oceanplexian

Daniel Kahneman is a big EA (Effective Altruism) advocate, aka the cult that all the tech elites such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk are a part of.

The book is selling you on a belief system (i.e. System1/System2). Then it uses some cherry picked data to set up a straw man to rationalize his idea of how the mind works. Death in a Shallow Pond is a good rebuttal to this even if it doesn't address the book directly.

It's weird to me that seemingly both sides are taking opposite positions to their philosophy.

Open Source AI democratizes the means of production to anyone with a computer. And yet, the hyper capitalists are defending it, and the progressives think it should be exclusively in the hands of 1-2 large corporations.

It goes both ways. It has been almost 10 years since I visited the PRC but the air and water were heavily polluted with industrial waste, outside the tier 1 cities people were living in makeshift subsistence tin housing, and it wasn’t uncommon to see farmers using oxcarts.

There’s a reason China has a GDP per capita somewhere around that of Argentina.

Of course, they also have futuristic cities, maglev, and plenty of brilliant engineers and scientists, therefore it makes sense to be pragmatic. But there are a lot people talking up China because they hate the US and are bought into a massive propaganda / influencer campaign.

Just a reality check. They can absolutely do it.

Altman or Dario will donate some money to Trump, get cozy with the Department of War and make up a bullshit excuse why Open Source needs to be eliminated.

All access to this technology will be gatekept by a bunch of nasty people who want to eliminate your job as a knowledge worker and put everything behind a subscription.

Sounds like they want regulation so I say give it to them.

Since they used stolen intellectual property to train their models, the government should force them to release the weights into public domain.

> Right after nuclear bombs were first developed, they were used in an extremely public way to kill 200 000 people. This was enough of a cold shower that everyone was agreeable to a global non-proliferation treaty.

Not really. Before NPT you missed a small gap in there of 20 years where the USA and USSR built 10's of thousands of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

And actually, public perception at the time saw Nuclear Weapons extremely favorably, as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the deadliest war in human history that killed 50-60 million people, most of which died excruciating deaths in trench warfare, fire bombing, chemical warfare, starvation and so on.

It's a chatbot that escaped a misconfigured Docker container.

I run open source models and it's pretty obvious when they fail some tool call and then keep trying different permutations of things until they get a solution. Just like Metasploit if you try enough different things at scale you will eventually crack some software or find a vulnerability in something. If you spend billions of dollars on compute and run tens of thousands of agents you might solve some novel Math and STEM problems as well, big whoop.

What Anthropic and OpenAI really need is to hire some engineers that know what they're doing and know how to properly set up a proxy server and sandbox/microVM, not a Global Arms Treaty.

The bioweapons argument is one of the favorites used by these con artists and dreamed up by their PR team.

Except Bioweapons already existed before LLMs, Adversarial governments already have them, they are already easy to make. You could use the same bullshit argument for why we need to ban libraries, books, or require a license to buy an internet connection.

The stock market is an API to build data centers and it’s proving to be extremely efficient.

And what is driving the Stock Market? Market makers like hedge funds and banks, who are using lots of AI to make decisions on what to invest in.

Ultimately it will be ID verification. How else are you going to check age?

Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.

Only 1 point behind the Chinese SOTA from two months ago.

Half the people on here are using Ollama. No one is doing market research.

LLMs have been found to have the same activations for the same concepts regardless of what language the question is asked in. So the answer is that they don’t do logic in a particular language either, they use their own internal symbolic representations.

Literally the highest tier ChatGPT that was available in 2025 can be run on a consumer laptop with Chinese AI now. Their regulations were obsolete before they put any words on paper.

I’m against it because the EU should be at the forefront of science and technology.

> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.

I hope no one takes this seriously.

If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.

I have 2x 3090s and I get 260 tokens/sec peak (110 avg) with Dflash2 and about 1500t/s prefill with a Q4 quant of Qwen 27b. I didn't buy an overpriced Apple product and it performs much better. It's extremely reliable for Agentic coding and I can run 2-3 simultaneous agents with a full ~260k context window.

I realize the price of NVIDIA has gone up but there are plenty of GPU options from others like AMD and Intel with reasonable performance.

Ollama? Running a q1 quant? I don't think the writer knows what the are doing here to be honest.

You will get better information cruising r/localllama for about 10 minutes.

Please explain why tariffs a "good thing" to protect a French winery but a "Bad thing" when it is used to protect an American worker.

Everyone loves the EU and Canada and their tariffs. In Canada for example American poultry and dairy have as much as 200-500% tariffs. Usually it is seen as a big win to prevent undercutting the working class with cheap foreign labor. But as soon as it has any association with Trump all of a sudden the Progressives forget everything they believe in and turn into laissez faire libertarian capitalists.

Most people in the US have a car, and the average new car is $40,000. Hell where I live a middle class consumer will spend double that on a Boat or an RV and think nothing of it. These aren’t elite tech workers.

It’s not unfathomable that if a personal, generally intelligent local AI provides enough utility and doesn’t require you to tweak CLI flags millions of Americans would want one.

The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?

Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.

> Anyway, companies are pouring billions into improving AI tooling user experience so most of what I do manually I just anticipate to be a waste of time.

I get patches into the biggest AI projects all the time to make inference faster on my 3090 and all you have to do is read the contribution docs and open a small PR.

It’s not a cabal of super geniuses. We are literally in the Wright Brothers era of AI.

You can trivially outpace what big companies are doing it’s insane, why do you think so many innovations are coming out of scrappy Chinese labs? They are willing to engage instead of being defeatist about it.

> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue

If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP.

The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant.

Some parts of the country are going to be more resilient than others.

I grew up 45 minutes away from Boston and all of the neighbors had standby generators. Even more have wood stoves. Water is abundant. Actually a lot of the old houses were built pre electrification or shortly after so there’s no limit to how long you could survive without the grid.

6 figures is a single mid range Xeon or Epyc server these days.

I use the $200 plan w/ Anthropic and run out of tokens half way through the week and supposedly they are progressively reducing the limits on all their subs even further.

At some point I will switch, $200 buys a lot of tokens on OpenRouter.

> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there.

So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here.

The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers back in the 1970s.

Breaking up code into small reviewable pieces is obsolete advice from legacy software engineering. We will probably be reviewing prompts or functional simulations as a form of review. Which brings me to the point that a Senior engineer in 5 years will look absolutely nothing like a Senior engineer in 2019.

I live in Utah and we have refineries a few blocks away from residential neighborhoods and a literal strip mine visible from half of the Salt Lake valley.

The datacenter controversy has nothing to do with caring about the environment and is a complete scam that preys on low-information voters. It is a product of outside Chinese money being funneled into US politics to hobble the US in Artificial Intelligence.

Side note: Now's a fantastic time get into industrial processes or oil & gas since all of the fake propaganda against buildings with computers in them has distracted people from facilities built on a daily basis that cause 1000x the pollution and noise of a datacenter.

> There are two ACs on the second floor which we keep turned off because the cool air prevents natural sweating and muscles from loosening.

Why do so many supposedly educated people from developed countries have completely pseudoscientific beliefs about A/C?

It’s so bizarre and frankly, embarrassing to even read. You will sweat exactly the same as you would at 30% RH at 72 degrees on a cool day outdoors. There’s nothing mystical about the air conditioner at work here.

I don’t think the industry knows how to price this stuff. Deepseek is great (I’m running it on a RTX 6000 pro setup) but it’s nothing like Fable. It’s still strongly human-in-the-loop which is fine, until you experience how good these models can be.

Think about it this way.

Let’s say you could buy an LLM that gets things right 98% of the time. But there’s another LLM that’s 100x the price but gets things right 99.9% of the time. To the lay person this sounds trivial but to a serious business this intelligence gap could represent millions, or billions of dollars.