6 ms·

> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.

by 113 11mo ago

hinkley 11mo ago
Christine didn’t end well for anyone.
lazide 11mo ago
Even if it purred real nice when it started up? (I’m sorry)
- ozim 11mo ago
  Looks like we have a Civic owner xD
jstummbillig 11mo ago
Most of us actually drive a car to get somewhere. The car, and the driving, are just a modality. Which is the point.
- 113 11mo ago
  Yeah but in this case your car is non-deterministic so
  - mikodin 11mo ago
    Well the need is to arrive where you are going. If we were in an imagined world and you are headed to work You either walk out your door and there is a self driving car, or you walk out of your door and there is a train waiting for you or you walk out of your door and there is a helicopter or you walk out of your door and there is a literal worm hole. Let's say all take the same amount of time, are equally safe, same cost, have the same amenities inside, and "feel the same" - would you care if it were different every day? I don't think I would. Maybe the wormhole causes slight nausea ;)
    - hyperadvanced 11mo ago
      I think it’s pretty obvious but most people would prefer a regular schedule not a random and potentially psychologically jarring transportation event to start the day.
    - didericis 11mo ago
      > Well the need is to arrive where you are going. In order to get to your destination, you need to explain where you want to go. Whatever you call that “imperative language”, in order to actually get the thing you want, you have to explain it. That’s an unavoidable aspect of interacting with anything that responds to commands, computer or not. If the AI misunderstands those instructions and takes you to a slightly different place than you want to go, that’s a huge problem. But it’s bound to happen if you’re writing machine instructions in a natural language like English and in an environment where the same instructions aren’t consistently or deterministically interpreted. It’s even more likely if the destination or task is particularly difficult/complex to explain at the desired level of detail. There’s a certain irreducible level of complexity involved in directing and translating a user’s intent into machine output simply and reliably that people keep trying to “solve”, but the issue keeps reasserting itself generation after generation. COBOL was “plain english” and people assumed it would make interacting with computers like giving instructions to another employee over half a century ago. The primary difficulty is not the language used to articulate intent, the primary difficulty is articulating intent.
      - simianwords 11mo ago
        this is a weak argument.. i use normal taxis and ask the driver to take me to a place in natural language - a process which is certainly non deterministic.
        chii 11mo ago
        and the taxi driver has an intelligence that enables them to interpret your destination, even if ambiguous. And even then, mistakes happen (all the time with taxis going to a different place than the passenger intended because the names may have been similar).
  - nurettin 11mo ago
    I mean, as long as it works and it is still technically "my car", I would welcome the change.
  - chii 11mo ago
    > your car is non-deterministic it's not as far as your experience goes - you press pedal, it accelerates. You turn the steering, it goes the way it turns. What the car does is deterministic. More importantly, it does this every time, and the amount of turning (or accelerating) is the same today as it was yesterday. If an LLM interpreted those inputs, can you say with confidence, that you will accelerate in a way that you predicted? If that is the case, then i would be fine with an LLM interpreted input to drive. Otherwise, how do you know, for sure, that pressing the brakes will stop the car, before you hit somebody in front of you? of course, you could argue that the input is no longer your moving the brake pads etc - just name a destination and you get there, and that is suppose to be deterministic, as long as you describe your destination correctly. But is that where LLM is at today? or is that the imagined future of LLMs?
    - crote 11mo ago
      Tesla's "self-driving" cars have been working very hard to change this. That piece of road it has been doing flawlessly for months? You're going straight into the barrier today, just because it feels like it.
    - iliaxj 11mo ago
      Sometimes it doesn't though. Sometimes the engine seizes because a piece of tubing broke and you left your coolant down the road two turns ago. Or you steer off a cliff because there was coolant on the road for some reason. Or the meat sack in front of the wheel just didn't get enough sleep and your response time is degraded and you just can't quite get the thing to feel how you usually do. Ultimately the failure rate is low enough to trust your life on it, but that's just a matter of degree.
      - pepoluan 11mo ago
        The situations you described reflects a System that has changed. And if the System has changed, then a change in output is to be expected. It's the same as having a function called "factorial" but you change the multiplication operation to addition instead.
      - 11mo ago
- 63stack 11mo ago
  Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity. The getting there is just a modality.
  - jermaustin1 11mo ago
    Most of us actually want to get some where to do an activity to enjoy ourselves. The getting there, and activity, are just modalities.
    - tags2k 11mo ago
      Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?
      - shswkna 11mo ago
        This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand) This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria. So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process. I could write a long essay on this. But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing. Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.
        narrator 11mo ago
        >Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand) When you suddenly realize walking down the street that the very high fentanyl zombie is having a better day than you are. Yeah, you can push the button in your brain that says "You won the game." However, all those buttons were there so you would self-replicate energy efficient compute. Your brain runs on 10 watts after all. It's going to take a while for AI to get there, especially without the capability for efficient self-repair.
- GTP 11mo ago
  But I want that somewhere to be deterministic, i.e. I want to arrive to the place I choose. With this kind of non-determinism instead, I have a big chance of getting to the place I choose. But I will also every now and then end up in a different place.
- kennywinker 11mo ago
  If this was a good answer to mobility, people would prefer the bus over their car. It’s non-deterministic - when will it come? How quick will i get there? Will i get to sit? And it’s operated by an intelligent agent (driver). Every reason people prefer a car or bike over the bus is a reason non-deterministic agents are a bad interface. And that analogy works as a glimpse into the future - we’re looking at a fast approaching world where LLMs are the interface to everything for most of us - except for the wealthy, who have access to more deterministic services or actual human agents. How long before the rich person car rental service is the only one with staff at the desk, and the cheaper options are all LLM based agents? Poor people ride the bus, rich people get to drive.
  - aryehof 11mo ago
    Bus vs car hit home for me as a great example of non vs deterministic. It has always seemed to me that workflow or processes need to be deterministic and not decided by an LLM.
  - soco 11mo ago
    Here in Switzerland the bus is the deterministic choice. Just saying.
stirfish 11mo ago
But do you want to drive, or do you want to be wherever you need to be to fuck?
- codebje 11mo ago
  For me personally, the latter, but there's definitely people out there that just love driving. Either way, these silly reductionist games aren't addressing the point: if I just want to get from A to B then I definitely want the absolute minimum of unpredictability in how I do it.
  - theendisney 11mo ago
    That would ruin the brain placticity. I wonder now, if everything is always different and suddenly every day would be the same. How many times as terrifying would that be compared to the opposite?
    - whilenot-dev 11mo ago
      A form of Alexei Yurchak's hypernormalisation?
  - mewpmewp2 11mo ago
    Only because you think the driving is what you want. The point is that what you want is determined by our brain chemicals. Many steps could be skipped if we could just give you the chemicals in your brain that you craved.
ozim 11mo ago
I feel like this is the point where we start to make jokes about Honda owners.
- bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
  Go on, what about honda owners? I don't know the meme.
  - hathawsh 11mo ago
    The "Wham Baam" YouTube channels have a running joke about Hondas bumping into other cars with concerning frequency.
OJFord 11mo ago
...so that you can get to the supermarket for food, to meet someone you love, meet someone you may or may not love, or to solve the problem of how to get to work; etc. Your ancestors didn't want horses and carts, bicycles, shoes - they wanted the solutions of the day to the same scenarios above.
- sublinear 11mo ago
  As much as I love your point, this is where I must ask whether you even want a corporeal form to contain the level of ego you're describing. Would you prefer to be an eternal ghost? To dismiss the entire universe and its hostilities towards our existence and the workarounds we invent in response as mere means to an end rather than our essence is truly wild.
  - anonzzzies 11mo ago
    Most people need to go somewhere (in a hurry) to make money or food etc which most people don't want to do if they didn't have to, so yeah it is mostly a means to an end.
    - sublinear 11mo ago
      And yet that money is ultimately spent on more means to ends that are just as inconvenient from another perspective? My point was that there is no true end goal as long as whims continue. The need to craft yet more means is equally endless. The crafting is the primary human experience, not the using. The using of a means inevitably becomes transparent and boring.
      - mewpmewp2 11mo ago
        It should finalize into introducing satisfaction to the whims directly, so the AI would be directly managing the chemicals in our brains that would trigger feelings of reward and satisfaction.
        11mo ago
mjevans 11mo ago
Food -> 'basic needs'... so yeah, Shelter, food, etc. That's why most of us drive. You are also correct to separate Philia and Eros ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love ). A job is better if your coworkers are of a caliber that they become a secondary family.
lambdaone 11mo ago
Sadly, this is not true of a (admittedly very small) number of individuals.
zahrevsky 11mo ago
Weird kink

> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.

by 113 11mo ago

> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.

hinkley 11mo ago

Christine didn’t end well for anyone.

lazide 11mo ago

Even if it purred real nice when it started up? (I’m sorry)

ozim 11mo ago
Looks like we have a Civic owner xD

jstummbillig 11mo ago

Most of us actually drive a car to get somewhere. The car, and the driving, are just a modality. Which is the point.

113 11mo ago
Yeah but in this case your car is non-deterministic so
- mikodin 11mo ago
  Well the need is to arrive where you are going. If we were in an imagined world and you are headed to work You either walk out your door and there is a self driving car, or you walk out of your door and there is a train waiting for you or you walk out of your door and there is a helicopter or you walk out of your door and there is a literal worm hole. Let's say all take the same amount of time, are equally safe, same cost, have the same amenities inside, and "feel the same" - would you care if it were different every day? I don't think I would. Maybe the wormhole causes slight nausea ;)
  - hyperadvanced 11mo ago
    I think it’s pretty obvious but most people would prefer a regular schedule not a random and potentially psychologically jarring transportation event to start the day.
  - didericis 11mo ago
    > Well the need is to arrive where you are going. In order to get to your destination, you need to explain where you want to go. Whatever you call that “imperative language”, in order to actually get the thing you want, you have to explain it. That’s an unavoidable aspect of interacting with anything that responds to commands, computer or not. If the AI misunderstands those instructions and takes you to a slightly different place than you want to go, that’s a huge problem. But it’s bound to happen if you’re writing machine instructions in a natural language like English and in an environment where the same instructions aren’t consistently or deterministically interpreted. It’s even more likely if the destination or task is particularly difficult/complex to explain at the desired level of detail. There’s a certain irreducible level of complexity involved in directing and translating a user’s intent into machine output simply and reliably that people keep trying to “solve”, but the issue keeps reasserting itself generation after generation. COBOL was “plain english” and people assumed it would make interacting with computers like giving instructions to another employee over half a century ago. The primary difficulty is not the language used to articulate intent, the primary difficulty is articulating intent.
    - simianwords 11mo ago
      this is a weak argument.. i use normal taxis and ask the driver to take me to a place in natural language - a process which is certainly non deterministic.
      - chii 11mo ago
        and the taxi driver has an intelligence that enables them to interpret your destination, even if ambiguous. And even then, mistakes happen (all the time with taxis going to a different place than the passenger intended because the names may have been similar).
- nurettin 11mo ago
  I mean, as long as it works and it is still technically "my car", I would welcome the change.
- chii 11mo ago
  > your car is non-deterministic it's not as far as your experience goes - you press pedal, it accelerates. You turn the steering, it goes the way it turns. What the car does is deterministic. More importantly, it does this every time, and the amount of turning (or accelerating) is the same today as it was yesterday. If an LLM interpreted those inputs, can you say with confidence, that you will accelerate in a way that you predicted? If that is the case, then i would be fine with an LLM interpreted input to drive. Otherwise, how do you know, for sure, that pressing the brakes will stop the car, before you hit somebody in front of you? of course, you could argue that the input is no longer your moving the brake pads etc - just name a destination and you get there, and that is suppose to be deterministic, as long as you describe your destination correctly. But is that where LLM is at today? or is that the imagined future of LLMs?
  - crote 11mo ago
    Tesla's "self-driving" cars have been working very hard to change this. That piece of road it has been doing flawlessly for months? You're going straight into the barrier today, just because it feels like it.
  - iliaxj 11mo ago
    Sometimes it doesn't though. Sometimes the engine seizes because a piece of tubing broke and you left your coolant down the road two turns ago. Or you steer off a cliff because there was coolant on the road for some reason. Or the meat sack in front of the wheel just didn't get enough sleep and your response time is degraded and you just can't quite get the thing to feel how you usually do. Ultimately the failure rate is low enough to trust your life on it, but that's just a matter of degree.
    - pepoluan 11mo ago
      The situations you described reflects a System that has changed. And if the System has changed, then a change in output is to be expected. It's the same as having a function called "factorial" but you change the multiplication operation to addition instead.
    - 11mo ago
63stack 11mo ago
Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity. The getting there is just a modality.
- jermaustin1 11mo ago
  Most of us actually want to get some where to do an activity to enjoy ourselves. The getting there, and activity, are just modalities.
  - tags2k 11mo ago
    Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?
    - shswkna 11mo ago
      This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand) This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria. So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process. I could write a long essay on this. But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing. Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.
      - narrator 11mo ago
        >Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand) When you suddenly realize walking down the street that the very high fentanyl zombie is having a better day than you are. Yeah, you can push the button in your brain that says "You won the game." However, all those buttons were there so you would self-replicate energy efficient compute. Your brain runs on 10 watts after all. It's going to take a while for AI to get there, especially without the capability for efficient self-repair.
GTP 11mo ago
But I want that somewhere to be deterministic, i.e. I want to arrive to the place I choose. With this kind of non-determinism instead, I have a big chance of getting to the place I choose. But I will also every now and then end up in a different place.
kennywinker 11mo ago
If this was a good answer to mobility, people would prefer the bus over their car. It’s non-deterministic - when will it come? How quick will i get there? Will i get to sit? And it’s operated by an intelligent agent (driver). Every reason people prefer a car or bike over the bus is a reason non-deterministic agents are a bad interface. And that analogy works as a glimpse into the future - we’re looking at a fast approaching world where LLMs are the interface to everything for most of us - except for the wealthy, who have access to more deterministic services or actual human agents. How long before the rich person car rental service is the only one with staff at the desk, and the cheaper options are all LLM based agents? Poor people ride the bus, rich people get to drive.
- aryehof 11mo ago
  Bus vs car hit home for me as a great example of non vs deterministic. It has always seemed to me that workflow or processes need to be deterministic and not decided by an LLM.
- soco 11mo ago
  Here in Switzerland the bus is the deterministic choice. Just saying.

stirfish 11mo ago

But do you want to drive, or do you want to be wherever you need to be to fuck?

codebje 11mo ago
For me personally, the latter, but there's definitely people out there that just love driving. Either way, these silly reductionist games aren't addressing the point: if I just want to get from A to B then I definitely want the absolute minimum of unpredictability in how I do it.
- theendisney 11mo ago
  That would ruin the brain placticity. I wonder now, if everything is always different and suddenly every day would be the same. How many times as terrifying would that be compared to the opposite?
  - whilenot-dev 11mo ago
    A form of Alexei Yurchak's hypernormalisation?
- mewpmewp2 11mo ago
  Only because you think the driving is what you want. The point is that what you want is determined by our brain chemicals. Many steps could be skipped if we could just give you the chemicals in your brain that you craved.

ozim 11mo ago

I feel like this is the point where we start to make jokes about Honda owners.

bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
Go on, what about honda owners? I don't know the meme.
- hathawsh 11mo ago
  The "Wham Baam" YouTube channels have a running joke about Hondas bumping into other cars with concerning frequency.

OJFord 11mo ago

...so that you can get to the supermarket for food, to meet someone you love, meet someone you may or may not love, or to solve the problem of how to get to work; etc. Your ancestors didn't want horses and carts, bicycles, shoes - they wanted the solutions of the day to the same scenarios above.

sublinear 11mo ago
As much as I love your point, this is where I must ask whether you even want a corporeal form to contain the level of ego you're describing. Would you prefer to be an eternal ghost? To dismiss the entire universe and its hostilities towards our existence and the workarounds we invent in response as mere means to an end rather than our essence is truly wild.
- anonzzzies 11mo ago
  Most people need to go somewhere (in a hurry) to make money or food etc which most people don't want to do if they didn't have to, so yeah it is mostly a means to an end.
  - sublinear 11mo ago
    And yet that money is ultimately spent on more means to ends that are just as inconvenient from another perspective? My point was that there is no true end goal as long as whims continue. The need to craft yet more means is equally endless. The crafting is the primary human experience, not the using. The using of a means inevitably becomes transparent and boring.
    - mewpmewp2 11mo ago
      It should finalize into introducing satisfaction to the whims directly, so the AI would be directly managing the chemicals in our brains that would trigger feelings of reward and satisfaction.
      - 11mo ago

mjevans 11mo ago

Food -> 'basic needs'... so yeah, Shelter, food, etc. That's why most of us drive. You are also correct to separate Philia and Eros ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love ). A job is better if your coworkers are of a caliber that they become a secondary family.

lambdaone 11mo ago

Sadly, this is not true of a (admittedly very small) number of individuals.

zahrevsky 11mo ago

Weird kink