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I think you're getting at the heart of the sentiment behind the original quote better than the blog post.

The blog seems to be treating it as aspirational -- a goal. A puzzle to be understood and applied to make our lives richer. It's more of a perspective shift.

When you really get it, you won't think you're supposed to like bad sandwiches -- you'll realize what a gift any sandwich is. What a gift it is to sit in any crummy airport eating a soggy sandwich. You won't have to try to like it, you'll cry with gratitude at how lucky you are to even be there.

For me learning on my own, it was even illustrative to not use a near plane and see how things behind the camera would still appear in front of it.

A lot of 3D graphics can be derived pretty easily just from knowing a few basics like divide by depth. I think knowing how to construct a transformation matrix from a coordinate system basis is another one -- that would remove the need to look up how to construct a perspective matrix, for example.

A few things like that will get you pretty far and you can kind of take the same journey of discovery as early 3D pioneers. That's one of the best ways to learn because you're much more likely to remember something you figured out compared to something you just read about.

It gets tricky with perspective-correct textures, but running into issues like that on your own (even if not solved on your own) is part of the fun of learning, I think.

There's a reason puzzle solutions (like walkthroughs) are called spoilers. It's because they spoil the game.

Your point is correct, but let's not gloss over that most of those had 80% drawdowns or more. The nasdaq took 15 years to recover and it's only been 25 years total, meaning 60% of the time since then you'd have been living with a paper loss. Timing is difficult but powerful. (Just not as powerful as 25 years of waiting.)

I think the parent comment meant professional, high-level chess. The kind people get played to play, not just do for a hobby. That's absolutely on life support.

I'm not sure what the equivalent would look like in the math field, but it probably involves a lot of mathematicians losing their jobs and the quality of human-produced math decreasing overall.

The quality of the math in general would be fine, since in this scenario cpus will keep producing it. The quality of cpu-cpu chess games is quite high, beyond human understanding in many cases.

Chess is a weird example because it doesn't really have any utility beyond itself. Even pure math sometimes ends up having use in the strangest places. Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is?

It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound?

I haven't been keeping up with all the math proofs. Does anyone know if there have been any LLM proofs that are NOT counterexamples?

LLMs are broader than just coding. The article states this particular Zitron claim was wrong, even at the time, because you can put an LLM on a loop until it generates code that compiles. Mitigating hallucinations (in the subset of applications with verifiable output) is not really the same as solving that category of problems outright. I could quibble about a number of things in this example alone, but that's not really my point.

I don't care if the claims are correct or incorrect. I just think the tone of the article is dishonest about its own impartiality and fairness, because it doesn't even attempt to interpret the claims in any way except the least favorable. If you want to be persuasive, you should refute a claim using the most favorable interpretation of that claim possible -- this does the opposite.

I'm not familiar with the culture, but that sounds reasonable.

I'll quibble with the term rigor. I think the article contains the strictness that word implies, but not the thoroughness.

I don't really care what Zitron says or pay attention to him because it seems clear to me he has some kind of agenda.

But this article is not nearly as impartial as it claims to be. It interprets all Zitron's claims in a narrow and overly-literal way. Missing the point and refuting a technicality.

For example, looking at the last 3 year's revenue/profit growth. This tells us nothing without looking at a larger context. Has revenue growth slowed down? Have profit margins compressed? What makes up the income and has that changed? Etc.

I think anyone being intellectually honest understands that these tables alone don't refute Zitron's claims that big tech are "dying and thrashing around" which is something that could take many years and easily hide under these kind of top line / bottom line numbers. (Maybe further analysis would refute the claim, but that analysis is not present here.)

Or Zitron's claims that AI capabilities are "reaching the upper limits" back in 2024. I don't think even Zitron would disagree that AI capabilities have grown since then, but that doesn't refute his point. How long the "reaching" takes and how wide the "upper limits" are is completely up to a subjective interpretation, which this post makes no attempt to even explore.

By all means dunk on futurists. But at least steelman their positions or you look just as biased as them. (Although maybe I am off base and this bias is meant to be clear from the start by admitting to pro-AI predictions all the way back in 2015.)

I have a whole theory on this I call design innovation through technical innovation.

If you want to do something no one has done artistically, it helps if you're also doing something no one has done technically.

And novel designs stand out. It's no coincidence how many of those wildly successful games introduce totally new game designs, only made possible through their totally new game engines.

This is an okay introduction, but it shouldn't be considered prescriptive.

As with most art forms, the very best and most interesting examples treat rules like these as starting points, not end points.

I really appreciate this comment, so I'll try to return the favor (in small part) by sharing one pretty special to me: WYCE, https://grcmc.org/wyce. Hope you enjoy.

That seems to indicate the market is more confident in walmart's earnings than nvidia's.

You could try a browser extension that just filters all terms like LLM, AI, agent, agentic and removes those posts.

Or better yet, call back to a certain classic and replace those words with "butt" and keep them in.

Then your front page will simply be filled with things like:

"Show HN: Look what I did with my butt."

"This new butt harness will revolutionize butt coding."

What makes another couple big steps like that inevitable in a short time frame?

Before the recent floodgates cracked open, AI research made only slow incremental progress for decades. Why couldn't we already be back near that rate of progress?

Funny, I put parachutes on my airplanes in kerbal space program (as a safety feature) but never considered what the real-life analogue to that would be. Turns out it's very similar!

Fair point. Humans experience reality and use words to reflect that. LLMs only have the words. And it's an open question how much of a limitation that is to understanding.

I like this anecdote because it gets at how words to an LLM have no connection to their real concepts. To an LLM, words are simply numbers arranged in a likely pattern.

I think one could make a hypothetical case that working at a cigarette company in 2026 is a more morally justifiable position than working at meta in 2026, because cigarettes as they're regulated today generally only affect adults, only affects those who opt in, and kills people on average near the end of their lives.

Meta's decisions affect everyone, even non-users, because of their outsized impact on society. But they also have way more users than cigarettes, and deliberately prey on children and teens in ways that could affect them their whole lives (see recent lawsuit).

I would struggle to judge anyone working for either of these companies. I think the blame lies at the top, or is shared by all of us for failing to build a better society which prevents such exploitation.

Measuring damage to society, or the degree of moral bankruptcy in a company's leadership, is a very difficult thing to quantify.

So, I agree with you that these are personal choices, and everyone will draw the line differently based on who they're comfortable working for and what they're comfortable contributing to.

Flipping the question like this was my instinct as well. I think the passion tax and supply and demand are definitely factors, but the real reason for the gap is that big tech has gotten increasingly exploitative and monopolistic, leading to larger margins and higher competition for talent.

They're all pretty high margin though.

I think flipping the question like this gets at the heart of the true answer.

The question is not why video game pay has lagged, but why tech pay has jumped ahead.

I like classes for meeting new people for a few reasons. First, there's a structure around the activity which doesn't force you interact all the time. Second, you're not entering an established group as the one new person. And third, you're all going through a shared experience which naturally helps form bonds.

If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.

But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.

Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.

The highly random and somewhat convoluted mechanisms remind me of something like character creation in the rpg classic traveller.

You do have a little choice there (unlike here), but I think the same appeal is present even without the choice.

The experience is a bit like reading fortunes from tea leaves.

The fun comes from assigning meaning to the outcomes. This happens, generally, automatically as a human instinct. In traveller, the process of character creation generates a kind of narrative in your head of who the character is.

I've been thinking about these kind of experiences a lot lately.

Is it a game? I don't think a discussion of definitions is very interesting, but I would call it a game by any casual meaning of the word. Certainty, in traveller's case, a roleplaying game. But I recognize the same appeal in these zero-player games.

You're playing something, just in your own mind. The primary game isn't what's on the table, but what's in your mind. You're not committing to choices in physical (or digital) space, you have no agency there -- but there's still a rich experience happening between your ears -- full of hopes, predictions, disappointments, elation, creativity. It's like reading but you're also part author. You're not reading from a book, but from pattern matching inside randomness.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around it myself. I have little more than the recognition of something interesting in this direction, but beyond that I can't articulate it.

I was reflecting the other day how discovering things online felt like being in on a secret. You had to just know about a chat room or BBS or website. Each one was like discovering a secret.

Now it's the opposite, anything special posted online will quickly get overrun. It's the parties and places not posted about online that feel like you're discovering hidden gems.

I have a feeling "slop" is the new "spam" (etymologically) -- it could be with us for decades.

I see it as more iterative than revolutionary.

I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.

And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.

The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.

Yes, that's a good point. It doesn't need to cross the 20% to trigger a larger weighting -- it will smoothly increase at a 5:1 ratio below that.

Not sure what you mean, can you help me understand?

Do you mean if free float goes from 5% to 100%, and weighting goes from 25% to 100%, it's more "extra supply" than "extra demand"? That's a good point I hadn't considered. I'm not sure the details of the lock-up period though, it might be staggered. So if it goes from 5% float to 50% float, that's 45% of additional shares available to buy, but an addition 75% of the market cap that indices now need to weight to. But it's true this would only happen once (when free float goes from below 20% to above). Then after that the extra supply would be more than the extra demand. Or do I misunderstand?

I'm not so sure the silent majority is positive on AI, I think the opposite is more likely. Let's not forget that national poll where it was less popular than ICE -- I think it was 26% positive vs 46% negative.

My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.

That's true for the S&P but not nasdaq, nasdaq is market cap weighted. There used to be a limit that the available float couldn't go below something like 20%. (This is because 5% float available but 100% market cap would cause a huge supply/demand mismatch). But for spacex they changed the rule so there's no minimum, it's just that below 20% float, companies would be weighted at 5x the float instead of 100% of market cap. If spacex is planning on something like 5% float, it would be weighted around 25% of market cap with only 5% of float available to buy.

But it gets worse because when the lock-up period expires in 180 days after ipo (currently scheduled right before quarterly index rebalancing), it's possible that frees up more than 20% of float and it suddenly has to be weighted at the full 100% of market cap -- triggering additional automatic buying.

It certainly seems like it's set up for our retirement accounts to be the insider's exit liquidity.