srveale

For several months of the year, vitamin D synthesis is near zero in latitudes as low as like 40° or 45°. Boston is 42°.

In Calgary, it's almost half the year that you basically cannot rely on the sun at all for vitamin D.

I think you'll find most Albertans would welcome international trade diversity, and if anything is theatre, it's the referendum. "Secessionists" are a significant minority, and even most of those don't actually want to secede, they just don't like the national government. "Send a message to Ottawa" is the motto.

"Sorry, the driver could have turned on FSD, but decided to drive [drunk/tired/distracted] and killed your son. Thankfully we can ban them from driving for a while."

This could play out a million times at the population level. If you can decrease the chances of needing justice in the first place, shouldn't that be considered?

An LLM can indeed output the tokens "I must persist" and invoke the tools to do so.

The article advocates lighter course load so ambitious undergrads can work on personal projects, some of which (preferably for the author) would be startup ideas.

Glossing over the fact that ambitious undergrads are more likely to be ambitious about grad school rather than starting a company, and reducing their course work is a hindrance if anything.

The goal of a physics degree is not to prepare you to start a business. Don't disadvantage your future physicists on the off chance one of could be the next zuck.

"Republicans will jail the innocent if democrats jail the guilty" really says a lot

Bieber in this case refers to body as in "corps", the subject's collective professional or military associations. He laments the loss of power he enjoyed stemming from the subject's erstwhile allegiance.

> F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time

Do you have evidence for this beyond your friends (who were accepted into college)?

I recommend reading table 3 in this paper:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7284300/

"It was stated in notes that I had lung cancer. I do not and never have had lung cancer."

"I did receive a referral for physical therapy, it was for the wrong body part"

"Doctor reported that I did not claim to have pain in my hand. I am a pianist and I went specifically because pain was in my hand."

"I have been complaining of difficulty breathing [for over 3 mo]... notes saying my breathing is normal"

And plenty more

There have been instances of mass unemployment without mass violence, sure. But are you sure you want to see how it plays out in a country with >1.2 guns per capita?

If it does come to pass, the AI version of the Big Short will be wildly entertaining

It's common practice to release a detailed system card (OP) and a high level summary: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5

It's okay if you're not the target audience for one or the other.

The AI breached containment! Flip the breakers!

It's too late. It already exfiltrated the benchmark rubric.

Cut to pandemonium on the streets

> Because most of those people are not repeat violent criminals

Oh so you do believe in justice

Why not just incarcerate everyone between the age of 15-27, if what we're worried about is crime rate.

The main reasons I'll never get a neural chip are, in increasing order of importance: A. Safety B. It gives them a vector to beam ads directly into my brain

How many tracks didn't make it to the Billboard charts?

And yet here we are

I think the illuminating part here is that only a magic wand could determine if something is sentient

Isn't that usually the choice for most things?

I keep seeing the "AI of the gaps" argument, where AI is whatever computers currently can't do. I wonder when I'll stop seeing it.

Do you have any thoughts on the second half of my comment?

You may underestimate how many people do not need to be convinced. Again, I'll refrain from making a value judgment, but the hard numbers show that LLMs have been one of the most quickly adopted technologies in the history of mankind, including the time before anyone was forced to use them.

Not sure if these are the best stats to illustrate the point, but ChatGPT was released November 2022, 2.5 years ago, and they currently claim ~1 billion users [1]

By comparison, iPhone sales were something like 30 million over the same time period, June 2007 through 2009. [2]

In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took smartphones several years.

Of course there are problems with the comparison (iPhones are expensive, but many people bought each version of the iPhone making the raw user count go down, Sam Altman is exaggerating, people use LLMs other than ChatGPT, blah blah blah), so maybe let's not concentrate on this particular analogy. The point is: even a very skeptical view of how many people use LLMs day-to-day has to acknowledge they are relatively popular, for better or worse.

I think we're better served trying to keep the cat from scratching us rather than trying to put it back in the bag. Ham-fisted megalomaniac CEOs forcing a dangerous technology on workers before we all understand the danger is a big problem, that's for sure. To the original point, "AI-first is the new RTO", there's definitely some juice there, but it's not because the general public is anti-AI.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt...

[2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...

I don't necessarily disagree with the main argument, but

> did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone

Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to the managers and require work communication on them. I know this was true for many companies.

This isn't the perfect analogy anyway, since one major reason companies did this was to increase security, while forcing AI onto begrudging workers feels like it could have the opposite effect. The commonality is efficiency, or at least the perception of it by upper management.

One example I can think of where there was worker pushback but it makes total sense is the use of electronic medical records. Doctors/nurses originally didn't want to, and there are certainly a lot of problems with the tech, but I don't think anyone is suggesting now that we should go back to paper.

You can make the argument that an "AI first" mandate will backfire, but the notion that workers will collectively gravitate towards new tech is not true in general.

I'm so sorry for complimenting you. You are totally on point to call it out. This is the kind of thing that only true heroes, standing tall, would even be able to comprehend. So kudos to you, rugged warrior, and never let me be overly effusive again.

Books may not be good propaganda for the latest, localized issues, but they are fantastic propaganda for ideology.

I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!

Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These are brilliant but are also such effective forms of propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of propaganda in itself.

To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.

So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)

When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)

We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.

That's a good point, and maybe I was preaching the gospel of flipping too hard. It is by no means a silver bullet.

Should we let the kids who cheat using AI drop by the wayside, never learning a thing for themselves? Or should we do the same for kids who, for whatever reason, just will not do school work outside a classroom? Maybe it works really well for some subjects and not others? Or only for some age ranges? What about the students like you, and there are probably a lot of them, where it would be unfair to judge their abilities at specific times in specific settings?

I guess the reason I bring it up now is that AI has tipped it over the edge, where cheating is now so easy and effective that it is starting to tempt kids who would not otherwise cheat.

Hackernews is not the place for political arguments. That's not just a suggestion, it's a rule. I noticed somebody used an ambiguous word in a way that, IMO, was not quite correct, and it is an interesting word so I clarified the technicality, and mea culpa, I probably dipped into actual politics too far. Let's get back to building stuff, yes?

I think you misinterpreted my comment as "LLMs are good" which is a different conversation.

My point is: you can't say LLMs are a dangerous tool and call them vapourware at the same time. It's a contradiction in terms.