It'd be nice if they didn't use the term at all because I don't think they're useful relevant or real.
If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.
On the other hand, "magical new systems that provide almost unlimited capacity for intelligent work" is probably a more functional mental model. Genie can give you 1000 wishes till you reach your session limit.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune
'Rogue super intelligence' is the most ridiculous sci-fi nonsense of the AI hype, worse than the pro AI hype.
AI will be 'dangerous' because humans will use it irresponsibly, and that's all of the risk.
- giving it too much trust, being lazy, improper guards and accidents
- leveraging it for negative things (black hats, military targetting)
- states and governments using it as instrument of control etc.
That's it.
Stop worrying about the ghost in the machine and start worrying about crappy and evil businesses and governing institutions.
Democracy, vigilance, laws, responsibility are what we need, in all things.
> 'Rogue super intelligence' is the most ridiculous sci-fi nonsense of the AI hype, worse than the pro AI hype.
In my view that line of argument is pro-AI hype. It's the Big Tech CEOs themselves who often share their predictions of the end of the world as we know it caused by AI. It's FUD that makes the technology sound more powerful and important than it is.
Java is a fine language and has sufficiently expressive types. It's the most consistently overlooked language and frankly it's completely annoying. Java is a powerhouse. If you can live with a VM, it's an amazing language. The disdain for Java is honestly just weird. The boiler plate is only marginally annoying to write and makes it considerably easier to read. The 'enterprise ecosystem' is definitely bloat, but that's not Java.
1. Java is mentioned in their comparison table. They just don't use it much.
2. There is really no reason to include Java in the search for your preferred language, since Kotlin is strictly better along every relevant axis.
Kotlin is a few tweaks on top of Java, most of which aren't relevant anymore, and it's not strictly better in most ways other than saving a few keystrokes (and preference).
It's a little bit nicer to write but that's almost irrelevant.
It also comes with some runtime cruft.
In reality there is no Kotlin without Java, which means most projects end up a bit 'dual'; every single Kotlin project we've had (except Android) folded back onto Java. Even Scala wasn't worth it, though that's a different question.
Kotlin’s closed-by-default design choice makes it worse than Java, and thus not strictly better than Java. It’s premature optimization, and a design-up-front-influenced paranoia/fear of any extension in not-designed-for places. But when I write code, I prefer to keep it open to extension, and in practice, I found a lot of value in extending decently written code, that would not be possible with Kotlin without having to go back and modify things to be open.
Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.
Primates fighting each other is not.
Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.
We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..
Wow. I just read that whole wikipedia article and had a fantastic time. Thank you very much for sharing
But to comment on your point: species DO pay for it in the long term when members murder or teratorialism.
Lions are not cannibals. Some lions are cannibals. A successful group of lions cannibals existing (and what a brutal and awesome-in-the-biblical-sense story it is!) does not mean that it pays for the lion species as a whole to have groups of cannibals existing.
In fact, I could only see the “proliferation of groups like this committing atrocities” reach a tipping point for a species - not murdering when this murdering happens will make you cease to exist. So if the species doesn’t have a reason to reach the extreme where this NEVER happens, then it will quickly reach the point where this ALWAYS happens
On an individual level, even in authoritarian situations murder is still immoral and illegal.
Even within the context of power it's still nominally immoral. Stalin did not kill people, he tortured them until they 'admitted their crimes'. That Stalin needed to present the blood-stained admission is very telling.
Even Bloody Mary couldn't just kill however, there had to be some kind of legitimate premise. Heretics, threats etc.. It's how QE1 survived.
Inside their territory, they will attempt to kill any other predator who could compete with them and who belongs to a weaker species. This is a necessary strategy, because any territory has a limited productivity and it cannot sustain too many predators that want to eat the same kind of prey. Thus predators either specialize into separate niches, e.g. some eat mice, some eat rabbits and some eat deer, or they kill each other if they want the same food, to eliminate the competition.
They will also attempt to repel outside their territory any predator of the same species with them. They will seldom attempt to actually kill a predator of their own species, but that mainly because this would be risky, as in a fight to death they could be killed themselves, so ritualized harmless fights are preferred.
The difference with some primates like chimpanzees and humans, is that competitors of the same species may be treated as other predators treat only predators from different, weaker species.
The reason might be that when you cooperate within a bigger team, you may have the same advantage against competitors that a stronger predator has against a weaker predator, e.g. a wolf against a fox.
Thus a fight to death may be chosen, because the bigger team has good chances to win the fight. So chimpanzees start wars for the same reason why Russia attacks Ukraine or USA attacks Iran, those who have more weapons and more money believe that they can win the war, so they start it.
Most other predators do not start wars against their own kind, because in a balanced fight the winner is unpredictable.
> Thus a fight to death may be chosen, because the bigger team has good chances to win the fight. So chimpanzees start wars for the same reason why Russia attacks Ukraine or USA attacks Iran, those who have more weapons and more money believe that they can win the war, so they start it.
In the two Chimpanzee "wars" discussed in Wikipedia (Ngogo and Gombe) it was the smaller group that started the aggression. They were objectively at a disadvantage, but managed to kill or drive off most of the chimps from the larger group. It's as if being focused on aggressive behavior was their advantage.
Smaller groups do not start aggression simultaneously against the entirety of a bigger group.
They seize the opportunity when a smaller group than themselves is separated from the remainder of the big group, and then they overpower the smaller group.
Then they repeat this until they eliminate the bigger group.
My point was that animals understand very well the advantages of belonging to the bigger group at the moment of starting a fight, and they will start the fight only when they estimate that they will win.
The same happens with other social predators. A big group of hyenas will harass or even kill other predators, like leopards or lionesses, which would make them run away when in a small group.
Humans and chimpanzees are probably better at planning a long-term strategy about how to use their advantage in numbers in order to eliminate rivals. Other predators might use their advantage in numbers when an opportunity happens, but they might not perform a surveillance of the actions of a neighbor community, to discover when it becomes possible to use the bulk of their mates against a smaller group of the neighbors that happens to be separated from the others during their foraging activities.
That's not a given. Look at the Old Testament, it professes that you shall not kill, but is also full of laws that are upheld by death, stories of just killings, etc and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god.
In cultures where honor is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who bring dishonor or to maintain honor.
In cultures where purity/cleanliness is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who are impure/unclean.
All cultures, even it seems primates, discriminate between notions of 'arbitrary murder' and 'justice' implying different things.
And it's all roughly consistent.
Arbitrary murder is always 'wrong' across cultures.
Self defence is almost always considered reasonable and a form of justification.
Even basic cultures developed sense of 'justice' as retribution or punishment.
It gets a bit more complicated in terms of organized violence, but even there, it's generally always considered moral in the posture of defence, just as it were a single person defending themselves.
For other things, it's more complicated.
And of course 'war parties' and 'arbitrary retribution' has always been there, aka 'they slighted us, we harm them' absent true moral justification. That's always been problematic, admittedly.
Also "and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god." this is not an appropriate assertion (not nice or welcome)
Among the Yanomami (per Napoleon Chagnon), killing outsiders was not “murder,” it raised status. Men who killed had more wives. Violence was cyclical and regulated, not collapse. Humans are not universally anti-killing, mainly in-group.
That pressure kept population density low and groups mobile. Less surplus, less accumulation, weaker incentives for technological scaling. Over ~10,000+ years this maintained a relatively stable human–environment equilibrium.
“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this.
Basically banding into groups and guarding against outsiders is the default human behaviour. It just works that way if you do a game theory analysis of our social structures. They usually don’t scale too well, but that’s what we revolved to do as social creatures.
It’s actually and very counter intuitively the Catholic Church that lead us to individualism, common laws, nationalism, even the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method.
It sounds bizarre but if you follow the historical logic, in a round about way it has paved the way for the modern world, which the rest of human civilisation was forced to adopt, either to compete or at gunpoint.
There are few books I read in a year that change the way I look at the world, “The Weirdest people in the world” was definitely one of them.
I will agree with some of those - although i would say Christianity rather than the Catholic Church specifically for most of it.
The Catholic Church did ban marrying first cousins and some other relatives (there is a complicated rule) which broke up clans. It also deserves a lot of credit for the scientific method, although that was not a deliberate strategy - it just emerged from theology and lots of educated people within in.
On laws and nationalism, there were many states and legal systems that predate it. Rome or Athens in Europe, empires, kingdoms, even a republic or two elsewhere. Legal systems go back to Hammurabi. Breaking up clans (requiring better laws) and distinguishing between secular and religious laws are something it deserves credit for.
I am puzzled by what the Church contributed to the Industrial Revolution though.
Interesting claim, though not enough detail to disagree with constructively. I'd agree that the Catholic Church had a big influence on our history of course, though among the things you mention I would only count common laws as being intertwined with Church history, everything else pre-dating it or being independent of it in my understanding.
I'll have a look at that book however: what were the other books?
Capital in the 21 century, how to win and influence people, Sidhartha, meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the mars trilogy, the nurture revolution.
These are off the top of my head.
The Catholic Church thing - yea that was quite unexpected for me, and apparently accidental for the church too - the basic premise was - they banned cousin marriage, and heavily enforced it throughout all of society - kings to peasants - this drove people to move around and settle outside of their home towns, driving up individualism and just changing the way our brains work on a neurological level - we have always been a close nit kin social structure animals.
The e book explains it quite well with tons of historical data, neuroscience, comparisons with different countries, continents and social structures.
It got me to “understand” India on a much deeper level since I moved here from Europe, and not get pissed off at people for “not thinking things through”.
But also appreciate how small and consistent things can drive profound changes. Also how did china/ussr speed run the Industrial Revolution so quickly - spoiler alert - they copied the same “ban cousin marriage” thing
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.
People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.
You have to be in a very secure situation to think this way. You also ignore that a war can prevent more problems down the line though often it doesn't. When applying game theory to these situations, depending on how you rig the utility function, you can get any chosen strategy as optimal. So it is more about how you value outcomes and if you are estimating their probabilities correctly as to what is the right decision. By your logic, imprisoning or executing a serial killer isn't OK (let's say in this situation we know they are guilty).
Finally you are completely ignoring competition for resources in your analysis. What makes you think more monkeys has positive utility to individual monkeys? You hope that's true, but until you can speak to them, its going to be hard to know.
These are complex decision and you are acting as if there is always one "correct" answer to every situation. Heck, the trolley problem was conceived of to explain to people like you why your thinking is just plain wrong in some situations.
If one tribe's men kills all the men in the other tribe, that's double the number of women, and double the number of children. A large, permanent improvement in genetic fitness. Not temporary at all.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
The idea of sin is designed to fix less than ideal human tendencies. If anything, this being the biggest sin means murder is the most inherent bad trait of humans.
It's just the sin with the greatest consequences since it invokes the wrath of the groups the person being killed belonged to. Unlawful killings challenge the authority of those who determine which killings are lawful and which aren't, therefore destabilizing societies that are more complex than a hunter-gatherer group.
However, most religions do more than just declare murder to be a sin. They usually aim to foster bonds between relative strangers as well. And values like the guest-host relationship are held to apply to all humans and even to sentient non-humans.
You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
You are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.
But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".
Read carefully. Neither me nor bluegatty claimed humans were inherently biased against killing. We claimed that humans were inherently biased against murder - and the universal taboo proves our point.
So your claim is that there is a universal taboo against things that there is a universal taboo against? If your definition of murder is taboo killing, it is very curcular to claim there is a universal taboo against it since by definition it is only murder if there is a taboo. Thus the claim kind of proves the opposite - if you have to limit it to murder then it shows there is no built in bias, as the definition of murder varies from society to society and essentially means killing in a way the society doesn't approve off. There is no possible way for there not to be a bias against murder since if a society is ok with it is ceases to be murder.
To be fair, it doesn't really seem worth mentioning to say humans are inherently biased against murder, which we then agree is a killing against that society's norms. Because the definitions of "murder" vary so hugely, you're essentially just saying "there is a taboo against breaking the arbitrary rules of your social group."
No. What we are saying is that murder is a universal taboo. That the "arbitrary rules" of every social group on earth regulate killing demonstrates exactly that. It is precisely these rules that demonstrate universality. Some societies regulate what you can eat - halal/kosher. Most don't. Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".
> Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".
That's probably a poor choice of example given cannabilism is pretty uniformly condemned.
Even ignoring that, pretty much every society regulates food. The health inspector shutting down resturants is just as much of a regulation as religious rules like kosher & halal (and there is some reason to suspect that the original goal of those rules were at least partially health related and made a lot more practical sense with the technology available 2000 years ago)
Nonetheless, ignoring all that, i still think any self-referential taboo applies in all circumstances, and thus is kind of pointless to discuss.
E.g.
All societies regulate unlawful insider trading. Societies where all insider trading is lawful are still vaccously regulating unlawful insider trading.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. Or maybe you are just dumb? Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity. Hence, there is no universality. Your poor attempts at coming up with counterexamples proves my point.
I struggle to think of a society that didn't have some regulation on what you can eat. They almost all have taboos against various meats especially. Can you give me some examples?
This is simply not true, in time of severe distress and survival pressure humans are clearly capable of mass killings. It happened so many times throughout history. For example a famine forces a human group to take over rivals resources or when defending own group against agressive rivals.
Nobody ever said that these murders are arbitrary. They're the opposite of arbitrary. They're coalition-based murders against men in the opposite tribe. Highly targeted and intentional. Not random.
Lookup the definition of murder because its subtly different from the definition of the word kill. You keep substituting those two words as if they are synonyms and they are not.
You've equated war and murder, but the distinction between the two is one of the brightest lines in many law codes. Murder is a private act committed by private individuals, while war is a public act of friend against foe (distinguished as a public enemy in contrast to private ones).
Further, murder may be restricted to the killing of publicly acknowledged members of the public "friend" group, i.e. citizens, while the killing of outsiders living with the "friend" group, like slaves, is considered something else in the law.
When we codify morals as laws, we usually make a heavy and deliberate distinction between private and public, and between citizen and non-citizen. This is probably related to the nature of a social animal.
No disagreement across cultures? That’s downright funny, there isn’t even agreement over what counts as murder. Do you think a jihadi sawing off a head thinks they’re a murderer?
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive.
Nazi planned to exterminate several whole ethnicities. If you think it was (or is) unversally accepted as "Bad" -- think again. Most developed countries had Nazi parties, including US and Canada. Some sympathize today. Several Middle East governments publicly claim that murders/rapes/kidnappings of people from another particular country is just and honorable, and will be rewarded in heavens.
Ancient Spartans (reportedly) killed their own weak children. In order to become a citizen every Spartan must have killed a man (non-citizen). It was considered good and just (by citizens).
In many cultures tribal warfare was paramount, even before states (and some remote tribes practice it even today). It was considered good and just.
And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.
The US engages in preventive wars, generally. For example, the wars in Korea and Vietnam were ultimately fought to prevent the USSR from becoming more dominant than the USA and ultimately to prevent it from becoming so strong that in an eventual direct confrontation they would be able to cause a lot of destruction in the US. Iran is similar: they seem to want to prevent Iran from getting nukes which could then be used to destroy Israel, which the US considers its protectorate.
But this is a super slippery slope. It’s essentially the same excuse Russia used in Georgia and now Ukraine: they are near neighbors geographically and culturally that must be stopped from joining the enemy alliance in order to prevent the enemy from attacking Russia in turn, which would be much easier should those countries be part of NATO. But where do you stop? Should Cuba be allowed to join Russia military alliance? Should Mexico be allowed to join BRICS? According to US foreign policy, the answer is always no, because of “national security”.
Well, it's much better to be on the invading side though. I've been to a coutry that was on invaded side (Ukraine), and, trust me, you'd always want to be on the invading side. And sometimes all it takes is just one invasion.
But when I said "we honor our veterans" I did not speak of USA, I spoke of any country veterans.
> And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
This is too cynical a take. "Tribal" warfare (what, Africa, North America?) seems to not be anything compared to civilizational war machines. Evidence shows it instead is two groups shooting arrows at eachother or engaging in non-bladed physical combat - think the PRC vs India in the mountains - with maybe one death. Sort of a mutually accepted way to "blow off steam."
Given that these kinds of battles exist throughout history, alongside catastrophic civilizational ethnocides, we can't assume one or the other is our "core primal behavior." Seems we have a tendency to both, depending on circumstance.
What is universally true though, preceding our capability to organize into warbands, is the fact that our evolutionary advantage is derived from our social nature. We rule the planet because we're so social we're the only species that invented language so as to communicate very complex topics. So in terms of "natural order" for humans, and adaptive behavior, it clearly is cooperation.
Evidence doesn't support your conclusion. Try reading something from Steven Pinker on this topic. Your chance of dying violently in such tribal societies is easily 10x (or more) higher than in modern society.
It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.
This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.
Technically you're right, because of your use of "only", but it is a fact that a minority of males reproduced, vs a majority of females, with historic ratios of 2:1 to 4:1.
The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.
Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.
At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.
In practice, social groups (from tribes to big nations) tend to treat murder very differently from killing in war.
Sufficiently long term, everyone is dead, and I am not sure if we can tell those long-term effects that you foretell from random chance.
The Roman Empire is very dead, but so is the Carthaginian one. Nevertheless, a lot survives from the Roman Empire: basics of law, their alphabet, descendant languages and a certain fame. Quite a lot for famously war-like people.
In comparison, the Carthaginians are gone completely, only fans of history know anything about them. And they are gone because they lost a series of wars all too decisively.
Plenty of people know who Hannibal Barca was. But sure, they probably don't know anything else about Carthage.
Fun fact, the main lesson from that war on the Carthaginian side was that you never let the merchants control the state in a time of war. There was a point where Hannibal was one siege away from erasing Rome from the history books and the leaders in Carthage called him back because sieges are expensive. This decision cost those leaders everything. Most of western history ever since swung on this lone bad decision. Its one of the few true inflection points in history.
I think most people associate the name Hannibal with Silence of the Lambs, maybe 10-15 per cent will know that it was some ancient warrior, perhaps 5 per cent know that it was a Carthaginian general and 2 per cent will know that his surname was Barca. Let's not kid ourselves about actual knowledge of history...
My point wasn't about Hannibal, though. Carthage died in a very different way from Rome: none of its institutions or cultural developments survived, while we still encounter plenty of obviously Roman things in everyday life, starting with the letters we use and names of the months and ending with Latin names for diseases and animals. Pretty much the only thing that survives from Carthage is the faint memory of Hannibal and, for military history buffs, Cannae. Otherwise, the culture has been erased from this world.
The story of the callback is interesting and reminds me of the Mongols suddenly withdrawing from Europe in order to elect the new Khan.
I would caution against the use of "murder" so loosely. Lions don't murder their prey. They kill their prey. Murder occurs when one entity with personhood intentional kills another entity with personhood, where personhood is rooted in the ability to comprehend reality (intellect) and the ability to make free choices among comprehended alternatives (free choice). "Murder" thus has a moral dimension that mere killing does not. Personhood is the seat of moral agency; without personhood, murder simply cannot take place, only killing, and it is a category error to ascribe moral goodness or evil to an act committed by a non-person. A spider eating another spider of the same species isn't murder; it may very well be the nature of that species to function that way.
(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)
From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.
Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans? Why do you think personhood is even required for murder? Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? How about the source of your blt?
I think that 'hom' in homicide stands for homo so killing of (hu)man. I read your comment as lions committing homicide on hyenas which I'm sure you don't mean.
An act is composed of object (the act itself), intent (the purpose/end motivating the act/toward which it aims) and circumstances (the context).
Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.
The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.
So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.
> It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
This is not true at all. Not even close. Sneaky backstabbing murder by a group member against another group member in violation of implicit group norms has probably always been "bad", but "go out and murder some random human" was a rite of passage for many cultures, raids against other groups for no reason at all except for fun and maybe women were typical across perhaps the majority of groups for thousands of years, and history is full to the brim of wars prosecuted for no particular reason at all.
This goes well into the historical period and there are doubtless groups today still with the same attitude. Why did the Athenians murder the entire male population of Melos despite their neutrality? Because the strong do what we can while the weak suffer what they must.
You are confusing your modern-day HN-poster social norms with some constant of human nature.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder'
The quantity of murders in bad neighborhoods tends to contradict. Even seems like a matter of routine wealth acquisition. Yes, society tries to chase the murderers but, I know the figure for France, even only 40% of murders get solved.
We’ve just built a fragile social construct that not everyone recognizes, against murder, among wealthy societies mostly.
"I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures"
You realize that this is largely propaganda and doesn't honestly or accurately describe the actual history right? If a history teacher taught you this, you deserve to get a refund. The actual history is a lot more complex, subtle, nuanced, and driven by biology and trade more than warfare. Most of the deaths were caused by disease and trade drove the warfare in most cases. Also, the warfare was rarely strictly along ethic lines but it was at times.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Spanish or something...
Look up Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act[0], manifest destiny[1] and the American Indian Wars[2]. The Trail of Tears[3]. Here's a whole Wikipedia list for massacres of native Americans[4]. Here's one for native American genocide[5]. The United States had a policy of extermination towards native peoples. Read about the history of boarding schools for native Americans[6]. This isn't propaganda, it's fact.
The narrative you're trying to present here, where the relationship between settlers and natives was mostly peaceful and amicable, is whitewashing history. Sometimes it was, but presenting the exceptions as if they were the rule is deceptive. It's the same kind of gross distortion that led to the "happy slave" narrative, that American slaves for the most part enjoyed slavery because some of them got to live in houses and had families and apparently amicable relationships with their masters. And there were plenty of Nazis who had Jewish friends - Hitler's personal chauffeur was Jewish. But the Holocaust still happened.
Most natives didn't give up their lands willingly, nor did they volunteer for the reservations or boarding schools (which were themselves part of a system of forced cultural assimilation and genocide[7]) because they agreed that the white man's God had granted their lands to them. And even if it is true that disease killed many (sometimes intentionally, as with the case of smallpox blankets) the remainder were still victims of genocide.
You are doing exactly what you are accusing me of. That is, cherrypicking to support a narrative. Maybe you should learn the entire history of the Seminole instead of just one event. Perhaps you would learn that they were paid by European monarchies to attack settlers in an entirely different country, about 500 miles from their lands. You might also learn that after the Trail of Tears, they moved back to Florida when the reservation system was dismantled (a bit before WWI). You would also learn that they built casinos and are one of the wealthiest groups in the US today. Your narrative comes from communist propaganda and in no way describes the majority of their history. You seek to turn them into children with no agency.
PS Those European countries who paid the Seminole to attack the US, they tried the same thing with about 6 other tribes, all of whom turned them down.
PPS The only event that meets the dictionary definition of a genocide in North America was natives killing natives, so that one tribe could control fur trading around the great lakes region and not have to share with other tribes.
PPPS 90% of natives died due to disease, not warfare. Nothing Europeans could do after setting foot in the New World could have prevented that without modern medicine.
Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible.
The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions.
If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands.
I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are.
Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
Yep, spend 100 billion on what should have cost 1/50that cost, and send people up to the moon with rockets that we are still keeping our fingers crossed wont kill them tomorrow, and we have to congratulate them for dunking on some irrelevant career?
I don't like calling a posture 'ignorant' , but I think that's what we have here. I don't mean that as an insult.
It's likely you didn't learn how to use the tool properly, and I'd suggest 'trying again' because not using AI soon will be tantamount to digging holes with shovels instead of using construction equipment. Yes, we still need our 'core skill's but, we're not going to be able to live without the leverage of AI.
Yes - AI can generate slop, and probably too many Engineers do that.
Yes - you can 'feel a loss of control' but that's where you have to find your comfort zone.
It's generally a bad idea to produce 'huge amounts of code' - unless it's perfectly consistent with a design, and he architecture is derived from well-known conventions.
Start by using it as an 'assistant' aka research, fill in all the extra bits, and get your testing going.
You'll probably want to guide the architecture, and at least keep an eye on the test code.
Then it's a matter of how much further 'up' you can go,
There are few situations in which we should be 'accepting' large amounts of code, but some of it can be reviewed quickly.
The AI, already now in 2026 can write better code than you at the algorithmic level - it will be tight, clean, 'by the book' and far lesss likley to have erros.
It fails at the architectural and modular level still, that will probably change.
The AI 'makes a clean cut' in the wood, tighter to the line than any carpenter could - like a power tool.
A carpenter that does not use power tools is an 'artisnal craft person' , not really building functional things.
This is the era of motor cars, there is really no option - I don't say that because I'm pro or anti anything, AI is often way over-hyped - that's something else entirely.
It's like the web / cloud etc. it's just 'imminent'.
The entire industry is moving towards integrating these new platforms, because they obviously work.
It's perfectly reasonable to find problems with AI use, perfectly reasonable to 'not actually want' to use it, but it's basically irresponsible to reject the notion outright.
Like I said I still use Copilot as needed, I just don't trust Claude to go off on its own and generate a mountain of technical debt that I can't 100% trust.
To use your own analogy, there's plenty of carpenters still around for when someone needs something doing properly and bespoke, even though we can all go to Ikea, or any other flat pack furniture company, to get wobbly furniture cheaply at any time.
I'd rather be the last carpenter charging a liveable wage, working on interesting problems for clients who appreciate a human touch than just pumping out mountains of slop to keep up with the broligarchy. If that makes me ignorant that's fine, but I'll be happily enjoying the craft while you're worrying about your metrics.
No one is paying a liveable wage for purely human-authored code anymore. This is the job now, and you are far more effective with these tools than without. If you still have an issue with their output, that's a PEBKAC and you need to upskill and/or attitude adjust. Stop thinking like a programmer and start thinking like a business person. Delegate! It doesn't matter if the machine wrote code just the way you would have, only that it gets you closer to the goal, and the machine can help with vetting and assuring that it does. If you choose to remain stubborn and closed-minded, what you will find is that clients will not care about the "human touch" in their code, and some AI-assisted consultant will come along and deliver more for less money, drinking your entire fucking milkshake.
In 2005, Tim Bryce wrote that programmers were by and large a lazy, discipline-averse lot who are of average intelligence at best but get very precious about their "craft", not realizing that it's only a small part of a greater whole and it's the business people who drive actual value in a company. AI is proving him 100% correct.
Interesting - I'm still making a very liveable wage building projects for small and medium companies, because they don't know their AI from their elbow and don't want to know, they have their own business to run.
You forget that templates and off the shelf SAAS products have been around forever and yet I'm still here getting work because there's always a catch and it always shits the bed.
You mention that I must have a user/skill issue because the AI can't be trusted, I had to explain multiple times to Claude during my work that it had left a very obvious security hole in a controller and in a different policy. Stop pretending it's some sort of super intelligence, they can't even do a timer bro and OpenAI is laughing at you while taking your money.
This sort of angry post, with many demands "attitude adjust" "delegate" and invectives "close-minded" "lazy" never appeared for any other technology shift. React devs never posted like this about jQuery devs. Mobile app devs never posted like this about mobile web devs. Yet tons of AI users post like this about non-AI-using devs.
Is it some kind of fear or doubt? It's a strange phenomenon.
Like for example I strongly believe Typescript is better than Javascript and needs to be used instead for any serious project. But if someone says they don't like it, I cannot imagine myself writing a post like yours about it. First of all I don't care what they use, but second of all if I really wanted to convince them it would not look anything like this. Your post and many like it reads like anger and condescension and incredulity.
Indeed it is quite bizarre. Why are they so emotionally charged? I dont quite get it. Frankly if they are so confident in what they say, why not just watch from the side lines and laugh at the people who get bulldozed?
Me thinks something far more bizarro is aloof.
Im not even a SWE btw so I have no financial interest here, but I can see how bizarre his post is.
He's drunk the kool aid and forgotten that some of us have been working in this industry for decades and got along just fine without AI, while he's busy debugging his technical debt and getting sued for leaking customer data I'll just be over here quietly enjoying coding for customers who like dealing with human beings and not black box robots.
"Stop thinking like a programmer and start thinking like a business person."
Lmao software engineers are engineers because its not their job to be the business guy. Man you have been here since 2007 but you sound like an absolute bozo.
FYI I am a CEO and I would never expect my engineers to be thinking like a business person - thats my job. Their job is to go make my vision a reality whilst ensuring the product is trusted and so on.
You're offering to deliver parcels by horse - thinking that somehow your 'delivering is better because it's more natural' and that your customers will appreciate it, over the 'smog' that the cars create.
Or in other words - 'non existent'.
It is arrogant and luddite to suggest that 'using AI is not doing it properly' or that anyone will care.
They care that it's done well - that's it.
FYI, the code that AI produces is probably better than what you produce - at least a functional level.
'Artisanility' is worthless in 'code' - there are no 'winding staircases' for us to custom build, as a master carpenter would.
Where you can continue to 'write code by hand' is for very arcane, things, but even then you're still going to have to use AI for a lot of things in support of that.
So if you want to get into compiler design - sure.
But still - without mastery of AI, you'll be left behind.
At least with horses, there's a naturalist component, with 'code' - nobody cares at all. There's zero interest in it, there's not 'organic' angle to sell.
Maybe in your industry but in mine working with small and medium businesses they value reliability above everything else. They don't give a shit whether you use AI or not as long as it's stable and works and are prepared to pay a premium for someone who knows what they're doing.
If you want to have a race to the bottom and be Sam Altman's lap dog, that your business.
I really don't understand why you people always say these things so matter of factly. I'd put a lot of money (and do, in the markets) on you being wrong. I'm pretty sure in ten years I will not have a problem keeping a software job without using AI.
Maybe it's because of the environment they work in or their understanding of other people because of the business they're in.
Your average 50 year old business owner doesn't understand AI at all and doesn't care to know, he's too busy thinking about getting a new order for 5000 widgets that he invented. What he needs is a website with inventory management, some sort of email marketing software, some sort of CRM, maybe a dashboard or something. What he wants to do is pick up the phone to someone and get them to take care of it for a reasonable price.
AI is coming for programmers with no social skills, but it isn't coming for the human relationship side of the business where you need to have a few meetings to work out what they want to achieve, build a plan that works long term, have a call with other third parties or their vendors etc to alleviate pain points and then build a project around the business needs that won't crash every five minutes and leak their internal information because Claude decided security was optional.
Half my job is understanding what they need and then instead of accepting their original scope, building a brand new scope in collaboration with them to fit the business needs long term. If one of these guys just wants to plow the original scope into Claude and let it rip then the customer isn't getting what they need.
We don't even know what 'creativity' is, and most humans I know are unable to be creative even when compelled to be.
AI is 'creative enough' - whether we call it 'synthetic creativity' or whatever, it definitely can explore enough combinations and permutations that it's suitably novel. Maybe it won't produce 'deeply original works' - but it'll be good enough 99.99% of the time.
The reliability issue is real.
It may not be solvable at the level of LLM.
Right now everything is LLM-driven, maybe in a few years, it will be more Agentically driven, where the LLM is used as 'compute' and we can pave over the 'unreiablity'.
For example, the AI is really good when it has a lot of context and can identify a narrow issue.
It gets bad during action and context-rot.
We can overcome a lot of this with a lot more token usage.
Imagine a situation where we use 1000x more tokens, and we have 2 layers of abstraction running the LLMs.
We're running 64K computers today, things change with 1G of RAM.
But what I see again and again in LLMs is a lot of combinations of possible solutions that are somewhere around internet (bc it put that data in). Nothing disruptive, nothing thought out like an experimented human in a specific topic. Besides all the mistakes/hallucinations.
> A lot of humans have difficulty with very reality that they are in fact biological machines, and most of what we do is the same thing.
I think we are far and ahead from this "mix and match". A human can be much, much more unpredictable than these LLMs for the thinking process if only bc looking at a much bigger context. Contexts that are even outside of the theoretical area of expertise where you are searching for a solution.
Good solutions from humans are potentially much more disruptive.
Yet they never give you replies like: oh, you see how dolphins run in the water taking advantage of sea currents if you are talking about boats and speed.
What they will do is to find all the solutions someone did and mix and match around in a mdiocre way of approaching the problem in a much more similar way to a search engine with mix and match than thinking out of the box or specifically for your situation (something also difficult to do anyway bc there will always be some detail missing in the cintext and if you really had go to give all that context each time dumping it from your brain then you would not use it as fast anymore) which humans do infinitely better. At least nowadays.
Now you will tell me that the info is there. So you can bias LLMs to think in more (or less) disruptive ways.
Then now your job is to tweak the LLMs until it behaves exactly how you want. But that is nearly impossible for every situation, because what you want is that it behaves in the way you want depending on the context, not a predefined way all the time.
At that time I wonder if it is better to burn all your time tweaking and asking alternative LLMs questions that, anyway, are not guaranteed to be reliable, or just keep learning yourself about the domain instead of just playing tweaking and absorbing real knowledge (and not losing that knowledge and replace it with machines). It is just stupid to burn several hours in making an expert you cannot check if it says real stuff instead of using that time for really learning about the problem itself.
This is a trade-off and I think LLMs are good for stimulating human thinking fast. But not better at thinking or reasoning or any of that. And if yiu just rely on them the only thing you will emd up being professional at is orompting, which a 16 year old untrained person can do almost as well as any of us.
LLMs can look better if you have no idea of the topic you talk about. However, when you go and check maybe the LLM hallucinated 10 or15% of what it said.
So you cannot rely on it nayways. I still use them. But with a lotof care.
Great for scaffolding. Bad at anything that deviates from the average task.
> First - I'm doubting your assumptions about "What they will do is to find all the solutions someone did and mix and match".
I never, ever got from a LLM a solution that either I could have never thought of or it was available almost verbatim in internet (take this last one with a grain of salt, we know how they can combine and fake it, but essentially, solutions looking like templates from existing things, often hallucinating things that do not exist or cannot be done, inventing parameter names for APIs that do not exist, etc).
When I give some extra thought to a problem (20 years almost in software business) I think solutions that I come up with are often simpler, less convoluted and when I analyze LLMs they give you a lot of extra code that is not even needed, as if they were doing guessing even if you ask them something more narrow. Well, guessing is what they are doing actually, via interpolation.
This makes them useful for "bulky", run fast, first approach problems but the cost later is on you: maintenance, understanding, modifying, etc.
I think the terminology is just dogshit in this area. LLMs are great semantic searchers and can reason decently well - I'm using them to self teach a lot of fields. But I inevitably reach a point where I come up with some new thoughts and it's not capable of keeping up and I start going to what real people are saying right now, today, and trust the LLM less and instead go to primary sources and real people. But I would have never had the time, money, or access to expertise without the LLM.
Constantly worrying, "is this a superset? Is this a superset?" Is exhausting. Just use the damn tool, stop arguing about if this LLM can get all possible out of distribution things that you would care about or whatever. If it sucks, don't make excuses for it, it sucks. We don't give Einstein a pass for saying dumb shit either, and the LLM ain't no Einstein
If there's one thing to learn from philosophy, it's that asking the question often smuggles in the answer. Ask "is it possible to make an unconstrained deity?" And you get arguments about God.
do they reason? Where was a video by AI researcher, that showed, that they do not reason but actually come with the result first and then try to invent "reasoning" to match it.
I mean humans do that too, and I don't think it's very unjustified. The "we deduce from a deep base premise P down a chain of inferences" picture is extremely incomplete and has been challenged all over the place - by normal people, by analytic and continental philosophers, by science itself, etc.
Not trying to say that LLM's are equivalent to humans but that the concept of reasoning is undefined.
And the fact that their performance does increase when using test-time compute is empirical evidence that they're doing something that increases their performance on tasks that we consider would require reasoning. As to what that is, we don't know.
But humans verify things. AI just fools you and I would say it is the biggest problem.I have with AIs.
They give me stuff that I do not know whether to trust or not and what surprises I will find down the way later.
So now my task is to review everything, remove cruft. It starts to compete against investing my time to deep-think and do it thoughtfully from the get go and come up with something simpler, with less code and/or that I understand better.
If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.
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