this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
293 points (90.1% liked)

Technology

63375 readers
4177 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Or if you hire more personnel. Overtime work is more expensive anyway.

Btw, the overwhelmingly positive field study in the UK over the 4-day week...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 53 minutes ago

no no, he means free overtime. Like a reverse "20% policy"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 39 minutes ago

So this is how you use AI to get these promised productivity gains.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 58 minutes ago

His balls are within reach for stress relief.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

When exactly was this pivotal moment when Google became a cult not a company ?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

We can make the AI slave, we just need the humans to be more slave-like to do it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Then we can enslave humanity with the AI slave

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Well that's the neat thing, the owners of the AI won't need humanity. They will exterminate us using the AI and sit smugly on their thrones of skulls until they expire or kill each other. Then I guess AI can just do its own thing in our ruins.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Dude who's done nothing of importance since bouncing off google throwing words like that 😄

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Just for information: We know, from multiple studies, that working more than 40 hours a week for longer periods of time is extremly unhealthy for you. A week has 24*7 = 168 hours and you should sleep 8 hours. That are 56 hours and if you're working 60 hours, that leaves you with 52 hours or 7,5 hours per day for stuff like "commuting to work", "buying groceries", "brushing your teeth" , "family", "friends", "sport" or "this important appointment at the dentist".

And that 7,5 hours are without a weekend. This will kill you. You might be younger and feel strong, but this will kill you.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Not to mention that it doesn't yield higher output. So it's stupid on every level.

7,5h per day is an absolute maximum for a standard workday. Crunches are sometimes fine if there's a good reason, but they probably need to be followed by extended rest.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, that is also a factor. You can't expect good work from somebody who has been working for 60 hours for years without having a vacation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

And if you want to have two weekends, 60 hours in 5 days is 12 hours of work a day, minus 8 hours for sleep you get 4 hours, minus ~2 hours commute you get 2 hours, and the rest is basic cooking and eating. This leaves 0 hours for anything else, including rest or even any other duties. This will absolutely kill you in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 47 minutes ago

I remember hearing about somewhere - alphabet or meta or something like that - that basically provided adult crèche facilities for the employees. Way beyond just food - On-site nap rooms. Washing machines. Showers. The works. All to enable just a super unhealthy attitude towards work. Thinking about how much that must've affected anyone going there straight after uni when they should have been leaning how to look after themselves makes me shudder with cringe

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 hours ago

Just a few more hours bro.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 hours ago

If it's within reach of a 60 hour week then it's within reach of a 30 hour week.

This LLM copycat bullshit is never going to be it though. It's not thinking, it's looking up the answers at the back of the book.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

wtf? why is everyone turning techbro all of a sudden even those who are supposed to be more knowledgeable on such stuff. Oh right because there is a bubble to sustain.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 6 hours ago

"Man who works 10 hours per year tells underlings to work 60 hours per week."

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago

I highly recommend Kara Swisher's recent book "Burn Book" for insights into the Tech lads like Brin, etc, as she's known most of them since the 90s.

Really helps contextualize the crazy cocktail of engineering/commercial power with general naivety a lot of these guys have going.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 hours ago

Thought this was an Onion article!

Hey plebs! I demand you work 50% more to develop AGI so that I can replace you with robots and fire all of you and make myself a double plus plutocrat! Also, I want to buy an island, small city, Bunker, Spaceship, And/Or something.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 hours ago

Who gives a fuck what Sergey brin thinks

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

So he's saying they've exhausted the pool of applicants so badly to replace that with normal work weeks, just 150% amount of Googlers or maybe 200% amount of Googlers?

Power and fame break a man. Even if he wasn't broken from the beginning.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

He just wants more money and doesn't want to pay his workers. Google has been laying off thousands of people in the last year, so there really is no shortage of applicants. They could have just kept their current workforce, maybe?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

What I learned working with Googlers. They were dorks. Big ass dorks. Who got used by women because for the first time in their lives. They were attractive to these women. So many broken marriages and divorces from cheating husbands. That they joked about at the Christmas party. It was an eye opening experience.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

AGI requires a few key components that no LLM is even close to.

First, it must be able to discern truth based on evidence, rather than guessing it. Can’t just throw more data at it, especially with the garbage being pumped out these days.

Second, it must ask questions in the pursuit of knowledge, especially when truth is ambiguous. Once that knowledge is found, it needs to improve itself, pruning outdated and erroneous information.

Third, it would need free will. And that’s the one it will never get, I hope. Free will is a necessary part of intelligent consciousness. I know there are some who argue it does not exist but they’re wrong.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

The human mind isn't infinitely complex. Consciousness has to be a tractable problem imo. I watched Westworld so I'm something of an expert on the matter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

Specifically, the women who report to him that he's attracted to need to spend 60 hours a week dating him.

Thanks for the input, Big Head.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Karoushi is the new cool trend. Everyone is doing it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 hours ago

I don't believe a single word of this bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

He can fuck all the way off.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Or just hire 50% more engineers? Or wait 50% longer?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 hours ago

with "hire more" you do run up against the "9 women can have a baby in 1 month" limit, but in this case it's likely to help.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 hours ago

I bet it would happen faster if this guy was fired.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago

That might speed it up, but that certainly is not a prerequisite.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

They warn us about AGI while simultaneously attempting to sell it to us.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Black PR is PR too, it's like warnings about weapons of the future and combat robots and antiutopia for many people worked as an ad, and they want that exact future.

I think it's the same with AGI. People think Skynet is cool and want Skynet, because they think it's the future.

Except it's a bit less, like real fascism doesn't look similar to Warhammer, just to a criminal district ruled by a gang, scaled for a country.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

I guess we don't need it then.

[–] [email protected] 131 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

AGI is not in reach. We need to stop this incessant parroting from tech companies. LLMs are stochastic parrots. They guess the next word. There's no thought or reasoning. They don't understand inputs. They mimic human speech. They're not presenting anything meaningful.

[–] biggerbogboy 1 points 19 minutes ago* (last edited 15 minutes ago)

My favourite way to liken LLMs to something else is to autocorrect, it just guesses, and it gets stuff wrong, and it is constantly being retrained to recognise your preferences, such as it starting to not correct fuck to duck for instance.

And it's funny and sad how some people think these LLMs are their friends, like no, it's a collosally sized autocorrect system that you cannot comprehend, it has no consciousness, it lacks any thought, it just predicts from a prompt using numerical weights and a neural network.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

I feel like I have found a lone voice of sanity in a jungle of brainless fanpeople sucking up the snake oil and pretending LLMs are AI. A simple control loop is closer to AI than a stochastic parrot, as you correctly put it.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That undersells them slightly.

LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They're good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.

LLMs can't generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they'll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there's no difference to a real answer.

They're text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn't that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

For how many years? Cuz y'all ain't anywhere near AGI. You can't even get generative AI to not suck compared to your competition in that market (which is a pretty low bar) lol

[–] [email protected] 107 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

"Work 50% longer weeks so you can make something that'll both make me richer AND cost you your jobs!" is not the motivational speech he thinks it is.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 231 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

That's why I bake my cake at 2608°C for ~1,8 minutes, it just works™

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 12 hours ago

With all the rounds of layoffs they've had, their remaining employees would need to be quite stupid to give a shit what this disloyal piece trash says.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Let's work 20 hour weeks then. Who wants AGI other than war pigs and billionaires?

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›