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awbon "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

We’ve seen tech completely eliminate jobs like phone switch operators and lamp lighters.

And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc.

It seems like people are debating whether the impact of AI on computer-based jobs will be elimination or decimation. But for the majority of people, what’s the difference?

awbon Show HN: 1 min workouts for people who sit all day

The best exercise is the one that you’ll do.

In the vein of atomic habits, reducing a task to its minimal effective dose is great for starting new habits.

For people that sit all day, a 1min exercise snack makes a lot of sense. After that becomes easy and routine then gradually increasing the duration and difficulty up until a typical 30-45 min workout 2-4x a week is a great end goal.

awbon Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation

A recent project on HN declared Supabase dead: https://www.isthistechdead.com/supabase

While the funding is impressive, I haven’t come across too many people touting Supabase or using it in production.

awbon Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

A Great Filter could come before or after intelligence.

For example, predation could be a Great Filter. We made it past the threat of predation, but perhaps most life forms in the universe don’t. In this example, life could be pervasive in the universe but it’s optimizing for defensive attributes like speed and armor rather than intelligence. That could explain why we don’t see aliens colonizing the galaxy. With the Great Filter behind us, nothing would be stopping us from colonizing the galaxy ourselves, we just might be among the first to do it.

Putting the Great Filter in front of us postulates that many life forms have achieved our same accomplishments but haven’t colonized the galaxy. It could be because of doom and gloom scenarios like war, aliens, cosmic catastrophes, etc. Or it could be a beneficial Great Filter like enlightenment and the lack of desire to propagate and consume endlessly, or the ability to survive in deep space, leaving stars and planets untouched.

awbon Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

There’s no evidence yet, but we also haven’t looked very carefully or in very many places. And we only know to look for planetary life as we know it.

The middle of the galaxy could have a wildly different composition and habitat for life than the outer reaches where we are.

Time is also another factor. Maybe the galaxy is perfect for complex life, we just happen to be early on the timescale and in another billion years or two life will be clearly abundant everywhere.

For some perspective, if you take the size of the Milky Way (100k light years) and relate it to the size of NYC (~30 miles), then 120 light years ends up being ~190 feet in NYC, or less than a city block.

awbon An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

So every year I go to a swap meet and try to exchange my “expiring” belongings for something similar to reset the clock? Or, they get taken away by force? By someone who has meticulous records of all my stuff?

What problem are you trying to solve?

awbon CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep

It exists in a superposition of being both a joke and not a joke until you observe the article.

awbon Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting

There was broad bi-partisan support for the first Gulf War (response to Iraq invading Kuwait) and the war in Afghanistan (response to 9/11).

The broader dissent started to come after the invasion of Iraq (based on the notion of Iraqi WMDs) and the lack of progress in Afghanistan or finding Bin Laden.

Foreign policy under different Presidents is often contradictory and as in any political context, the President usually has some base of support from their own party no matter how far off script they go, simply out of unity or fear of the alternative party benefiting from a lack of unity.

So while a coherent policy of “The US should intervene in all conflicts or no conflicts” would be intellectually consistent, the circumstances surrounding the conflict and the political environment lead to inconsistencies.

awbon Three Observations

You might be right. I don’t know if new professions will appear though. My guess is that people will transition to those existing fields that are less likely to be dominated by AGI.

Tech has already disrupted industries like travel agencies, print journalism, video stores, bookstores, stock brokers, movies, etc.

And you can see it coming for truck drivers, cab drivers, narrators and voice actors, etc.

So we’ve already lived through a taste of it, but this round will be much broader and much faster IMO.

awbon Three Observations

Probably a similar transition to the Industrial Revolution, but much faster. Laborers had to learn skills that machines weren’t better at.

Any work that is information based is probably in for a dramatic shift.

But maybe some areas that are less vulnerable: - Experiences (food, travel, accommodations, events, sports) - Manual labor (carpenters, plumbers, roofers) - Human connection (caregivers, therapists, teachers, coaches) - Public service (government, police, fire, healthcare) - Executives (CEOs, entrepreneurs)

The Industrial Revolution completely changed the world, but there are still many tasks where a human is better/faster/cheaper than a physical machine, so it didn’t replace everyone. My guess is that there will be some niche domains where humans are preferred to AGI.

awbon I am rich and have no idea what to do

Good point. The about page does mention this. But perhaps broadening the volunteer perspective to other causes might give them greater purpose.

> i invest in companies and am willing to offer help to founders i vibe with for free and for no allocation

awbon I am rich and have no idea what to do

Abstracting out the details, it’s the same theme as the general who wins the war and now there’s no war to fight and thinks to himself, “Now what?”

There are many people struggling with far greater challenges in life and with far less support, but feeling directionless and without a purpose is a common struggle that many people go through.

awbon ChatGPT Pro

Also a worthy deal if you don’t lose your $300k/year job to someone who is willing to pay $2,400/year.

awbon Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

How would they verify?

awbon Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

On the flip side, it’s possible to sell a business for 7+ figures and then have little to no income in subsequent years in which case quite wealthy families would qualify for assistance.

awbon Trump wins presidency for second time

Ok, I’m actually curious why folks think the 2020 election was stolen. I don’t know of any credible reporting on it.

The polling average numbers are from Project 538. The dropdown lets you navigate to each state.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

The election results are from Wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...

awbon Trump wins presidency for second time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_relat...

62 lawsuits in 9 states, 30 dismissed on merits, several from Trump appointed judges.

My recollection is that when the cases went to court, the lawyers backed away from claims of fraud: https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/

Trump was consistently losing in all polls in 2020.

538 had Trump’s odds at 10%: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

Betting markets had him at ~35%: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/betting_odds/202...

Biden was favored in MI, WI, NV, PA, AZ, FL, NC and GA on Election Day meaning he had many paths to victory.

And polls were pretty accurate for Biden:

State - Polling Avg. (Result)

MI - 51.2% (50.6%)

WI - 52.1% (49.5%)

NV - 49.7% (50.1%)

PA - 50.2% (49.9%)

AZ - 48.7% (49.4%)

FL - 49.1% (47.9%)

NC - 48.9% (48.6%)

GA - 48.5% (49.5%)

The surprise wasn’t that Trump lost in 2020, is was that based on polling averages that he didn’t lose by more.

awbon Trump wins presidency for second time

Polls seemed pretty accurate.

Look at PA polls: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...

The last 2 polls had Harris at 49, and 48. She ended up at 48.5%. Last 2 polls for Trump were 50 and 49. He ended up at 50.5%.

https://apps.npr.org/2024-election-results/pennsylvania.html...

Similar story for Wisconsin, (Harris polls 49 and 48; result: 48.9% and Trump polls 50 and 49; result: 49.7%) and Michigan (Harris polls 48 and 48; result: 48.3% and Trump polls 50 and 50; result: 49.8%)

Despite the end result, it was really was a minor polling error away from a Harris victory.

Also, FWIW, the total 3rd party vote in WI and MI was greater than the margin of victory for Trump in those states.

awbon Trump wins presidency for second time

Sure, but the FBI and DOJ still have the authority (and mandate) to detect and prevent election fraud, and certainly to the scale that was alleged.

Deciding between the effort required for a political opponent to run a massive multi-state voter fraud conspiracy under your nose and the effort required for an over-the-top personality to make a wild accusation that was never proven in court, I think we can consult Occam’s Razor.

awbon Trump wins presidency for second time

I don’t think many in either party are worried about small donations. But the concern from Dems is usually the unlimited donations as one billionaire could match the financial influence of millions of non-billionaires.

Kamala raised 2:1 from campaign contributions (limits: https://www.fec.gov/updates/fec-announces-2023-2024-campaign...), while the inverse was true for Trump.

Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/

In politics what’s pretty consistent is it’s almost always a debate about what’s to my advantage or not, masquerading as a principled argument.

awbon Trump wins presidency for second time

So the theory is that the Democrats while out of power stole the election and then when in power didn’t steal it?

Here’s another theory: the candidate with betting polling in 2020 won and the candidate with better polling in 2024 won.

awbon Introducing ChatGPT Search

I’m imagining LLMs might eventually have an upload tool, similar to Google’s site map upload, for registering content proactively instead of needing to be discovered through crawling the web or training on chat data.

awbon Introducing ChatGPT Search

LLMs have the chance to cannibalize the web and become the primary interface for knowledge. But if websites remain the final destination, it’s good for content creators.

The only other way to kill the web without killing LLMs in the process would be to create a way for people to upload structured public content directly into an LLM’s training. That would delay public content into release batches unless training can be sped up significantly.

awbon ACF has been hijacked

Check out “how are stories ranked” in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Overheated discussions get demoted. I think the idea is that the comments should support discussion of the content, but not usurp it.

awbon Ask HN: What breakthrough helped you build and maintain better relationships?

Sometimes group activities can be helpful. Have you tried inviting 3-5 friends to go out for drinks, go for a hike, play a sport, play cards, watch a game, etc.?

It’s less intimidating when you’re first getting to know someone if there’s a group, and then you’ll have something memorable in common in the future when you meet 1 on 1.

awbon Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

> you really, really suck as a human

That’s really, really harsh. Regardless of your reasons for feeling this way, this is not the appropriate forum for a personal attack like that

awbon Ask HN: How close are we to replace animal models with software?

This actually illustrates the crux of the problem. Gravity is a single (highly accurate) approximation when applied to 2 objects. But when you have 3 objects interacting with each other, the system is chaotic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem

Even if we could estimate all the molecules, cells, and processes of a biological entity to a similar precision as gravity, the errors would compound exponentially.

awbon Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence

Here’s my guess:

I think it’s a question of agency. If you’re an adult that makes their own choices (crime, bad financial decisions, etc.), then you know what the consequences are.

If you’re an unborn child, you’re don’t have agency.

For some there’s probably deeper religious belief in good things (birth) being the work of God and bad things (crime, vice, death) being the work of Satan.

To your point there are plenty of competing religious teachings that could lead some to be pro-choice, pro-welfare and anti-death penalty.

awbon Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence

> “I substituted [Allah] for the person who was really with me,” he wrote, saying he concealed the identity of the “real shooter” out of fear that “his associates might kill me”. He did not identify this person.

If your friend is wrongly facing the death penalty and you know they’re innocent there’s no reason to not name the person you claim is the real shooter.

awbon Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence

Whereas the Governor’s statement does say that information provided to the police by one witness was not known publicly.