Every time I call the Costco pharmacy, I just hit 0 immediately because: Phone. Trees. Suck. They have always sucked, it's just an awful, grindingly slow way to accomplish ANYTHING, and it's so, so much easier to, when I need help, get a person on the line who can figure out what's gone wrong and sort it.

The only people benefiting from cutting that down are the scum class (combo of shareholders and executives) and who's shocked, really. Everything is being ruined nearly at all times to benefit the scum class.

This is exactly how we got here though. Technology is not passive. It changes incentives, procedures, ideas and shapes the world. If we don't structurally limit what and how it's used, then we are not in control, no matter what are choices personally are.

Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.

I’ve had the same thoughts, but if you look deeper, it all circles back to what we already had: (open, transparent) public institutions, society, and government by the people. The foundation wasn't the problem; the environment was.

Along the way, social media noise, engagement-optimisation and Kardashian-style "entertainment news" infecting real news made an attention economy where, no matter how scandalous you are, attention can be minted into dollars. That is what polluted our infosphere and lead to the lack of trust.

Now, nobody trusts these previously mentioned public entities any more - sometimes due to state-actor or ad-tech disinformation, and sometimes for good reason like when the poisoned public allowed these 80s-style telemarketer-style political weirdos and their cronies to take over public administration.

You are ringing the clarion call for community and cooperation, and it will not work. Not because people don’t want community or the better things, but because incentives make the world go round.

The choice between making some money at the cost of polluting the information commons is no choice at all. That degradation of the commons means no one can escape. No community you form, no group you build, dodges the fallout when someone decides to set fire to shared infrastructure.

We are moving into the dark forest era of the information economy. As models improve, inference costs drop, and capacity increases, the primary organism creating content online will be the bot.

Instead of building communities of people, build collections based on rules of engagement. Participants - be it bots or humans - must follow proscribed rules of conflict and debate.

That way it doesn’t matter if you are talking to a machine or a person. All that matters is that the rules were followed.

Ironically this was the main reason LLMs were introduced in the first place, not to benefit the poor, but to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

Folks in the "now" have always had a tendency to cling to their fictions as if they were truth for whatever reason; like nationalist exceptionalism, racial superiority, or religions rooted in "othering", etc. Humans seem to have an innate desire to fool themselves and trust in things they should not. Perhaps it's simply a sort of existential coping mechanism of living in a cold, unforgiving reality. We seek the comfort of lies.

Organizing around groups of trust, tends to lead to factionalism and conflicts. Knowing and trusting are sadly very different things in our species.

The whale's been eaten now. The broader Internet is mostly not trustworthy, or convenient, and the information is not even very plentiful.

People will and are retreating into high-trust zones. In-person networks, product recommendations from real friends, and closed group chats.

It's not the end of the world, but things have changed. We'll have to put more work into finding information than we're used to.

I don't disagree with you at all, I have found that I turn to LLMs to answer questions that I would have just searched with Google before.

It feels like a case of companies creating a problem to sell you the solution. The problem in their eyes is that they couldn't squeeze any more money out of search. So they bring us LLMs to replace it at what is sure to be a much higher cost. But they had to torpedo search to force users to use LLMs.

Not a fictitious example.

I haven't a had a good experience since AT&T bought my previous ISP and forced me to switch to a different subsidiary.

A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, since all management decisions must have accountability, a computer must never make them.

computah says noooooo

My agent will be in touch with yours, I guess.

Not meant to be snarky. It's been two decades now since my first wide-eyed entry into the workforce, moving for new opportunities, meeting new people. it's been great. There's a lot of smart people out there. I also realize that many people I seen as smart had more access to more content then i did. i still appreciated their sharing , it was enlightening to me. But after 20 years, I think back and it's literally quoting things from smart youtube videos. and regurgitating the latest thought leaders.

We all do this, but like you, what's meaningful to me is the chewing, the dissection and synthesis. coming together to share different perspectives and so on. i've had those friends too! it's just not 1:1

Recently, I have been taking intentional steps to avoid falling into the same tar pit. I've started corresponding over email with some of my friends, with us sending multi-page letters back and forth instead of just using chat apps. So far, it has been a wonderful breath of fresh air. Long form communication requires thought and time instead of superficial engagement, and we have had some incredibly interesting discussions that simply aren't possible over voice chat or instant messaging.

I read one of his last week? and didn't like it that much. I read this one despite it because its quite high on hn for whatever reason.

I don't think everything is lies and i don't like how he thinks a LLM is just some bullshit machine.

Its also waaaay to early to even understand were this is going. We as humans have never had that much compute and used it this particular way. It could literlay be the road to a utopia or dystopia. But its very crazy to experience it.

His article series feels so negative and dismissive, that i'm not taking anything from it.

There is so much more research, money and compute behind this AI topic right now, every week or two weeks something relevant better/new comes out of this. From 2d, 3d models, new LLM versions, smaller LLms, faster inferencing (Nvidias Nemotron), we don't know how this will continue.

And the weird thing is that he clearly knows plenty about LLMs but it feels so negative dismissive, hard to put a finger to it.

I also enjoy the series. But sometimes my friends send me things and I'm like, "not gonna read all of that."

Just because you're friends don't want to invest the same amount of time that you want to invest in your own personal enrichment doesn't mean they're getting stupid.

> Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

> Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. …

> Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

It is an incredibly vexing situation to see whatever you're an AI hater or enthusiast.

I, for one, welcome our trillion parameters multiple layers overlords.

The real issue is new amendments are needed. But that’s hard. You need 75% of states ratifying. And that seems impossible today on any topic.

The future of everything is lies... sure, well so was the past, what's your point?

When we say "snake oil salesmen" we literally had people selling these mineral oils, fraudulently, for a century. People yearn for a time when there wasn't an antagonistic relationship between buyer and seller, but it has never existed. There is only one way have that relationship, and it's by having a personal -- repeatable -- relationship with your seller, and that's usually expensive, even if that expense is not monetary. It just the game theory of repeated games.

The easiest way to establish this behavior is to be a regular at a bar while being a good patron that creates a positive experience for everyone else. There are multiple places I frequent where I have no doubt in my mind that if there was an emergency, they might ask me to help out in some way because I'm trustworthy. And they could hand me an envelope of money, knowing I'd not steal it, because it's not worth it for me to take a bit of money and ruin my welcome at this place.

That's not going to happen with online sellers, and it's not going to happen with most corporations. The promise was always "save money through economies of scale, such that you still win even though there is no relationship." For the most part, that's proven true. But as everything has been outsourced to China, and anyone can make a basic version of everything, we're running up against the limits of those benefits. And I truly believe that brands are going to start mattering a lot more going forward for marketplaces.

Shop at Costco because they care about their customers. In other areas where companies don't, you're going to have to do the legwork to find out who is going to treat you right. That sucks, and it'll probably be more expensive, but that's the antagonistic relationship that buyers and sellers have naturally. Regulation helps, yes, but it's not some cure all. The expectation that you can just go with the person with the lowest price and get quality services is not a thing that's every existed.

Incentives make the world go round, so even if people recognize the issue, they would rather it become someone else’s problem, than willingly harm their own future.

Of course, what those who call for regulation of AI or other nascent technologies are really saying is, "Unqualified and/or biased and/or corrupt and/or dull-witted people should make decisions that affect us all, based on incomplete, misleading or rapidly-evolving information, with the power to enforce them at gunpoint."

And then they wonder why other countries beat their own.

The average person on the street is familiar with consumer-facing AI but doesn't think it's really alive/magic/the solution to everything. Our supposed best-and-brightest are the ones flogging the horse.

Also, if the effective tools do exist, count on American companies using the American bribery-based political system to change the laws to dull those tools or to eliminate them.

Again, if you live in some consumer-friendly country good for you, I’m just saying how it plays out in this one society. I’ll stipulate that it’s all our fault blah blah blah.

We intuitively know that an employee will be punished and may get fired if we trick them. Many of us won't try to trick human employees as a result, because we would feel bad if they had bad consequences as a result of our trickery

There is likely no such hesitation around tricking LLMs. I know I personally wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Mostly because any computerized customer service process is annoying so anything I can do to limit my time dealing with it is a win in my books

> People are very excited about “agentic commerce”. Agentic commerce means handing your credit card to a Large Language Model, giving it access to the Internet, telling it to buy something, and calling it in a loop until something exciting happens.

I think you're confusing this for the other side of things. The article talks about how some people already use OpenClaw and the variations, give them access to bunch of stuff including cards to purchase things (sometimes virtual and limited cards), I think that's what the article talks about when they say "agentic commerce".

Obviously a intentional simplification in the language the author uses, but I think it gets the point across at least.

As the author said:

>I suspect that like the job market, everyone will wind up paying massive “AI” companies to manage the drudgery they created.

That is not known. Things could easily just get worse, and IMO that is far more likely. Every civilisation has collapsed, ours is clearly in decline, and AI could likely accelerate that decline.

I'm not exactly seeing the progress here. AI helps us write some software a bit faster? Doesn't seem revolutionary to me. Is it having any significant impact on peoples lives other than the various economic forces? I'm not seeing it.

> Yeah, because you voted with your dollars

In our system? No. In crony capitalism the companies who win do it through manipulating the political system. And when the government inflates the currency and destroys people buying power they simply cannot afford to "vote with their dollars". This is hilariously naive.

It would be great if people chose not to do business with the former, but many simply do not care. They may think only other people get screwed. They may not take the time to think about it, especially if the company spends a ton of money obfuscating their misbehavior. Quite a few actively defend the right of companies to screw them.

Technology multiplies that like a lever. We weren't prepared for capitalism before LLMs and we're massively under-prepared now.

This does not matter without antitrust, which is why customer service became bad in the first place. 30 years ago, the low quality of customer service we complain about now simply didn't exist, at any size or professional level of business, and never had.

If a company back then had the customer service of the average company now, or even the average government agency now, people would have suspected that it was a covert front for criminals or spies.

If a company doesn't have to compete, it can cut everything until it only has the ghost of a product and a billing department. You don't boycott monopolies, monopolies boycott you. If three companies put you on a list to not have internet, phone service, a bank account or a credit card, etc., you just can't have them. You've become a European human rights judge.

The company that deployed the LLM is lying to you. The people who made that decision are the ones who are culpable.

We both agree that it’s terrible.

I think it’s important to have an enforcement mechanism to force companies to do what they are responsible for doing. An Anti-Kafka Law, so to speak.

Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.

You have no argument here. Make an argument then we can talk. Right now it’s going in circles.