251–260 of 288 posts
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Fairly certain the least expensive option will always be a dumb toaster that just plugs into the wall
But in that case, it won't be subsidized by the manufacturer! I'm sure people would get a cheaper toaster in exchange of an ad being burned in your bread.
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We are the horses, though. At some point those became almost fully obsolete in a productive economical sense (they're just fancy toys now, basically). No 'raising the ambition' is ever going to change that. They are what they are and they can do what they can do. I don't know about you, but if the something in "we'll find something to do" is becoming a toy for AI or very rich people, I'm not exactly hopeful about the…
I try to not be fatalistic. As I was trying to argue, it's historically inaccurate and it doesn't actually change the outcome. Clinging to the past has never really worked that well. As for rich people, they get richer and richer until people correct them. Sometimes violently. The current concentration of wealth in particularly the US seems more related to political changes since about the Reagan era than to any rece…
This is false. Being fatalistic and 'panicking' can definitely influence and thus change the outcome. Your logic is similar to what is (incorrectly) used to dismiss the Y2K-problem, for instance: Looking back it seems like there was no need to panic, but that is only because a lot of people recognized the urgency, worked their ass off and succeeded in preventing shit from going horribly wrong.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
Your handwaving is doing harm by lulling people into a false sense of security. Your initial comment amounts to "Ah, it'll be fine, don't worry about it. We'll adapt, we always have.", even though you provide absolutely no arguments specific to this enormous force of insanely rapid change in an already incredibly unstable fragile world. We might adapt, but it will require serious thought rather than handwaving and leaning back; even then it might come with massive societal upheaval and a lot of suffering.
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Why? Is this is because of shame or fear of losing your job?
Because its incredibly embarrassing to admit you can no longer do very basic programming tasks as a "professional" in that field.
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Change is a constant in history. Stuff happens, and then we adjust. Big changes may result in short term confusion, anger, etc. All the classic signs of the five stages of grief basically. If you step back a little, a lot of people simply don't see the forest for the trees and they start imagining bad outcomes and then panic over those. Understandable but not that productive. If you look at past changes where that wa…
We are the horses, though. At some point those became almost fully obsolete in a productive economical sense (they're just fancy toys now, basically). No 'raising the ambition' is ever going to change that. They are what they are and they can do what they can do. I don't know about you, but if the something in "we'll find something to do" is becoming a toy for AI or very rich people, I'm not exactly hopeful about the…
I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around but- it will also be 2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the los…
Show HN: RedSOC – adversarial evaluation framework for LLM-integrated SOCs
I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.
This conversation keeps missing me because I don't think I've typed out boilerplate in like 20 years. Were people actually physically typing every character of the software they were writing before a couple of years ago?
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Agreed, it interests me how much some people emphasise knowing facts - like dates in history or dictionary definitions of words. Facts alone are like pebbles on a beach, far better (IMO) to have a few stones mortared with understanding to make a building of knowledge. A fanciful metaphor but you know ...
This is an entirely false dichotomy though, is it not? One can both know facts and understand logic behind them, it's not like you're creating an RPG character and need to make a choice with limited character points. (Can't say time is the limiting factor either -- we're both in HN comments, valuing our own time at zero.)
There is limited time, of course - no one can learn everything, but you can pay attention to the important facts, and the connections between them.
In some ideal world you would learn every fact there is, and the connections would fall out on their own, but in the real world we have to construct theories and frameworks to organise facts.
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Agreed, it interests me how much some people emphasise knowing facts - like dates in history or dictionary definitions of words. Facts alone are like pebbles on a beach, far better (IMO) to have a few stones mortared with understanding to make a building of knowledge. A fanciful metaphor but you know ...
Knowing facts matters quite a lot imo, even if it doesnt 'seem' like it. To use another metaphor, you can't REALLY see the forest amongst the trees, if you don't consider the trees themselves. One of the reasons I like history so much is because, with enough facts accumulated, you can see how one piece of information flows into another - e.g. dates matter, because knowing the precise order in which important events o…
I guess an interesting counterpoint to what I said is something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory (and similar) where a grandiose framework tries to fit inconvenient facts into a shape that is entirely invented.
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Will you do anything differently knowing this? Does the risk of LLMs being unaffordable to you in the near future make you wary about losing the skills?
Open Models are currently within reach for most of the kind of writing I do I still decide what and why it generates what it does, I just don't do it manually I'm not super worried, either I still do the last leg of the work, or I go back an abstraction level with my prompts and work there