yodsanklai

> The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is

Why would they care? maybe they're aware of millions of inhabited planets and life isn't anything special for them.

Also, humans are a dominant and invasive species right now, but in geological times, our dominance couldn't be nothing more than a spark. Scenarios for destruction of civilization are numerous (nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, super volcanos, asteroids) and very possible even in the short term. Trump could do it tomorrow morning if he feels like it.

I loved my 4a, but broke a couple due to water infiltration in rainy conditions. Modern phones are resistant to water which is a nice improvement.

I get new phones and computers from my company every 3 years, I don't even bother upgrading so often. The improvements aren't even worth me spending a few hours to set up and migrate data.

Do they still care about cars though or they're chasing some new things after losing to the Chinese.

A point that Yann LeCun has been making for a while is that it's meaningless to regulate AI, but we want to regulate applications. For instance, you don't want autonomous vehicles to hit people, whether they use AI or not. In practice, most applications of AI are already regulated.

LLM + static types is a winning combo. And if you want to be serious with what you do with your LLM, you need to understand the output to some extent.

That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.

It's a good language to learn programming. Very simple semantics. But ultimately, you need to learn different paradigms, I think the order doesn't matter, they'll still be an element of surprise.

Also OCaml lets you write imperative code if you wish so. So you can learn the different paradigms within the same language.

It seems like every few days there's a new model with hundreds of comments on HN. I find it hard to keep track of the progress. Is there a TL;DR on what benchmarks to look at to understand what is going on?

My point is that US can restrict visa all they want, it won't prevent companies to move somewhere else where they can get better talent and/or cheaper labour. So all this whining about H1B taking the jobs Americans feel entitled to is a bit misplaced - because this is all this discussion is about. It's all the more ironic when it comes from conservatives who claim to promote free market, globalization and meritocracy.

Now local talent over immigrants, each country has different policy, and it certainly affects where companies decide to open foreign offices. For instance, would OpenAI open an office in London if all they can hire are British citizens?

Big tech companies aren't patriotic, they work for their shareholders. They don't care about US or Swiss citizens. They'll open offices wherever there's a high density of talents, and where they can import qualified foreign workers. I'm pretty sure there aren't many SWEs from Switzerland at Google Zurich offices. If the US wants to restrict visas, automatically a portion of these jobs will be moved abroad.

What I'm saying is that I don't know if they are US citizens or not. From the look of it, most are not though. As for eligibility to work there, I suppose that's validated before with the recruiter.

If these companies relocate the jobs, Americans wouldn't even get a job.

A megacorp isn't property of the US government. It's a property of this shareholders who very often aren't even US citizens.

It's pretty ironic that Americans who forced globalization to the rest of the world, and largely benefited from it, are now bitten by it.

If Americans want the lucrative jobs, they should better improve their education system and work hard to compete.

> not if they rank first at whiteboards or fizz-buzz.

As an interviewer, I don't rank candidates. I have my set of questions, some candidates solve them, others don't. You can argue that it's the bar to do your job properly. Should politicians tell big tech companies what's the bar for being a successful SWE?

> When it comes to national interest, the argument for "meritocracy" falls apart quickly.

A lot of US tech exists because of skilled foreign workers. I'm not sure what would be the tech industry without them.

I work in a global company. As an interviewer, I don't even know if the person I interview is a US citizen. I don't even know if they live in the US or another country, and I'm probably not allowed to ask. I just rate their performance. And everybody is paid the same.

I think the situation is quite simple. Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.

If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar, or would they expand their Shanghai or Zurich offices? Are US citizens entitled to work at Google more than others for the sole reason they have a particular citizenship?

My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.

Youtube comments is a junkyard compared to HN.

I don't think this has to do with free speech. If companies can deliberately harm kids, they should be regulated.

Exactly. And also a way to opt-out of the comment section. It's hard for me to resist looking at the comments, and sometimes commenting.

Yes, and also if only I could disable shorts and the comment section in youtube.

> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world.

Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice

Aren't LSP dying (and eventually IDE, at least in their current form) as everybody use LLM to code. I know some big tech companies redirected teams supporting them to new efforts (ie. tool integration with AI).

Could it be that there's no magic formula, everybody uses the same known ideas, the same computation power, the same training data? if that's the case, we can imagine that models will be commoditized.

> put the effort into keeping Search profitable

The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.

> All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason ...

Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's no deeper motivation. There are activists and politicians who really believe this is a cause worth fighting for.

It's more complicated than that. You probably don't want all your equity in stock, unless you're young and you're confident you can keep your strategy when the AI bubble crashes. And what do you do with the part that isn't in stock? bonds? what are they? which ones to buy? Even the 6-12 months of expenses in cash doesn't apply to all people.

That being said, I agree with the bad and expensive advisors, but I think financial planning is hard, and you really need to educate yourself.

> Trump is a nationalist and will defend US companies

Does it though? Companies have to corrupt him in various ways to get his favors. Pichai won't get that for free.

Is that the standard Trump should be measured against?

So much energy to prevent resourceful teenagers from watching porn?

In the EU, the canary islands are known to have great skies. You check this map https://www.lightpollutionmap.info

I've been in some place with very dark skies, like Death Valley or Teide in the Canaries (https://www.teidebynight.com/tenerifes-dark-sky-reserves-hav...). It was great, but also not that much better than what I've seen closer to home in French countryside or in the alps. Maybe I didn't get the best conditions though.

> It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky,

Considering how little value we put on far more important things (like the climate or biodiversity), I'm not really surprised.