676 karma · joined February 13, 2026
I would think there's a point where, if you want this level of creative control and image quality, you go back to a mirrorless camera, which now costs less than iPhone Pro. But I guess the convenience is hard to beat?
Both from the Mastodon post of the journalist (which admits to casual use of more than one LLM), and from a cursory review of this author's past articles, I'm willing to bet that this rule wasn't followed more than once.
Had we stopped with 1990s tech, I don't think that things would have been fundamentally different. 1980s would have been more painful, mostly because limited memory just did not allow for particularly sophisticated graphics. So, we'd be stuck with 16-color aesthetics and you probably wouldn't be watching movies or editing photos on your computer. That would mean a blow to social media and e-commerce too.
If you have an growing mass in your body, then if it's cancer, after a year, it might be too late for treatment. Or it may turn out to be nothing: a benign tumor / cyst / fat deposit in an unusual place. Or it may be slow-growing prostate cancer that you can live with for another 20 years, and maybe it's the chemotherapy that will do you in. It's really not that clear-cut in medicine.
To give you have another example: let's say that the risk of appendicitis in people who have an appendix is 1%. And the risk in people who had an appendix removed is 0%. Does this justify proactively removing the appendix? No, because the consequences of complications are much higher than the harm you're preventing. The same applies here: detection, even if 100% accurate, doesn't mean anything. You need to show that what you do with the result actually helps.
Here, you have a tool with a ~100% false positive rate, so if we start administering it to everyone, it will almost certainly cost lives. Botched biopsies, unnecessary treatments, other complications. Not to mention the huge cost that would divert money from other welfare programs. So you need to show that when it actually detects something, it saves at least as many lives. And I doubt that's the case.
Why? The available computing power and bandwidth are orders of magnitude more plentiful / cheaper than in the 2000s, too. I can't think of any technical reason why we couldn't have social in today's world media without advertising money.
The main non-technical reason why you can't run Facebook on the cheap is that it's expensive to respond to regulatory and PR pressures they're under. You need an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and compliance people in almost every country on the planet.
But that's in some respects a product of consolidation that we never really needed in the first place: we don't need every human on the planet on the same social network. Social circles are small and the only reason to have everyone under the same roof is if you want to be the gatekeeper for the world's ad targeting data.
The scrutiny is also a product of amount of money involved. No one is exerting as much pressure on Signal, Mastodon, etc, precisely because they're not trillion-dollar companies.
A lot of people on HN have preconceived notions here based on stories they read about someone being unfairly accused of plagiarism or people deliberately triggering failure modes in these programs, and that's basically like dismissing the potential of LLMs because you read they suggested putting glue on a pizza once.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
There are three reasons why "real" robotics is harder. First, to navigate unconstrained environments by means other than wheels, you need to learn a fair amount of kinematics and control theory. Second, your robot will need to build a map of the operating environment, which often requires complex sensing (lidars, cameras) and a lot of compute power. Even something as basic as a Roomba is no small feat, and these things get stuck a lot. Third, it's just hard to come up with practical applications for simple robots outside of industrial production lines.
Once you have that figured out, decide how much you want to learn. Do you want to do it the hard way, which would mean moving more slowly and working your way up from first principles and probably 3D printing or machining your own parts... or do you want to get results as soon as possible, in which case, you probably buy a Linux single-board computer and put it on top of an existing robot kit? The trade-off with the first approach is that it will take you months or years to get where you want to be. The downside of the second is that you're limited to premade kits and software components, and once you exhaust the possibilities there, you kinda hit a wall.
I don't want to be too meta, but isn't that a description of most HN threads? We show up to criticize other people's work for self-gratification. In this case, we're here here to criticize the dev caving in, even though most of us don't even know what Stoat is and we don't care.
Except for some corner cases, most developers and content creators mostly get negative engagement, because it's less of an adrenaline rush to say "I like your work" than to say "you're wrong and I'm smarter than you". Many learn to live with it, and when they make a decision like that, it's probably because they actually agree with the mob.
A bunch of revolutionaries who carried a campaign of murder that ultimately had little bearing on the economic standing or job prospects of French citizens?
I'm not saying that people will be content or that there will be no revolutions in the future. There might be. But most jobs are a social construct. A relatively small fraction of employed people are essential to the well-being of mankind. For every construction guy, there are office managers, assistants to the office manager, municipal form-pushers, etc. It's not that these jobs are completely pointless, but we could do without them and the damage would be probably less than the cumulative payroll.
The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment, errands. Now, that may sound dystopian, but on some level, so are most white collar jobs today. Microsoft employs 200k people. How many of these are directly involved in shipping money-making products - five percent? Ten? The rest is there essentially for the self-sustaining bureaucracy itself. And there's no reason for that bureaucracy to exist except the whims of people with money and power - delegation, empire-building, pet projects, etc.
Fundamentally, I think that many problems in white-collar life are text comprehension problems or basic automation problems. Further, they often don't even need to be done particularly well. For example, we've long decided that it's OK for customer support to suck, and LLMs are now an upgrade over an overseas call center worker who must follow a rigid script.
So yeah, LLMs can be quite useful and will be used more and more. But this is also not the discourse we're having on HN. Every day, there's some AGI marketing headline, including one at #1 right now from OpenAI.
And by "certain", you mean "not certain". The core tenet are index funds, and while for the average person, they're probably better than stock-picking, you're absolutely exposing yourself to market risk.
I mean, the answer is basically Reddit. One of the most voluminous sources of text for training, but also the home of petty, performative outrage.