somewhereoutth

I would add that human interfaces need to be tested by humans (preferably not your paying customers), machine interfaces by machines.

Uber's genius was getting their workers (sorry, 'contractors') to carry the capital costs of providing the fleet of vehicles they use.

> What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell

Not to detract from the overall message, but I think the author doesn't really understand Romanesque and Baroque.

(as an aside, I'd most likely associate Post-Modernism as an architectural style with the output of LLMs - bland, regurgitative, and somewhat incongruous)

Agreed. Many of the suggestions are pretty much code it yourself, but without actually tapping the individual keys.

Furthermore, and more generally, one of the great things about (traditional) coding is that it allows 'thinking through making' - by building something you learn more about the problem and thus how best to solve it. Code generation just leaves you with reviewing, which is less powerful in this way I believe. See also 'thinking through writing [prose]'.

No.

When there is low prevalence of a condition, but a non-zero false positive rate of a test, the false positives generated by universal testing can in fact be a net dis-benefit (worry, invasive further procedures, etc) to the patient population as a whole, regardless of cost. This is a well understood statistical phenomenon, and is carefully considered by healthcare systems when advising on testing.

"Hell is other people's code"

Not sure why we'd want a tool that generates so much of this for us.

Infinite scrolling combined with the algorithmic feed is the real nasty.

Feeds should be heavily regulated, effectively they are a (personalized!) broadcast, and maybe the same strictures should apply. Definitely they should be transparent (e.g. chronological from subscribed topics), and things like veering more extreme in order to drive engagement should be outlawed.

> based on multiple public statements from people like Dario

> clear picture of the finances of these companies

Since they are not publicly traded companies, presumably there is no legal duty for the officers to be clear or even honest about these numbers?

But even assuming good faith, my understanding is that the scale of the current build out is so huge that revenues would need to exceed the size of many entire industries to have a chance to turn a profit.

Sorry - if a model costs (say) 20B to train, lasts 12 months before it becomes obsolete, generates 2B/month revenue, but with 1B/month inference costs, then it has lost 8B.

Or are you suggesting that in fact each model comes out ahead over its lifespan, and all this extra cash is needed because the next model is so much more costly to train that it is sucking up all the profits from the current, but this is ok because revenue is expected to also scale?

Apple was built on a product manager shouting at engineers until they got it right.

"we don't want your electric car, we want your car, but electric!"

Indeed. And this burden of a top heavy population pyramid is a major reason for not having [more] kids - a vicious circle, which, if left to continue, will result in humanity simply evaporating.

A pretty depressing place, with whole towns and cities abandoned, as the dwindling population huddles closer together. Not just geography though, there would also be a retreat in the arts, sciences, etc as there are simply not enough people to maintain let alone advance these endeavours. Life would be about eking the last out of what was left over from the 'glory days', a sort of slow motion apocalypse.

However a lot of the modern world is carried by 'pride of workmanship' - and not just by those who 'make'. It's an extension of the 'planting trees' parable, to care about things even though you are not immediately (or ever) rewarded.

However if the 'non determinism and inaccuracy' of LLMs is more pathogenic than that of humans, then we have a problem. Pathogenesis is inherently a system level effect, so it may take a little time (and money!) to become evident.

specifically to keep up with the Soviet Union. Sputnik 'concentrated a lot of minds' as they say.

I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very well.

The cowling is its own structural support, so needs to be strong all around, otherwise it would fail on the other side and you'd get blade+cowling approaching the fuselage at high velocity.

I think it is the stators fixed to the engine nacelle, judging by the article image.

In other news: https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro...

'ability to reason' implies that LLMs are building a semantic model from their training data, whereas the simplest explanation for their behavior is that they are building a syntactic model (see Plato's Cave). Thus without new training they cannot 'learn', RAG or no RAG.

without training new models, existing models will become more and more out of date, until they are no longer useful - regardless of how cheap inference is. Training new models is part of the cost basis, and can't be hand waved away.

LLMs will stop being trained, as that enormous upfront investment will have been found to not produce the required return. People will continue to use the existing models for inference, not least as the (now bankrupt) LLM labs attempt to squeeze the last juice out of their remaining assets (trained LLMs). However these models will become more and more outdated, less and less useful, until they are not worth the electricity to do the inference anymore. Thus it will end.

Features : Quality : Timeline

Choose 2. For example a large feature set can be made quickly, but it will be of poor quality.

Note that cost is somewhat orthogonal, throwing money at a problem does not necessarily improve the tradeoff, indeed sometimes it can make things worse.

> Investors were briefly spooked last July when an M.I.T. study suggested that almost none of this is useful to businesses. Corporations had poured tens of billions of dollars into A.I., yet only one in 20 projects had succeeded, the study reported. But a Wharton study in October delivered the opposite verdict. After interviewing 801 leaders at U.S. companies, Wharton concluded that three-quarters of the businesses were getting a positive return on their A.I. investments.

MIT actually carried out a study. Wharton just asked some execs, who of course parroted the party line. Winter is coming.

If your product interface is with humans, you test it firstly with devs, then QA, then your customers.

Devs are a bit leaky for bugs/non-conformance, so if you skip the QA, then your customer is exposed. For some industries this is fine - for others, not so much.

depends if the cost of training can be recouped (with profit) from the proceeds of usage. Plenty of inventions prove themselves to be uneconomic.

However, as you point out, anti-AI people are pushing back against hype, not indulging in hype themselves - not least as nobody is trying to sell 'not-AI'.

I for one look forward to the next AI winter, which I hope will be long, deep, and savage.

I feel that this article (like many other endeavors) has been derailed by the whole AI thing. Let's ignore that part.

The major point is that yes both clay and code are mediums for expression and they have advantages and drawbacks - for expression, for monetization, for utility and so on. I myself are quite interested in how these (and other) different mediums affect the author (artist/designer/potter/coder etc) in how they think, what they think about, and how that mediates their relation with the world around them - and indeed the consequent cultures emerging therein.

As it should be.

However this practice has become deeply culturally ingrained, whether through religion or other custom, so it is going to be a hard slog to eradicate it worldwide.

Rain radar is something I'm always looking at online, it's easy to fast forward from an hour back and see whats about to hit you.

I think that would make a great single purpose mobile app - automatically knows where the sources of information are and shows you the rain - where it was, and where it is going.