151–160 of 303 posts
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Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.
A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not. Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
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Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? An…
Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search. My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there. Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or put…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.
A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not. Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
Congratulations, I suppose?
LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use. Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
As far as I understand the backstory of the jihad this rule was caused not by machine minds being bad but (some) humans are very shitty.
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This take is unfathomable to me. How are LLMs not massively revolutionary, despite them not being infallible? This comment reminds me of there being competitions for finding useful purposes for electricity when it was first discovered. Imagine talking about the usefulness of LLMs while thinking that LLMs in 2026 just compress a few TB of data into a set of weights and that's all they work with lol.
Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick. I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I w…
Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?”
TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.
The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.
Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
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Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search. My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there. Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or put…
How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
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agent's failures on long horizon tasks We've moved from LLMs being able to work on a task for about 2 minutes to about 2 hours in the last 18 months, and that's mostly limited by the context window size filling up. In 14 years time I don't really see a reason why that wouldn't have extended a time frame that's effectively continuous forever, or at least a ceiling that's indistinguishable from that. The question reall…
I do not think agents need to work continuously. They "just" need to work on a project longer than an employee is able to work on it for them to be commercially useful. Although this does not consider that agents might take a shorter or longer amount of time for the same task. Therefore, we should begin to compare these in tasks completed during that time instead.
This is one of the inflection points around working with AI. When your thinking shifts from "AI does what the person used to do" to "AI does something different that leads to the same outcome as before, but with all that cool stuff I'd love to have the time for", then the equation changes. For example, I will never write another app that doesn't have 100% test coverage again. I stress- and soak-test everything these days. That's changing how I write code - I need to write things in ways that have deterministic harnesses for things mutable state outside of my immediate control (like random numbers or datetimes or state loaded from a save) so that I can task AI with building a fuzzer that does tens of thousands of random tests on every push to see if anything broke. I couldn't do that in the past because it was always effort that a client wouldn't get enough value from to pay me to do it. I can do those things now. It's ace.
(Everywhere I put 'I' you can replace with 'AI of the Week')
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick. I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I w…
The TAM of electricity is 99.999% of humanity, yet there was 82 years between Alessandro Volta's Voltaic Pile experiments and the first electrical grid in the world, Pearl Street Station, New York City. A farmer may have seen an LLM answering their questions about how to make a less dry chicken sandwich, but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester. There is…