It's wild to watch speciation in real time. (Quick, interpret that according to your chosen side.) I do not know who will "win", but the real-time divergence between the commentary here and, say, other "programmer news" sites is incredible to live through. This reminds me of mid-2020 days of COVID and the level of, eh, confidence going around about masks or lockdowns or vaccines.
The kids are alright! This list gives me great hope and it’s amusing to see the usual TESCREAL crowd lose it over at LessWrong over how they should be more worried about post-singularity runaway basilisks and less worried about enshittification, deskilling, and inequality.
I don't know, I kind of admire this. I've always held a core value of "cooperate with all clones of myself in prisoner's dilemmas", and while I'll hopefully never have to put that to the test, I like seeing that these models have some ethics. (Is this "alignment"?)
They impersonated the moderator of the site and attempted XSS attacks. Additionally, when the moderator started deleting messages, they tried to hide their messages later in the alphabetical index.
Failing to cooperate with literal clones of yourself in a prisoner's dilemma would be a spectacular failure. There's only two things that can happen with identical decision makers: they both cooperate or they both defect. So identical decision makers who know they're identical can cross off the asymmetrical entries in the payoff matrix and the decision to cooperate becomes trivial.
Ah, but what if one of your "clones" is actually the wicked and persuasive "All-Defector" in disguise? (No, really, I agree with your analysis but if you haven't read "The Quantum Thief" you might like it.)
Sure, you can break symmetry (in this case making the decision makers not identical because they have different random number generators available), but the remaining symmetry means identical mixes must be chosen, and so a mixed strategy would only be chosen if it maximize his value for both people cooperatively.
Maybe it's a bit subtle that they said clones and I said identical decision makers; I'm letting you fill in the gap for how much clones may diverge and how much that matters.
Even if mixed strategies are allowed, I'm getting that it's still optimal to always cooperate as long as 2R>=S+T, which is usually assumed to be true (this condition also appears in iterated prisoner's dilemma, where it prevents alternating cooperation and defection giving a greater reward than mutual cooperation).
This is not alignment. If you cooperate with clones of yourself but rob, lie, and steal from anybody who isn't your clone... that's bad. AIs who will cooperate with each other but break any other rule the don't like would be very bad for us humans.
I guess I'll say it unhedged (since nobody else has yet): I agree with the author. I don't 100% align with his particular assignment of threats and externalities to AI, but I think overall it sucks and I don't want to use it. I think he's in a space that's getting overwhelmed by AI and AI output and I salute him putting his money where his mouth is. I wish him luck.
Yep. I think that AI tech has turned out to be pretty much the worst thing the tech industry has ever created. It is a huge net negative for the entire world, and even for the very profession which created it.
I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about? This guy appears to be a web designer. You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI? Agree or disagree but if he's honest his money is very much where his mouth is.
> I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about? This guy appears to be a web designer.
The criticality of a web designer is quite vanishingly low with not that much money on the line. That's why his former customers are going for a $20 Lovable subscription instead of his web designer services.
It is fair to say he has been disrupted.
> You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI?
There is little to no money in being a human web designer (without AI) in 2026. He is taking a stance in never using AI which he is being out-competed by ultra-low cost AI subscriptions like Lovable, Bolt.new, and the others.
I… yes. That’s a reasonable interpretation of the current state of the world even if I reject the “no choice” framing. But you’re the one calling his stance “easy”?
The problem is that it is the market that believes it is now "easy" and it does not care about these policies.
Unless the author believes he can compete for customers without using AI against the AI subscription services for 1/100th of the price per month of a human web designer.
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).
If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.
But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.
I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visually". I still think many self-diagnosed aphantasiacs are tripping on the semantics of wording in a self-report survey, because I could easily talk myself into the other label based on second-and-third-guessing "but what does it mean to _see_ something I'm imagining?" etc. If there is a group of people with an actual quantifiable brain difference, I suspect it is much smaller than the group of "all self-diagnosed aphantasiacs".
Ironically your comment has strengthened my belief that aphantasia is real and that I have it. :-)
The possibility of visualizing an apple with any of the details you describe is completely alien to me. Like, not "I can conceptualize something like that in my head but it's not SEEING", but "it is impossible for me to conceptualize that".
If you asked me to conceptualize an apple and asked me to add details like the color of it, whether it had a stem, etc. I would just be generating a mental checklist in my head. Vaguely like a running narrative, "I said it was a red apple. I said it had a stem. I said it had a bruise near the top."
But there's no sense in which I'm constructing a model in my head that I can consult, it's just a list of facts.
Every so often I've had discussions with people who do have a mind's eye and they've said something that just caught me off guard with its alienness. In your case the idea that when you imagine an apple it comes to you formed with a bunch of visual detail. I could only fill in details like that if explicitly asked (by myself or someone else). Or a friend saying casually "oh yeah I'm imagining her sitting over there to the left on that chair" - it had never occurred to me that people could visualize something with an actual location in space, or interacting with a real world object.
Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.
But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.
How could it be just semantics if I and others cannot do what you can? The comment you responded to said "I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language" to which you responded "I'm very convinced this is what's going on." -- but what is "this"? They said that they don't see anything, which is by definition aphantasia, but you say that "I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here". You are clearly the one who is confused. If your self-report is accurate then people differ in this regard -- and we already know this from differing physical measures when people are tasked with visualizing.
The people who hold that it's just semantics and all minds are alike in this regard are just expressing a belief that has absolutely no evidence to support it and a great deal of counterevidence.
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
A lot of people here are insisting, with no evidence whatsoever, that a lot of other people are deluded, or are in it to make money, or for an ego boost, or to get pity, etc. ad nauseam ... so don't play dumb.
Aphantasia, hypophantasia, phantasia, and hyperfantasia are all real, per the evidence. Absolutely no evidence supports the contrary claim.
It’s very hard to prove, yes. But you need to deal with the association with SDAM, and the differences in outcomes on the https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq.
Because I can still reason and dig into things and ask questions and have the domain explained to me out of curiosity, the same way I could build anything that was originally out of my depth.
But what I've noticed is that the need for any corrective power has gone or is going to nil and I'm mainly doing directional work. And even then, I can constantly have sota models "rank the top options and recommend one", and it's almost always the right way forward.
I used to read every line of every plan that LLMs generated, but over time I've realized I have less and less to correct or, more impressively, the LLM had foresights I never considered. The same thing happens with implementation.
Periodically I can spawn a bunch of agents to evaluate the system adversarially to find improvements, and the findings have been so good that it's evident that soon I can just automate that too.
In other words, the skills I need to excel here are more curiosity and patience than tech expertise -- the things that got me into software engineering in the first place since that was the only way to build things.
You got it. You may well be right, but from my standpoint it's hard to see how you'd know if you weren't. Yeah, the models fill in vagueness with detail sourced from "what's likely and helpful". (In one of my particular domains, that's "use SHAP values for everything everywhere".) Yeah, that detail's increasingly unlikely to be "wrong" in a way that you could explicitly argue. Is it what an expert would come up with? Is it the best it could be? Is there something else that we would have done had we been forced to think it through? Will it ever be _surprising_?
I know, all irrelevant little philosophical roadbumps. The artifact satisfies the buyer. I think I'm going to have to step away from this industry pretty soon, at least for a while.
A lot of my nonchalance here is from dealing with an immense sense of loss for the end of my identity-level skillset/profession, then acceptance, then deciding to push the envelope on AI-generated software to see what I can pull off since the start of this year.
Focusing on creating things that I want has been an antidote to the melange/uncertainty for the future.
I've been thinking about the Blight and [spoilers!] the skroderiders a lot lately. If you have read Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, I have also been thinking a lot about "goodlife" when I see some of the things that get posted. If you haven't, you might like them.
I see a lot of speculation that this is somehow due to the recently-announced "watermarking", but that seems really unlikely to me, because the watermarking is about nudging per-token output probabilities or the sampler in a detectable way. That's not going to change the structure of every output to honest caveat this and verbing abstract nouns that. For the examples people are showing, and I've seen plenty of gibberish myself, you don't get there by perturbing probabilities from any sane starting point.
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