181–190 of 228 posts
Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either). If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades a…
When I read HN comments where people say "AI sux, AI is useless, AI is a waste of time", I think I must be living in a different universe. Maybe Hacker News is a dimensional portal between my reality and other people's. Hi there, friends from another dimension! In my reality, there's a cold front coming from the north. Healthcare is expensive and politics are a mess. But AI? It hallucinates sometimes but it's so much…
AI is subsidized for the users
> … it amplifies your cognitive abilities… And yet studies show the opposite [0]. [0] https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…
> For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your overall productivity, because the time it took was already…
Scale it back and give us the ability to make our own AI rigs?
Energy doesn’t take “social permission,” but it costs money. Translation for this is: we need to make AI make money or the bubble will collapse. I’ve been predicting for a while: free or cheap AI will enshittify and become an addictive ad medium with nerfed capabilities. If you want actually good AI you will have to pay for it, either a much heftier fee or buying or renting compute to run your own. In other words you…
For instance, as a SWE, I get just a little help with boilerplate from the AI. I could usually have done it better, but sometimes the ask is both simple enough and boring enough that the code from the LLM actually produces something very close to what I would produce.
On the other side of the coin, a non-technical person using AI would be unable to properly understand and review the output.
Where it shines is on things that I am OK at. Like writing marketing copy. I can get by myself, but its slightly outside of my wheelhouse, but as long as I have a solid understanding of the product I can use AI to compliment my beginner/intermediate skills and produce something better than I would produce on my own.
A similar thing is writing tutorials. I write some code and documentation, but the tutorials are enough of a slog that I get distracted by my distaste for it. This is a good fit for AI.
I think this is where we will see AI help the most. Where someone's skillset includes the task at hand but at a secondary level where the user might doubt themselves or get distracted with the misery the task brings them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They built an oceanic fiber termination down in South Carolina. Data centers are starting to move in. Now they'll charge you $12/KWh during your peak usage.
You really said 12 USD/KWh? Time to put solar panels/batteries over there. Even if you resell to the grid at 1/10th of that you recoup the investment in O(months) and not O(years)
So you can easily add 1-200 dollars to your bill for one day of higher usage.
https://www.myhorrynews.com/news/horry-electric-co-op-to-cha...
This will sound pedantic but I'll explain why it matters: the exact wording is "We need to do something useful with AI", because the current (editorialized) submission title (of an already slanted article) makes it sound like people don't know what to do with AI. We already know many useful things to do; there are already 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-related) doing various ostensibl…
It's my opinion that AI can help a lot when it is supporting you when expanding beyond your core competency. For instance, as a SWE, I get just a little help with boilerplate from the AI. I could usually have done it better, but sometimes the ask is both simple enough and boring enough that the code from the LLM actually produces something very close to what I would produce. On the other side of the coin, a non-techn…