IMO the community will fracture in two directions. Reddit's differentiator over Instragram, twitter etc. is that it's community based rather than individual based (with the algo making psuedo communities)
I feel some users will leach into platforms that created even more walled gardens, i.e. Discord, or platforms that reduce the sense of walled gardens i.e. Twitter.
Reddit seems to follow the psuedo community flow. In my account's feed, I started seeing communities of people's whose accounts I looked at (or maybe clicked into, but didn't follow).
Instead of platforms expecting the user to inform who/what to follow, they infer from user behaviors.
> I think Stack Overflow went dead because of AI specifically
This doesn't hold up when looking at usage charts. There is a clear peak around ~2015 with a steady decline through to now. LLM's came to market in their current form in the last couple years, and took a couple years to be broadly adopted. There was a clear and obvious market fall off way before AI / LLM.
> Reddit isn't comparable
I agree with that in isolation; but since I don't agree with the AI premise this isn't especially relevant. I don't think AI will replace Reddit, I think one of the other major platforms will absorb it's users like Reddit / Hackerrank / better documentation / back searching absorbed SO's users through 2015-2021
Stack Overflow is dead because of AI. Devs can get quicker answers with less hassle with AI. Without AI there is no other option for amateur devs to get answers, so Stack Overflow would otherwise still be used. This isn't difficult logic.
Then explain the usage chart declining since ~2015?
As I said in my original post, LLM was the final nail in the coffin. I'm not arguing they aren't related. I'm saying they SO was falling long before LLM's took over. This isn't difficult logic.
SO falling before AI doesn't preclude AI killing SO. You aren't listening to anything I've been saying. Your graph is meaningless. If it wasn't for AI, SO would still be used. It isn't more complicated than that.
Not gonna keep going back and forth when you seem to agree but are choosing to be difficult. We agree SO was falling before LLM's hit the market. We agree LLM's accelerated SO's demise.
You seem to think they weren't failing before LLM (simply rapidly losing member activity), which is a narrative that I won't follow.
When you load a random content page, the top 50% of the page is a question, the bottom 50% is an ad that is designed to look like a comment, and the entire right panel is ads. Quora is more ads than content, you have to scroll and decipher what is or isn't an ad based on their greyed 2px font ad disclaimer.
I used to throw loads of parties. At somepoint I realized..
1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.
2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.
3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.
4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.
I don't think the point of a party is "ROI" either in terms of the dimensions of time, effort, or money. When I decide to host one, this kind of "cost" is assumed. I don't worry about it because I can afford it (in all three dimensions), and the point of hosting a get-together is not to make a profit on any of those dimensions or break even. I look at it as: I'm spending time+effort+money, and the return, for myself and everyone who attends, is not any of those three. It's getting some much needed socialization and a fun experience. I guess your point is that you're not getting as much fun out of it to justify the spend?
As cool as this sounds, I'm not sure I'm as enthused with stuff our oceans full of more tech, which inevitably will wear down, break, and pollute.
It's better than oil (duh), and something that provides power when solar/wind can't is great (duh). I just wish we would give up on approaches that are basically "If we had a few million of these giga-ton structures all over the ocean, they would provide power equivalent to a few dozen nuclear plants"
Lifecycle analysis is a common and increasingly detailed field which includes impacts to manufacture, transport, install, run, and clean-up installations, either cradle-to-grave, or cradle-to-cradle (includes the cost of recycling). I assume for installations like this, those studies have been done.
There's a whole tirade in "Landman" about wind turbines not being green because of this or that thing[0], ending with the statement: "in its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it". These are just feelings (of the fictional character, but unfortunately ones adopted by real people) that are unconcerned with the facts that, no, the lifecycle analysis shows that wind turbines break even in 1.8 to 22.5 months, with an average of 5.3 months[1].
And I'm not qualified to say the tidal based solutions will never beat out Geo/Solar/Win + Batteries. In my informed but non-professional opinion, it seems like this avenue will never ever work at scale.
From everything I've seen, we have the answer, we're just stuck under the boot of old money oil barons. Solar + wind + geo (depending on the geographic area) for the majority of our power generation. Nuclear + batteries to smooth out the duck curve form the bottom, paired with more aggressive demand pricing & thermal regulations to smooth it out from the top. That's the answer. But lobbyist's going to lobby.
Yep, lifecycle analysis is the key lens we should be using when evaluating any energy technology, especially in emotionally charged debates about what’s "green" or not
People aren't terribly keen on what happens when nuclear plants inevitably wear down, break or pollute either.
Mind you the market has tended to give up on tidal power too. The sea is a harsh environment, working there is expensive, and solar cost reductions have simply run over most of the competition. Scotland has seen quite a few innovative ocean energy companies launch a pilot, run it for a few years, then go bankrupt.
People are broadly misinformed. Nuclear plants release significantly less radiation than coal based plants, as an example. They do create a lot of waste that we currently don't know how to process, but the quantity is actually shockingly small in the context of a global issue. We're talking several warehouses. Not millions, not all of California. We can just pick some cave in northern Canada or central sahara and bury it there, it seriously isn't that much. It's better than where we currently store the waste which is basically the ocean & clouds.
Meltdowns are tragic when they occur - but rare. It just gets a lot of press when a city of 50k gets deleted than when global ecosystems fail or a billion people die a decade earlier than they otherwise would due to pollution related helath issues.
While all that is true, the problem is specifically how much it can cost in the worst case. There's only been one Chernobyl out of about 400 reactors, and its cleanup cost amortised over all those reactors makes a surprisingly small difference to the cost of electricity, but also Chernobyl was bad enough to be considered a significant part of the collapse of the USSR.
Likewise, although it's absolutely true we're only talking about a few football fields of even the more voluminous low-level waste (high-level is about the size of one small block of flats), this is difficult to collect when it's a layer of dust spread over a few hundred square kilometres or dissolved in the seawater.
If one of the UK reactors had gone up like Chernobyl, the UK would have ceased to exist, not because of the radioactive kind of fallout but simply the economic fallout would have done it in.
It's a massive stretch to think one poorly placed meltdown somewhere in the UK would lead to the UK collapsing. I suspect it would be visible on a 10 year GDP chart but not "trending towards 0" levels of economic fallout.
Also I might just be misinformed but I thought nearly all of the radioactive waste from nuclear plants is already collected. It's not a collection problem, it's a storage problem. And a "what do we do when the energy company shuts down and stops maintaining their storage yard" problem.
If any of the Hinkley Points, Berkeley, Oldbury had an exclusion zone like Chernobyl's, Bristol and half the Bristol Channel would have been in the exclusion zone. (Berkeley, Oldbury would also have forced evacuation of GCHQ).
Dungeness, would have included Dover.
Bradwell, the Thames. The Sizewells, it would have been Lowestoft and Harwich.
Torness, the Firth of Forth, blocking sea access to Edinburgh.
While this is not an exclusive list, and also I grant I'm not actually modelling what the fallout zone might look like when there's a coastline involved (is it better or worse? IDK), I ask you: which major international transit hub can the island of Great Britain do without? I'm sure they can be rapidly evacuated (being transit hubs), but how fast can the capacity be replaced elsewhere, how fast, and at what cost?
Consider that the UK barely had enough stuff in place just for the Brexit-related customs checks, which it saw coming, even though there was a global pandemic at the time that reduced/zero passenger on the same hubs. How much worse if any of these hubs becomes completely off-limits?
That plus the chronic[0] extra demand on the rest of the power grid. Ukraine had to keep the other reactors at the Chernobyl power plant itself running after the incident, just to avoid shortages.
A 2016 estimate said the overall cost of the Chernobyl disaster was US$700 billion, which is approximately [EDIT: not 97%, mixing dollars and pounds, see [3]] 72% of the tax revenue the UK collected in the tax year starting about when that report was published[1][2][3].
Regarding your point about collection of radioactive waste from nuclear plants, that's only the case for correct operations, not when they leak — or, in the case of Chernobyl, explode.
[0] the acute (sudden) part is fine as shutdowns happen at random anyway; chronic is the long-term.
> A 2016 estimate said the overall cost of the Chernobyl disaster was US$700 billion ...
You're taking 30 years worth of expenses and comparing them to the UK tax intake for one year. I am pretty certain the USSR didn't pay for all that up-front.
So $700b over 30 years is about $23b/year. The UK gov budget for the year you selected was about $1045b[1]. So if we are to take your Chernobyl example, it's about 2% of GDP per year. That is roughly half of what was spent on the second-smallest sector of the budget - "Public order and safety". That is a lot of money! But you're implying it would cause the collapse of the UK altogether.
As a comparison, during the 07/08 financial crisis the UK government bailed out the banks to the tune of $185b and managed to not collapse...
> You're taking 30 years worth of expenses and comparing them to the UK tax intake for one year. I am pretty certain the USSR didn't pay for all that up-front.
Didn't pay all of it ever, that's also the damages of other affected nations after the collapse of the USSR.
So, there was a de-facto if not de-jure default on that cost.
> As a comparison, during the 07/08 financial crisis the UK government bailed out the banks to the tune of $185b and managed to not collapse...
It also owned some of the banks as a result (I was personally affected by this, LLOY shares), it wasn't just a pure cost.
They are only intended to show that it is a real possibility by analogy with what happened to the USSR following Chernobyl. It would require a detailed simulation to elevate this from "vibe" to "a clear risk percentage".
I do not have sufficient grounding in any of the relevant fields to create such a simulation, so I'm limited to drawling circles on a map around the reactors, seeing what's inside, and making a best-guess as to the consequences informed more by world news than anything more precise.
Isn’t GP’s point, that it’s already enough for those two to have solved it? Not every country with a civil nuclear program needs its own waste containment, it’s just such a small absolute quantity.
I like the idea of solar and support it in general, but the implementation is some places is bizarre. Instead of building solar panels over parking lots, putting them on top of buildings, or using them as covers over fields of crops sensitive to sunlight, lots of places have clear cut forests and absolutely covered mountainsides with them. The reason being that it's cheap and out of sight for most people.
The vision now might not be to fill the sea with these turbines. But if it turns out they can be made cheaply and deployed cheaply, easily broken machines that nobody will take responsibility for will definitely be littering the oceans by the millions.
How are concerns about ecological impact misplaced when discussing solutions to ecological problems. It feels pretty relevant to me.
And from everything I've seen/heard, tidal based solutions are just fundamentally incompatible with their product. Keeping sensitive metalic moving parts in saline solution exposed to the sun for years on end - paired with other random things like boating accidents or marine life - it's a non-starter. Constructing these things creates pollution. If it's lifecycle impact is less than oil's, great, I just don't believe we'll ever get to a state where it's better than oil AND (solar/geo/wind) + Batteries.
Because the amount of pollution these things generate is clearly totally negligible. Metal in the sea does not matter. And they are an alternative to burning fossil fuels which is clearly far worse.
They may not be a good commercial idea due to the maintenance cost (hence this article) but the idea that they would pollute the seas and therefore we should burn oil & gas instead completely idiotic.
I do not need to know if AI therapy is as good as Real Life therapy. It almost certainly is not.
I need to know if using it as AI therapy is actively harmful for some significant percentage of the population, and should be avoided. This arxiv does not discuss that as far as I can tell. LLM therapy is closer to an interactive journal. Journaling, getting your thoughts out, being forced to articulate grief in succinct words and pick out patterns - is all healing.
And most people cannot afford professional therapy.
>You should remain open to new things in this industry
I'm open to new things. I've seen demo's, attended presentations, and spent a long time toying around with it myself. I have not been convinced there is any meat there, not in it's current iteration. LLM's are designed to make things that "look" like human output and thus are very good at hiding bugs. It's ok at getting the first 20% of the project done, but that was never the hard part. It's always been the last 20%, and modern LLM's simply cannot do it. Not on large scale projects.
New things have come and gone. So far the only thing I'm convinced of is, it's easier to get funding when you can claim you use AI. That's it.
> I have never copy and pasted code into development from an LLM/AI helper
Well that's simply a different reality from what my employer is encouraging. So not relevant. They not only want us to copy-and-paste, they want us to delete otherwise functional code to make it easier to paste in AI generated stuff.
Asking questions is fine, that's much much closer to an augmented search engine than prompt engineering. You're describing something different from what this post is about.
>5 years is not what I would consider a big bargaining chip
I'm not bragging. I'm giving context. If I was 0 yoe or 20 yoe, those would be relevant too. And for what it's worth, I also started in middle school.
>one leadership away from asking their employees the same thing your employer is
I didn't think you were bragging, and I hope I didn't come across as trying to put you in your place.
I'm responding with market context. The market is upended right now with no end in sight. Also, most employers if not meaningfully all, will or are involving AI. Many, if not most, people applying for decent positions right now have 3x the experience and are very willing to do whatever.
Don't let your principles end you up sleeping in your car.
> LLM's are designed to make things that "look" like human output and thus are very good at hiding bugs.
This can be true, definitely was more often true in the past. But there is a time and a place for human expression, and probably isn't in code. Your human expression is likely helped by tools. I doubt you're writing in Notepad, but your IDE doesn't get thrown out the window because it can't fully replace you or write code for you.
IF you are being blindly told to copy/paste from an LLM, then use that as part of your ideation and work from there, using AI tools as much as you can in ways that work. Become a leader in this new frontier by delving in (just kidding, that's meta about another article trending on AI)
> They not only want us to copy-and-paste, they want us to delete otherwise functional code to make it easier to paste in AI generated stuff.
Your post needs more detail if you want people to reply to your exact situation, but I think you can make clear arguments against doing this, then do this for 3 weeks, followed by the obvious: backtracking.
Leaders are by nature often encouraged to try new things. Standing in their way won't help you, but you can warn them, do it, then help them get back on track. By being a team member in this way, you are not in charge, but you can build trust equity if these leaders stick around and have techy ideas in future. In my experience, I usually outlast bad leadership (and their associated ideas). You have to be correct and not act like you're the boss to survive it, though!
Feel free to make your own decisions about this stuff but know that there are people with lots of experience and success in the industry using llm coding tools successfully (I’m one).
I am in a situation where ai was mandated, I was skeptical, but took it as a chance to try it out. I now can’t imagine going back.
Yep, if you know what you're doing, if you have good software dev and review practices and if you manage to aim the AI foot gun away from the body, then the productivity boost is absolutely gigantic.
