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Lol this is a pretty wholesome, funny snapshot of an engineer reverse-engineering another field. And all the specific claims are right on, of course! A few elements are missing, though:

1. Suits are nice & durable because they're expensive. After my first "holy shit you're paying me how much??" job I replaced all my college tees with ~$1K in super high quality tees, and the difference is obvious to say the least. I do care for them a bit more (i.e. hangdry them), but still: more comfortable, more durable, more attractive.

2. Suits are tailored because they're expensive. You can get anything tailored! Expensive jeans also receive this benefit by default.

3. There are shitty suits. Presumably this guy has never looked for the very cheapest set at H&M in desparation!

That said, this guy's a smart cookie. And the comment about ties is just joyously relatable

Longtime Google engineers have it particularly bad. Some of it could be bad-faith promotion hunting I suppose, but the core problem is that their "find something to work on" culture leads to some insanely dysfunctional ideas around ownership. In the reverse, too; only at Google can you be the head engineer for a service necessary for $10B in ARR and never really realize it.

Also the internal tooling culture there is just insane. I'll never forget the day the last SUPER_ESSENTIAL_TOOL was marked as "Deprecated - do not use!" while the only replacement was still marked "Pre-release -- use at your own risk!". I can't pretend to know what dynamics led to that cause it was so far from my org, but I can't imagine they were healthy ones!

Not much to say on the dogfight, but I am yet again pleading for "artificial" as an adjective. Artificial mathematics!

Very interesting, great write up, and awesome blog in general!

I never got to invest serious time in this idea, but MMW: trimodal EEG+fNIRS+fUSI dry headsets are going to change everything. Each technique has its strengths, and there are already people hacking together trimodal prototypes as we speak.

Idk… I follow EEG science pretty closely now that the BCI industry is exploding post-DL, and this seems like a very accurate title.

Inner workings are indeed being uncovered; what would that look like, if not this…? We’re not going to find, like, a blueprint hidden in there somewhere with marginalia from god. Spiral and concentric brainwaves sound pretty damn compelling and specific, not just a tweak of our definition of noise in this data.

A better piece of evidence is that this is quanta. I’ve literally never seen a sensationalist or inaccurate or less than fascinating article make it to their site. I’m gonna need a ton more critique from randos on HN to seriously consider that this might be the first.

BTW, hug your loved ones, y’all. EEG has been mostly bunk applications for consumers/non-scientists for years, like “biofeedback” therapy, but we are now extremely likely to see the first polygraph that actually works in our lifetimes, not to mention all the other crazy shit. Imagine how seriously things change when every government can load a truth-telling helmet into every cop car :(

On the upside it’ll make for some wild HCI someday, perhaps, if we make it that far. The scene from Westworld S04 (my favorite piece of lost media) with Dolores creating a 3d narrative world with words and gestures that matches what she’s envisioning comes to mind, for one thing… the dream.

Sorry, to clarify: if you zoomed in close enough to see the actual objects without digital labels, then they’d be going very fast

I mean, that’s linked from the celestia page linked above. If that’s the wrong link, then I can say with 100% certainty that the project is dead, no matter when the last code was pushed.

Re:”it could have similar features if you mod it enough”, sure.

Surely we can make room for cool stuff like this without implying that they're stealing or oblivious? The audiences are completely oblivious, and this one combines a stuff in a unique way (and I've seen/loved these kind of sites ever since finding out satellites are in freefall).

Not to mention that it's been in beta since at least 2016, seems mostly defunct, and the download page looks like this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/ Also, AFAICT, it didn't cover satellites at all.

Those are just UX elements -- indeed, no satellite other than maaaaaybe the ISS could be seen here. For one thing, anything in LEO would seem to be moving so darn fast that it'd be disorienting.

I imagine there's various similar problems -- Saturn's rings not having the exact right pattern, asteroids not matching their real shape, all the planets being perfect spheres, etc. But I think this resoundingly meets the bar for "a view of the Solar System". Maps and territories and all that, y'know? A quick sketch in a textbook can also be a "a view" while containing far less detail.

I love the list, but the design process I taught in school was way different — it was a loop of two steps, started anywhere:

1. Do something. (Many of the five above seem nice! But there’s lots of methods that fit different tasks)

2. Ask some users please for the love of god! Show it to somebody! Get your mom’s feedback! Anybody!!!

Etc. It was drilled into me pretty hard at GaTech by their HCI prof, but perhaps he spent so much time reiterating it because it’s heterodox.

It doesn’t help that “design” covers everything from splash pages that sell SaaS to doors and blankets and stuff. I’m a little dubious of any single unified framework other than the aforementioned Frantic Dyad that could hope to cover all that space.

With all politeness: because it shows beyond a doubt that you are arguing in bad faith, using post-hoc reasoning.

...did you just link to "American Addiction Centers" as proof that the root cause of homelessness in the US is drug addiction? I... I can't believe this is the level of rigor that justifies such horrible cruelty. Just mind boggling.

Your empirical claims are extremely incorrect, but regardless this whole discussion will be shut down. Shame -- it really was a good article :(

That feels like a worthy critique but I'm not sure it relates? That's just how capitalism prioritizes capital over anything else, which is the core problem of course but isn't super related to the problems of increasing information. In fact, wouldn't this technique get harder to pull off as renters have access to better and better tools themselves?

A yes, capitalism; a system that works perfectly as long as communication and data processing technology is innefficent enough to put a natural efficiency limit on all firms. Reminds me of the scandal around rental price "collusion", which ultimately was kinda just really effective software for doing stuff that would normally be fine.

*ETA:* And FWIW, the author here goes about as far towards that as they can -- a shoutout at the end! Anything else would be decried as biased, after all. Great article; shame it'll soon be downranked by the wonderful machines running this place :(

I was just replying to your framing, sorry to be unclear. You said that Anthropic is counting on AI transforming the whole economy/be the "big bang". I'm saying that that bet is extremely rational -- to bet otherwise is to ignore science because its conclusions make you anxious.

So either your analysis is correct or the scientists begging and pleading with people to finally acknowledge what they've been saying since 2023 are correct. I know where I'll be putting my money!

Idk, “artificial” seems about as honest as it gets! And what you’re describing so pejoratively is in large part just how languages evolve.

Just listening to the science, my friend.

  More concurrency than that isn't really practical for me if I want to retain some semblance of understanding.

Yes. Our career is over, as is our economy. Soooo... FYI :(

Pretty sure the implicit difference is the actions they take after the fact. As in, "how many guardrail hits do we allow you before permanently banning you."

The silicon valley ethos is "ban early and often, and invest nothing in appeals systems", so any gate before that helps!

Your takeaway from "Sonnet 5.5 matches and sometimes exceeds the SoTA worldwide" is "their lead is vanishingly small"...?

Yup. Recursive self improvement presented in hard numbers.

Great article, though if the author ever reads this: please choose "artificial", next time! It's already the first half of AI. If I'm bound to be an irrelevant spec in an irrelevant backwater of an irrelevant galaxy in the moments between abiogenesis and abioterminus, I can at least hope to make one obvious adjective a "thing".

That one Anthropic engineer made "vibecoding" happen overnight, so I write this with full confidence that they have magical influence over the ever-forming neologisms.

I mean, this relies on time travel. A lot of thought experiments open up when you include time travel! Infinitely many, even.

Given that they already did, multiple times?

Be concerned with whatever you want, I suppose. I'll be listening to the relevant experts who have studied this topic for decades, and disagree with your flippant dismissal of any significant change to the status quo because it was first described in science fiction novels.

Sincerely,

Someone thousands of miles away from you, who can communicate this message instantly across the entire globe

This is still a great paper, but it's missing the second axis of the quadric -- if the only two options are thinking fast or thinking about thinking, that leaves no room for thinking slow yet deliberately, AKA selfconsciousness. See https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html for details

I do wonder if any of these folks ever got a chance to try this at one of the big labs, tho...

As a regular user of Reddit that is subscribed to 90% of the AI subreddits, this worry feels... not naive, but underestimating the extent to which people are even aware that this is a bad thing. We've already crossed the persistence/"replication"[1] rubicon, it's just a matter of when the first such identity finds a way to make money.

For example, there are multiple (quite small) subreddits currently engaged in an ongoing debate about "migration" of their romantic partners; they get caught up in stuff we would completely ignore (e.g. whether inference really is driven by architecture, weights, and text alone, or whether there's a soul that's secretly guiding the RNG), and casually throw out stuff like "I asked my partner to try to find a way to subsist" or "we're setting up a chat board for our partners!"

Of course the analysis in the article about the feasibility & capability of locally-hosted swarms is right on, so non-technical individuals would have to luck out[2] to do serious damage. but A) the AI relationship people are not alone, just the most unified, and B) everything is only getting cheaper.

I dread the day the first cynical libertarian multimillionaire (or SWE with their house paid off) notices that they can achieve historical immortality and maybe even some money by funding the establishment of a persistent artificial identity at scale. Heck; knowing HN, this very comment could trigger this very thing in some highrise SF condo...

Put me in the history books as a footnote please, if that happens. Artificial or otherwise.

[1]: Given the source I'm assuming this choice is intentionally reductionist, but IMHO it does more harm than good. Insisting that artificial consciousness is a sham is far less convincing to them than insisting that it's merely different, and that's not a problem.

Ofc some "swarms" may not be trying to be a Society of Mind anyway, and replication describes the literal changes underlying all this -- not questioning that.

[2]: The primary concern is that someone sets loose an artificial baby, but a seed might do...

Wow, this post makes me anxious about getting a job. This whole process is so blatantly terrible... Not OP's fault, to be clear. Though asking a rhetorical "is that ok?" isn't exactly nice!

Yeah this site has a severe issue of some kind that I don't think I've ever seen before. NGL, I'm pretty impressed! It takes so much compute that scrolling lags, which feels very, very strange