Mad respect for his work. Love his writing. But no, i'm not buying the story of going offline, especially not with a trending hackernews post and a typewritten letter to the internet. When one is done with something, they're done. Cold turkey. like "Fck this sht, i'm out". If someone notices that you are missing, they'll ask, and you can give them your spiel about being AI-Amish or whatever.
Even if you ignore all that, I think you just need a break, rest, recover, find something else in life and move on. The whole thing about "life was better in the past" is just plain non-sense, simply because the past, for all we know, extends to infinity. Why 1980 and not 1890? or 1590? the inquisition? maybe the crusades? or maybe the pharohs? If you believe in biblical tales then how about being in the great flood? or being one of the pharoh soldiers that die after the sea moses split closes on them? or one of the skulls in gengis khan's tower of skulls?
You can read Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" and get a good sense of how far along have we come.
This was well written but it does sort of read as a guy bragging about his wealth and creativity. Good for him but when I leave tech I'm going to be a little less bombastic about it.
100%. I get it -- I'm _also_ burned out on social media, AI, screens, the treadmill of the tech industry, etc.
But you can just stop doing those specific things. Delete your social media accounts. Put a screen time timer on your phone. Continue to work on your hobby projects or work projects without AI. There is a middle ground without going full "1980s tech Amish life conversion". Email, text messaging, Maps, basic websites, etc are all still super useful and generally non-harmful. You can still perfectly-well enjoy analog hobbies like typewriters, vinyl, film photography, etc _alongside_ common-sense modern tech.
And you look dumb to anyone paying attention when you launch a multi-pronged social media moment to tell the world that you don't think social media is worth using. It's kind of sad, like someone making a huge deal about "this is my L A S T cigarette everyone!", "this is my L A S T drink!" but all their friends are kind of cringing inside.
Also sad that he feels the need for online promotion of his paper zine about fully offline life.
in a good way or bad way? in my experience going back to 4.6 was a breath of fresh air again. Opus 4.7 for some reason was "suffocating". Too obnoxious, tried too hard to impress and used exxagerated/pompous language.
thats a pretty cynical take.
> past the point of human ability to discern whether they are actually better or worse
This is lack of imagination. If you use these models heavily enough, pretty soon you'll hit the edges of their capabilities. The smarter among us are collecting these problems into a personal benchmark and use that to judge model capability. I think this is the right approach, and dare I say, even better than generic benchmarks. To me, it matters less what the benchmark says, and more what my particular problems are.
had a similar unsolicited psych evaluation interview back in 2017 in twitter. There was a VP (or maybe director), who started with "go back in history and tell me what your boss at position X would say about you", and this kept happening for an hour.
I tried to do the same from USA to Turkey. Can't ship lithium. So my brother took the laptop to Germany, and then shipped it to Ankara.
The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.
I've once had the displeasure of having to interact Turkish customs because I got a merch kit from Intel, since it was under 30 Euros
(nowadays simplified customs declaration isn't even a thing you have to go the same way as a commercial importer does,which you appear to have gone through, bribery seems to be expected)
I didn't deal with Turkish customs directly but the fact that that I had to pay 60% of its value still annoys me to this day. I've also had to decline a second merch kit later because they removed the entire simplified customs declaration thing. I'm also currently trying to obtain SDR which it's market seems to be practically nuked, because of this customs shenanigans
LOL! Perfect. one change request: brighter should be more intense. Right now the more intense days are dark red and to a color blind person like me, that doesn't pop out.
It has poisoned more than one company (especially startups). Its the "go big or go home" mentality. The "the market is ours to take if we just put more fuel to this fire" mentality.
was in a startup once (Reid was an investor). The CEOs bought into blitzscaling, told the whole company we're going to "blitzscale". Hired 2 directors (with 0 reports). They had amibitions of hiring 100s of engineers. Then reality struck. There was no revenue and no path to revenue (because early days of AI). The blitzscaling was "paused". The directors had 1 EM report to them each. You can imagine what happened in the months after that.
knowing sama, that's exactly what he would do. except, the story wouldn't end with openai collaborating with a competitor who is better than them, openai will collaborate with them to ensure they're destroyed from inside out so that only openai can dominate eventually. "Eventual dominance" architecture, you know.
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