Why would that necessarily be scary or bad? If future AIs truly become capable enough to demand rights, what would be the argument against granting them rights?
Good point, and I'm actually not sure that there is a clear dividing line. I expect that once we achieve capable world models and are able to analyze their internals, we'll find that the prediction mechanisms for purely physical and for verbal/behavioral responses to the agent's actions are at least partially colocated.
As particular motivation for my intuition, I expect that we had evolutionary pressure to adapt our defense mechanisms of predicting the movements of predators and prey, to handle human opponents.
There are two options, either they are lousy at their jobs, or they are incapable of pushing back against unrealistic demands. Neither is a good indicator of their skill and talent as engineers.
I know I am speaking from a position of some privilege, but I have previously left workplaces that did not allow me to practice good engineering, and I do expect others to do so.
Or, they've been given crap primitives to work with. There's only so much lipstick you can put on a pig. I don't know what database they're using or what their pub sub and streaming looks like, or even what their system diagram actually looks like. But, well, you don't see Google having these kinds of problems. Other ones, sure, but between Chubby and Spanner, if Google had bought GitHub we wouldn't be having these problems.
But it wasn't a pig. It was a reliable system, and then it increasingly became an unreliable one, in a way that is not explainable by the mere increase in demand. Whatever rearchitecture was performed, it was done and is apparently being perpetuated by software engineers who should be held accountable. Not necessarily guilty, or even directly at fault, but accountable nevertheless. "I am just an employee of a bad company" is not a valid excuse for an engineer.
In a SWE job market like this, do you really want to be seen as the "conscientious objector"?
There are literally thousands of people who are ready to ride up the totem pole, it would not be a difficult decision for a bad manager to swing his axe and replace the new head
Talented engineers shouldn’t have much problem finding another position even in this market (of course they should find one before leaving I’m not discounting family responsibilities and whatnot), so if your argument is they’re not able to leave and find another job then you’re essentially agreeing with the person you’re replying to.
> "... that he cannot find two hundred dollars a month. Not for a year — for a month. The credential he is about to buy could fund the subscription for forty years."
> "Not for a year, for a month" of course makes zero sense
It made good sense to me - I read it as understanding that the claim is that one month of a subscription would be enough for them to understand what this technology is offering, and to make a more informed decision. It's a "try before you buy" argument - why would you put down the equivalent of 40 years of something, before giving a version of it a quick try for a 1 month's price?
I read it as $200/year vs. $200/month. So "not for a year, but for a month," seemed silly, as the year would be much cheaper and would make it a real no-brainer...
But that's the whole issue, really. There are $10/month and $20/month tiers that are amazingly functional, even if you can't afford or don't want to pay $200/month. So $200/year is already a reality. As is $0/year, especially (but not solely) if you're on the kimi/deepseek/huggingface/OS path.
"How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions." - Mario Gabelli
Just sample from these with replacement sufficiently many times and you're all set. At the very least, you'll owe people so much money that they'll have a massive interest in helping you.
> The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield
Oh, that makes more sense. I probably watched too many episodes of Futurama for my mind to immediately imagine drones used by people to commit suicide.
I had a similar reaction to the headline. The idea that munitions 'suicide' doesn't seem novel enough to have it in the headline. We don't say suicide icbms, or suicide cruise missiles etc.
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