[rebekkamikkoa]

I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.

[ramon156]

Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"

[block_dagger]

Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”

[embedding-shape]

To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.

Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.

[limflick]

I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.

[master-lincoln]

This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product

[bayindirh]

Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron.

...and many people choose to ignore that fact.

[sweetheart]

They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.

[muddi900]

Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?

[darkwater]

Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...

[sweetheart]

I think it’s possible.

[globalnode]

Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.

[sweetheart]

Okay!

[globalnode]

found the prompt "engineer"

[mherkender]

If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.

[jappgar]

They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech

[aduwah]

There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money

[coffeefirst]

We are about to test that theory.

[master-lincoln]

not even Bernie Sanders?

[mythrwy]

probably not

[maratc]

In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."

[limflick]

"Citizens United" might be the most ironic name in the history of western democracy.

[tardedmeme]

Every evil propaganda corp has a cutesy brand name like that. Names like Voice of the People, or Electoral Freedom Foundation, or Moms for Liberty, or Free America Foundation or First Amendment Recovery Temple (I definitely made that one up, and some of the others).

[twoodfin]

Do you know what the Citizens United organization wanted to do? Why didn’t they have a right to do it?

[jappgar]

They don't need money they just need votes.

If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.

You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.

[maratc]

> If money can buy votes

It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."

Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?

[jappgar]

That's why political parties were invented, so you don't need to create name recognition for every candidate.

Those signs aren't changing anyone's mind. But a party is something people can talk about and understand. It's unifying.

Giving a fuck means engaging with party politics and making it part of your day to day life (at least during election season).

Signs are the laziest and most inconsequential way of supporting a candidate. By far the best way is to convince everyone that you know in person to vote for a particular candidate.

[SecretDreams]

Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes:

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.

[Jtarii]

The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.

[SecretDreams]

By what metrics?

Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.

But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.

Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.

[limflick]

I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.

On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

[simonh]

It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI.

Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.

Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.

[mr_toad]

Hallucinations and other errors are a real problem. I’ve tried tinkering with Shortcuts (which get you more direct access the models) to generate AI responses to messages and emails, but it’s unreliable. The biggest problem is it has trouble distinguishing between people, confusing me with the person I’m conversing with, or with third parties.

[limflick]

How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)

[evilduck]

Like most MS vs. Apple differences, it comes down to a matter of taste. They've added quite a few AI enhancements across their apps and operating system, but they are mostly feature enhancements and not major AI branded efforts. Having a Summarize button in Mail.app where it's contextually relevant or having text improvement menu options in text fields vs. slapping a major "Copilot" tab into everything.

Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".

[limflick]

I think that's the best thing they could have done as a company. Sounds like the end-user first philosophy is still there.

[mr_toad]

It’s very limited. Only a few buttons to push, unless you roll up your sleeves. For instance there’s a button to have it summarise an email, but having it search through all your emails requires writing scripts.

[embedding-shape]

Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ.

I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.

Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.

[cheschire]

His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.

[jorvi]

> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.

Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.

I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).

Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.

> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..

Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.

You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.

In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.

[jcgrillo]

The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.

It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.

[latexr]

> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.

Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.

https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114

Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.

> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.

Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.

> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.

[Forgeties79]

The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it.

They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.

Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing

[latexr]

Good point. Yes, I also have all of that turned off and can ignore it. Not that Apple is without its pushiness, though, I still get frequent nags to “upgrade” to Tahoe and iOS 26 without an option to turn those off, and every time I go to System Settings to update to a new macOS 15 version and click to show more details, they sneakily select macOS 26 checkbox.

[tracerbulletx]

From the bicycle of the mind, to the Rascal scooter of the mind.

[porknbeans00]

no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.

[embedding-shape]

There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.

Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.