snek_case

The people who make that comparison are just showing how clueless they are IMO.

I wish the tech field wasn't so full of clueless grifters. The most frustrating thing is that this kind of people, the kind who loudly and confidently assert bullshit claim based on insufficient knowledge, have a knack for positioning themselves in positions of power.

The difference is that LLMs are not compilers. You can't trust the output to be correct. They routinely make bad design choices. If you're prototyping some kind of throwaway MVP, you're just sketching something, it's probably fine not to review it. If you're trying to build a piece of software that's going to survive for years, why are you doing this? The tech is clearly not yet fully mature.

Just yesterday, I was trying to use Claude Opus 4.7 to debug an issue in a program that I wrote, and its solution was to remove a feature, change the design to eliminate the problem without consulting me. I only found out that it had removed this feature through testing. Imagine not reviewing things like that. How can people argue for this with a straight face? We'll probably get there eventually, but there's no need to rush before the tech is ready. Doing that is just being clueless.

Yeah this is pretty shady. The S&P 500 in particular has fairly strict criteria (e.g. 4 consecutive quarters of profitability) and those criteria exist for a reason. They made me more comfortable buying the S&P 500 knowing I'm not buying pre-revenue companies. This is a bad precedent to set just to please Elon.

Not to downplay their accomplishment but Llama 3.1 8B is a terrible model. It's really outdated at this point. It's cool that they were able to accelerate a model with silicon, but it also feels wasteful since llama 8B is such a useless model?

It's not just the UI... It's that producing content is much easier on a laptop or desktop, with an actual keyboard, or video editing software available. The rise of mobile contributed to a shift where the internet was split between producers and consumers, or influencers and followers. A lot of mobile users are only passively consuming content.

Yeah but they weren't as toxic. I was an early YouTube user... The platform used to have no ads, can you imagine?

I can sympathize... I got to the point where I was sleeping only 5 hours a night, having digestive issues and tinnitus.

Make it a personal goal to beat every game and expansion pack on nightmare.

Nickname checks out

> it's just making it harder for honest people to pay for what they like.

I have a female friend who creates that kind of content. Her take is that this is very much intentional. There is a general crackdown on porn in the US. They're not just trying to make it difficult for the clients, but also difficult for people to make this kind of content, distribute it and get paid for it.

Of course none of this makes sense. There are VPNs and there is bittorrent. All of this is just making this kind of stuff more underground. In China porn is fully illegal, but people still share bootleg porn on thumb drives.

A lever is classified as a simple machine.

Wrt the space shuttle, I would take some issue because you could say it's not just one machine, but a collection of many, for example it probably has onboard computer systems that are not always in use. It would be a bit like saying that a whole factory is "a machine". Whereas the ASML devices serve one single clear purpose.

Meta's vision was worse than that. They were trying to hype doing work meetings in VR. There's a case to be made that VR games and VR universes can be fun... But work meetings?

The metaverse is another example if anyone doubts the bounds of corporate stupidity.

Sure, but it's probably not that easy to exfiltrate multi-terabyte datasets without being detected.

Culture is often set top down. Look at the current US administration for a public example. People at the top will choose people who agree with them or who are sycophants. Top execs also chose this job and zuck because they have no moral issues with what the company does... Often if you closely associate with someone creepy or immoral it's because you care more about money and power.

I think the pivot to profit over good has been happening for a long time. See Dario hyping and salivating over all programming jobs disappearing in N months. He doesn't care at all if it's true or not. In fact he's in a terrible position to even understand if this is possible or not (probably hasn't coded for 10+ years). He's just in the business of selling tokens.

Sort of. At the moment there is a fad of websites that mess with your scrolling and have very low content density. They are all trying to imitate Apple's marketing pages. Most startup websites do this. It's not at all good design, it's user-hostile, but it's trendy and popular right now.

They're also getting closer to IPO and have a growing user base. They can't justify losing a very large number of billions of other people's money in their IPO prospectus.

So there's a push for them to increase revenue per user, which brings us closer to the real cost of running these models.

It probably depends what you're using the models for. If you use them for web search, summarizing web pages, I can imagine there's a plateau and we're probably already hitting it.

For coding though, there is kind of no limit to the complexity of software. The more invariants and potential interactions the model can be aware of, the better presumably. It can handle larger codebases. Probably past the point where humans could work on said codebases unassisted (which brings other potential problems).

I guess there's a pretty clear incentive to nerf the current model right before the next model is about to come out.

Maybe HN is particularly upset because they feel targeted, given that overpaid tech executives have been giddily making the claim that programming jobs will disappear any minute now. What makes it even worse is that it's very obvious that said tech executives haven't programmed in over 10 years, if ever, and don't know anything about the technology they are selling. They are putting jobs at risk purely for the sake of personal enrichment.

This is probably combined with a general sense of AI fatigue. The population as a whole is getting tired of "AI slop" and companies trying to shoehorn "AI" into everything. Personally I'm also tired of every startup needing to be an AI startup. As if there was nothing else worth building or investing in. It's sucking the air out of the room.

It made me kind of angry when I saw Dario repeatedly claiming that AI would be taking all the programming jobs any minute now. His company supposedly is working for a better future, but he's giddily talking about something that could cause millions of people to lose their homes if it were true.

Our governments have a habit of being reactive rather than proactive. People have floated the idea of UBI, but if UBI happens, it will probably mean it's the only way to avert a crisis, and the amount that people will get might only be enough to rent a bedroom and eat processed food.

I think in the medium term, the reaction is overblown. Even though LLMs can make software engineers more productive, you still have a competitive advantage in having more software engineers. Medium to long term though, the goal is obviously to replace human jobs.

I'm not a communist, but Karl Marx understood that the labor force gets its bargaining power because they are necessary to produce value. What do people imagine happens when the human labor force becomes essentially completely replaceable? They imagine the government will be forced to take care of the population to prevent an uprising, but they forget that the police and the army can be replaced by machines too.

And TPUs, their own hardware designed specifically for AI, and designed to scale better to larger models.

Yeah but the first LCD screens sucked. Poor color rendition and not usable for gaming. In the early 2000s you were better off sticking with your CRT.

For divers, we really should be focusing on building better underwater drones. Remove the risk to human life entirely. You don't need AI either, just a remote-controlled machine with a cable that goes up to the surface. I know there is some loss in dexterity with current robot arms, but building more dexterous system seems like it's not an impossible task.

In general it looks like these kinds of changes are trying to make it harder for people to do this kind of basic maintenance themselves. Force you to go to the dealer.

There probably should be a maximum legal age for the president and congresspeople (e.g. 65 aka "retirement age"). The guy is 78. It's common and expected for brain health to deteriorate, it's not a huge surprise, but the guy has too much ego/narcissism to ever admit that this is happening, and the people in his administration won't want to admit that they put a toxic narcissist with dementia into power and defended him way past the point where it was reasonable to do so.

There's many simple, small changes the US could put in place to make its political system less corrupt.

I feel like this is most products in the AI space lately. More marketing fuzz than substance. Hard to figure out what thing even does.

You're definitely going to get people using LLMs running on 8x $50K GPUs in a datacenter to do the job of a bash script.