321–330 of 383 posts
Generating changes is becoming cheap. Predicting second and third order effects across large systems is still hard.
I've seen director / VP-level folks at a public company point LLMs at a corporate product and essentially ask it "What deficiencies do you see here? Output to a Word document." Then forward the output to engineering management as a product task list. One person did this to the same product more than once in a couple week span without realizing it so there were multiple documents with conflicting issue lists floating…
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What's unique to AI is that CEOs now have a robot that supports that disconnect. Our CEO recently announced that he has now started doing frontend programming, by which he meant that he had told ChatGPT to output some HTML. No doubt it also told him how smart and clever his ideas were and what a great engineer he was. This kind of thing only increases the disconnect between what CEOs think employees do and what they…
maybe the html part is unique to ai, i suppose. but a c-suite picking up some tool, making a toy example, then declaring “well doing X is super easy, roll it out” (or “change the kpi”, etc.) is something i have seen dozens of times.
Me too. But I think AI might be a much more powerful delusion generator.
I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI > There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs) if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market,…
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> silly 30 years ago was 1996. No 30 year panels have lasted anywhere near 30 years yet.
And your point is? How long would you say a properly installed panel from 2000 made it in practice? How long would the modern equivalent installed in 2025 be expected to make it? And how many replacement events does each of those make for over the course of your life? Do you contest my earlier claim that solar is roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof?
Using 30 years as a lifetime for solar panels is risky as there are no solar panels running for 30 years, not even close. Never mind the lifetime of the power wall battery and the inverters.
I bought a 40 year "premium" asphalt roof. It barely made it to 20. A regular asphalt roof, perhaps 10 years. Now I have a metal roof.
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I was reading some posts on r/locallama the other day and apparently it's a common problem that when people try to use Qwen to develop something that hosts a server, it'll try to use the same port as vllm, see that it's already being used, then it'll try to remove the process that is using it and promptly commit suicide. The self awareness of missile tasked with blowing up its own control center.
Reminds me of the movie "Dark Star" by John Carpenter / Dan O'Bannon. The plot revolves around a talking smart bomb which is programmed to detonate and then gets stuck before being deployed. The crew spends the whole movie trying to reason with the bomb, hoping to talk it out of blowing up at the designated time. The movie is very very bad but if you like B movies it is also very very good.
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RAG died to better AIs. Turns out that a sufficiently advanced agentic model can do more than what RAG does with nothing but a grep tool over a pile of text files.
I think if the dream of semantic search from vector embeddings had worked out as well as people had hoped then "grep over a bunch of text" would have some significant disadvantages. But in practice I never saw anyone crack the embedding-generation-and-comparison problems well enough to actually get better results than grep for things like "find similar code and see what it does." (You also don't need that advanced a…
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> When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers. Uh, no. Not at all. Agriculture absorbed the extra population that used to be unsustainable. There were no losers.
Plenty of losers. See native americans. Sorry about your generational hunting ground, white man would like to ranch cattle and therefore you should leave or eat lead.
P.S. Moreover, they had very advanced agriculture - most of the food Europeans eat today are adopted Native American designs.