Human communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years.
When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way.
Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it.
But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity.
LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.
There's plenty of people communicating more with LLMs than humans right now, of course it's going to have an effect because our language and thought patterns are extremely adaptive to our environment.
The communication system we are born with is extremely bare-bones/general so that it can absorb whatever language and culture we are born into.
Those people tend to suffer from AI psychosis, and I don't think it's a thing you'd want to admit publicly that you don't interact with any humans and prefer the company of machines (let us also ignore that such people wouldn't be in public to begin with).
I can't image such people are living meaningful lives in any capacity. They're up there with consumers that think the only purpose in life is to cheerlead for a corporation and buy their wares.
The GP said more with LLMs than people - not no interactions at all with people and not preferring machines to people. I don't think it is that hard to spend more time talking with LLMs than people if you work in tech and I don't think that takes away from one's life meaningfulness.
Yes, this is called alienation of the work place and it has been discussed since the 1800s. Maybe tech workers will realize that their employers are literal enemies of humanity rather than their friends.
Employers want to mechanize humans and they'll force it even if it makes everyone miserable for their entire, short, lives.
I caught myself saying “you’re absolutely right” to my wife last night, unironically. This was 100% not in my vocabulary six months ago.
If I spend 40 hours a week talking to anybody, some of their language or mannerisms are going to rub off on me. I can’t think of a compelling reason why a human-sounding chat bot would be any different.
Almost two decades ago I watched all of Farscape in under two weeks during a college winter break. I often still reflexively say "frell" instead of "fuck".
Another one I noticed is "or maybe I hallucinated that" instead of "or maybe I dreamed that". Researchers will be horrified to learn that even talk about LLMs affects people's vocabulary.
It's obviously untrue that technology can't fundamentally alter human communication in a few years. For example, the advent of film, then radio, and finally television caused a convergence of culture at the national and even global level. Characters like Mickey Mouse and the cast of Star Trek are instantly recognized internationally, even to those who never have seen any of the works they star in. There likely isn't anyone here who doesn't remember some catchy commercial jingle of their youth or catchphrase from media that entered the national lexicon. And yes, it also affected reasoning: Walter Cronkite, a long ago TV journalist, was labelled "the most trusted man in America" for the integrity of his reporting. The internet caused a second wave of transformation since it was many-to-many communication instead of unidirectional broadcasting that allowed the coalescence of subcultures, examples being various fandoms and, infamously, 4chan.
Young singers brought up listening to autotuned vocals can unknowingly learn and emulate the sonic signature of the tuning algorithm (and the telltale lilt when it's used as an effect, but the subtle tuning case is more surprising).
If you read too much sloppy LLM prose, it's going to influence how you write and structure your own.
Technologies often have rapid, and obvious, effects on writing. The telegraph services charged by the word, so an abbreviated style that became known as "telegraphese", developed.
And it doesn't have to be that direct. Novels have been hugely influenced by films.
Fashion seems like the right analogy. I think about how many sentences I speak today that would have been incompressible to me ~15 years ago and not even due to recent events/technology, but just because our slang/humor has evolved during that time.
The flip side is the same thing was true then, and we aren't making a lot of jokes about the narwhal baconing at midnight these days.
The first thing I thought when I read the abstract of the underlying paper was that this sounds like "model collapse" at the society level.
I don't feel super confident that we'll "soon" find ourselves in a world where there is no variance left in thought (would that be the net effect of total model/epistemic collapse?), though if you do accept that there could be any loss of variance due to AI, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider how much and how quickly could this happen?
All this is by way of saying, I don't think it's wrong to ask these kinds of questions and think deeply about the consequences of societal shifts like this.
Think of all the things that took hundreds/thousands/millions of years to develop and mature, which humans have managed to destroy in relatively short order.
Every 50 years we cycle out an entirely new batch of thinking humans. What cognitive legacy is it exactly that you think is going to be self-preserving?
You're talking about system altering the environment. GP was talking about the system altering itself. The system is a massive self-stabilizing collection of feedback loops. Unlike the static environment[0], it's incredibly hard to intentionally move such system to a different equilibrium. If it weren't, we'd already solved all the thorny world problems long ago.
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[0] - Any self-stabilizing system that operates much slower than us - such as ecosystems or climate - is, from our perspective, static.
> The system is a massive self-stabilizing collection of feedback loops.
Source? lol
Actual, measurable literacy is in the toilet. The average person reads at the 6th grade level. What sort of equilibrium are you trying to claim we are in right now?
> Unlike the static environment, it's incredibly hard to intentionally move such system to a different equilibrium.
>But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity
The internet didn't follow this trajectory. Neither did smart phones.
Surprise, surprise, it's the same people trying to make AI entrenched into our society.
Fads are often driven by moneyed interests. AI is no different. As long as guys Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. are trying to bend the world to their will, and as long as they have the resources to do so, AI will be zeitgeist for just as long. On a smaller scale, this extends even to a CEO outsourcing support to AI, etc.
Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
With google, the problem is that their "AI" can randomly ban you though. And the only recourse is making it to the top of HN. If that even works any more.
Honestly, the instability of the political environment in US feels so extreme, that it seems like something could bite you that you didn't even see coming.
Just on the Gmail front: maybe Trump decides to trade embargo you country and pressures Google to cut off email access. Maybe he decides Google needs to be broken up and sold for parts, and Gmail's data goes to Truth Social. Maybe he thinks illegal immigrants or "radical left wing lunatics" shouldn't have access to American email providers and gets Google to start suspending accounts based on a some criteria. Maybe some of this seems far fetched, but we are talking about a president who threatened to to go to war with one of America's closest allies.
The non-American west's exposure to the instability is too high, and already affecting people. Switching software providers where possible is something that can be done quickly, and relatively easily by individuals in the short term.
It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync
Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app.
My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.
thunderbird (formerly k9 mail) is a decent enough android app, but im not very picky when it comes to email either so keep that in mind. ive been using it with posteo for about 2 years now
Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.
I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
I did it with tons of accounts and services linked. It's not anywhere as daunting as you'd think (and I thought). Although it seems you don't want to move away from it so I'm not sure what point your comment serves to make.
i thought the same but ive actually moved twice now. first to protonmail whenever that came out, then again a few years ago to posteo. it actually didnt feel like that much work in the end. i set up forwarding and switched over a few accounts every week. i still kept my gmail account around for years just in case but there will be a point where you just know you have all the important things switched over
Are you suggesting that authors didn't know or understand that commercial exploitation of their OSS contributions was possible? If so, that is a complete misrepresentation of history. There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. Authors have chosen not to use them, and instead chose licenses, such as MIT/GPL, that allowed commercial use. And there has always been commercial use of OSS. Big companies, small companies, tech companies, oil and gas companies, weapons manufacturers, banks, hardware companies, etc. They all use OSS and they all make a profit from it, without giving anything back to the people who originally wrote it. That's not an edge case or an unexpected consequence, it a fundamental tenet of free (as in freedom) software: You do not get to choose who uses it, or how they use it.
I wonder if we're going to end up in an arms race between AIs masquerading as contributors (and security researchers) trying to introduce vulnerabilities into popular libraries, and AIs trying to detect and fix them.
Why would it be like that instead of the way we already handle low-trust environments?
Projects that get a lot of attention already put up barriers to new contributions, and the ones that get less attention will continue to get less attention.
The review process cannot be left to AI because it will introduce uncertainty nobody wants to be held responsible for.
If anything, the people who have always seen code as a mere means to an end will finally come to a forced decision: either stop fucking around or get out of the way.
An adversarial web is ultimately good for software quality, but less open than it used to be. I'm not even sure if that's a bad thing.
What I'm suggesting is: what if AIs get so good at crafting vulnerable (but apparently innocent) code than human review cannot reliably catch them?
And saying "ones that get less attention will continue to get less attention" is like imagining that only popular email addresses get spammed. Once malice is automated, everyone gets attention.
I think the issue I have with this argument is that it's not a logical conclusion that's based on technological choice.
It's an argument about affordability and the economics behind it, which puts more burden on the (open source) supply chain which is already stressed to its limit. Maintainers simply don't have the money to keep up with foreign state actors. Heck, they don't even have money for food at this point, and have to work another job to be able to do open source in their free time.
I know there are exceptions, but they are veeeery marginal. The norm is: open source is unpaid, tedious, and hard work to do. It will get harder if you just look at the sheer amount of slopcode pull requests that plague a lot of projects already.
The trend is likely going to be more blocked pull requests by default rather than having to read and evaluate each of them.
So I do think we're in a bubble, but I also remember when all the discussion around here was around Uber, and I read many, many hot takes about how they were vastly unprofitable, had no real business model, could never be profitable, and only existed because investors were pumping in money and as soon as they stopped, Uber would be dead. Well, it's now ten years later, Uber still exists, and last year they made $43.9bn in revenue and net income of $9.8bn.
Oh dear, we are definitely in a bubble, it's just not in the way of total burst.
Back when everybody got into website building, Microsoft released a software called FrontPage, a WYSIWYG HTML editor that could help you build a website, and some of it's backend features too. With the software you can create a website completed with home, newspages and guestbooks, with ease, compare to writing "raw" code.
Now days however, almost all of us are still writing HTML and backend code manually. Why? I believe it's because the tool is too slow to fit in a quick-moving modern world. It takes Microsoft weeks of work just to come out with something that poorly mimics what was invented by an actual web dev in an afternoon.
Humans are adoptive, tools are not. Some times, tools can better humans in productivity, sometime it can't.
AI is still founding it's use cases. Maybe it's good at acting like a cheap, stupid and spying secretary for everyone, and maybe it can write some code for you, but if you ask it to "write me a YouTube", it just can't help you.
Problem is, real boss/user would demand "write me a YouTube" or "build a Fortnite" or "help me make some money". The fact that you have to write a detailed prompt and then debug it's output, is the exact reason why it's not productive. The reality that it can only help you writing code instead of building an actually usable product based on a simple sentence such as "the company has decided to move to online retail, you need to build a system to enable that" is a proof of LLM's shortcomings.
So, AI has limits, and people are finding out. After that, the bubble will shrink to fit it's actual value.
This is fair but it's also assuming that today's AI has reached its potential which frankly I don't think any of us know. There's a lot of investment being spent in compute and research from a lot of different players and we could definitely make some breakthroughs. I doubt many of us would've predicted even the progress we've had in the last few years before chatGPT came out.
I think the bubble will be defined on whether these investments pan out in the next two years or if we just have small incremental progress like gpt4 to gpt5, not what products are made with today's llm. It remains to be seen.
I think Uber’s profitability has also been achieved by passing what would be debt to a traditional taxi company (the maintenance of the fleet of taxis) onto the drivers. I think many drivers aren’t making as much money as they think they are.
Did this change since Uber was created? Did Uber previously, back when people were making their "Uber is Doomed" comments pay to maintain drivers' cars? If not why bring it up?
This is a pattern where people have their pre-loaded criticisms of companies/systems and just dump them into any tangentially related discussion rather than engaging with the specific question at hand. It makes it impossible to have focused analytical discussions. Cached selves, but for everything.
But did their business model require them doing that forever? That seems like something they can cut back on once there is a healthy size of drivers in a market.
Yeah I agree it was the original plan from the beginning: use Saudi money to strangle competition and then get the prices back to taxi level (or higher). I believe they partly succeeded by making a compromise here: they both cut the payments to drivers and increased prices.
The original plan worked because in the switch-and-bait phase they were visibly cheaper so in the last year people's mental and speech model changed from "call me a taxi" to "call me an uber". But at least in my local market, the price difference between a taxi an and uber in 2025 is negligible.
A decade ago in NYC, they were giving out free rides left and right. I used Uber for months without paying for a single ride, then when they started charging, they were steeply discounted. I could get around for a little more than a subway fare.
Lyft did the same thing, got a bunch of free rides for a while with them, too.
What I think has never changed, is that most people do not understand depreciation on an asset like a car, or how use of that vehicle contributes to the depreciation. People see the cost of maintenance of a vehicle as something inevitable that they have almost no control over.
I think the point is about Uber's profitability and not necessarily about their business practices or ethics, and we should be careful not to conflate the two. It is absolutely valid to criticize the latter, but that (so far) seems mostly orthogonal to the former.
Now, it is totally possible that their behavior eventually create a backlash which then affects their business, but then that is still a different discussion from what was discussed before.
There is also a significant difference in insurance. Taxi companies usually have comprehensive insurance, hence the higher standards for drivers and vehicles (monitored and maintained) while Uber has a more differentiated model (part driver, part company, not monitored):
This is underselling the Uber story to a degree. The original sell for Uber was that their total addressable market was the entire auto industry because people will start preferring taxis over driving. They are still trying to achieve that with similar stories now pushed to sell robotaxis.
Uber was undercutting traditional taxis either through driver incentive or cheaper pricing. Many hot takes were around the sustainability of this business model without VC money. In many places this turned out to be true. Driver incentives are way down and Uber pricing is way up.
That said, this is also conflating one company with an industry. Uber might have survived but how many ride sharing companies have survived in total? How many markets have Uber left because it couldn’t sustain?
In a bubble the destruction is often that some big companies get destroyed and others survive. For every pets.com there is one Amazon. That doesn’t mean Amazon is good example to say naysayers during the dot bubble were wrong.
Simplifying Uber's story to "pricing or more drivers" misses the most important part.
Uber was undercutting traditional taxis because, at least in the US, the traditional taxis was horrible user experience. No phone app, no way to give feedback on driver, horrible cars, unpredictable charges... This was because taxis had monopoly in most cities, so they really did not care about customers.
The times when Uber was super-cheap have long passed, but I still never plan to ride regular taxis. It's Waymo (when availiable) or Lyft for me.
Well just look at the price of Uber and Lyft rides. I regularly had single-digit fares on both Uber and Lyft early on. Of course they were unprofitable then. Now that they have gained mindshare they have increased prices drastically.
Uber proposed $43.00 yesterday for a 23 minute drive from park slope to brooklyn heights in New York City, versus $2.90 for a 35 minute R train ride.
I am humbled by how myopic I was in 2010 cheering for a taxi-hailing smartphone app to create consumer surplus by ordering taxis by calling taxi companies.
It's been my experience (~ 4 years ago) that generally taxis were cheaper than Uber in new york, especially for anything like "Get me to the airport", sometimes like $25 cheaper.
In my experience its actually cheaper at least for airport rides. $50 flat through yellowcab app and no surge nor tip when ordered through app compared to $65 at best sometimes well over double during a bad surge.
Airport trips these days are often over $100 for me. What is crazy is yellowcab will take me to my area for $50 flat tip included through their app. We’ve exceeded even taxicabs by this point.
The story about Uber was that they were going to be unprofitable until they destroyed taxi services, then they were going to charge more than taxis and give less of a share to the driver.
Nobody is predicting that AI is going to do that. One thing I hadn't considered before is how much it was in google's interest to overestimate and market the impact of AI during their antitrust proceedings. For the conspiratorially minded (me), that's why the bottom is being allowed to drop out of the irrational exuberance over AI now, rather than a couple months ago.
it doesnt look likely that any particular ai service will have a moat. every time one of them does anything right now, theres a dozen competitors able to match it within months
Uber was unprofitable and when it ceased to be unprofitable ceased to be better.
They did managed to offload price on weaker actors party by simply ugnoring laws and hoping it will work for them. It did, but it was not exactly some grand inspiring victory and more of success of "some dont have to follow the law" corruption.
At the prices they were charging back then that was indeed the accurate take. Of course prices rose and a lot of middle and lower income riders were kicked to the curb in favor of those who can afford to blow another $60 per leg on a night out. I guess there turned out to be enough of them at scale.
The "hot takes" were that they were using investor money to illegally undercut the taxi industry until ride share had an oligopoly and that the government would stop them from breaking the law.
I don't know why law enforcement is considered a hot take here, but I have a few guesses.
> Nakamura responded to Kramnik’s allegations by arguing that focusing on a particular streak while ignoring other games was cherry-picking. The researchers note that there’s a problem with this argument, too, as it violates the likelihood principle. This principle tells us the interpretation should only rely on the actual data observed, not the context in which it was collected.
I don't quite understand this objection? If I won the lottery at odds of 10 million to 1, you'd say that was a very lucky purchase. But if it turned out I bought 10 million tickets, then that context would surely be important for interpreting what happened, even if the odds of that specific ticket winning would be unchanged?
I believe they're speaking within the scope of the Bayesian analysis. We could interpret games outside of the winning streak as evidence to whether he's a cheater or not. Instead, I believe they are looking at the question of "given this winning streak in particular, what's the probability of him cheating in this set of games"?
They start with a prior (very low probability), I'm assuming they use the implied probabilities from the Elo differences, and then update that prior based on the wins. That's enough to find the posterior they're interested in, without needing to look outside the winning streak.
> "given this winning streak in particular, what's the probability of him cheating in this set of games"
I think the problem lies in the antecedent. Given all chess tournaments played, how often would we observe such a winning streak on average? If the number of winning streaks is near the average, we have no indication of cheating. If it is considerably lower or higher, some people were cheating (when lower, than the opponents).
Then the question is, whether the numbers of winning streaks of one person are unusually high. If we would for example expect aprox. 10 winning streaks, but observe 100, we can conclude that aprox. 90 were cheating. The problem with this is that the more people cheat, the more likely we are to suspect an honest person of cheating as well.
Again, this would be different if the number of winning streaks for a particular person were unusually high.
His performance in games outside the streak is relevant to the prior of his being a cheater, which in turn is highly relevant to how calculate p(cheater | this streak).
Indeed. I'd say that the issue is that they are misinterpreting the word "collecting". The principle is true if you are collecting or observing data live, but this data was collected long ago and with a much wider scope: when the games were recorded.
What they are doing here is sampling the data after the fact, and obviously one needs to take a uniformly random sample of a dataset for any statistical analysis done on it to be representative.
Perhaps, but Hank Green published a pretty convincing argument recently that electricity supply has nowhere the necessary elasticity, and the politicised nature of power generation in the US means that isn't going to change:
When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way.
Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it.
But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity.
LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.
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