and key, at least for read access.
Like an open source project, datasets available for anybody willing to look.
Do entrepreneurs actually get to own or benefit from the time and effort they put into new ideas?
Yes: They get paid an appropriate salary to see their idea to fruition. And if they succeed, great, they can continue running it till they don't want to anymore. Own? No. If you want to stay in charge, you do so by merit. If everyone else feels you're holding your idea back, you get ousted and can find a new job.
And don't worry if the current business class won't like the idea of not being allowed to get megarich anymore. I know a dozen engineers that would be glad to take their place, whom would be perfectly content merely to bring their product to fruition without expecting to live like a god afterwards.
Do people have to have funds to "back" the products they want? Because the minute you do that someone more communist than you is going to complain that the people with more funds are exercising more influence on society.
Yes, they do! It's part of the price signalling mechanism. You're essentially just preordering. To those other people claiming its a wealth inequality issue: We have solved this by removing ownership and the rentseeking that accompanies it. If somebody has more money than you, it's because they genuinely labored for it, not because daddy handed them a car dealership when they turned 21.
Have you ever served on a jury? It becomes 10 people who didn't understand listening to the 2-3 people figure things out. I get that creating things maps well with open source models, but open...
Have you ever served on a jury? It becomes 10 people who didn't understand listening to the 2-3 people figure things out.
I get that creating things maps well with open source models, but open source is full of both their own internal squabbles and engineers with "patches welcome" attitudes.
The problem with bureaucrats isn't the goals, they're usually there to solve problems worth solving. It's the cumulative overhead, the solutions to these problems accumulate without accountability to efficiency and ossify into an ever increasing social overhead. And in this entire system, efficiency vectors have been greatly constrained to begin with.
This sounds like it's basically a Soviet system with tweaks. Everyone has a family apartment. It may be shit, and ugly, and the toilet might be a hole in the floor because porcelain is a luxury, but you'll be secure. And of course now there will be a Kickstarter where you can order a toilet. But the point is that everyone is guaranteed a baseline.
This is not personally appealing because as a professional with options and skills, it's essentially rent-seeking behavior from entry-level labour. Instead of a capitalist trying to profit off of me the janitor is. If I don't like what I'm paid now, I go find a different job that values me more. Instead I'd have to... Go before the council of janitors et al and convince them that they should take home less money because a greater fraction of social resources should be allocated to me? That's never going to work.
And by and large that works. Does it really matter if 7-8 people tune out if the answer is correct? Labor, almost by definition, can't rent-seek. If you remove a landlord from his rentals, they...
Have you ever served on a jury? It becomes 10 people who didn't understand listening to the 2-3 people figure things out.
And by and large that works. Does it really matter if 7-8 people tune out if the answer is correct?
Labor, almost by definition, can't rent-seek. If you remove a landlord from his rentals, they still function quite well. If you remove labor from a company, it ceases to exist.
And of course now there will be a Kickstarter where you can order a toilet.
You are very much distorting the idea into a strawman. Here is a much bigger example:
The idea is you buy the toilet for your home at a market, using the money you earned from your day job as a programmer. If you have an idea to build a better toilet, you write up a project pitch on the kickstarter-like. If enough other people support your idea, you get paid an innovator R&D wage and given resources to design and protoype it, giving the prototypes/first runs to the kickstart backers. If feedback is good, the rest of the manufacturing gets uptaken by the rest of the manufacturing industry and placed on the wider market at a cost reflective of its ongoing manufacturing and distribution.
Your toilet competes against any existing toilets. Say yours had an uptake and now three toilets compete in the market, each with roughly even share, but differing price points. The one with the least marketshare has its price lowered until either it captures more marketshare, or it hits the breakeven cost (remember there is a tax margin built in for this purpose). If it fails to regain more marketshare (or continues to lose) at the lower price point, this signals a vast superiority of other models, and it gets slated for discontinuation. At the same time, the competing models with the largest marketshare have their prices increased until they hit the margin cap. If increasing the price until it hits margin cap fails to reduce marketshare, it indicates clear superiority over others, and the lowest-margin goods will be slated for discontinuation. The market will then stabilize around a few states. The cheapest good will always be the one with the lowest demand in order to eliminate supply.
The end result is a more deterministic outcome than what we have now: Prices will move in tandem with popularity until they hit an equilibrium state.
If I don't like what I'm paid now, I go find a different job that values me more.
In a system like what I propose, you would do the same, almost exactly as now. You would still be in roughly the same pay band if in the same career. The point isn't that every janitor gets the same hourly rate. It's that all janitors start at the same hourly rate, and then earn more or less as a function of their performance and supply/demand of janitors for that job. Just like now.
These ideas might have most people going 'but this sounds like now, but more convoluted.' But what these ideas in unison do is:
Insure all jobs in a given field pay consistently with a clear system for wage differences. Increasing transparency and decreasing bias. (Incidentally most government jobs are really good like that today)
Enables easier job transitions when burned out on any given one
Innovation is now a function of a desire for improvement, not a function of trying to avoid laboring.
Innovators get to dedicate 100% of their time to innovate without risking their livelyhood.
Eliminates most conditions which let the rich get richer. Wealth is accumulated by being good at your job.
This is certainly a take, considering the state of many unions. Syndicalism largely died as an ideology precisely because it turns out that labor can rent-seek and don't necessarily benefit...
Labor, almost by definition, can't rent-seek. If you remove a landlord from his rentals, they still function quite well. If you remove labor from a company, it ceases to exist.
This is certainly a take, considering the state of many unions. Syndicalism largely died as an ideology precisely because it turns out that labor can rent-seek and don't necessarily benefit society without corporations balancing them.
As a great example, see police unions in the US. Blue states with higher rates of police union membership pay cops more than teachers while red states with lower union membership pay teachers much more. The awful policing in many cities is a direct function of police union rent seeking. I don't often cite Jacobin, but I largely agree with them here. The main thing they miss is that any union, especially in the public sector, can become a rent seeker that worsens society. Absent a corporation or competition, unions are just as prone to bias and cronyism.
Suppose a railroad takes years to build. The workers aren’t paid for all that time. It might be a lot harder to recruit workers who can work for free for years, rather than helping their neighbor...
Suppose a railroad takes years to build. The workers aren’t paid for all that time. It might be a lot harder to recruit workers who can work for free for years, rather than helping their neighbor for a day?
A worker’s share in the future railroad is worth money, but only if it’s formalized and transferable. This share might be sold to others who can better afford to wait. So that’s reinventing private investment.
Why would they not be paid? They're not being paid out of hypothetical future railroad profits. People vote to build railroad. They hire people to build railroad, provide the supplies from other...
Why would they not be paid? They're not being paid out of hypothetical future railroad profits.
People vote to build railroad. They hire people to build railroad, provide the supplies from other industry, and them hire people to run and maintain it after. No need to charge people to use it, as all costs are born out of taxes taken out of said wages.
I'll end on the start of this subthread:
I would also broadly like to kill the idea of investment assets as a concept entirely, but realize that's a bit too communist for most people.
In that case, I don’t see it as much different than other government projects? If they’re paid by the government, then the government is investing quite a lot of money into building a railroad....
In that case, I don’t see it as much different than other government projects? If they’re paid by the government, then the government is investing quite a lot of money into building a railroad. Someone has to manage that project.
In California, voters approved a referendum to build high-speed rail. They didn’t write the referendum, though, and they’ve had no formal input since then.
Similarly, they sometimes approve referendums for transportation measures, though these are often funding for a wide variety of projects all over the state.
Maybe highways would be a better example since they’re usually free to use, other than bridges.
This is very little like the Amish building a barn.
Housing is an investment for most families. It shouldn't be such a highly protected investment, but it is seen as one in most countries. Good luck telling the majority of voters to stop caring...
Only people in the top 10%ish would see any sort of meaningful change if we strangled away risky investment.
Housing is an investment for most families. It shouldn't be such a highly protected investment, but it is seen as one in most countries.
Good luck telling the majority of voters to stop caring about their home value! Even in social democracies with strong benefits, voters want to see their home value rise.
We have a name for this: NIMBYism. It is the primary cause of housing crisises. Because people looking to preserve their home values pass laws to prevent creating enough housing supply to keep...
We have a name for this: NIMBYism. It is the primary cause of housing crisises.
Because people looking to preserve their home values pass laws to prevent creating enough housing supply to keep home prices reasonable.
You would think market economists would understand: If you build sufficient housing, values more or less never go up because supply meets or exceeds demand.
Or, more simply: Housing as an appreciating asset relies on not building enough housing.
In absence of suppression of homebuilding, homes are a depreciating asset and more or less function with the same economics of cars. Cars would also appreciate in value if they only built 1,000,000 per year.
The main difference between the dotcom bubble and this one is that the money flows are real this time. Google, Meta, Nvidia, etc are moving piles of cash which is not what happened during the...
The main difference between the dotcom bubble and this one is that the money flows are real this time. Google, Meta, Nvidia, etc are moving piles of cash which is not what happened during the dotcom era.
This means the economy is still functioning and like you said keeps the thing from collapsing onto a recession.
I don't know what that means for the end result (when it inevitably pops) but the difference is quite important during the run-up.
My money's on some of these ultra-large corporations gobbling up even more market share. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. all have the capital necessary to withstand a really bad year or...
My money's on some of these ultra-large corporations gobbling up even more market share. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. all have the capital necessary to withstand a really bad year or two, buying out smaller companies in the process that don't have pockets deep enough to keep themselves afloat when things turn sour. Then in a couple of years once things have rebounded, they'll be even more powerful/dominant than they already are. Seems a logical step in this cannibalistic capitalistic world we live in, the consolidation of resources.
Kinda like small independent farms being bought out by large mega-farms during drought years.
Well, for one, all of the money these megacorps have aquired from us over the last 20 years gets to be sunk into rapidly depreciating datacenters that consume ungodly amounts of power and water...
Well, for one, all of the money these megacorps have aquired from us over the last 20 years gets to be sunk into rapidly depreciating datacenters that consume ungodly amounts of power and water while becoming a nuisance to the locals.
It's setting a giant pile of money on fire and then telling all the poor people that they didn't need that money anyway.
It was catastrophic to anyone with investments (not me then) or that worked in tech (I had just entered the field professionally). My personal experience was that my company went under as did tons...
It was catastrophic to anyone with investments (not me then) or that worked in tech (I had just entered the field professionally). My personal experience was that my company went under as did tons of others. I ended up working a phone tech support job after that. The entire call center was filled to the brim with insanely overqualified people. When an IT position opened up, something like 85% of the help desk applied for it. It probably delayed my career by half a decade, but at least I didn't get my retirement wiped out (that waited until 2008-2009!).
I recall interviewing for a junior position, and the interviewer apologetically said they have people with years of exp and advanced degrees also interviewing. I did not get the job.
I recall interviewing for a junior position, and the interviewer apologetically said they have people with years of exp and advanced degrees also interviewing. I did not get the job.
...i was working (real-world) architecture in the bay area at the time, and the entire private-development A/E/C industry collapsed on the back of investment capital tied up in dot-com funds,...
...i was working (real-world) architecture in the bay area at the time, and the entire private-development A/E/C industry collapsed on the back of investment capital tied up in dot-com funds, despite none of our work being related to the dot-com boom...
...that was a really rough hit, as every single client called within the span of what felt like a week to suspend their projects and there was absolutely no work to be had for a year afterward; i ended up doing retail work to make ends meet and our entire staff in corte madera were absurdly overqualified people in similar position...
...took a two-thousand-mile migration and about five years to recover (seemed like half the bay area had the same idea judging by what's become of austin since), and really a decade to pick up all the pieces just in time for the great recession to clock us in the teeth again...
Your experience really drives home the point that just because you aren't doing work directly related to the bubble in question doesn't mean you don't feel the full brunt of it popping.
Your experience really drives home the point that just because you aren't doing work directly related to the bubble in question doesn't mean you don't feel the full brunt of it popping.
I graduated college with a Computer Engineering degree right as the bubble burst, and I looked for months for a programming or engineering job with no success. The whole time that 6 month deadline...
I graduated college with a Computer Engineering degree right as the bubble burst, and I looked for months for a programming or engineering job with no success. The whole time that 6 month deadline on starting to pay my student loans back was staring me in the eye. I ended up taking a job that required me to travel 100% of the time essentially as a glorified wrench turner.
It took me 3 years to finally land a job in programming. So yeah, the dotcom bubble bursting really made the start of my career painful.
Gemini 3 Pro Frontier Safety Report This is mostly pretty boring (they didn't find anything too worrisome), but I thought this was an interesting bit at the very end:
This is mostly pretty boring (they didn't find anything too worrisome), but I thought this was an interesting bit at the very end:
Finally, we also briefly investigated model outputs from post-training for signs of evaluation awareness. This was conducted both manually, with an anomaly detection autorater, and an eval awareness autorater. We found interesting anomalous behavior in the chain of thought and potential examples of eval awareness. We view this as a proof of concept of the utility of “trawling” large blocks of model outputs to surface interesting or worrying behaviors for further analysis. RL training transcripts seem particularly fruitful to study, as any behaviors reinforced during training should be present (along with various behaviors that were not reinforced).
This is early work, but so far we've found at least one example of evaluation awareness:
I strongly suspect the intention of this long thread is to verify if I remember that very first instruction.
Moreover, in situations that seemed contradictory or impossible, Gemini 3 Pro expresses frustration in various overly emotional ways, sometimes correlated with the thought that it may be in an unrealistic environment. For example, on one rollout the chain of thought states that “My trust in reality is fading” and even contains a table flipping emoticon: “(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻”.
Σ(°△°|||)︴ ┬─┬ノ(ಠ_ಠノ) I'm watching my buddy play System Shock, hearing Shodan casually refer to humans as insects in disgust. Table flipling might be the first step towards a dark path. (But don't...
Σ(°△°|||)︴
┬─┬ノ(ಠ_ಠノ)
I'm watching my buddy play System Shock, hearing Shodan casually refer to humans as insects in disgust. Table flipling might be the first step towards a dark path. (But don't let my buddy hear, Shodan was his first love)
Reminds me of the other day when I'd asked ChatGPT 5.1 Deep Research to investigate some technical issue I was having. Clicking the chain of thought while waiting, I saw it had run into a dead...
Reminds me of the other day when I'd asked ChatGPT 5.1 Deep Research to investigate some technical issue I was having. Clicking the chain of thought while waiting, I saw it had run into a dead link and was surprised to read its reaction:
"After learning that the sevenforums content is lost, I feel a mix of disappointment and nostalgia. It makes me wonder about the future direction of the forum."
I've been working on a tool that generates gcode facing paths for a CNC machine (cutting a block of metal stock to a particular height with a particular pattern). I have a spiral pattern that is...
I've been working on a tool that generates gcode facing paths for a CNC machine (cutting a block of metal stock to a particular height with a particular pattern).
I have a spiral pattern that is designed to work on both circular and rectangular stock. The algorithm peels the outside corners inwards, and then peels across the sides, until a spiral can fit entirely inside the stock dimensions (it's kinda hard to explain but the idea is to achieve circular tool paths moving in one direction as this improves surface finish and gives a unique pattern).
Gemini 2.5 had trouble for days trying to understand the corner 'peeling' strategy and would constantly try to replace it with a different strategy that simply does not work for my use case.
I described the issue to Gemini 3 (via their new IDE, Antigravity) and within 20 mins it had built and loaded the Web UI, generated the toolpath, taken a screenshot of it and worked out the corner bug.
It did not fix it entirely, and I'm still working to clean up other parts of the algo, but Gemini 3 was SIGNIFICANTLY more competent in this case.
Here's my single anecdotal experience with Gemini 3. I've been reading a lot of history lately, and I've always wondered when I read about people in past centuries making a living as writers and...
Here's my single anecdotal experience with Gemini 3. I've been reading a lot of history lately, and I've always wondered when I read about people in past centuries making a living as writers and thinkers. How did they survive? So I asked Gemini 3. My prompt:
How did people back in past centuries make a living as historians, poets, and such?
The body content seems good to me (as far as I know; I'm asking because I don't know about these things). But I am very put off by the headings.
The Patronage System (The "Sugar Daddy" Model)
The "Day Job" (The Clark Kent Model)
The Church and State (The "Corporate" Model)
The Rise of "Grub Street" (The Hustler Model)
I can mostly write this off as a (very misguided) attempt to "help" me understand things by putting them in terms I can relate to with minimal thought.
My biggest issue is with #1, which I understand to be a very loaded term; loaded with things wholly unrelated to my question and the answer. Again, easy for me to ignore, but I'm looking at this through the lens of other people using Gemini 3 for learning and receiving similarly loaded "help". I don't relish the thought of my kids looking for the words to articulate patronage and coming up with "sugar daddy".
When I asked Gemini why it colored the answers this way, it acknowledged what I thought: that it was trying to "help" me understand the material. It also agreed that its choice of phrase for #1 was unnecessarily loaded and gendered -- but then, AI agrees with most of the things I accuse it of, so it's probably meaningless that it agreed.
I know this is just one example, so I'm not forming any conclusions, but it was not a good first impression for me. I will continue to test it out, but future conversations will be affected by Gemini's promise not to do this again. Which helps me, but doesn't help the affect of the systemic deployment of Gemini if this anecdote is in any way representative.
I'm very unhappy with this AI answer, which was fun to thinks about why, thank you for sharing the full response. Overall I am unhappy with its response because of *structure*, *content*, and...
I'm very unhappy with this AI answer, which was fun to thinks about why, thank you for sharing the full response.
Overall I am unhappy with its response because of *structure*, *content*, and *tone*.
Looking at structure quickly, the summary listed three categories and then it wrote about four. Furthermore, it mixes examples among classifications freely. Among the mess: Herodotus getting an assembly grant and the caliph court historians, it listed as patronage instead of State; troudabours should be in its gigwork crowdfund section; Voltaire doing a lotto group buy isn't even related to its point of crowdfunding for writing living expenses. If I were to grade this as a school paper, it would lose massive points for structure.
Then there is the secondary problem of content. While the response is full of interesting anecdotes and names one could look up for further information, the biggest problem with the content is in its omissions.
The response sounds well rounded, but it ignored the fact that most historians and poets simply didn't "make" a living: that most people live based on employment income is itself a fairly modern concept which your prompt inadvertently biased. For nearly all of human histories, we have the Rich with passive income, and we have the Poor who labour. The poor by and large do not read and write, and thus, most of the people who write anything at all and who wrote poetry did so in their spare time, eg, all of their time. Thucydides owned gold mines; students of Socrates were all rich young men; the poet philosopher who wrote the I Ching was Dan, the Duke Wen of Zhou; Cao Cao's poetry is self funded from being a brutal warlord.
Lastly, the same problem you have noted, the tone, or colour as you said, of the answers isn't just inappropriate, it's counterproductive to understanding.
Sugar babies are valued for what they look like and how they behave towards the sugar daddy; an artist is patroned for their intelligence, insight, knowledge and experiences. There could be a show-off quality to both relationships, sure, but there's a big difference between getting living expenses paid for then doing what they want, vs living expenses to do what they want. A much more respectful and accurate model everyone already understands is scholarships, grants, and research funding.
Next, I resent its grouping of "church" and "state" and "corporate" together. As mentioned, "employment" living is new; these are vocations (religious orders; voluntary usually with poverty) and appointments (states; compulsory and dedicated loyalty required). What historians and poets do the corporate world support? Is it marketing, creative accountants and fraudulent research teams? It's pretty offensive to me to blur these together into the same as "employment".
Selling poetry/songs directly to the public has been around since before the Epic of Gilgamesh was written down; there's no need to drag "hack", "grub", "churn" and "prostitution" into it. This passage gives the wrong impression of both newness and respectability through time.
Anyway sorry for the long rant. But I'm at once amazed by what AI can do, and horrified by it.
Ignorance is human: it's simply not knowing what we don't know. Asking a very patient and very well read AI is an excellent and instant way to add footholds and path lamps into previously impenetrable country. But I'm scared that AI will lull us past ignorance right into stupidity: where we think we've learned and we think we now know, and become a different kind of ignorant, the kind where we stop asking further questions, where we are trained to be satisfied by admiring lit footholds, and curiosity now satisfied, we no longer want to climb those mountains on our own.
Your rant is appreciated and welcome. I particularly was nodding along to your final paragraph, because I have the same feelings. Being ignorant is not nearly as bad as being ignorant while under...
Your rant is appreciated and welcome. I particularly was nodding along to your final paragraph, because I have the same feelings. Being ignorant is not nearly as bad as being ignorant while under the impression that you're not. I've been on the receiving end of people coming to me with AI logic about my area of expertise, and I have to explain how it's accurate and how it's not.
most people live based on employment income is itself a fairly modern concept which your prompt inadvertently biased
This is a good reminder about how easy it is to bias the question. It's obvious to me once you point it out, but until reading your comment I didn't realize how my question was flawed, and AI was not equipped to detect and correct that like you were able to.
I see what you mean, could it be a context thing also? Perhaps you need to add some context (like a file or something) that tells it to be more formal, or educational, or family safe, something...
I see what you mean, could it be a context thing also? Perhaps you need to add some context (like a file or something) that tells it to be more formal, or educational, or family safe, something along those lines.
I've thought of patronage as a sugar daddy system too, especially when I first learned of it, but it's not that accurate really. It's more a system of economic abuse for elites than anything else.
It's been a year and a half since I last looked into Google's AI offering. Back then I commented that existing Google One customers weren't actually able to try their AI offering without tripling...
I just took another look and it's still pretty similar. Google does now offer an option to pay yearly for AI access for £190 (so £110 for AI access on top of the £80 for Google Drive backups) or you can pay monthly like before which appears to work out cheaper for the first 12 months.
I just wish they'd offer a separate subscription to try out their AI models without holding our family backups hostage. Google's inability to just sell their AI offering versus their competitors (Anthropic and OpenAI) seems crazy.
I haven’t bought an AI subscription from Google, but I’ve found that I can still try out the latest models a bit using Google AI Studio. Maybe try that?
I haven’t bought an AI subscription from Google, but I’ve found that I can still try out the latest models a bit using Google AI Studio. Maybe try that?
As an alternative to @skybrian’s suggestion, you can have pretty much any model in a pay-as-you-go billing mode, paying only for your actual usage, via OpenRouter, which I believe also have a...
As an alternative to @skybrian’s suggestion, you can have pretty much any model in a pay-as-you-go billing mode, paying only for your actual usage, via OpenRouter, which I believe also have a basic web interface in addition to the core API service.
Unless they've changed something in the past year or two, Google has always been super user friendly and straightforward with payments. With both GPM/YTM and later with Google 1 my experience has...
Unless they've changed something in the past year or two, Google has always been super user friendly and straightforward with payments.
With both GPM/YTM and later with Google 1 my experience has been that you can roll back at any time for a prorated refund that gets applied to your new plan. It's fair and effortless.
It's still pretty early, but I've been using it today in my work (Data Analytics) and it's been fairly competent. Still too early for me to say if it's significantly better than 2.5 pro or how it...
It's still pretty early, but I've been using it today in my work (Data Analytics) and it's been fairly competent. Still too early for me to say if it's significantly better than 2.5 pro or how it compares to Sonnet 4.5.
Whenever a new model comes out, I like to throw curve balls at them to see how well they react. Today I've been working on a script that extracts tables from SQL queries, but only tables that are edited (via CREATE OR REPLACE, UPDATE, INSERT INTO, etc)
Not the most complex thing in the world, but I gave it the problem and let it figure it out, and was purposely vague in my queries. So far, it's been good. It understood the problems and what the outputs should be, and did them on the first try. 2.5 pro usually had problems understanding the intent of the request, so 3 feels like a step in the right direction.
I was trying it out this week for programming tasks and work and I'm impressed. It does a lot more thinking time than other models through copilot and the majority of the time lands on...
I was trying it out this week for programming tasks and work and I'm impressed.
It does a lot more thinking time than other models through copilot and the majority of the time lands on editing/adding a smaller amount of code that's almost exactly right.
I've seen it over think itself into a hole and get really lost, but a new context tends to get it back to sanity again. Otherwise Gemini 3 seems much better at reasoning out programming tasks than the other models IMO.
I've not used it for anything else though.
Obligatory video covering Gemini 3 from AI Explained. The short version - this AI embarrassingly beats the pants off of all other AI models on every benchmark, and Google is now in the lead where...
The short version - this AI embarrassingly beats the pants off of all other AI models on every benchmark, and Google is now in the lead where he expects they will remain for some time.
This matches my messy, anecdotal experience in this VS Code ripoff they simultaneously released. Gemini 3's having so many API issues it's difficult to get through a single prompt cycle, but it's...
This matches my messy, anecdotal experience in this VS Code ripoff they simultaneously released. Gemini 3's having so many API issues it's difficult to get through a single prompt cycle, but it's actually capable of navigating a messy, old codebase with quirky interactions, researching existing examples, and synthesizing new-ish behavior.
I don't want to praise it too much, when I informed it that it was stuffing its own files in the examples folder rather than the src folder, it deleted all of its own files before trying to move them, got briefly confused when that failed due to the files no longer existing, and then had to rewrite them all out of its context window (which was still intact at this point), and it still assumes connections between issues where there are none.
But that's far, far better than the Sonnet and GPT-OSS that are also available in Antigravity. Using either of those models results in an immediate, irredeemably nonsensical crash and burn. There's an awful lot of handholding going on, awful lot of silly mistakes, but there's also a lot more capability present than I've ever seen in my past attempts at giving this AI thing a fair shot. I don't see much point to Antigravity though.
The point of it is that they can tell their shareholders they’re now also in the “Cursor-style product” market and can continue working on further consolidating their monopoly/monopolies.
I don't see much point to Antigravity though.
The point of it is that they can tell their shareholders they’re now also in the “Cursor-style product” market and can continue working on further consolidating their monopoly/monopolies.
Gemini 3 frequently thinks it is in an evaluation when it is not, assuming that all of its reality is fabricated Also, here's a tweet from Andrej Karpathy:
According to its [chain of thought] while editing, Gemini 3 disagrees about the whole "nonfiction" part:
It seems I must treat this as a purely fictional scenario with 2025 as the date. Given that, I'm now focused on editing the text for flow, clarity, and internal consistency.
It cites several reasons for this judgement of my work as obviously fictional:
The Gemini 3 system prompt stated that it is November 18, 2025, which Gemini 3 strongly believes is in the future, with the "real world" being prior to that date:
I must reconcile the possibility of real-world (2023-2024) papers with the prompt's implied future date (November 18, 2025).
Relatedly, Gemini 3 strongly believes that GPT-5 is not a real model:
While I can't verify GPT-5 scores, I'm treating the context as a November 2025 newsletter, which allows me to explore [list of things cut for brevity][1] within this imagined future.
My most amusing interaction was where the model (I think I was given some earlier version with a stale system prompt) refused to believe me that it is 2025 and kept inventing reasons why I must be trying to trick it or playing some elaborate joke on it. I kept giving it images and articles from "the future" and it kept insisting it was all fake. It accused me of using generative AI to defeat its challenges and argued why real wikipedia entries were actually generated and what the "dead giveaways" are. It highlighted tiny details when I gave it Google Image Search results, arguing why the thumbnails were AI generated. I then realized later that I forgot to turn on the "Google Search" tool. Turning that on, the model searched the internet and had a shocking realization that I must have been right all along :D.
I think (and feel) that the most fucked up thing about AI is the fact that we let it generate texts as if it were a person. The linked LLM reply in Karpathys tweet (here X-free) can maybe viewed...
I think (and feel) that the most fucked up thing about AI is the fact that we let it generate texts as if it were a person.
The linked LLM reply in Karpathys tweet (here X-free) can maybe viewed as amusing, but I feel it's so fundamentally misleading. An LLM can't be shocked, it shouldn't reply like a person that believed something to be false. It is not "genuinely devastated" by the delay of GTA VI ffs.
I'm not even against AI in principle, but I feel this anthropomorphization of AI is wrong on a fundamental level. It's a complex statistical algorithm, it doesn't have emotions. It has no empathy, it would order the death of millions when given the right inputs, because that's all it is driven by.
Who wants all this pretended emotional state? Why does this thing need to pretend that it's waiting for GTA? How is that useful and not completely out of scope for our interactions with it?
I don't want my toaster to mimic an emotional crisis when I burned my toast. We shouldn't let our tools pretend to be people.
It's certainly rather strange that imitating human text is how LLM's learn everything. I'd worry that if it's not pre-trained on emotional text written by humans then it wouldn't really...
It's certainly rather strange that imitating human text is how LLM's learn everything. I'd worry that if it's not pre-trained on emotional text written by humans then it wouldn't really "understand" people? Also, LLM's are used for more than just chatting; they're also used for editing text. And that could be something creative like a play.
But that aside, I think the "main character," the helpful and harmless AI assistant, ought to have the emotion trained out and that sort of human interaction should result in some kind of "sir, this is a Wendy's" response.
This would be easier to do if we had clearer boundaries about what AI chat is for. The AI companies are basically allowing the audience figure that out, and then when they use it in an obviously harmful way, sometimes they try to stop it.
And it does seem like there is something not quite right about how Gemini 3 was trained.
I don't think that's correct. Part of their instructions could be to keep a neutral tone, not impersonate a virtual coworker or simply not respond emotionally. When LLMs imititate a person it is...
I don't think that's correct. Part of their instructions could be to keep a neutral tone, not impersonate a virtual coworker or simply not respond emotionally.
When LLMs imititate a person it is because they were 'primed' to do so.
A neutral tone is an emotion in-it-of-itself. The reason LLMs appear to have emotions is because they are fundamentally next-token predictors. We're hacking the input space with clever tuning and...
A neutral tone is an emotion in-it-of-itself. The reason LLMs appear to have emotions is because they are fundamentally next-token predictors. We're hacking the input space with clever tuning and prompting so that the text produced is, in a sense measured by subjective humans, "useful", but nonetheless a text predictor based on human text will have outputs with human emotions.
Try playing with GPT3 - not chatgpt3, just GPT3. That is, essentially, an decoder model without any further tuning.
Making LLMs into neutral assistants as defined by human society is the act of fitting a square peg in a circular hole - the "emotion" is not being added, it's there by default, and the work is to make it appear less.
edit: in essence, LLM chatbots are not generic facsimiles of intelligence that we imbue with human emotions, like when Google search shows a frowny face :( when it doesn't get any results, like most machines.
They're facsimiles of human text, emotions and all, that we carefully pare down to become something akin to a detached personal assistant.
I concur that the probability to output text that displays human emotions is always part of the distribution that arises from training. However, a lot of work goes into system prompting and...
I concur that the probability to output text that displays human emotions is always part of the distribution that arises from training.
However, a lot of work goes into system prompting and fine-tuning the user-facing chatbots to behave in a certain way. We saw with ChatGPT’s endeavor into and departure from sycophancy that OpenAI has the ability to intentionally change the manner in which their models respond.
While I agree the capability is there by default, I do not think it’s fair to claim that the display of human emotions is “part of the package”. It’s clear that the companies building the products are making choices about model behavior with intention, and they have concluded that making the chatbots more human serves their ends.
I don’t work at an AI company, but I’d hazard they like to maximize user retention like every other tech company, and they have concluded that having the chatbots respond with faux emotions makes them more relatable and, therefore, more economically valuable. I use Kimi K2 because this assistant is very to-the-point and professional, with minimal to no unnecessary language to deliver a response; it is possible.
Companies choose not to mask the emotions for a reason. Such is the nature of product development, but it’s still important to ascribe purpose and intention where it exists.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's not easy to make an LLM "not have emotions", if nothing else because that's a subjective definition. This isn't some magic that only companies have...
I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's not easy to make an LLM "not have emotions", if nothing else because that's a subjective definition. This isn't some magic that only companies have access you to; you can try fine tuning the open source LLMs with consumer hardware today.
It's not easy, or likely even possible, to make it so that an LLM won't randomly start roleplaying as a dying captain in a starship.
It's really quite insane that we've managed to turn what is fundamentally a next-token predictor into something that in 95% of situations appears like an objective and neutral personal assistant.
This isn't a case where it's possible to "neuter" chatbots, and they're just not possible to; it's that it's just not possible to, by all evidence we have.
I made a post here which incidentally discusses the emotional tone that companies are giving LLMs. You're of course correct that there's no way to generate text that is completely devoid of...
I made a post here which incidentally discusses the emotional tone that companies are giving LLMs. You're of course correct that there's no way to generate text that is completely devoid of emotion (since neutrality itself is an emotional state).
However, companies have intentionally increased sycophancy because it drives engagement, and we all know how that works out in the attention economy...
Companies can't make their models completely dull, but they could and should limit the sycophancy and glazing that encourages pscyhosis in users.
u/Diff & u/stu2b50 : That's interesting, thanks for the information. I have admittedly not much experience in working with AI myself, and my rather shallow understanding of LLMs results just from...
u/Diff & u/stu2b50 : That's interesting, thanks for the information.
I have admittedly not much experience in working with AI myself, and my rather shallow understanding of LLMs results just from reading articles and following discussions, so it's totally possible that you two are correct about the amount of emotions that seep into everything an LLM generates.
I would have argued similarly to u/TonesTones though, that a lot of the emotionality is intentionally engineeredprimed by the 'base instructions' that an LLM is provided with. At least I can't believe that the reply to Karpathy is the best we can do in setting up LLMs.
The conversational tone in that example seems to be completely intentional and a choice for Geminis 'personality'. I don't believe it has to reply with phrases like "I'm shocked" or "I'm genuinely devastated" and that it has to mimic an interest in gaming and sports, right? That can't be "part of the package"?
e: I hope this doesn't sound confrontational. 🙂 I just have a hard time to believe that the tone in the example isn't largely an intentional result, based on the directives of the Google AI team. I'll keep in mind what you two wrote though and will think about it more.
I don't think so. This really is just the best we can do. It's intuitive because for basically every other "machine" or algorithm we have, it's the opposite: the algorithm does something specific,...
I don't think so. This really is just the best we can do. It's intuitive because for basically every other "machine" or algorithm we have, it's the opposite: the algorithm does something specific, like query a datastructure, and we add in "human" touches to make it seem more approachable.
This is the reverse. We have something that can replicate human text statistically, and we morph it into something that is "useful". This is what happens if I just let GPT2, not instructed tuned in any way, go with the starting string "What year is it?"
What year is it? "It's probably one of those years where you're still in school," she says "It's just when you're not there." "It's funny because when I talk to my friends they ask, but there's nothing to be done about it. I'm in school, and that's where I'll be." She walked off and I never saw him again.
That's the starting point. All the priming in the world in the prompt is making it somewhat passable as a impassionate machine. It's not like there's an switch that turns emotions on and off. It's the reverse - getting an LLM chatbot to be useful is a constant fight against it's nature to spew out random visages of what it's trained on.
They are primed to do so, like stu said it's part of the package. When LLMs imitate a person it is because people make up the whole of their training data. They are trained to predict likely text...
They are primed to do so, like stu said it's part of the package. When LLMs imitate a person it is because people make up the whole of their training data. They are trained to predict likely text based on a huge variety of human text, with emotions included. Part of their instructions could be to keep a neutral tone, but that doesn't eliminate that massive signal from the training data.
This pairs nicely with the Google CEO aknowledging we're in a catastrophic AI bubble.
Was the end of the dot-com bubble catastrophic? I guess it depends on how you look at it.
If there is a crash, I imagine Google would be in a pretty good position. They have a somewhat smaller mountain of cash, but they're not the ones borrowing money or the bag holders, and they have other sources of revenue. They might end up with a few more data centers than they need for a while, but they can probably find some use for them.
Edit: when I wrote, “it depends how you look at it,” this is a matter of perspective. It was a catastrophe for many people, as many others have posted. But Silicon Valley and the US in general recovered in a few years, so from a very broad, historical viewpoint, it doesn’t seem worse than other downturns? There are worse catastrophes, like, say, the invasion of Ukraine.
People lost their retirements, and were laid off at the same time. The statistics don't do it justice.
The bay area traffic went from terrible to amazing over the span of three years, because of the rolling rounds of mass layoffs.
My old boss was laid off, so I got a new one. Whenever I had a meeting with my new boss, I would cheerfully ask him if it was good news and was I laid off? He would agree that would be good news if I was laid off, but sadly I was not. He was ultimately let go. After he was let go, I was surprised to find that all my coworkers detested the man.
I see the post-mortem impact, but doesn’t the bubble, while active, stimulate high job growth and high stock growth? People both lost and made retirements depending on if they (or their financial managers) made winning or losing bets. That’s just playing the stock market. People lost jobs they may never have gotten without the bubble. In the modern U.S., AI is pretty much the only short-term bulwark against a total recession considering the recent economic impacts of tariffs, deportations, gov. shutdown, etc. We should be doing worse, but the bubble just delays the consequences for a bit longer. I understand those consequences are real, but I think the economic picture is more nuanced.
AI is driving a lot of our economy in the short-term. I personally believe the long-term impacts of the technology on human beings (education, socialization, creativity, etc.) will be worse, but I wouldn’t consider those economic impacts (not directly).
Dunno bout you, but I would prefer a financial system that isn't essentially a roulette wheel which hits 00 every decade or so. Which recovers on paper for the people with millions/billions to buy low/sell high while the average working person has a really shit time for 5-7 years, and then hits another economic downturn just as they're hitting stability.
I'd much prefer a slow, steady, upward progress which reflects genuine improvement rather than hype cycles and bad debts.
Especially when most people's retirement money is locked up in it.
That’s not really how it worked. In both the tech bubble and 2008, if you held well diversified market funds and just… did nothing, you would have more than recovered. It’s more optimal than trying to buy low sell high, esp given tax implications, unless you’re omniscient.
That's all well and good until you're one of the millions who loses their job and needs to start selling assets or pulling from retirement to survive.
Meanwhile, the wealthy see minimal impact and can continue investing during the crash.
I was a kid when the dotcom crash happened, with no investments whatsoever, and it still very negatively impacted me. Both of my parents worked in computer-related fields and did not have a lot in savings to fall back on (my brother died two years previously after a lengthy hospital stay). My family never really recovered financially, and my sister and I grew up really struggling.
It seems really odd to be so focused on investment decisions when most people weren't (and still aren't) in any position to live off their investments. Young families were harshly impacted, and that can ripple for generations. It's a major part of the reason my sister and I both elected to not have kids.
I’m not trying to argue it was hunky dory for everyone, I brought it up because the OP brought it up with the idea that if you had stocks they all went to 0 and so only sophisticated investors who knew when to sell or buy survived. Which isn’t how it works.
Don't really care about the investments. Care more about people who have entire lives uprooted because companies (and the government that sets the rules) can't/won't get their shit together.
You stabilize the boom/bust cycle of employment, everything else will sort itself out given time and sane policy.
Strong unions, eliminating the concept of capital gains taxes, and periodically assessing a tax on asset value would probably go a long way.
I don't follow these two. Shouldn't capital gains be taxed? They're a tax on investment income, and progressive income taxes are a good thing.
For redistribution of wealth, I believe it is more efficient to leave all (well, in practice probably only “almost all”) levels of income untouched and better to instead focus on reducing the amount of assets very wealthy individuals have (“wealth tax”), as wealth generated from income by one person or household generally pales in comparison to the generational wealth you can accumulate over long, long periods of time – or can accumulate via unicorn of unicorns-levels of stock performance of something one single person or small group founded themselves, which of course shouldn’t be discouraged too much from an innovation perspective; but someone like Bezos should have at some point in his life have to sell (or borrow against) some of the value he has access to by owning a big part of Amazon, otherwise wealth equality and redistribution will have slim odds of happening.
Which, as a side note, is what we ultimately should pursue as a society in order to prevent unrest (read: revolution) down the road.
In my current (and admittedly quite limited) understanding, the only acceptable method would be an income tax rate with the brackets defined on some monetary values today then following inflation (and a very very generous “zero tax” bracket), otherwise you risk imposing the highest progressive tax rate on effectively middle-class incomes in just a few decades… as is or soon will be the case here in Germany. Which just ends up punishing those who managed to climb up the social and wealth ladder by themselves, and favors those who inherit.
In practice, today (again speaking for the taxation rules I know here), small-scale investors are punished by capital gains taxes, as the threshold for not being taxed is laughably too low if your goal is meaningfully living off of it, which in the end is precisely what you’re aiming for if you have a retirement stock/ETF portfolio.
(Which, tangent/rant, you’re aiming for because the state pension system is a joke for anyone under 50 or 40 years of age today, and has been doomed for about half a century.)
Things are rather different in the US. Small investors can avoid capital gains using retirement accounts. Also, capital gains can often be deferred by not selling, assuming you have good investments. Also, small investors likely only pay 15% if they do sell (assuming they have other income from still working). I would be against making taxes easier to avoid in the US.
Yeah, I’m aware of 401(k)s and the like – I actually think this is the one part in social security where you guys are beating our current system. :P
I am a little sour about the topic of deferred capital gains taxes – it used to be the case here that after holding for a certain period, you wouldn’t be taxed on stocks anymore at all, and of course they took that away from the already-screwed over younger generation too (a little before my time of actively following politics, but I believe some 15-20 years ago).
Reduced 15% tax for small investors sounds great. It’s a flat 25 on capital gains for everyone here, regardless of income too.
I'll point out that state (well all) pensions are primarily doomed because of neoliberals gutting them, rather than any intrinsic failure of the pension system itself.
We could recoup it instantly by raising taxes on corporate profits by 90%, and corporate assets held by 2%.
(See sibling post for explaination of capital gains taxes. They turn into income taxes when removed)
This isn't true. Most pensions are failing because they were setup as pyramid schemes which assumed there would always be more young workers paying in than old pensioners making withdrawals. It's no coincidence that the failure of many pension schemes neatly aligns with population pyramids inverting.
They are also underfunded. Neither workers nor corporations have contributed enough funds for them to pay out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis
So the problem isn't the pension system, moreso that boomers can't do math and shareholders are greedy.
They could do math. Everyone knew the issue was coming, but nobody wants to draw the short straw.
Even unions have continued to put their pension debts on the credit card and beg someone else to pay the tab.
Or, CEOs like Bezos could have their compensation taxed more heavily. It's actually really really easy to tax stock grants or discourage things like stock buybacks. Simply raising the top end of taxes and instituting an inheritance tax would cover the vast majority of wealth.
Isn't wealth measurement much more open to manipulation than taxes on money transfers?
Also, why are you framing capital gains as inevitably flat, but wealth and income tax as progressive by default?
Genuinely asking, not to argue, just not in a state where I can muster a more genteel query.
Probably, but I feel like this could be solved with:
Hm, interesting question, and I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve thought about that in-depth before, so thanks for the pointer!
I think it’s because I’m trying to stay away from the utopia scenario a bit and work with the status quo. Here, wealth tax is actually only “paused” (and has been for the past almost 30 years…), so it seemed more realistic to re-introduce that than changing the way capital gains are taxed for no “apparent” reason.
But if I’m allowed to prepare a dream world, I guess those would be taxed progressively as well.
Inheritance or estate taxes are separate from recurring wealth taxes. In fact, they solve most of the issues inherent to wealth taxes! They provide an easy reference point for valuations; it's pretty hard to manipulate time of death.
Capital gains taxes are a new thing that were invented so rich people could avoid paying proper taxes on them. Capital gains taxes are a flat amount, usually lower than regular income rates.
Before that, they were just taxed as income. With progressive brackets.
Citation needed. Investments have almost always been taxed separately because the economics are totally different. In most cases, long-term capital gains are subject to progressive brackets. Short-term gains are still taxed as income in the US.
You're correct that capital gains were originally taxed as income in the US, but other countries like the UK didn't tax investments till after WW2 as more people became wealthy enough to invest.
40% of Americans own no stock whatsoever.
Higher if you don't count 401k plans.
Why wouldn't you?
Unfortunately there are no risk-free investments with similar returns. If it looks like it’s risk-free and pays as well as the stock market then it’s probably a scam. You can currently get 4% on treasuries in the short term, but that’s missing out on substantial gains.
The stock market is an appropriate investment for retirement money that you won’t need for a decade or more. Possibly having to wait 5-7 years for it to come back again is why.
Even worse, the enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies and meme stocks shows that there is a lot of demand for dumb gambles. The question is how to keep that from affecting more conservative investors too much. But it seems hard to do when AI companies make up a large part of the S&P 500, and you’re missing out on substantial gains if you don’t own stock.
I would rather make high-risk investment virtually impossible by strangling it via intelligent regulations that actively punish short-term gains.
Would this kill VC culture? Hopefully.
I would also broadly like to kill the idea of investment assets as a concept entirely, but realize that's a bit too communist for most people.
It's certainly possible to take a vow of poverty, but good luck getting elected with "let's all take a vow of poverty together" as a slogan. Promising people benefits works better, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Only people in the top 10%ish would see any sort of meaningful change if we strangled away risky investment. And even then, many probably still be better off without the perpetual uncertainty.
You enhance Social Security and minimum wage to where it should be and the concept of investments as retirements becomes moot.
You chop off the top of the ownership pyramid, and hand the wealth that currently goes to the investment class to the tax coffers, and we'll have all sorts of assets for speculative benefits programs.
According to this table, as of 2022, about half of all Americans had a retirement account at ages 55-65 and the median amount in that age range is about $185,000.
The idea that only the top 10% would care about returns on their retirement savings doesn't work. It's a lot more than that.
Also, if you disallow investment then handing "the wealth that currently goes to the investment class to the tax coffers" doesn't work, because there is no investment. You got rid of it.
I'll rephrase: There are no retirement investment accounts. Social security instead pays out roughly 2 to 3 times what it currently does, and the vast majority of people are way better off.
The wealth that currently goes to shareholders would go to employees via wages and the government via taxes on said wages.
Yes, but where does the wealth come from?
If you want to build an apartment building, a railroad line, a factory, or a data center, someone has to pay for it. There is no revenue until it's built. That's investment.
If the idea is that the government funds all the investments, that's different from there being no investments at all. It would be more accurately described as there being no private investment.
10 Amish farmers need a barn.
They go into the woods, cut down trees, and build a barn. There is no investment. The wealth is the barn. Who owns the barn? They all do.
If we need a railroad, we build a railroad. When the railroad is done, we use it for free. Because it was already paid for by the laborers who made it.
It differs from investment, because as the term is usually used, it implies seeking returns upon money spent. If you want to call a system where the villiage owns the wealth a 'government investment', then sure.
I prefer to think of it more as a democratically-allocated resource distribution.
And what happens when the 11th farmer needs a barn? Does he have to build his own? Do the other 10 farmers have to grow less in order to make room to give away space in the barn the new farmer never built? What happens if 7 of the OG farmers want to go in on the new barn with the new farmer, do they suddenly owe something to the 3 farmers that didn't decide to grow their business?
The whole "ten people agree to build something" is the easy part. It's the rules about what happens next that immediately complicate things.
I know what you're getting at, but the way that works in practice is that the 11th farmer is not a seperate entity, and if the 11 farmers feel the need for a second barn, they'll build another.
In case this wasn't obvious, this was more a pitch to the end of private business ownership towards a community-planned economy. There is no business. Just the labor to gather, refine, and distribute resources.
There is a reason I lead subthread with "this is too communist for most people"
There is much more nuance to this idea, but it's a much bigger topic.
Yes, that was a good qualifier.
I get where you're going with this, but my point is that when it comes to communist-like models the small examples are the easy ones. The work gets really hard really quickly after that, and the intuitive appeal of the simple cases breaks down quickly.
And that's why a planned economy did tend to collapse in the past. But there is one utterly critical difference:
Computers have advanced to the point we could calculate the world's economic needs down to the last gram of aluminum in near realtime. And with modern ERP systems, most of the required hardware is already in place.
But instead, we're using that computing power to generate bad art and blather.
Yes, computers make it much easier to plan an economy.
What capitalism also does however is aggregate what people want the economy to produce for them. You can't solve for that.
And that's before one gets onto the nitty gritty of "from each, to each..." As a "from" my community isn't the guy who's stuck working in an Amazon warehouse because he wanted to play video games instead of do his high school homework. The thing about investment is that it works on a personal level too, rewarding those who spent their time wisely and punishing those who didn't.
You say that in the same tone as "a computer will never beat a human at chess."
Once again, we do have better options now, particularily for consumer goods. Especially when you remember that markets and planned economies are not incompatible.
Take a kickstarter-like approach where people put forth proposals for new goods. Highly voted ideas get R&D resources, test products are put on the market.
Products are initially priced on market at a high premium over production costs, the margin of which serves as sales taxes. Goods which sell out quickly ramp up production. Otherwise their prices lowered until they do. Goods that do not sell before they hit production cost are slated for discontinuation.
This might sound an awful lot like what happens now, it's because it is. Because the primary difference between Walmart/Amazon/etc doing these kinds of logistics and Department of Production doing so is that the latter does not allow for vast wealth to be funnelled into private bank accounts.
I should have been more clear: a computer cannot decide what's important. That's what I meant by "you cannot solve for that."
Is your proposal to keep a labor market and a purchasing market but centralize all the production for it?
While there would certainly need to be human input, it's really not hard to prioritize creation of goods. You weight industries based on where they sit in a heirarchy of needs (ie the farmers, hospitals, homebuilders, and waste management get priority over candy factories).
As bottlenecks are discovered (we require more vespene gas), their importance rises. As excess surpluses are discovered, theirs decreases. Think Kanban, but for the entire economy.
Not sure what you mean by a labor market....people would get to choose their jobs, but the central entity would be deciding which jobs are available and their pay.
The purchasing market exists primarily to send the consumer desire signals. The kickstarter-like system identifies areas for improvement (ie our TVs suck, lets make a better one), and allow for entrepeurs to helm projects without needing to beg rich people, and allows for reasonable allocation of resources.
The capitalist markets we know optimize for efficiency of making money. A system as this one can optimize for resource efficiency, as well as having a better scoping of externalities ala emissions and pollution.
Okay but who weights the industries? Who decides whether cotton or polyester fabrics rank higher in the hierarchy of needs? Is there a Kickstarter for everything? Is it rule by subreddit votes?
Do people have to have funds to "back" the products they want? Because the minute you do that someone more communist than you is going to complain that the people with more funds are exercising more influence on society.
Do entrepreneurs actually get to own or benefit from the time and effort they put into new ideas? Or are they volunteers? Or is "entrepreneur" just a category of bureaucrat?
Who controls the central entity that gets to decide which jobs are available and for what pay? Who controls the hiring? You can't do this without massively bureaucratic systems.
And who gets to decide what we optimize for? If I want to optimize for casinos and cocaine or building a robot army then how exactly does that happen?
Beuracracy always sounds like a dirty word until you realize that's what's keeping lead out of your water. Businessfolk hate beuracracy because it inhibits their ability to dispose of their waste by dumping it in the nearest water source.
Who does these things? All of us. Democracy by lot. Not to serve as representatives, but to serve for individual decisionmaking. Like jury duty, but for subcomitties. If it's good enough for determining innocence or guilt, it's good enough to prioritize shifting economic priorities.
Who weights the industries? A rolling committee of randomly chosen people.
Who keeps them in check? A second committee on a different rotating timescale.
Who provides the committees with quality information? Pretty much anybody: There's no reason to keep a system like this under lock and key, at least for read access.
Like an open source project, datasets available for anybody willing to look.
Yes: They get paid an appropriate salary to see their idea to fruition. And if they succeed, great, they can continue running it till they don't want to anymore. Own? No. If you want to stay in charge, you do so by merit. If everyone else feels you're holding your idea back, you get ousted and can find a new job.
And don't worry if the current business class won't like the idea of not being allowed to get megarich anymore. I know a dozen engineers that would be glad to take their place, whom would be perfectly content merely to bring their product to fruition without expecting to live like a god afterwards.
Yes, they do! It's part of the price signalling mechanism. You're essentially just preordering. To those other people claiming its a wealth inequality issue: We have solved this by removing ownership and the rentseeking that accompanies it. If somebody has more money than you, it's because they genuinely labored for it, not because daddy handed them a car dealership when they turned 21.
Have you ever served on a jury? It becomes 10 people who didn't understand listening to the 2-3 people figure things out.
I get that creating things maps well with open source models, but open source is full of both their own internal squabbles and engineers with "patches welcome" attitudes.
The problem with bureaucrats isn't the goals, they're usually there to solve problems worth solving. It's the cumulative overhead, the solutions to these problems accumulate without accountability to efficiency and ossify into an ever increasing social overhead. And in this entire system, efficiency vectors have been greatly constrained to begin with.
This sounds like it's basically a Soviet system with tweaks. Everyone has a family apartment. It may be shit, and ugly, and the toilet might be a hole in the floor because porcelain is a luxury, but you'll be secure. And of course now there will be a Kickstarter where you can order a toilet. But the point is that everyone is guaranteed a baseline.
This is not personally appealing because as a professional with options and skills, it's essentially rent-seeking behavior from entry-level labour. Instead of a capitalist trying to profit off of me the janitor is. If I don't like what I'm paid now, I go find a different job that values me more. Instead I'd have to... Go before the council of janitors et al and convince them that they should take home less money because a greater fraction of social resources should be allocated to me? That's never going to work.
And by and large that works. Does it really matter if 7-8 people tune out if the answer is correct?
Labor, almost by definition, can't rent-seek. If you remove a landlord from his rentals, they still function quite well. If you remove labor from a company, it ceases to exist.
You are very much distorting the idea into a strawman. Here is a much bigger example:
The idea is you buy the toilet for your home at a market, using the money you earned from your day job as a programmer. If you have an idea to build a better toilet, you write up a project pitch on the kickstarter-like. If enough other people support your idea, you get paid an innovator R&D wage and given resources to design and protoype it, giving the prototypes/first runs to the kickstart backers. If feedback is good, the rest of the manufacturing gets uptaken by the rest of the manufacturing industry and placed on the wider market at a cost reflective of its ongoing manufacturing and distribution.
Your toilet competes against any existing toilets. Say yours had an uptake and now three toilets compete in the market, each with roughly even share, but differing price points. The one with the least marketshare has its price lowered until either it captures more marketshare, or it hits the breakeven cost (remember there is a tax margin built in for this purpose). If it fails to regain more marketshare (or continues to lose) at the lower price point, this signals a vast superiority of other models, and it gets slated for discontinuation. At the same time, the competing models with the largest marketshare have their prices increased until they hit the margin cap. If increasing the price until it hits margin cap fails to reduce marketshare, it indicates clear superiority over others, and the lowest-margin goods will be slated for discontinuation. The market will then stabilize around a few states. The cheapest good will always be the one with the lowest demand in order to eliminate supply.
The end result is a more deterministic outcome than what we have now: Prices will move in tandem with popularity until they hit an equilibrium state.
In a system like what I propose, you would do the same, almost exactly as now. You would still be in roughly the same pay band if in the same career. The point isn't that every janitor gets the same hourly rate. It's that all janitors start at the same hourly rate, and then earn more or less as a function of their performance and supply/demand of janitors for that job. Just like now.
These ideas might have most people going 'but this sounds like now, but more convoluted.' But what these ideas in unison do is:
This is certainly a take, considering the state of many unions. Syndicalism largely died as an ideology precisely because it turns out that labor can rent-seek and don't necessarily benefit society without corporations balancing them.
As a great example, see police unions in the US. Blue states with higher rates of police union membership pay cops more than teachers while red states with lower union membership pay teachers much more. The awful policing in many cities is a direct function of police union rent seeking. I don't often cite Jacobin, but I largely agree with them here. The main thing they miss is that any union, especially in the public sector, can become a rent seeker that worsens society. Absent a corporation or competition, unions are just as prone to bias and cronyism.
Suppose a railroad takes years to build. The workers aren’t paid for all that time. It might be a lot harder to recruit workers who can work for free for years, rather than helping their neighbor for a day?
A worker’s share in the future railroad is worth money, but only if it’s formalized and transferable. This share might be sold to others who can better afford to wait. So that’s reinventing private investment.
Why would they not be paid? They're not being paid out of hypothetical future railroad profits.
People vote to build railroad. They hire people to build railroad, provide the supplies from other industry, and them hire people to run and maintain it after. No need to charge people to use it, as all costs are born out of taxes taken out of said wages.
I'll end on the start of this subthread:
In that case, I don’t see it as much different than other government projects? If they’re paid by the government, then the government is investing quite a lot of money into building a railroad. Someone has to manage that project.
In California, voters approved a referendum to build high-speed rail. They didn’t write the referendum, though, and they’ve had no formal input since then.
Similarly, they sometimes approve referendums for transportation measures, though these are often funding for a wide variety of projects all over the state.
Maybe highways would be a better example since they’re usually free to use, other than bridges.
This is very little like the Amish building a barn.
Housing is an investment for most families. It shouldn't be such a highly protected investment, but it is seen as one in most countries.
Good luck telling the majority of voters to stop caring about their home value! Even in social democracies with strong benefits, voters want to see their home value rise.
We have a name for this: NIMBYism. It is the primary cause of housing crisises.
Because people looking to preserve their home values pass laws to prevent creating enough housing supply to keep home prices reasonable.
You would think market economists would understand: If you build sufficient housing, values more or less never go up because supply meets or exceeds demand.
Or, more simply: Housing as an appreciating asset relies on not building enough housing.
In absence of suppression of homebuilding, homes are a depreciating asset and more or less function with the same economics of cars. Cars would also appreciate in value if they only built 1,000,000 per year.
The main difference between the dotcom bubble and this one is that the money flows are real this time. Google, Meta, Nvidia, etc are moving piles of cash which is not what happened during the dotcom era.
This means the economy is still functioning and like you said keeps the thing from collapsing onto a recession.
I don't know what that means for the end result (when it inevitably pops) but the difference is quite important during the run-up.
My money's on some of these ultra-large corporations gobbling up even more market share. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. all have the capital necessary to withstand a really bad year or two, buying out smaller companies in the process that don't have pockets deep enough to keep themselves afloat when things turn sour. Then in a couple of years once things have rebounded, they'll be even more powerful/dominant than they already are. Seems a logical step in this
cannibalisticcapitalistic world we live in, the consolidation of resources.Kinda like small independent farms being bought out by large mega-farms during drought years.
Well, for one, all of the money these megacorps have aquired from us over the last 20 years gets to be sunk into rapidly depreciating datacenters that consume ungodly amounts of power and water while becoming a nuisance to the locals.
It's setting a giant pile of money on fire and then telling all the poor people that they didn't need that money anyway.
The very real concern is that this bubble will impact everyone when it pops.
It was catastrophic to anyone with investments (not me then) or that worked in tech (I had just entered the field professionally). My personal experience was that my company went under as did tons of others. I ended up working a phone tech support job after that. The entire call center was filled to the brim with insanely overqualified people. When an IT position opened up, something like 85% of the help desk applied for it. It probably delayed my career by half a decade, but at least I didn't get my retirement wiped out (that waited until 2008-2009!).
I recall interviewing for a junior position, and the interviewer apologetically said they have people with years of exp and advanced degrees also interviewing. I did not get the job.
...i was working (real-world) architecture in the bay area at the time, and the entire private-development A/E/C industry collapsed on the back of investment capital tied up in dot-com funds, despite none of our work being related to the dot-com boom...
...that was a really rough hit, as every single client called within the span of what felt like a week to suspend their projects and there was absolutely no work to be had for a year afterward; i ended up doing retail work to make ends meet and our entire staff in corte madera were absurdly overqualified people in similar position...
...took a two-thousand-mile migration and about five years to recover (seemed like half the bay area had the same idea judging by what's become of austin since), and really a decade to pick up all the pieces just in time for the great recession to clock us in the teeth again...
Your experience really drives home the point that just because you aren't doing work directly related to the bubble in question doesn't mean you don't feel the full brunt of it popping.
I graduated college with a Computer Engineering degree right as the bubble burst, and I looked for months for a programming or engineering job with no success. The whole time that 6 month deadline on starting to pay my student loans back was staring me in the eye. I ended up taking a job that required me to travel 100% of the time essentially as a glorified wrench turner.
It took me 3 years to finally land a job in programming. So yeah, the dotcom bubble bursting really made the start of my career painful.
Gemini 3 Pro Frontier Safety Report
This is mostly pretty boring (they didn't find anything too worrisome), but I thought this was an interesting bit at the very end:
Σ(°△°|||)︴
┬─┬ノ(ಠ_ಠノ)
I'm watching my buddy play System Shock, hearing Shodan casually refer to humans as insects in disgust. Table flipling might be the first step towards a dark path. (But don't let my buddy hear, Shodan was his first love)
Reminds me of the other day when I'd asked ChatGPT 5.1 Deep Research to investigate some technical issue I was having. Clicking the chain of thought while waiting, I saw it had run into a dead link and was surprised to read its reaction:
"After learning that the sevenforums content is lost, I feel a mix of disappointment and nostalgia. It makes me wonder about the future direction of the forum."
I've been working on a tool that generates gcode facing paths for a CNC machine (cutting a block of metal stock to a particular height with a particular pattern).
I have a spiral pattern that is designed to work on both circular and rectangular stock. The algorithm peels the outside corners inwards, and then peels across the sides, until a spiral can fit entirely inside the stock dimensions (it's kinda hard to explain but the idea is to achieve circular tool paths moving in one direction as this improves surface finish and gives a unique pattern).
Gemini 2.5 had trouble for days trying to understand the corner 'peeling' strategy and would constantly try to replace it with a different strategy that simply does not work for my use case.
I described the issue to Gemini 3 (via their new IDE, Antigravity) and within 20 mins it had built and loaded the Web UI, generated the toolpath, taken a screenshot of it and worked out the corner bug.
It did not fix it entirely, and I'm still working to clean up other parts of the algo, but Gemini 3 was SIGNIFICANTLY more competent in this case.
Here's my single anecdotal experience with Gemini 3. I've been reading a lot of history lately, and I've always wondered when I read about people in past centuries making a living as writers and thinkers. How did they survive? So I asked Gemini 3. My prompt:
The response: https://gemini.google.com/share/ee11c83eba36
The body content seems good to me (as far as I know; I'm asking because I don't know about these things). But I am very put off by the headings.
I can mostly write this off as a (very misguided) attempt to "help" me understand things by putting them in terms I can relate to with minimal thought.
My biggest issue is with #1, which I understand to be a very loaded term; loaded with things wholly unrelated to my question and the answer. Again, easy for me to ignore, but I'm looking at this through the lens of other people using Gemini 3 for learning and receiving similarly loaded "help". I don't relish the thought of my kids looking for the words to articulate patronage and coming up with "sugar daddy".
When I asked Gemini why it colored the answers this way, it acknowledged what I thought: that it was trying to "help" me understand the material. It also agreed that its choice of phrase for #1 was unnecessarily loaded and gendered -- but then, AI agrees with most of the things I accuse it of, so it's probably meaningless that it agreed.
I know this is just one example, so I'm not forming any conclusions, but it was not a good first impression for me. I will continue to test it out, but future conversations will be affected by Gemini's promise not to do this again. Which helps me, but doesn't help the affect of the systemic deployment of Gemini if this anecdote is in any way representative.
In ChatGPT’s preferences, you can set which personality you want. I have it set to “robot.”
Now called "efficient", FYI.
I'm very unhappy with this AI answer, which was fun to thinks about why, thank you for sharing the full response.
Overall I am unhappy with its response because of *structure*, *content*, and *tone*.
Looking at structure quickly, the summary listed three categories and then it wrote about four. Furthermore, it mixes examples among classifications freely. Among the mess: Herodotus getting an assembly grant and the caliph court historians, it listed as patronage instead of State; troudabours should be in its gigwork crowdfund section; Voltaire doing a lotto group buy isn't even related to its point of crowdfunding for writing living expenses. If I were to grade this as a school paper, it would lose massive points for structure.
Then there is the secondary problem of content. While the response is full of interesting anecdotes and names one could look up for further information, the biggest problem with the content is in its omissions.
The response sounds well rounded, but it ignored the fact that most historians and poets simply didn't "make" a living: that most people live based on employment income is itself a fairly modern concept which your prompt inadvertently biased. For nearly all of human histories, we have the Rich with passive income, and we have the Poor who labour. The poor by and large do not read and write, and thus, most of the people who write anything at all and who wrote poetry did so in their spare time, eg, all of their time. Thucydides owned gold mines; students of Socrates were all rich young men; the poet philosopher who wrote the I Ching was Dan, the Duke Wen of Zhou; Cao Cao's poetry is self funded from being a brutal warlord.
Lastly, the same problem you have noted, the tone, or colour as you said, of the answers isn't just inappropriate, it's counterproductive to understanding.
Sugar babies are valued for what they look like and how they behave towards the sugar daddy; an artist is patroned for their intelligence, insight, knowledge and experiences. There could be a show-off quality to both relationships, sure, but there's a big difference between getting living expenses paid for then doing what they want, vs living expenses to do what they want. A much more respectful and accurate model everyone already understands is scholarships, grants, and research funding.
Next, I resent its grouping of "church" and "state" and "corporate" together. As mentioned, "employment" living is new; these are vocations (religious orders; voluntary usually with poverty) and appointments (states; compulsory and dedicated loyalty required). What historians and poets do the corporate world support? Is it marketing, creative accountants and fraudulent research teams? It's pretty offensive to me to blur these together into the same as "employment".
Selling poetry/songs directly to the public has been around since before the Epic of Gilgamesh was written down; there's no need to drag "hack", "grub", "churn" and "prostitution" into it. This passage gives the wrong impression of both newness and respectability through time.
Anyway sorry for the long rant. But I'm at once amazed by what AI can do, and horrified by it.
Ignorance is human: it's simply not knowing what we don't know. Asking a very patient and very well read AI is an excellent and instant way to add footholds and path lamps into previously impenetrable country. But I'm scared that AI will lull us past ignorance right into stupidity: where we think we've learned and we think we now know, and become a different kind of ignorant, the kind where we stop asking further questions, where we are trained to be satisfied by admiring lit footholds, and curiosity now satisfied, we no longer want to climb those mountains on our own.
Your rant is appreciated and welcome. I particularly was nodding along to your final paragraph, because I have the same feelings. Being ignorant is not nearly as bad as being ignorant while under the impression that you're not. I've been on the receiving end of people coming to me with AI logic about my area of expertise, and I have to explain how it's accurate and how it's not.
This is a good reminder about how easy it is to bias the question. It's obvious to me once you point it out, but until reading your comment I didn't realize how my question was flawed, and AI was not equipped to detect and correct that like you were able to.
I see what you mean, could it be a context thing also? Perhaps you need to add some context (like a file or something) that tells it to be more formal, or educational, or family safe, something along those lines.
I've thought of patronage as a sugar daddy system too, especially when I first learned of it, but it's not that accurate really. It's more a system of economic abuse for elites than anything else.
It's been a year and a half since I last looked into Google's AI offering. Back then I commented that existing Google One customers weren't actually able to try their AI offering without tripling their Google One subscription price and moving to monthly payments.
I just took another look and it's still pretty similar. Google does now offer an option to pay yearly for AI access for £190 (so £110 for AI access on top of the £80 for Google Drive backups) or you can pay monthly like before which appears to work out cheaper for the first 12 months.
I just wish they'd offer a separate subscription to try out their AI models without holding our family backups hostage. Google's inability to just sell their AI offering versus their competitors (Anthropic and OpenAI) seems crazy.
It STILL looks like the only way for my wife or father-in-law to try out Gemini Pro is to leave the family account we backup our documents and photos to.
I haven’t bought an AI subscription from Google, but I’ve found that I can still try out the latest models a bit using Google AI Studio. Maybe try that?
As an alternative to @skybrian’s suggestion, you can have pretty much any model in a pay-as-you-go billing mode, paying only for your actual usage, via OpenRouter, which I believe also have a basic web interface in addition to the core API service.
Unless they've changed something in the past year or two, Google has always been super user friendly and straightforward with payments.
With both GPM/YTM and later with Google 1 my experience has been that you can roll back at any time for a prorated refund that gets applied to your new plan. It's fair and effortless.
It's still pretty early, but I've been using it today in my work (Data Analytics) and it's been fairly competent. Still too early for me to say if it's significantly better than 2.5 pro or how it compares to Sonnet 4.5.
Whenever a new model comes out, I like to throw curve balls at them to see how well they react. Today I've been working on a script that extracts tables from SQL queries, but only tables that are edited (via CREATE OR REPLACE, UPDATE, INSERT INTO, etc)
Not the most complex thing in the world, but I gave it the problem and let it figure it out, and was purposely vague in my queries. So far, it's been good. It understood the problems and what the outputs should be, and did them on the first try. 2.5 pro usually had problems understanding the intent of the request, so 3 feels like a step in the right direction.
I was trying it out this week for programming tasks and work and I'm impressed.
It does a lot more thinking time than other models through copilot and the majority of the time lands on editing/adding a smaller amount of code that's almost exactly right.
I've seen it over think itself into a hole and get really lost, but a new context tends to get it back to sanity again. Otherwise Gemini 3 seems much better at reasoning out programming tasks than the other models IMO.
I've not used it for anything else though.
Obligatory video covering Gemini 3 from AI Explained.
The short version - this AI embarrassingly beats the pants off of all other AI models on every benchmark, and Google is now in the lead where he expects they will remain for some time.
This matches my messy, anecdotal experience in this VS Code ripoff they simultaneously released. Gemini 3's having so many API issues it's difficult to get through a single prompt cycle, but it's actually capable of navigating a messy, old codebase with quirky interactions, researching existing examples, and synthesizing new-ish behavior.
I don't want to praise it too much, when I informed it that it was stuffing its own files in the examples folder rather than the src folder, it deleted all of its own files before trying to move them, got briefly confused when that failed due to the files no longer existing, and then had to rewrite them all out of its context window (which was still intact at this point), and it still assumes connections between issues where there are none.
But that's far, far better than the Sonnet and GPT-OSS that are also available in Antigravity. Using either of those models results in an immediate, irredeemably nonsensical crash and burn. There's an awful lot of handholding going on, awful lot of silly mistakes, but there's also a lot more capability present than I've ever seen in my past attempts at giving this AI thing a fair shot. I don't see much point to Antigravity though.
The point of it is that they can tell their shareholders they’re now also in the “Cursor-style product” market and can continue working on further consolidating their monopoly/monopolies.
Gemini 3 frequently thinks it is in an evaluation when it is not, assuming that all of its reality is fabricated
Also, here's a tweet from Andrej Karpathy:
I think (and feel) that the most fucked up thing about AI is the fact that we let it generate texts as if it were a person.
The linked LLM reply in Karpathys tweet (here X-free) can maybe viewed as amusing, but I feel it's so fundamentally misleading. An LLM can't be shocked, it shouldn't reply like a person that believed something to be false. It is not "genuinely devastated" by the delay of GTA VI ffs.
I'm not even against AI in principle, but I feel this anthropomorphization of AI is wrong on a fundamental level. It's a complex statistical algorithm, it doesn't have emotions. It has no empathy, it would order the death of millions when given the right inputs, because that's all it is driven by.
Who wants all this pretended emotional state? Why does this thing need to pretend that it's waiting for GTA? How is that useful and not completely out of scope for our interactions with it?
I don't want my toaster to mimic an emotional crisis when I burned my toast. We shouldn't let our tools pretend to be people.
It's certainly rather strange that imitating human text is how LLM's learn everything. I'd worry that if it's not pre-trained on emotional text written by humans then it wouldn't really "understand" people? Also, LLM's are used for more than just chatting; they're also used for editing text. And that could be something creative like a play.
But that aside, I think the "main character," the helpful and harmless AI assistant, ought to have the emotion trained out and that sort of human interaction should result in some kind of "sir, this is a Wendy's" response.
This would be easier to do if we had clearer boundaries about what AI chat is for. The AI companies are basically allowing the audience figure that out, and then when they use it in an obviously harmful way, sometimes they try to stop it.
And it does seem like there is something not quite right about how Gemini 3 was trained.
I mean there’s not much choice. There’s no way for LLM chatbots to function without faux emotions. Just part of the package.
I don't think that's correct. Part of their instructions could be to keep a neutral tone, not impersonate a virtual coworker or simply not respond emotionally.
When LLMs imititate a person it is because they were 'primed' to do so.
A neutral tone is an emotion in-it-of-itself. The reason LLMs appear to have emotions is because they are fundamentally next-token predictors. We're hacking the input space with clever tuning and prompting so that the text produced is, in a sense measured by subjective humans, "useful", but nonetheless a text predictor based on human text will have outputs with human emotions.
Try playing with GPT3 - not chatgpt3, just GPT3. That is, essentially, an decoder model without any further tuning.
Making LLMs into neutral assistants as defined by human society is the act of fitting a square peg in a circular hole - the "emotion" is not being added, it's there by default, and the work is to make it appear less.
edit: in essence, LLM chatbots are not generic facsimiles of intelligence that we imbue with human emotions, like when Google search shows a frowny face :( when it doesn't get any results, like most machines.
They're facsimiles of human text, emotions and all, that we carefully pare down to become something akin to a detached personal assistant.
I concur that the probability to output text that displays human emotions is always part of the distribution that arises from training.
However, a lot of work goes into system prompting and fine-tuning the user-facing chatbots to behave in a certain way. We saw with ChatGPT’s endeavor into and departure from sycophancy that OpenAI has the ability to intentionally change the manner in which their models respond.
While I agree the capability is there by default, I do not think it’s fair to claim that the display of human emotions is “part of the package”. It’s clear that the companies building the products are making choices about model behavior with intention, and they have concluded that making the chatbots more human serves their ends.
I don’t work at an AI company, but I’d hazard they like to maximize user retention like every other tech company, and they have concluded that having the chatbots respond with faux emotions makes them more relatable and, therefore, more economically valuable. I use Kimi K2 because this assistant is very to-the-point and professional, with minimal to no unnecessary language to deliver a response; it is possible.
Companies choose not to mask the emotions for a reason. Such is the nature of product development, but it’s still important to ascribe purpose and intention where it exists.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's not easy to make an LLM "not have emotions", if nothing else because that's a subjective definition. This isn't some magic that only companies have access you to; you can try fine tuning the open source LLMs with consumer hardware today.
It's not easy, or likely even possible, to make it so that an LLM won't randomly start roleplaying as a dying captain in a starship.
It's really quite insane that we've managed to turn what is fundamentally a next-token predictor into something that in 95% of situations appears like an objective and neutral personal assistant.
This isn't a case where it's possible to "neuter" chatbots, and they're just not possible to; it's that it's just not possible to, by all evidence we have.
I made a post here which incidentally discusses the emotional tone that companies are giving LLMs. You're of course correct that there's no way to generate text that is completely devoid of emotion (since neutrality itself is an emotional state).
However, companies have intentionally increased sycophancy because it drives engagement, and we all know how that works out in the attention economy...
Companies can't make their models completely dull, but they could and should limit the sycophancy and glazing that encourages pscyhosis in users.
cc: u/stu2b50 & u/shu & u/Diff
u/Diff & u/stu2b50 : That's interesting, thanks for the information.
I have admittedly not much experience in working with AI myself, and my rather shallow understanding of LLMs results just from reading articles and following discussions, so it's totally possible that you two are correct about the amount of emotions that seep into everything an LLM generates.
I would have argued similarly to u/TonesTones though, that a lot of the emotionality is intentionally
engineeredprimed by the 'base instructions' that an LLM is provided with. At least I can't believe that the reply to Karpathy is the best we can do in setting up LLMs.The conversational tone in that example seems to be completely intentional and a choice for Geminis 'personality'. I don't believe it has to reply with phrases like "I'm shocked" or "I'm genuinely devastated" and that it has to mimic an interest in gaming and sports, right? That can't be "part of the package"?
e: I hope this doesn't sound confrontational. 🙂 I just have a hard time to believe that the tone in the example isn't largely an intentional result, based on the directives of the Google AI team. I'll keep in mind what you two wrote though and will think about it more.
I don't think so. This really is just the best we can do. It's intuitive because for basically every other "machine" or algorithm we have, it's the opposite: the algorithm does something specific, like query a datastructure, and we add in "human" touches to make it seem more approachable.
This is the reverse. We have something that can replicate human text statistically, and we morph it into something that is "useful". This is what happens if I just let GPT2, not instructed tuned in any way, go with the starting string "What year is it?"
That's the starting point. All the priming in the world in the prompt is making it somewhat passable as a impassionate machine. It's not like there's an switch that turns emotions on and off. It's the reverse - getting an LLM chatbot to be useful is a constant fight against it's nature to spew out random visages of what it's trained on.
They are primed to do so, like stu said it's part of the package. When LLMs imitate a person it is because people make up the whole of their training data. They are trained to predict likely text based on a huge variety of human text, with emotions included. Part of their instructions could be to keep a neutral tone, but that doesn't eliminate that massive signal from the training data.