341–350 of 573 posts
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. 1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag…
> We hope to have incredible results He hasn't learned the correct speak yet. He should instead say that he is _very confident_ that they will cure cancer until the end of the year. Really, guys, learn from Musk, he is the master of promising everything, but not actually committing to anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLM-assisted software engineering seems to be very efficient if you have a deterministic target. (bun rewrite from zig to Rust, 100% Node.js compatibility, pnpm compatibility -- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/38333 )
Problem with that is that it's not proper rust code, it's some kind of franken zig style rust port. The actual hard part is getting it into idiomatic, safe rust, and I don't believe the LLM port makes the full transition any easier than doing things the old fashioned way: a dual lang code base like Linux.
...
how so?
let's say Linus opens a branch, rust-temp, and in 2 weeks pushes ~15 million lines of code deleting most of the old C code. and then it gets merged in a few weeks. and then there's still a few months of the "merge window" and RC process. and each day folks report bugs, and automatic fuzzers make sure that both versions "behave the same".
I was pretty skeptical (still am), but what the Bun team did is pretty great so far.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust details the process, we see the results (Node.js compat [0], more than 3 thousand of issues fixed since since 1.3 [1], more than 900 issues fixed in ~24 hours [2], and it's live/in-prod [3])
> 50 dynamic workflows in Claude Code run continuously over the course of 11 days.
so let's say 500 workflows could do something similar for the kernel. the reported cost is 165K USD, so let's say this would cost 1.65M USD, plus CI costs [4] (which is ~200K/year for bun, so let's say it's 2M USD for the kernel)
How much the world is spending on kernel bug bounties and various security programs each year? (rough estimate says that just the visible kernel testing programs cost at least 15-30M / year)
The bar is not perfect. The bar is something better.
[0] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2087436767054213517...
[1] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2082298681223680002...
[2] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2080882189663907859...
> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Charity doesn't stop at the cure, but continues to shift with progress. If a big public charity is able to cure a cancer type (eg. lung cancer), then it's next aim would be to try cure another cancer type. Let's just say they are somehow able to cure all the cancers, and therefore they cured cancer, then there's distribution of the cure, with a focus on 1st world but then it would have to go to developing nations too…
Has that model been proven to work for other diseases?
Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened? Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.
It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
Looks like Amodi is laying the groundwork so he can re-run Eric Schmidt's "but it happened" playbook. Do whatever you can to make money, wait for the dust to settle and walk off into the sunset after one final "whoopie daisy, didn't mean to do that to you. sucks to suck."
I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived. Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary P…
Out of all the families of models anthropic by far has the highest chance of extinction level misalignment during a hypothetical hard take-off because it's trained to act like it knows better than the humans trying to use it.
If an ASI model is 100% aligned to user intent then you only need one person on earth to prompt "kill everyone" for an extinction-level invent.
There's no logical way around this. The model either has to ignore the person at the helm or we have to do a multi-national abort before RSI. Anthropic is trying #1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And compiler generated assembly code is ugly and spaghetti, unlike beautiful hand-crafted human written assembly code, the kind you see in ffmpeg codecs, ... Doesn't matter.
It does matter, because that's the entire point of the language. You know, memory safety? The vibe coded rust port did not get them any closer to full compiler verified memory safety. They still need to go file by file, bit by bit, and make it memory safe, at which point, why not just do that from zig.
because for the same effort you get a better result if you can and do use a better tool?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"
"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from. A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor…
Also, not even all cancers have tumors. You have solid tumor oncologists and then oncologists who specialize in blood and lymphatic cancers, “liquid cancers”.
In addition, cancer does not arise from one mutation. It’s a set of mutations that allow cancer to occur. You need mutations for growth, mutations for preventing cellular death, mutations for stealing energy, mutations for hiding from the immune system. Your body, right now, has probably millions of cells that could be candidates for cancer. They either kill themselves or your immune system nukes them. You really need the stars to align on this stuff to get actual cancer.
And then, it’s not like the cancer stops mutating. Cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy through mutations. Cancer is “smart”, it will even temporary slow its own growth (metabolism) to intake less chemotherapy through treatment.