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When do they want to unpause it?

"3. hope scaling stops working before we create an AI formidable enough to pose an existential risk"

I have my doubts. The current AI models are already powerful enough to do some real damage. I am always horrified when I read about people giving Claude direct access to a production system and then being wiped out. My use of AI is usually for the AI to propose something which I then review. But that's not very fast so careless people will usually look better. Until something blows up.

And it's only a matter of time until AI even with the current capabilities is being deployed into military or other critical systems.

I think this will go down like any other technology. We'll ignore issues until there is a real problem. And then hopefully we will do something. Seems with climate change we will soon reach a point where something needs to be done after knowing about consequences already for decades.

We probably also need some massive AI blow ups to (only maybe) do something about it.

"Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuously mocked on HN. All of this stuff is viewed as "future sci-fi" until suddenly it's not."

Are there any practical approaches to AI safety? I hear a lot of warnings but I don't hear much about what to do. Considering that there are many open source models know, what can be done?

My oral irrigator is super important for my gums. Whenever I have a sensitive spot it some inflammation I can get it under control by irrigating the spot twice a day. It’s been years since I had bleeding gums. Before using the irrigator I constantly had problems with my gums.

I had this sometimes happen as a kid. I think we mostly solved it with some old fashioned violence.

How do you figure out what is a malicious ad? That seems really difficult at scale.

I think writing will go the way of software development. Really good writers and devs will probably thrive with AI but most of us do fairly mundane, repetitive work that will get done by AI.

I remember, when I used ChatGPT the first time to write some E-mails and other documents, I suddenly realized that I sound exactly like corporate communications or most tech writers. That made me realize that these guys are also working off templates and basically produce variations of the same thing. Same as developers do.

"When schemas or indexes change, how will that affect all of the different services? "

It's absolutely horrible. Now all the services are tightly coupled without the devs really realizing this. And the side effects of database changes can be super subtle and hard to predict.

That sounds like like they could just have used AWS Lambda instead of microservices.

Python is ok. People get used to it.

The biggest antipattern in my view is using different stacks for different services.

Kubernetes is pretty ok if you keep things simple. The project I worked on had kubernetes set up years ago and from there on it just worked.

"Big companies mostly seem to use the microservice(s) per team model. "

I am good with that. What we often see is 10 microservices per team of 3 devs. And ideally using the same database.

I hope this finally motivates the Europeans to step up their game long-term. They should be able to defend themselves without the US and also develop and produce their weapons within Europe. NATO will be better if it's an alliance of equal partners.

They poop on people they don't like. I used to work at an office where you had to walk under some trees from the parking lot to the entrance. There was one guy that got pooped on at least once a week. Then he used an umbrella which they pooped on too. No idea what he had done to them but they clearly didn't like him :-)

Another thing I saw at a park: The crows surrounded a swan. One would pick at the swan's butt. When the swan turned around, another would do it. It looked like they bullied the swan for entertainment.

That’s what my company is doing. Instead of hiring more people in the US they are hiring almost exclusively in other countries. The tariffs seem to be backfiring in a similar way. More production is moved outside the US to avoid the tariffs.

My company has a H-1B guy that travelled home to India a few months ago and since then can't come back because the next date he can get with the US embassy is next year. Seems he may get stuck even longer...

I am to some degree on board with keeping a closer eye on immigration, but the way the current administration does it feels intentionally cruel. The guy at my company has a house, wife, and kids in the US; his visa is perfectly legal, so it seems it would make sense to process these people quickly. But instead, he is now in some limbo. Same for ICE. Clamping down on illegal immigration makes sense, but it doesn't make sense for ICE to behave like some unaccountable secret police that hires the biggest assholes they can find who can then do whatever they want.

I am ok with paying for public toilets if they are being kept clean.

The problem in my view is that there aren't good tools to debug advanced SQL stuff within the context of the whole system which is usually written in a higher level language. I just spent a few weeks modifying some code where the original dev put a lot of logic into stored procedures. That's in principle fine but it's really hard to figure the actual business logic when it's spread out over C# and then also SQL. It doesn't help that the SQL code looks like FORTRAN code from 1985.

Personally I think we need ORMs that allow expressing advanced SQL stuff with other high level languages. Or even better: The ORM detects where advanced SQL makes sense and uses it.

You can rage against Trump and republicans as much as you want but in the end the democrats must learn to formulate why anybody should vote FOR them. Even in the current chaos they aren’t able to bring up a coherent message and follow through when they are in power. I see the same in Germany. AfD is getting stronger while the established parties get nothing done.

It reminds me somewhat of the state of the Weimar Republic. The democratic parties failed which gave an opening to the nazis.

“ every little change in requirements and docs has its own commit”

I think this would be a great thing to have and know who changed what and when. It seems it’s more of a problem of the tools being able to help the user see only what he needs to see in a certain context.

It seems the main benefit goes to Google.

I never know what to think about the phrase “ right tool for the job”. It almost feels like a platitude at this point.

From my experience the limits are way higher than people think.

I think that’s the way to go. Start with Postgres and only if there are problems, then think about something more specialized. Same for microservices. Start simple and introduce a service when really needed.

I hate it when people already start out with 10 or more different systems/services for a few messages per second.

Infinite money in the pursuit of profit or an ego trip of an exec. No money for the benefit of community or society.

Reminds me of the URL blocking of my company. Nature.com is being blocked but I can access a ton of super sketchy download sites.

I can name at least 10 people who are using Brave after I recommended it and don’t see YouTube ads.

IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture.

That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality.

Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for.

Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.

Back in the day artisans took care of horses and new have cheapened ourselves to use stinky cars. Back in the day we built computers with relays by hand, now we have cheapened ourselves to use weird semiconductors and use inefficient python code instead of highly optimized hand crafted assembly.

Maybe we should go back to hunting and gathering?

Kind of sad that they didn’t work out. I really wish German industry had a little more willpower to get things done instead of giving up so easily. That’s one strength of the US. They just keep marching forward and have enough investors that are willing to take the risk.