MegaButts

> VCs are not betting that the company will be asymptotically good, just good enough to make an exit.

This is a misunderstanding of VC investment. Any competent VC expects most of their investments to go to zero. They're hoping a small percent of their investments will make up for the losses. The goal of a decent VC isn't to avoid bad investments so much as it is to make sure they get one good investment. A good investment in AirBnB/Google/Facebook will make up for dozens of speculative bets that go to zero.

> I was a 3-4x programmer before. Now I’m a 9-15x programmer

What the fuck does this mean?

You are weirdly defensive about this.

> Google at least used to provide a decent service to the end users in exchange for all the data, but they've gone completely off the rails the last few years.

Ever since Google fucked up social media by requiring verification with Google+ they've been pretty bad. That was 14 years ago.

> And the millennial expectation that "OF COURSE the monopolistic corps should know everything", is by far the most disturbing part of all.

Your experiences are very different from my own. I struggle to remember meeting anyone that thought this. Mostly people are just apathetic.

> What's weird is when people like you involve themselves for no reason at all though.

They made it so much better with a witty reply. I was just thinking this is one of my favorite HN threads I've seen in a long time. And now you've ended it with the HN trope of "I have no sense of humor but I still need to point out why I'm better than you."

Different strokes for different folks.

> when they were given $500B

You're off by an order of magnitude here.

If you can't learn to read sheet music in a million years then you are not generally intelligent.

The same options the average citizen of any country has - protest followed by rebellion. America was founded by rebelling against the tyranny of unfair taxes.

Until Americans understand that this isn't going to end without violence (or a very real threat of violence, meaning people actually show up prepared to fight), they will continue to be increasingly oppressed. You may disagree with violence, but the oppressors see that as convenient.

> if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves

There's the rub. In my experience, and I understand anecdata is only so useful, people that really want to keep learning more than they have to are quite rare. I doubt that group is even 10% of people. If you only surround yourself with nerds who code for fun, you are going to have an extremely biased view on this issue.

Trump has announced plans to change that (this is news from today).

https://archive.is/2eLzj

> The Trump administration plans to rescind Biden-era AI chip curbs as part of a broader effort to revise semiconductor trade restrictions that have drawn strong opposition from major tech companies and foreign governments, according to people familiar with the matter.

> It would be absurd to expect to change anyone's core beliefs with a couple of HN posts.

I 100% agree.

> I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets.

I'm a believer in free markets. You just cannot stop projecting assumptions onto me. I've clarified my point multiple times already so I'm not going to bother repeating myself again. I think we can both agree it's okay to be misunderstood by people on the internet.

> That doesn't all mean they are "holding" money. Money is not the same thing as wealth. Personally, I don't have any money other than pocket change.

I'm using money and wealth interchangeably here because there is no meaningful distinction in this context. I cannot take you seriously when you keep bringing up irrelevant things. It's obvious you don't understand my point. And I've had enough arguments with you on this site over the years to know it's a waste of my time to engage with you more than I already have.

You are replying to every single comment - you seem really upset about this. I never said anything was stolen from me. I said wealth inequality is the result of rich people holding money, because by definition there can be no wealth inequality without rich people. It's an objective statement and you're projecting so much political vitriol onto it.

> I get what you say -- hoarded wealth is essentially idle.

I'm not talking at all about wealth being idle in my previous comment. My point is entirely that the more money the rich have, the less money the poor have.

What you're bringing up is how the wealthy use their money to change their political environment to benefit themselves. This is also a problem, but is parallel to the point I was making.

You don't even need to think about money as power, you can just think about money as money. There's a far simpler way to think about wealth inequality. If you believe it's a problem, by definition the people holding the wealth are the cause of the problem. This isn't some social or philosophical construct - it's just basic deduction.

So quite literally, the wealthy holding the money means less money to go around to everyone else. The more they hold themselves, the more is withheld from everyone else. You can have debates about wealth distribution endlessly because it's subjective and complicated, but you can't argue that the wealthy getting richer is good for anyone except the wealthy. Trickle-down-economics has already been established as propaganda at this point.

I understand that wealth is not static in the world and it's possible to create wealth for everyone, but my point is money hoarding is definitionally the cause of wealth inequality.

Ah, now I see your point. I suspect the culture will change with the times assuming people want to give any credibility to universities moving forward. I remember how rampant cheating was where I went (decades ago) that I already put very little weight into degrees.

I still don't understand why taking an in-person exam is considered some difficult ordeal that we cannot expect younger people to endure. I have no idea what culture you come from that this is even a talking point, let alone a debate. It has never occurred to me ever in any context that having an exam being proctored means I need to be mature? I took many hours-long proctored exams long before I was 18. What does being mature have to do with having a literal adult in the room? If anything it requires less maturity because you're requiring oversight.

I truly do not understand your point at all.

> Medical schools don’t take in 18 year olds in North America. They can have more in depth entrance exams since the people come in are more mature.

Why do you need to be more mature to take an exam? We're not talking about toddlers - many (most?) of them are legal adults.

JFC if someone asks you multiple times for a source then provide a fucking source, instead of continuing to be an obnoxious holier-than-thou "do your own research you ignoramus" asshole.

You are so completely incompetent when it comes to discourse that I have to assume you are purposefully spreading misinformation. Either provide evidence or do everyone else the favor of shutting the fuck up you intolerable asshat.

Turbocharged cars have been reliable for a while now. There was a time when people said the same thing about fuel injection - because it is objectively more complicated than carbureted engines. But as time went on and they became more reliable and cheaper the only people that care about carburetors now are enthusiasts because they have so many drawbacks. It's the same thing with turbo engines today, except they're already reliable and better to drive (assuming you ever want to merge onto a highway). If you consider the higher RPM typical for NA vehicles they're arguably less reliable over time. If you include rising fuel costs turbocharged is arguably cheaper over the lifespan of the vehicle.

Buy whatever you want. But most people's perceptions of 'reliable' for cars is based entirely on rumors and hearsay and has nothing to do with data. Most awards for reliability are marketing gimmicks and aren't based on useful data.

> both shittier and more expensive

> Some examples: turbochargers

I disagree that turbochargers are shittier. For most people, hell even for a large subset of people that only want to race their cars on a track, turbochargers provide huge benefits. Yes, they add complexity and cost; they also vastly improve fuel efficiency, create the best torque curve possible on an ICE vehicle, and substantially improve power output. Sometimes you actually need more complexity to build a better system. I think turbochargers are a marvel of modern engineering.

And while it's subjective and admittedly more enthusiasts prefer naturally aspirated to turbocharged, I personally prefer the character of a turbocharged engine. I'd rather hear turbo whistles than a whining V10.

> reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft

The bigger problem is that the overall weight increases. Rearranging the COG doesn't really matter when most of your energy is spent literally fighting gravity.

This is the first thing that popped up in google when I wanted to compare gravimetric density between gasoline and lithium ion batteries. Gasoline is still approximately 30x denser. That is at least one revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology away, if not several.

https://research-archive.org/index.php/rars/preprint/downloa...

There are times it just generates complete nonsense that has nothing to do with what I said, but it's certainly not most of the time. I do not know how often, but I'd say it's definitely under 10% and almost certainly under 5% that the above happens.

Sure, LLMs are incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint. But they're so fucking stupid I hate using them.

> This is not necessarily useful but it's quite impressive.

I think we mostly agree on this. Cheers.

I vehemently disagree. If I ask a question with an objective answer, and it simply makes something up and is very confident the answer is correct, what the fuck has it understood other than how to piss me off?

It clearly doesn't understand that the question has a correct answer, or that it does not know the answer. It also clearly does not understand that I hate bullshit, no matter how many dozens of times I prompt it to not make something up and would prefer an admittance of ignorance.

Fact checking is paranoia?

An ability to answer questions with a train of thought showing how the answer was derived, or the self-awareness to recognize you do not have the ability to answer the question and declare as much. More than half the time I've used LLMs they will simply make answers up, and when I point out the answer is wrong it simply regurgitates another incorrect answer ad nauseum (regularly cycling through answers I've already pointed out are incorrect).

Rather than give you a technical answer - if I ever feel like an LLM can recognize its limitations rather than make something up, I would say it understands. In my experience LLMs are just algorithmic bullshitters. I would consider a function that just returns "I do not understand" to be an improvement, since most of the time I get confidently incorrect answers instead.

Yes, I read Anthropic's paper from a few days ago. I remain unimpressed until talking to an LLM isn't a profoundly frustrating experience.

I've always been amazed by this. I have never not been frustrated with the profound stupidity of LLMs. Obviously I must be using it differently because I've never been able to trust it with anything and more than half the time I fact check it even for information retrieval it's objectively incorrect.

It's the first time I've ever used that phrase on HN. Anyway, what phrase do you think works better than 'stochastic parrot' to describe how LLMs function?

> LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things.

LLMs are literally fundamentally incapable of understanding things. They are stochastic parrots and you've been fooled.