alpinisme

Syntax highlighting does go, but at least on iOS the reader still uses a monospace font for the code blocks.

I think the original point was that cancer 80+ is better than cancer at 45, so you should still try to avoid habits that make it more likely earlier, even if the chances remain 100% at sufficient time scales

You assume that the money that was invested in AI wouldn’t have been invested elsewhere.

That means that all new investment has been in AI (trading in other sectors is a wash). So a bubble burst would sweep up all that growth.

Large index funds that most people’s portfolio inevitably includes substantially invest in AI-adjacent stocks. Not to mention the fact that bubble bursting is not by any means guaranteed to have its effects limited to one sector.

People whose retirement funds might be impacted by a bubble burst, or who might lose their jobs (or struggle to get a first/next job) in a post crash economy.

You seem to be neglecting the economic impact question and assuming only the ai companies themselves are impacted in a burst.

A good parallel in English is actually “going to (or being at) school.” While you can say you’re at “the” school or “a school”, they mean different things than just being at school. Ditto for UK “to hospital.” (Cf. to university, to college, to city hall, in government)

Notably these are not the norm in English, but they do illustrate the pattern.

I think we are being sold AI as expert only when given tools (although that is not emphasized). The (quasi?) miracle of AI right now is that you can get an agent to accomplish the task of a team of intelligent but not exceptional humans at speeds far exceeding what the human could do. Which makes it “cheap” to throw (effectively) dozens of teams at a problem for the equivalent of hundreds of man hours.

That may not be the AI of sci fi fantasy but it’s still a game changing reality.

The objection is not too far from criticisms of the use of passive voice: a man was injured at the factory vs a faulty saw blade snapped and injured a man vs after the company loosened safety inspection policies, etc.

Which way you say it shifts the framing. And it’s not that one is less accurate to the facts, necessarily. It just is that one less aptly captures the moral and political relevance of the scenario.

For my part, I think it makes good sense to anthropomorphize in some contexts and not others. Generally when responsibility is at issue, you probably want the framing that tunes anthropomorphism down to near zero, since it’s the human dimension you care about.

> the lack of consequences

Not saying the article is right, but the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).

Speaking for myself, shame has certainly sometimes been enabling, sometimes disabling. Wanting to live up to an image I have of myself and what I should be (and feeling ashamed when I don’t) is a pretty core part of how “I” work. I agree shame can certainly turn toxic, but there are times when it is fair to say, “you should feel ashamed of yourself” (including in some circumstances, “for driving that kid to suicide by making him feel ashamed of who he is”).

They definitely get glares and annoyed looks from fellow passengers. And they must be oblivious if they’ve never noticed other people distractingly listening to music next to them or whatever.

Yes but diagrams aren’t abstract paintings (or interpretive dances), which I assume the original commenter meant as intentionally artsy and indirect forms of art.

It’s not clear that doing an abstract painting can make you reconceptualize in the way that reframing in other words does. The point about putting in other words is that you may stumble on a clearer, more tractable, more extensible framing. The kind of reframing an abstract painting does is very different, more like changing your attitude or way of looking. But I don’t think it ever leads to a place where you will suddenly find yourself with a sharper understanding that helps you communicate with others more effectively.

I don’t think it solves for novel thinking. I don’t think it will make better decisions than an informed and engaged human. But I don’t think there are any decisions a human is forced to make (unlike with a calculator) so people can offload any decision in particular, which is encourages, in aggregate, atrophying. And on top of that, you may find it increasingly difficult without extended time working with someone to identify them as the kind of person who has offloaded all important decisions in this way and just maintained the minimal awareness needed to keep sounding plausibly able.

A graphing calculator for all knowledge work is just a(n artificial) brain. It’s not hard to see how offloading brain work to another brain makes your brain less powerful.

I’m not saying you can’t be intelligent in a world of LLMs but people who use the calculator analogy underscore the fact that the LLM isn’t just eliminating the drudgery of one subdomain of mechanical problem solving — every problem is one an LLM can provide and answer for, including what you should learn, what problems you should solve, what your next conversation with the LLM should be about. So they do pose at least a threat of people truly offloading indefinite amounts of their own critical thinking to models, and there’s also danger that such people will in general still be competent enough often enough (due to LLM competence) that they are hard to screen out of key decision making roles or even from highly profitable roles.

> People need to stop overthinking everything

If anything, it sounds like (you think that) they need to be more thoughtful and not just throw every new technology and technique at the kids and see if it works.

I’m not trying to nitpick, but slow down, think, and measure before acting seems like clearer advice. Really what you are fighting is assuming that new technology is useful and just trying out various ad hoc ways to discover how to realize that usefulness.

That still sounds like it chimes with the quote you shared. The question the senior engineer was asking may have been exactly your last sentence. As in, among the “pool of known problems,” how do I find the ones worth working on? “Worth” may not mean “interesting” but “of lasting value”

Codepen is an awful experience on mobile (and is slow, as you said). But your page is an html page about html tips. Surely you can just embed them in the page itself?

The point is end to end type safety. Whether that is worth the tradeoff of losing direct developer access to the db primitives is another question.

Required in what way? Better coverage (or lower rates) if you do it? Or is it literally no coverage if you don’t?

Yeah if the comment just meant a review is warranted, great. But it’s not like separating personal desire and professional responsibility isn’t a routine part of just about every career. (Not saying this is equivalent to saying “that shirt looks great on you” when as a retail worker you think a customer looks ridiculous; but the analogy isn’t so far off that we should be shocked anyone would manage to have the fetish and still be a caring professional).

What do we gain by pathologizing it in newspaper headlines? Fetish is relatively value neutral, just a blank way of conveying the fact of his desiring it (against the current of normalcy).

If, as you imply, most people would stop a friend who did this, then it sounds like society already has the right attitude against it, and underscoring our concern by turning it into explicit disapproval at every mention is just lathering on a layer of censoriousness or shame.

How is it tainted by that alone? It’s almost certain that at least some of the patients he amputated actually needed amputation.

There’s also a known correlation between firefighters and arsonists

He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”

The claim isn’t knowing 99% of the field but that 99% of topics are ones you could do a quick-and-dirty crash course and come out with some understanding.

He’s a hacker news celebrity but not a global celebrity

Not if you’re on page 2

I don’t think it needs to be “flipped”…that’s the plain reading, isn’t it?

> And this is apparently super common even in ivy league universities as Youtube lessons have shown me over and over.

I think you have the “even” backwards. Elite research first universities have this problem more than teaching-first, low research output programs.