School-Cotton

I'm not sure I grasp the analogy to the invention of calculus. Calculus helped us solve new and interesting math/physics problems. Repeated for emphasis: helped *us* solve.

This technology is solving interesting math/physics problems for us, which is completely different.

Why would it excite you, rather than terrifying you? The better LLMs get at math, the closer the expertise you spent your whole life building is to being worthless.

Along with all the rest of what humans find meaningful and fulfilling.

"Predicting the next token" is meaningless. Every process that has any sort of behavior, including a human writing, can be modeled by some function from past behavior to probability distribution of next action. Viewed this way, literally everything is just "predicting" the next action to be taken according to that probability distribution.

The most likely series of next tokens when a competent mathematician has written half of a correct proof is the correct next half of the proof. I've never seen anyone who claims "LLMs just predict the next token" give any definition of what that means that would include LLMs, but exclude the mathematician.

Huh? You said it has to do with "large corporations", specifically. Which is not true.

> The best way for one to reduce their carbon footprint is to stop supporting large corporations.

Not really, no. The carbon footprint associated with your consumption has little-to-nothing to do with the type of economic structure that provides it.

Lots of fossil fuels are produced by the state, some even in socialist countries. Burning oil extracted by Pemex or Petróleos de Venezuela releases just as much carbon as oil extracted by Chevron.

And high-quality grass-fed organic beef raised by your local rancher involves at least as much carbon emissions as the cheapest beef you can get from Wal-Mart. Why wouldn't it?

The issue is consumption of fossil fuels, not capitalism. Capitalism is indirectly at fault only inasmuch as it has grown the economy, enabling our consumption of fossil fuels to increase.

> Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle

Yes, if everything else were held equal, but it's not. People have a limited amount of energy to dedicate to caring about environmental issues; every minute spent talking about recycling (or other only marginally important environmental issues) is one we're not spending talking about things that matter.

Recycling is largely a scheme to make people feel better about themselves without actually meaningfully addressing their environmental impact.

If you care about the environment, BY FAR the most important thing you can do is reducing your carbon footprint. Everything else is really a rounding error compared to that. But that requires a materially poorer existence: living in a smaller home, eating meat less frequently, foregoing air travel, bundling up in the winter instead of cranking up the heat, etc.

Most people generally feel like we need to do more for the environment, and have a vague sense of guilt if they're not contributing. However, that guilt is not strong enough for them to be willing to meaningfully decrease their standard of living. It is strong enough to make them willing to sort their trash into separate bins. Hence recycling.

Why? Even if the common myth that public company executives must maximize profits at all costs were true, it's easy to construct a plausible explanation for why one might believe in good faith that destroying 538 rather than selling it is the best strategy to maximize profits. For example, because they think the profit they'd lose from 538 competing with their own politics offerings outweighs the amount Silver would pay for it.

What are you referring to?

The number of people who profess to care about user-replaceable batteries is absolutely baffling to me.

It would save you an $80 trip to the Apple Store (or non-Apple equivalent) every three or four years. What am I missing?

> Are people showering and swimming with their phones or something?

Believe it or not, yes!

E-waste is a minuscule rounding error compared to all the other forms of environmental destruction modern industrial civilization causes. European countries are massive polluters and net carbon producers (though not quite as bad as the US); e-waste shouldn't even be on their radar since it is a distraction from almost infinitely more important environmental concerns. People complaining about this don't actually care about e-waste, they just talk about it because it's convenient for their argument.

They're rare because outside of the tiny minority of people who complain loudly on HN, nobody cares about this feature.

Who is "they"? Linux isn't a person or an organization. The people (and organizations) contributing to Linux are all doing it for their own motivations to solve their own problems. You are asking them to make their lives harder, for free, in service of fixing an issue that they don't care about.

That is great, they should also start ticketing human-driven cars that violate traffic laws too!

Punishment is not only tied to the harm done by the crime, it’s also tied to difficulty of enforcement. For laws that are relatively easy to break without getting caught, you need severe penalties or everyone will just ignore them.

We make child porn illegal which is even easier to copy than local LLMs. It doesn’t work perfectly, of course there are people who still have it, but we could dramatically reduce the number of people with local LLMs if we punished possession with long prison sentences.

My impression is that The majority of people do want to.

Okay. Let China become more technologically advanced than us. I don’t care. Chinese tech companies being able to write software 20% faster than us is a less bitter pill to swallow than having to live in our current LLM world.

I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution. We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?

> On the other hand, there are too many less-experienced Rust fans who do claim that "Rust" promises this

Link some comments like this? Because I've been reading Rust discussions for years and never seen them.

I have never seen a comment claiming that Rust leads to magically completely bug free programs.

Could you please link one? Because I doubt it exists, or if it does, it is probably on some obscure website or downvoted to oblivion.

On the other hand, I see comments in every Rust thread that are basically restatements of yours attacking a strawman.

The reality: Rust does not prevent all bugs. In fact, it doesn't even prevent any bugs. What it actually does is make a certain particularly common and dangerous class of bugs much more difficult to write.

I agree it’d be nice if there were a safe stdlib openat API, but

> If I have to use unsafe just to open a file, I might as well use C.

is a ridiculous exaggeration.

The concept of engineer predates the accreditation systems you’re referring to by centuries.

Have you ever worked at a big company? There are plenty of people who don’t give a shit and just do whatever their boss tells them.

And I still, to this day, see mojibake from time to time.

Wouldn’t it be close? AFAIK modern network libraries on modern OSs default to IPv6 when available.

The cafe WiFi thing (getting IPv6 only, no ipv4, on a public network) used to happen quite often to me on macOS. I never figured out why, and I haven’t noticed in a while.

That’s indeed what they’re saying, but they’re simply wrong which is obvious from looking at the graph and accounting for seasonal variation.

In my case, yes. I have never used AI to write any prose (including HN comments), and I never will. But I certainly started using them more often since the ChatGPT era began, purely through osmosis. I'm not exactly proud of that, but there you have it.