timr

nono...it's "combined with a form of fusion", you see, so it's obviously based in science.

People obviously know this stuff is absurd on some level, but it doesn't stop them from cherry-picking the parts they "like" (i.e. fear) and ignoring the rest.

Read more sci-fi. The dystopian takes are not the only ones. They're not even the majority.

Pick up an Asimov book in the Robot series, or any number of novels written by lesser authors in the 1950s. Fiction reflects broader societal anxieties.

True!

See my comment on the sibling thread. This take has been repeatedly claimed online, but nobody brings any evidence other than fanfic.

Ironically, if you ask Google, the Gemini Annoyance AI [1] confidently asserts that what you're saying is true, but if you follow the links they give, none of them support the claim, and the further you click, the more it becomes people repeating each other's speculation and hearsay and calling it evidence. For example:

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

Typical internet story.

[1] Aside: I am far more worried about the influence of AI gaslighting on mushy-brained humans than I am on AI destroying the human race. The dystopic future of AI is people.

No:

https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/1qatv42/is_it_your_...

There is some stuff online suggesting that the original script had that angle, but the movies did not, and AFAICT it's fanfic.

We should definitely use this stuff to guide our thinking about the real world, though, and not, say, Asimov (or a million other science fiction authors), who had an optimistic version of the same thing. Those are wrong.

The compute in the Matrix wasn't handled with human brains. They used the bodies to generate energy, and kept the brains occupied with the simulation so they wouldn't reject the pods.

It doesn't make any sense, of course, because it's a movie.

But hey...if we're going to extrapolate wildly from sci-fi, let's at least know what the stories said.

I don't know. But since we're talking about fiction, pretty much any answer is valid.

Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.

> Obtaining the knowledge is a process of trial and error, bruteforce, observation, search, etc. Humans follow that same process. Machines can do that too. If they discover or are taught the same heuristics humans use, and a computational capacity greater than that of all humans combined, they will outpace us in this endeavour.

Sure, you can reduce the 99.9% of research labor that matters to "a process of trial and error, bruteforce, observation, search, etc.", but that's like saying that nuclear fusion is only a few technical details away from implementation. We already know the theory!

The part where you're closest to being correct is "trial and error" -- it would be great if a robot existed that could do any experiment, tirelessly, with the mechanical fidelity, intelligence and creativity of a human. That robot does not exist. Moreover, the fundamental techniques to do the kinds of observation necessary to unlock the parts of science we don't know about do not exist. They must be invented. So now we have two problems. The problems are recursive and interlocking.

Biology and chemistry are the sciences I know best, so I will use those examples -- every major breakthrough of the last 50 years has involved invention of some fundamental new mode of observation, such as crystallography, NMR, mass spec, electron microscopy, various kinds of light microscopy, DNA sequencing, PCR, etc. Someone invents some innovative technique, and a wave of progress happens. Expert practitioners in in the lab are probably the second rate-limiting step, but the part that LLMs can do -- taking data and turning it into hypotheses -- is the part that carries the least value. Any postdoc has enough ideas to keep a lab going forever.

The thing you linked about Anthropic creating a "robot standard" for operation of lab tools is great for Anthropic, but that's about all. There's tons of lab automation tooling already. Having LLMs run the microscope is maybe a cool automation technique if you have the kinds of experiments that benefit from it, but those are rare, and they're still ultimately limited by people doing the upstream work.

AI will certainly help people be more efficient at their current scientific jobs, make better methodology more universal, etc., but suggesting that it will replace actual scientists is just science fiction.

Yes, you were guessing. That's the only thing you could be doing, since, as you said, nobody actually knows.

> There's nothing that AI won't be able to mine and accomplish (aside from being literally human), it's only a matter of hardware and scale at this point.

Sure there is: problems that require knowledge that simply doesn't exist yet. Until "AI" turns into general purpose robots that can develop new tools to explore the world, it is, in fact, pretty damned limited in what it can do without human help. The world is vast. Math is small.

Biology is replete with examples. Computers "solve" protein folding [1], and midwits immediately leap to conclusions that drug development will also quickly fall. But we literally have no idea how most of biology works, and simply getting to the starting line for drug development problems is often 95% of the battle. Come talk to me when you've done a million experiments to find the fundamental knowledge that unlocks the pathway(s) we didn't know about that makes a drug discovery program possible in the first place [2].

I am not pessimistic about humans running out of challenges. We'll just declare one class of problems "done" [3], and move on to the next frontier, as we always have. The problem with AI doomers is that they lack imagination that extends beyond computers, or perhaps more accurately, are so sophomoric in their thinking that they skip over the hard parts of any problem they don't fully understand. This stuff reminds me of the endless smartypants whinging about the end of human intelligence when chess machines started beating grandmasters. Chess was never really that great a measurement of human intellectual capacity, and we found new things to do with our big monkey brains.

[1] They did not solve protein folding, except in the minds of people who don't fully understand the problem.

[2] ...and invented new machinery to make the experiments possible in the first place.

[3] ...and we'll likely be wrong about that.

> We don't have enough accurate knowledge to say that, and it doesn't seem to be the case at all.

The first part of your sentence literally contradicts the second part: "we don't have enough knowledge to know, but I know the opposite".

No. They don't. Every day I see huge numbers of people in lace up oxfords, high heels, and more. And no, people don't ruin their expensive shoes by crushing the heel cups. People do that for cheap shoes, sure, and professionals often wear slip on / slip off shoes intentionally, but it's by no means generalizable.

OP here. The steel-man argument for React is not that it is faster at rendering. It cannot be, because it ultimately relies on the same DOM that everyone else does to do the job, and it has to set up a massive JS data structure to do what it does, which uses a lot of memory and has big GC costs. Arguments that assert that the React virtual DOM are faster than the native/shadow DOM are simply wrong [1]. Even the React team admits this [2] (though back in the day, they made a number of puffed-up claims about speed that never made sense).

The principle argument in favor of React today are developer ergonomics. People don't have to manually alter individual elements anymore -- they just describe state, and React takes care of the UI change set. On top of that, you have components, etc., that are debatably more pleasant to work with, and at the least create an ecosystem advantage for users of the framework. One can certainly see the argument for something like facebook, where there are probably dozens of different things changing independently at any given time.

But that said, one really has to question whether React makes sense anymore, given LLMs. Back when the alternative was that someone had to bespoke code every UI component, it might have been worth taking the hit of having to adopt the entire React ecosystem. But now that LLMs are writing the code, there's really no argument for developer ergonomics, and suddenly, things like "rewriting URL handling in JS" are pure liabilities.

[1] Though sadly, many front-end devs don't know this.

[2] https://rossenahuh.netlify.app/React/react-concept-1---virtu...

> It's idiotic that things like memory layout and bit-level hardware management are done in C abstractions. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, compiler optimizations wouldn't matter.

Cute, but no, not even close to a good metaphor. The C example is abstracting away fundamental complexity in a new platform. The other is completely re-writing -- in duplicate and slightly broken -- what the platform gives you for free. There's nothing about implementing form controls or URL management in JS that is more abstract. It's just different; a downstream bad decision that branches off a long tree of other bad decisions.

The equivalent level of idiocy in a C-related metaphor would be...I dunno...if you decided that you didn't like the way that header files worked, and decided to keep the C compiler, but build an external header-file management system in Fortran [1] that calls the C compiler for you. Or even closer to the JS metaphor, you shipped a special C compiler that had an embedded interpreted language that only activated at compile time, and you then used that language to allow any user to fundamentally change the syntax of C.

(It hopefully shouldn't be lost on you that this exact approach to language features has been repeatedly tried in the javascript world, including right now, with package management. But see also: typescript, coffeescript before that, Dart, etc. Javascript is a mess, and history repeats itself with regularity about every 5 years.)

[1] ...and then you re-write that about sixty times, each time being slightly incompatible with the last, and all having different fundamental incompatibilities with C headers.

That's largely because a lot of developers have made the devil's bargain of replacing standard web stuff with badly re-implemented JS versions of same. People did it because they could, but never considered if they should.

See most of the ecosystem around React, for reference. It's idiotic that things like URL management are done in Javascript. Or form controls. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, JIT wouldn't matter.

To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like V8 and Node appeared, JS became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.

Yes. It’s one of the best coding models right now. Highly recommend.

This isn't responsive to the parent's question, in a way that ironically underscores the point: you can tell me that "1 in 50 patients experience X", but that's meaningless, unless I know what X is in the selected population at baseline.

I don't mean to pick on you. This problem is widespread in academic research.

> I never wrote it hides the debt

Hm?

> > The carry trade hides a lot of US debt, too.

Your comment.

Anyway, have a nice day.

The carry trade does not hide public US debt. The US Treasury is concerned about Japan because it’s like the first or second largest holder of Treasuries in the world.

> If the US is not trying to defend the US dollar, why'd they use Euros and not USD to prop up the Yen

Because that was the legal facility open to them. They used a foreign currency reserve that they had the ability to trade.

> And, if it is better for the US if Japan normalized rates, then why did the US buy yen at all? According to you, just telling Japan to raise rates would be better, right?

Yes. Go re-read my comment: Japanese politicians do not want rates to go up. It’s like a cornerstone of current LDP policy.

It’s true that the carry trade unwinding suddenly would be…traumatic (and debatably the root cause of the rate spike that killed SVB a few years ago), but it could be managed gradually, and must be done to bring Japan back from the brink.

> So, I believe the US is pressuring Japan NOT to raise rates, i.e. to save the U.S.'s own currency.

The US is pressuring the BoJ not to liquidate US debt to get the USD needed to buy Yen. It only tangentially relates to bond yields, and has nothing to do with defending the USD.

It would be better for the US if Japan just normalized rates, but Japanese politicians are resistant.

Well, hopefully they’ve been smarter than the US about managing bond duration, but yeah. Doesn’t change reality in the currency markets, and sometimes you have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The US has the same problem. Maybe less extreme, but the balance sheet has tons of short-term debt, and rates aren’t cooperating.

Yes, my bad. I got in the bad habit of referring to it like the ECB.

> It's expected for the BoJ to raise the rate to 1.25% in 2 weeks.

Cool. Only like four hundred basis points to go!

It’s pointless. Setting money on fire to avoid the inevitable.

Since Bessent did what he did the whole issue has been swallowed up in the idiotic partisan maw of US politics, but it’s just a self-defeating effort by Japan to fight the market.

The BoJ has to raise rates. Dumping Dollars to buy Yen is spitting in the wind.

No. Not everyone boils everything down to a sophomoric take.

No, but it's so vague that it's meaningless.

Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.

There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.

> it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible.

What is “your class of people”, and why is it threatened by what other people do with coding robots?

You can try to dress it up as an intellectual argument, but at root it’s the same thing that the luddites were trying to do: defending your preferred lifestyle from technological advances.

We, the ditch diggers of the world, support your unqualified resistance to the use of steam shovels! Fewer holes, slower!

Yes. But there's a clear difference between, say, stealing someone's voice, identity or intellectual property, and preventing someone from using automation to do labor.

The former is obviously unfair to the person whose identity is stolen. The latter is sour grapes from people who want to control the future.

I also can't bring myself to get incensed over someone using a robot to write code. It's literally the modern equivalent of smashing knitting looms.