orangecat

Yes, because old people need expensive health care and are much less productive. Those are two of the major reasons to solve aging. (The third and most important being quality of life).

Now imagine everyone lives in perfect health forever.

That would be great. Medical costs would fall drastically, and the worker-to-dependent ratio goes way up.

The military ran Anthropic models on their own infrastructure; Anthropic had no access to it. "They might disable Claude in the middle of an emergency" was never a possibility.

"Thermodynamic evolution" says that sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. Yes, I do think we're more clever than that.

Wanting to die after a handful of decades seems weird to me, especially if you're in good health.

It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life

That is very much not obvious.

Yeah, like Apple tells me the M6 is the best chip, but just a few months ago that's what they said about the M5. What a bunch of frauds.

This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.

How so? If the answer is "Trump" I certainly won't disagree on the catastrophic part, but he didn't get elected because of money; in all three elections his campaign was substantially outspent by his opponents.

Right, including Sony. AI finding security flaws is very good in general, but one downside is that it will become easier to make "secure" devices that are hostile toward their owners.

======================================

Hi! I'd like to create an app for interactively learning Chinese using AI. My current idea is:

- The AI generates a Chinese sentence at a specified vocabulary level (e.g. HSK2)

- The user translates the sentence into English, and the AI evaluates the response. If the answer is wrong or is partially correct but could be improved, the AI offers a hint. If correct, the AI confirms and explains any particularly important vocabulary or grammar points that the sentence demonstrates.

- The user should be able to click on an individual character once to see the pinyin, and again to see its definition and any helpful techniques to remember it (radicals, similarity to other characters, visual meaning)

- The app should also be able to go the other way, giving the user an English sentence and having them translate to Chinese.

App details:

- UI is a web app

- The AI should be pluggable. We'll start with a local Ollama install running gemma4, but it should be easily possible to add support for Claude/OpenAI/Gemini or other models (may need to provide an API key).

- Not actually sure if we need a backend. It might be useful to keep track of characters or concepts that the user has difficulty with, or to keep track of what sentences the AI has previously generated so it doesn't become repetitive.

- Build everything in a Docker container (or multiple if needed with docker compose)

I guess people are just going to keep spreading misinformation about this, along the same lines as "Anthropic's C compiler fails on hello world". There is zero indication that they stole anything, unless it counts as "stealing" to spin up a bunch of compute based on rumors that the problem had been solved already.

Well, yes? If you want to write code that isn't useful to anyone and just gives you warm fuzzies, go for it. I've done plenty of that. But it's exceptionally selfish to try to forbid technological improvements so that you can get paid to work exactly how you want to.

Does cooking food serve any purpose beyond mass producing food for restaurants to sell?

Should we ban industrial agriculture so that you can feel more proud of your rooftop garden?

Not really, we explored almost the entire world on foot and horseback. Cars and trains "just" make it easier.

A million lines of LLM slop?

As they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last few years I was working on a side project that needed a lot of tedious logic of the form "if X then Y, unless both A and B, in which case either P or Q depending on the phase of the moon". I gave Claude the problem, it independently came up with a nearly identical architecture to what I had already built, then tore through all the scenarios and produced thousands of unit tests along with validation and fuzzing scripts. The code isn't terribly elegant, and was never going to be. But it works and it's shipping, and that wouldn't have happened anytime soon without AI.

I think a lot of it is the continuing denial that AI can do anything useful. It can't possibly be that OpenAI's better-than-Astra model is very strong at math; the only way it could have generated a novel proof is by ripping off human work.