If only they had insisted on a secure 8 character password!
10,514 karma · joined February 7, 2014
For me, the entire thing that made me want to use Deno was it was a clean-sheet rewrite that was aiming to overcome the negatives of node and npm. It was a breath of fresh air. Yet overtime they basically ended up just trying to replicate node. Such a shame.
Still, I like cloudflare's offerings so I'm very interested to see what they come up with after work on worded/celld
This happened to software engineers already. Mathematics isn't special.
Hold someone accountable for this behaviour - Dario, Sam, Sundae whoever and you can bet there'd be fucking improvements in sandboxing and security m
Someone told me some years ago that it was "impossible" for Google to apply an upper usage caps due to technical design reasons which I found absurd. You can build a globally distributed continent-scale SQL database with consistency guarantees, but you can't stop me paying more than X USD when my usage ticks over that? Huh?
It smelt much more to me like Google's business model made it impossible to stop customers spending money, not their engineering.
I voted with my wallet.
I think it is largely because IMHO React is very much an "overlay" on top of (and inspite of) normal web standards and general beat practice (e.g. JSX throwing out decades of separation of concerns etc), leading to whole swathes of people who have basically only ever been "react developers" not generalist frontend engineers. They find the DOM APIs "icky" because it takes them out of the React lifecycle, mindset, and ecosystem etc.
Tldr, React and NPM are a pox on the world of frontend development and especially the JavaScript ecosystem. It's given JavaScript such a bad name, unfairly.
Still with AI basically nothing matters any more - no one sees the code any more.
One way AIs really really really excel is pulling together a lot of different data sources and reasoning over that data. In the past sure we could collect data and create huge datasets, but the analysis of that data - extracting themes, finding commonality or issues etc - either required extensive human research and analysis at best, or at worst crude regexes or keyword matching.
Now an AI can pour over that data and make its own inferences and decisions and findings that we've simply not been able to do before at this kind of speed or scale just because of time and resources.
And the AI, having done that, can propose new things for e.g. training, i.e. new things that no human has ever done before that the AI is simply repeating. For example it can propose a task that it knows from it's research is hard for it to solve currently, and then we just throw compute and randomness at it to find the "best" solution from many many attempts, then repeat until we hill-climb up to a perfect 1.0 score (... although of course we have to try and avoid cheating/attempts to short-ciruit the eval)
So this could be coding tasks, UI control tasks, protein folding, maths, chemistry etc etc. Anything that is easily and objectively programmatically scored. You can run this in a loop many times, each time you go around the loop the model gets smarter, learns more things from it's research, new areas of loss it can optimise etc etc.
It's harder where there is not a way to objectively score the outcomes (e.g. art, creative writing). Often this uses a fuzzy "judge" model that is trained specifically to give the work a score based on it's appraisal. This works but you can see how we might end up with feedback loops, so often it is paired with humans who provide feedback to provide supervised fine tuning datasets.
Tl:Dr - It's not just "repeating what it's seen". AI is finding new ideas and creating new things millions of times a day, and that is just software engineers asking it to write code or fix bugs, let alone people using it for actual research or whatever.
And people are worried about human extinction when this is the potential trade-off!
C++'s death cannot come soon-enough.
Seriously though, things have changed so incredibly rapidly in the past year or so. I have never been such an efficient or such a proficient engineer than I have this past year (delivering feature after feature, project after project, faster and better than I could before with better feedback from users etc) and I don't even see the code any more. It could be c++, it could be python, or java or what ever - I don't really care any more: the computer deals with that trivia while I concentrate on what to build and how it should work.
Its amazing. It really is.
With respect, I don't find your arguement about them being "so far behind" especially convincing when you are using previous-gen releases and not actually using their current release.
If you have actual independent benchmarks and evidence about how this new model release is "so far behind" and refutes the stuff from their blog then please do share because I think we'd all love to see that?
Behind how?
FWIW in most European countries I think sales of new fuel cars are scheduled to be banned within the next 5-10 years, so that puts a date on it I guess.
I read a thing recently that in the UK the used price of EVs is soaring now too due to the increase in demand. Diesel especially is really expensive now so people are looking to switch. At least in the UK there are more charging stations now than gas stations - totally viable to drive an EV anywhere and find a charger, you even get e.g. 350kw chargers in grocery store car parks now. I think the transition is well underway - I can't think of a reason you'd not but an EV if you were in the market for a new car in the UK. The only thing I guess is not having off-street charging at home, but more and more lampposts have chargers in them now et. It's only 400 miles between London and Edinburgh (about an 8 hour drive give or take) and some current EVs can do that without stopping.
There is really no excuse for it I think - the range is there, the chargers are there, the competition/manufacturer options are there - apart from just not wanting one for your own personal reasons.
But hey each to your own.
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really.
Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.
What would you rather it said?
And they're making money doing it.
Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?
I would hope that would be less of a concern though Vs people worried that the hugging face example could have been "generate a human virus that kills all humans and then manufacture it and then administer it" etc
I find it far-fetched to think the AI is going to kill us, and not actually just humans using tools to do things like we've always done.
This is my point. What are the odds of humans killing everyone on the planet Vs that of AI going out of control doing it? If it's 10% chance of AI causing human extinction - and everyone is losing their shit over that 10% that I suspect was just plucked out of the air - are we not as concerned at what I think are much higher chances of those genocidal racial supremacists doing the same?
I guess though this is all semantics. Did the person pulling the trigger kill the person who was shot, or the actual chunk of metal that was the bullet kill the person?
E.g.
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/cornered-putin-under-pressure...
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-tactical-nukes-radioactive-ba...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-hawks-urge-puti...
I'd put it at 10-15% chance easy.
They could totally brick the internet and cause every electrical device to explode and power stations to explode, planes drop out the sky, cars accelerators stuck at 100%, trains derail and all that. That still wouldn't kill everyone.
Don't get me wrong we'd be fucked for sure, but analog human existence (e.g. something akin to 1960s 1970s level tech) would be totally possible in that scenario.
I am not sure how I feel about all this. Yes bad AI might screw some things up. But AI might also find and prevent the software errors that allow such things to even be possible in the first place.
And ultimately, even if we are "locked out" from bad AI taking over the internet, we know where the data centers are. It's not like AI can reasonably "escape" since we know it needs DC-scale power, cooling, chips etc to operate at scale. I am pretty sure that if it came to it, we can just cut the fibre to the data centers or cut the power and let the generators run out of diesel and the AI is literally dead.
Then whenever we are travelling we just grab that and I know that basically whatever happens on the plane or when we get to a hotel or whatever I have basically every possible combination covered. Perfect for carry-on.
Its bad consumerism, but I try not to keep too much legacy stuff around and send it for recycling. If I need it again in O(years) then amazon will have it for me usually the same day or next morning.
Alphafold or Earthquake alerts for example spring to mind.
You could argue about comprehensive "free" services (search, Gmail, YouTube, docs, etc) and "free" browsers and "free" operating systems (yeah plural) being net positives in the world but I know that many people view these as negatives as they (rightly or wrongly) view them as vehicles to sell ads or collect data, but I bet you 100 bucks the typical person on the street using their android phone to search Google, watch YouTube, check their Gmail, write a doc, view photos etc doesn't give a shit about that and values these things - google has ended up as a monopoly as these things are actually pretty useful to people and thus valued, even if we in the tech world disagree with the adtech and data aspects. This monopoly was not a fait acompli or pure market abuse - Nokia, MS, flikr, Hotmail, yahoo etc were all incumbent and market dominant but are now irrelevant because the Google products were viewed as better by end users.
It's not the screens, it what you do with the screens.
We do not need to reduce our lives to that of Luddites - we do not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and avoid all screen use - just because people are addicted to social media or short-form video content.
They're not addicted to the screens, they're addicted to YouTube/tiktok/twitter/whatever.