PostOnce

"decades" is a stretch.

The original A-12 took 4 years (or less) to design and build from scratch with slide rules and manual machine tools.

Surely we can match that with our 70 years of advanced knowledge and equipment?

Maybe our risk tolerance is low now, and we don't have Kelly Johnson.

There is an area where an AI audit can add some real value: the huge multitude companies that have never looked at security at all. Small businesses.

Choosing to build an application around a framework whose top contributors are Claude and Copilot may have catastrophic consequences for your project, especially if it's a business.

All software has limitations, that's why we keep writing more software.

Kivy is great, and the contributors are friendlier than most. I particularly like it for Android, but it's definitely way up there in terms of "easy reliable multiplatform python framework".

It also gives you a ton of options for how you want to use it, more than one way to skin a cat philosophy.

These people are over 100, and have been paying tax to the Japanese state since before world war 2. They lived through world war 2, and they rebuilt japan afterwards.

You're proposing to tell them they haven't "done enough", saved enough, paid enough tax, worked enough, sacrificed enough. You're assuming they all have kids to care for them.

20-something billion dollars can pay for a lot of medicine and care that F-35s can't deliver.

Defence is necessary to protect the people. But so is everything else. Medicine, food, affordable housing, education...

If the state wants tons of money and sacrifice, then what is the point of protecting it if it provides nothing in return?

This extends to everyone else in the developed world: if we're fucked anyway, why bother doing all this stuff the government wants? To protect the assets and incomes of the rich? So we can give all our life and labor to the lords and landlords?

I'm not buying it, and I doubt the centenarians are either.

You could've asked that about people saying we want 8 hour work days, sick leave, and safer work 100 years ago, and yet we got them.

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this:

Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?

It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite?

I remain a skeptic.

No, but a shocking amount of unappreciated software can cost a TON of money if it fails, even briefly, which is another disaster scenario.

More software than you'd think can get people killed, though.

And more software than you'd think is running inside a barely-understood SCADA package that runs user scripts, which can now be authored by AI the user doesn't understand, and that can result in either or both of the above outcomes. This is true in just about every city in the world, several times over.

"Everyone is an engineer" sounds like something you hear right before a building collapses and kills 300 people

However, Ikea furniture does not tend to collapse a critical moment 90 days after it's been put together because it was unforeseen that the cup you sat on the table would be green, which it wasn't designed to account for.

Software isn't furniture, in other words.

This is fascinating, but also makes me wonder about smaller scale printing from back in that era.

Does anyone know where I might find out more about small-scale printing, what we would call desktop publishing now, but prior to the advent of personal computers and photocopy machines?

It's easy to find some information, but hard to find detailed information like this article presents.

They make 200 billion dollars a year, 60 billion of which is profit, so they could afford to hire a million more moderators at first world wages (50k/yr) and still be making 10 billion dollars a year in profit, and that's assuming nothing else changed, if they stopped spending money on VR, AI, and other horseshit, they'd have even more money for moderators.

They can also choose to show fewer ads, i.e., only show manually human reviewed ads, and if there are too many to review, charge more per ad until there aren't too many.

Pre AI and Post AI code review hours are both 0.75 in this made up example. I find that implausible.

Even with the same amount of code, AI code is less trustworthy* and requires more attention... but we know it won't be the same amount, it will be more. This means it will take longer to review, or there will be unforeseen consequences of not spending that extra time.

*meaning no human eyes have looked at it and said "this doesn't make sense", or "this is cheating", or "this doesn't meet requirements", and won't be caught until code review if at all.

Once upon a time, optimism was plausible.

But now it seems the only likely outcomes of such technology are:

  > rich people hoarding wealth
  > high (and unpleasant) unemployment
  > ICE agents being remotely operated unaccountable robots whose operators are made anonymous by law.

Where the future goes I don't know, but I'm no longer optimistic about it for the average person.

answer to #1:

murder is already illegal, but we also heavily regulate explosives because the public can't be trusted.

With a byte you can keep track of 256 things, with two, 64k things, or with a byte you can issue one of 256 commands, etc.

Of course, now we'll use a dictionary of objects with various properties to keep track of a bunch of 'true'/'false' strings...

We collectively act like RAM is free and so are cycles

Tangent: I abandoned C and then later Windows as a consequence of Charles Petzold's* book on win32 programming, the fact that so much bullshit boilerplate was required to get a GUI up on a OS literally named after its GUI windows...

*Fwiw I like his books, I just didn't like the way Windows wants me to do things then

Is cloning Manim "innovation" now?

Plenty of open source is updated every day.

You had no problem taking advantage of Manim to profit, but when it comes to returning the great favor done to you by Manim being open source, you don't care?

Okay.

This post is timely, considering reddit is going to start requiring login for old.reddit.com which they announced in the past few days

There are far fewer of those than there used to be, because games take longer to develop now.

Nintendo has been the only one really good at that, and even there, they're slipping.

For example, the Switch 2 has been out for a year and has no exclusive Mario or Zelda games yet. They announced another Zelda remake.

One of the selling points of consoles is the secondhand market, and the physical games.

If digital only, then consoles have fewer differentiators to PCs, and PCs let you play online without a subscription.

It's not a given, but it's a plausible future that steam boxes outsell playstations, and that Sony loses its lucrative cut of game sales because people moved to PC since there was no differentiator for consoles other than extra hassle and costs compared to steam.

Suppose Anthropic trained only on data they paid to create, and not the internet or stolen textbooks.

It would still be extremely difficult to muster any sympathy for an organization whose MO is to go public not to honestly raise capital to fund growth and development, but rather to dishonestly leave someone else holding the bag, in some cases involuntarily as their retirement funds are passively invested.

And even supposing they were honest and didn't have an IPO, it would still be extraordinarily difficult to care about their misfortune, because "consolidating all thought-work into the hands of those few who can afford frontier models and datacenters and power plants" is also a special kind of misanthropy.

And even if that were not the case, they're filthy rich already, so who gives a shit if the Chinese companies prevent them from becoming quadrillionaires? :)

Lots more fun stuff on the rest of the channel https://www.youtube.com/@will_it_work

Hacks, on hacker news. I love it.

They have a finite # of employees, a finite budget, and a finite amount of time.

Hobbyists do not. ROI is not a factor.

New govt scrapped it.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/510439/smokefree-genera...

It already is our families. We don't have healthcare. We live in rentals that enrich others. We take rented scooters to work. We have no retirement funds or futures.

Live in slavery and be happy? Hold a sign no one reads? Own nothing? Feel no peace, have no medicine?

I don't condone it, but I understand it.

I believe there's still the possibility for us to fix things in peace, but I can see why others don't.

The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously?

The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer.

The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.

The US interferes in the rest of the world 24/7 with tariffs on allies and preemptive bombings and undeclared wars and kidnappings of heads of state, etc.

Would it be immoral to interfere, or would it be more immoral not to interfere and to let that situation continue?

There is an argument to be made either way.

Active and beautiful, I can start reading without having to scroll down, which I have to do on the AP site.

I miss when the web looked like this, and pages were documents instead of applications.

We built the wrong web, we needed two, one for documents, and one for applications, but we built this rube goldberg contraption instead.

I love the software look so much though! I never did like the blurring of textures :)

They're both beautiful in their own way, the darkness and glow in the hardware versions, some certain pixellated charm and roughness in the software version

"More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."

I'll take my information from a neutral third party, thanks.