I don't think one needs to understand consciousness to know if something is conscious or not. Much the same as how one can tell if someone is alive or dead. Sure maybe one day we can figure out a proper scientific explanation for consciousness/life but there is no reason to negate what can be perceived and immediately obvious.
EDIT: I am only making a limited point on "understanding consciousness". Not extrapolating it to AI.
From what I understand Ducklake needs a dedicated metadata database and it also ties to DuckDB land wherease with Iceberg many engines can query directly.
You are already using Postgres in your setup so why not just use Postgres itself as metadata database? It is a much better setup than using Iceberg [1].
> and it also ties to DuckDB land wherease with Iceberg many engines can query directly.
Ducklake can also be queried by many engines [2]. Though not as exhaustive as Iceberg.
This argument is funny because you could have said the same thing 4 years ago: Uber still picks you up just as it did years before that, so what did all those millions spent on developer salaries get them?
Uber’s business is relentlessly confusing for people who think it’s a simple app to send an alert to a nearby driver to pick you up.
Uber operates at a scale where there are no trivial problems because even small changes can impact hundred of thousands of customers. They can also justify spending time and money on new features that only 0.1% of customers might use because 0.1% of their customers is a very large number.
Uber also has to maintain thousands of region specific rules and features to be able to operate globally, and they do it all in the same app instead of having specific regional versions (which would be a terrible user experience for frequent travelers). That alone is a ton of work the end user will never see but is core to their operation.
This is not just me saying it. The Uber president himself says it in the article.
> so what did all those millions spent on developer salaries get them?
There was no doubt about what these developer salaries got them. It was to keep Uber stable and running in thousands of jurisdictions with varying rules/regulations.
The idea of using AI was (I hope) not just to replace developers for this purpose but to also ship features/products beyond what was already being offered. It has however not panned out as these CEOs/execs thought it would.
> They can also justify spending time and money on new features that only 0.1% of customers might use because 0.1% of their customers is a very large number.
And what are those features exactly? Because even the President of Uber doesn't seem to know:
"“That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features,’” said Macdonald."
The budget allocated to AI for the year has been wiped out in 4 months.
> Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination.
This seems like the kind of terrible idea that an LLM might have come up with. I'm pretty sure most drivers do not want people eating (especially a whole meal) in their car, and I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food, but don't mind waiting an extra 10 minutes for the driver to detour, find parking, and wait for your food.
Not to mention what anyone who's worked in an office with a shared kitchen can tell you - the smell getting into a car where an indeterminate amount of people have eaten different meals. Like climbing into a food court dumpster.
> I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food
Recently I got a car to take me to the train station and picked up food on the way. Seems pretty common to me. Of course, I didn't need or want it charged as a premium feature in the app.
This seems like the doom of all tech companies that hit a single kernel of a good idea, hire a big development team to build it, and then, once it's running well and making money, leadership looks around and sees this big body of developers, product managers, project managers, QA, and management tree, looking around for something else to do. Then, instead of saying, "Let's find the next big thing to do," they say, "Cram dozens more things into the thing that already works. Anything you can think of, spin up a team of 10 to bolt it onto the main product. Move things around to make everything fit. Run experiments on users to see if this new crap moves the metrics. A/B test to see what we should keep and what we should silently remove next update. Attach this other company's product that we just bought."
In a few years, what do you end up with? The modern version of every single fucking app we use today.
Well, travel booking is one of those things every company wants to get involved with because it's just straight referral fees. I get advertisements to book travel through my phone company (T-Mobile US) and a slew of financial services companies.
If it's easy enough to add to the app and sticks around for a while, it may well be profitable even if only a small percentage of customers use it or even realize it's available.
There's probably tons of backend projects going on, expanding in countries, payments, complying with regulations, effeciency and reliability projects. They also do food delivery. There's a whole engineering team to support
> Isn't that always the case in the early stages of new technology adoption? It becomes less and less true as the new technology becomes more and more integrated.
Not true. Plenty go into the graveyard. At some point in time typewriters were everywhere. So were landline phones. Both were highly integrated into the system. They were replaced by much superior versions.
> In the first few years after electric motors became a thing, one could have said the same thing. We would have just gone back to steam. If you tried to "do without them" now, society would collapse.
Yes but there is nothing to state that the current version of LLMs is equivalent to electric motors. We could very well be in the typewriter/landline phones stage. You would need even more iterations to get something that is equivalent to electric motors.
Even electric motors themselves underwent multiple iterations to become economically viable. Lot of wasteful overhead needed to be eliminated and parts re-engineered to make it more efficient before it could be truly adopted.
This specific psychosis is driven by peer pressure. If you are seeing everyone around you using tools to "enhance" their work, you wouldn't want to be "left behind". So it has permeated the entire ecosystem. The lucky ones are those who are outside this (or can afford to be outside this) and can see why it isn't working. You can't be inside it and hope to have any rationality. Everyone is competing on "I can figure it out better and quicker than you can if only I can get X to work".
Instead of product tours I like how AWS has little info/help buttons that are placed right next to every informational/actionable element on their dashboard. Totally unobtrusive. If you want to understand something on the dashboard that is not obvious at first, you can click on the info/help button that opens a side panel with a lot more information about that particular element (and any associated topics). Most of the time, you just know what you are dealing with (or can guess what that particular topic might mean and you will probably be right).
Incredible that tooltips were killed because braindead """designers""" couldn't figure out how to make them work on mobile.
They'll be reintroduced under a new name in a decade or two with endless self-congratulation. Same as physical car controls.
Here's a solution off the top of my head: have a dedicate "info" button at the OS level. Holding the button disables normal interaction, highlights all inspectable elements, and allows you to click on each one for a description. Like "inspect element" in the browser.
I'm fairly certain that exact thing existed on Windows XP and earlier. It was a question mark in the top right of the window, added a "?" next to your cursor. You could then click elements to see if there happened to be an explanation embedded in the program for that particular button/box/whatever. Didn't always work, but was useful when it was needed.
> Here's a solution off the top of my head: have a dedicate "info" button at the OS level. Holding the button disables normal interaction, highlights all inspectable elements, and allows you to click on each one for a description. Like "inspect element" in the browser.
This is a really cool idea. Agreed! Wish something like this actually existed.
In the future they'll track your eyes and when you've been staring blankly for a second at something, it'll pop up a tooltip that you'll have to dismiss.
Reminds me of Ramanujan learning during sleep from Namagiri.
There are umpteen stories in Hindu scriptures of baby learning in the womb of the mother and how the expecting mother must only be exposed to good thoughts and a good environment for giving birth to an intelligent and well rounded child: stories of Abhimanyu (learning how to break the Chakravyuha formation in his womb while mother was learning it but his learning was incomplete when mother fell asleep during the lecture) and Prahlada (mother learning about Lord Vishnu against the wishes of her demon husband Hiranyakashyapu). Wonder if any studies have been done on this as well.
EDIT: I am only making a limited point on "understanding consciousness". Not extrapolating it to AI.
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