I grew up with children and people in Northern Australia that had zero fear of snakes and spiders with plenty of exposure to both.
When I was 13 a friend of my sister, a large imposing Torres Strait Islander girl, visited and saw a cat for the very first time and screamed fit to break glass while jumping back to break the wall panel and up onto the couch.
This was someone comfortable handling large live mud crabs on the floor, gutting fish, handling snakes and killing them, etc.
Can we make a decentralized search engine. Which breaks down into two questions, is it technically feasible and is it socially feasible?
(Maybe the word search would be a bit more broad than retrieving web pages. It could be for everything right.)
I don't know but I'm inclined to say that the difficulty will be more on the social side than on the technical side.
The web was very decentralized 20 years ago, and we had all manner of peer to peer systems already. There just doesn't seem to be much appetite for that kind of thing, at least in the mainstream.
Although there might be something to it, with the AI part of the equation.
Like we had self hostable services for a long time, most people just don't want to be a sysadmin.
Well, I gave Claude root on my $3 VPS. Claude is my sysadmin now. I don't have to configure anything anymore. Life is good :)
I wouldn't read too much into it. Anytime I post something silly and stupid, it becomes the top comment. Anytime I post something important, I get downvotes. That's just normal. I think that's just human nature...
And the votes are pretty random too. Sometimes it'll go from -5 to +10 in the span of a few hours. Just depends on who's online at the time...
And yet don't they pull on our heartstrings? Isn't that funny? A random number generator for the soul...
So people have different definitions of the word, but originally Vibe Coding meant "don't even look at the code".
If you're actually making sure it's legit, it's not vibe coding anymore. It's just... Backseat Coding? ;)
There's a level below that I call Power Coding (like power armor) where you're using a very fast model interactively to make many very small edits. So you're still doing the conceptual work of programming, but outsourcing the plumbing (LLM handles details of syntax and stdlib).
I know tech bros like to come up with fancy words to make trivial things sounds fancy but as long as it’s a slop out process, it’s vibe coding. If you’re fixing what a bot spits out, should be a different word … something painful that could’ve been avoided?
Also, we’re both “people in tech”, we know LLMs can’t conceptualise beyond finding the closest collection of tokens rhyming with your prompt/code. Doesn’t mean it’s good or even correct. So that’s why it’s vibe coding.
My meaning was that if we actually decide on definitions that make sense, for the specific things that different people are already doing, then there will be a lot less confusion on the matter!
That depends on what you think jobs and the economy are for, generally.
If you think the purpose of the economy is for the economy to be good then it doesn't matter. If you think it exists to serve humanity then... You really wouldn't need to ask the question, I imagine.
The number of humans doesn't exactly serve humanity though either. Both of those variables are mostly irrelevant to actual human happiness and flourishing. In fact as far as I can tell they are actively harmful, for several different reasons.
I would say that it is bad when it has large derivative (positive or negative). However, the problem is not about >number of human beings< but about making agency that existing people have obsolete.
We're making slave morality obsolete. The sense of self dependent entirely on external performance. Reality is making it so that we will have very little value in that domain very soon. Because everything we do now will be done better faster cheaper by the machines.
That's going to be a pretty rough transition. I think the economic aspects will be pretty straightforward by comparison to the psychological upheaval!
It's bad if it goes down by more than about 1.2% per year. That would mean zero births, present-day natural deaths. Of course zero births isn't presently realistic, and we should expect the next 10-30 years to significantly increase human lifespan. If we assume continued births at the lowest rates seen anywhere on the planet, and humans just maxing out the present human lifespan limit, then anything more than about a 0.5% decrease means someone is getting murked.
My fridge happily reads inputs without consciousness, has goals and takes decisions without "thinking", and consistently takes action to achieve those goals. (And it's not even a smart fridge! It's the one with a copper coil or whatever.)
I guess the cybernetic language might be less triggering here (talking about systems and measurements and control) but it's basically the same underlying principles. One is just "human flavored" and I therefore more prone to invite unhelpful lines of thinking?
Except that the "fridge" in this case is specifically and explicitly designed to emulate human behavior so... you would indeed expect to find structures corresponding to the patterns it's been designed to simulate.
Wondering if it's internalized any other human-like tendencies — having been explicitly trained to simulate the mechanisms that produced all human text — doesn't seem too unreasonable to me.
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