skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AI (LLMs in this case) reduce the value of human conscientiousness, memory, and verbal and quantitative fluency dramatically.

So what's left for humans?

We very likely won't have as many human software testers or software engineers. We'll have even fewer lawyers and other "credentialed" knowledge worker desk jockeys.

Software built by humans entails humans writing code that has not already been written -- by writing a lot of code that probably has already been written and "linking" it together, etc. When's the last time most of us wrote a truly novel algorithm?

In the AI powered future, software will be built by humans herding AIs to build it. The AIs will do more of the busy work and the humans will guide the process. Then better AIs will be more helpful at guiding the process, etc.

Eventually, the thing that will be rewarded is truly novel ideas and truly innovative thinking.

AIs will make varioius types of innovative thinking less valuable and various types more valuable, just like any technology has done.

In the past, humans spent most of their brain power trying to obtain their next meal. It's very cynical to think that AI removing busy work will somehow leave humans with nothing meaningful to do, no purpose. Surely it will unlock the best of human potential once we don't have to use our brains to do repetitive and highly pattern-driven tasks just to put food on the table.

When is the last time any of us paid a laywer to do something truly novel? They dig up boilerplate verbiage, follow standard processes, rinse, repeat, all for $500+ per hour.

Right now we have "manual work" and "knowledge work", broadly speaking, and both emphasize something that is being produced by the worker (a construction project, a strategic analysis, a legal contract, a diagnosis, a codebase, etc.)

With AI, workers will be more responsible for outcomes and less rewarded for simply following a procedure that an LLM can do. We hire architects with visual / spatial design skills rather than asking a contractor to just create a living space with a certain amount of square feet. The emphasis in software will be less on the writing of the code and more on the impact of the code.
Or maybe, just maybe, TSMC has gaslit all of us to think it is much harder than it really is. If Taiwan isn't needed for its chips, what is the strategic interest of the USG?
Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look
Arguably compared to the technical people who do the actual work isn’t this a fairly perceptive description?
I’m convinced it’s already being done, or at least played with. Lots of public figures only speak through a teleprompter. It would be easy to put a fine tuned LLM on the other side of that teleprompter where even unscripted questions can be met with scripted answers.
The thing is my gut is telling me this is a nothing burger, and I'll listen to my own gut before yours - a random internet person insisting this is going to change the world.

So what exactly is the usefulness of this discussion? You think "I'll trust my gut" is a useful argument in a debate?
> And BTW that kind of testing is more needed for some industry critical equipment - processors with ME, routers, etc.

Yes, obviously testing should be ubiquitous.

> TV is a brainrot thing for dumbs, nobody needs a TV which doesn't spy you.

No, TV is nigh-universal and everyone deserves privacy.
Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024.

Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.

Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.
Chuck E Cheese taught me a lot about the value of company scrip and cutting out middlemen.
For anyone else curious, you have to go into your HN settings and change showdead to YES in order to see all the majority of his Comments. Only two show up if not.
> Until the competition outcompetes you with their new model and you have to train a new superior one, because you have no moat. Which happens what, around every month or two?

Eventually one of you runs out of money, but your customers keep getting better models until then; and if the loser in this race releases the weights on a suitable gratis license then your businesses can both lose.

But that still leaves your customers with access to a model that's much cheaper to run than it was to create.
Load times, you mean when you first start a game? Once you're in, everything is fast.

As for bandwidth inconsistencies, what do you mean? In the US northwest and in Chicago at least, I've had the high tier for years and it's been fantastic. Sure it's not your ISP or router? FWIW I've found hardwired ethernet to work a lot better than WIFI.
As much as our brain contents are unlicensed copies to the extent we can reproduce copyrighted work: If the model can recite copyrighted portions of text used in training, the model weights are a derivative work. Because the weights obviously must encode the original work. Just because lossy compression was applied the original work should still be considered present as long as it's recognizable. So the weights may not be published without license. Seems rather straightforward to me and I do wonder how Meta thinks they get around this.

Now if the likes of Openai and Google keep the model weights private and just provide generated text, they can try to filter for derivative works, but I don't see a solution that doesn't leak. If a model can be coaxed into producing a derivative work that escapes the filter, then boom, unlicensed copy was provided. If I tell the model to mix two texts word by word, what filter could catch this? What if I tell the model to use a numerical encoding scheme? Or to translate into another language? For example assuming the model knows a bunch of NYT articles by heart, as was already demonstrated: If have it translate one of those articles to French for me, that's still an unlicensed copy!

I can see how they will try to get these violations legalized like the DMCA safe-harbored things, but at the moment they are the ones generating the unlicensed versions and publishing them when prompted to do so.
No but it's the first time that we have a clear picture how it could go.

And.its not just incorrect sentences it's weird questions which are getting answered a lot better than ever before.

Why are you so dismissive? Have you ever talked or wrote with a computer which felt anything like a modern LLM? I have not
I am pointing out that, the moment betting and marijuana got the "you can profit from this" nod, money poured in and profit seeking explodes. Build! Advertise! Build! Advertise! This is the American way. Capital circles potential profits like vultures waiting for regulation to die.

I don't think many other countries' private markets act as extreme in this regard.

>All of which are commercialization

I feel like those are just cultural norms as opposed to commercialization pressure.

> Further, a maximalism interpretation can't be used to understand American culture pre-1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited banks from preventing women from getting a bank account, nor pre-1964, when the Civil Rights Act prohibited most businesses from preventing blacks from exercising the same commercial maximalism as whites.

I am failing to draw a line from your point to your argument here. I was referring to commercial maximalism, not sexual and racial equality maximalism.
The biggest mistake the FCC made was using spectrum to maximize revenue and not value for taxpayer.
Totally agree with you. That is the issue at the heart of the situation.

WP engine aren't keeping up with their moral obligations to fund WP development or associated services, so Matt is clearly trying to strong-arm them into doing so.

First they were asked to contribute fairly - which they refused and then they were called out on, then they were told that they cant call their fork of wordpress "wordpress" (technically no different than selling an android phone and calling it an iphone) without paying for a license - so they decide to threaten legal action, and now they have been cut off from free access to wordpress services.

They are nothing but money-grubbing hundred-billion-dollar private-equity parasites, who are trying (and seemingly succeeding on HN...) to distort the perspective on the whole situation.

Its clear to me that matt isnt after their revenue, he just wants them to play fairly and support wordpress as others do.
And then probing the e-mails, learning everything there is to know about you.
The parent post is probably referring to Amazon Sidewalk, a mesh network formed from Echo devices and other Amazon smart ~~garbage~~ devices, launched in 2021: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...
This jumped out at me:

"The NYT claims it discussed OpenAI's negotiations with nine people close to the discussions but who wish to remain anonymous."

"Claims"? Generally newspapers do not lie about the sourcing for a story.
Ah I see. Yea our CI is getting slower with more tests but so far we've found increasing parallelization helps.

And for one off tests, spring + rspec is good enough
Maybe there are people out there working in coding sweatshops churning out boilerplate code 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year - people who's job is 100% coding (not what I would call software engineers or developers - just coders). It's easy to imagine that for such people (but do they even exist?!) there could be large productivity gains.

However, for a more typical software engineer, where every project is different, you have full lifecycle responsibility from design through coding, occasional production support, future enhancements, refactorings, updates for 3rd party library/OD updates, etc/etc, then how much of your time is actually spent pure coding (non-stop typing) ?! Probably closer to 10-25%, and certainly no-where near 100%. The potential overall time saving from a tool that saves, let's say, 10-25% of your code typing is going to be 1-5%, which is probably far less than gets wasted in meetings, chatting with your work buddies, or watching bullshit corporate training videos. IOW the savings is really just inconsequential noise.

In many companies the work load is cyclic from one major project to the next, with intense periods of development interspersed with quieter periods in-between. Your productivity here certainly isn't limited by how fast you can type.
Reaffirming Our Commitment to Free
It was a common book in public libraries when I was a kid. It's full of various mnemonic tricks. I remember it though I don't remember every little thing in it.
Overall, I like this post. Solid reasoning.

This part I have small nitpick about:

> Also, the deflationary effects of high interest rates are not because it causes unemployment, but because it reduced the rate of increase of the money supply.

I would prefer to say: reduced money supply has an indirect effect upon unemployment. If it costs more to borrow money, corps will expand slower (fewer new jobs), or reduce costs (labour) to increase profits.
ok the "elites" have spent a lot of money training AI but have the "commoners" lifted a single finger to stop them? nope! its the job of the commoners to create a consensus, a culture, that protects people. so far all i see from the large group of people who are not a part of the elite is denial about this entire issue. they deny AI is a risk and they dont shame people who use it. 99.99% of the population is culpable for any disaster that befalls us regarding AI.
It’s the same picture.
Your UI library is just a stripped down React clone. The code wasn’t generated but rather copied, these test cases and functions are identical to React. I could have done the same thing with a “build your own react” article. This is what I don’t get about the LLM hype is that 99% of the examples are people claiming they invented something new with it. We had code generators before LLM-hype took off. Now we have code generators that just steal work and repurpose it as something claimed original.
Hmmm. They suggest running SQLite in production rather than PG or MySQL. As a long time RDBMS fan, I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I suspect the greater issue is that copyright is not always clear in this area? I am also not sure how you prevent "elites" from using the information while also allowing the "common" person to it.
The CRPG Book Project (2023)
And Emacs and VIM already have all the bits for improving your experience, but you have to integrate them yourselves. Or get an IDE that does it for the language you use. What you need to do is develop your own meta-language to shorten the time between idea and execution. Snippets, code generation, auto-completion, code analysis and navigation, all help.
And how is that related to the post?
Even if it automatically installs an update, it doesn't take effect until you reboot, right? And even if it does break something you just reboot and select the other partition and that rolls you back I think?

(Although I agree that there should still always be user control)
I went through that several years ago. Tough call. If your priority date is within reach, it might be better to wait it out.
it's obvious when text has been produced by chatGPT with the default prompt - but there's probably loads of text on the internet which doesn't follow AI's usual prose style that blends in well.
Well, most physicians will tell you the same about smoking and drinking (i.e. "less is better and none is best"), but some/many then go in their private lives and smoke and drink.

This is a thing physicians say but often don't heed themselves, and I don't think it singles out cannabis in particular.

The thing that horrifies me the most is physicians who smoke. There's an activity of which there is no safe level of doing other than "none", plus they've definitely seen what a smoker's lung looks like, and yet I've seen plenty of doctors who smoke regularly.
no programmer in my company invents things often
This is the exact attitude I am referring to. Also, Rust already uses LLVM.
There are some financial contributions listed at https://opencollective.com/automattic
Slight correction cars are typically taxed. Usually in 3 different ways. Fuel, property and tag. Now not all states call it a tax. Not all states have all 3.
OpenAI has no clear moat though. If they shut off training, everyone would just move over to a competitor.
You hardly have to be rich to spend $300 a month on fashion, you just have to be not poor, and have it as a priority. Just because fashion isn't a priority to you doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. The same people that spend $500 a month on clothes might think buying a TV for more than $300 is unthinkable. Priorities differ.
It's a good choice for the video though.

Thinking of D0 in, say, D020 as a page number, makes it a bit more intuitive.
But you are right, page 208 is not as familiar as D0.
Japan's humble onigiri took over lunchtimes around the world
They're also a terrible comparison to gambling because the participant can massively reduce the risk compared to the baseline by having the "skill" to not take the risk when the odds are particularly bad, like not jaywalking through traffic that's blinded by sun whereas with pretty much every form of gambling you can only change the risk very slightly if at all.
man im torn here

from sugar, cigs, to alcohol

from netflix, pornhub, to onlyfans

where do we draw the line
> The story of course is from reddit, so probably untrue, but it doesn't matter - it totally could be true.

What?! Someone just made up something and then got mad at it. This is specially weird when you even acknowledge its a made up story. If we start evaluating new things like this nothing will ever progress.
I think Google, with regard to Search here, is in the Skin The Sheep phase of its story arc. Innovation is done, market dominance is here, no point in innovating because they're making so much money. The total shit state that is Google Search these days is a tacit admission that search as we know it is over. No more innovating, instead lets suck as much money out of this thing as we can today because its going away. Good news is things become pure profit for Google while they wait for the inevitable changing of the guard and their replacement becomes the new normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu0B898X6ow
Didn't Cisco try to revert by putting some cloud back locally and we ended up with Fog computing?
SHA-2 was mentioned in the article as well
CouchDB dev here. While that was our idea early on for a while, we have loooong (10+ years) moved away from this narrative.

CouchDB is a document database that can be essentially indefinitely clustered to grow and shrink with your application / traffic demands.

It also comes with a unique replication protocol that allows you to synchronise casually connected instances (say offices around the world, or mobile devices and a cloud) much more like git uses push & pull. No other database really puts that into an open source / open government project.

There’s tons more cool stuff that CouchDB does and its being used in mission critical infrastructure that you’re relying on every day :)
This has been a problem on the internet for the past decade if not more anyway, with all of the seo nonsense. If anything, maybe it's going to be ever so slightly more readable.
Anyone using Kamal in production outside 37signals ?
Well, npm did... https://github.com/npm/npm-registry-couchapp
I don't think clam looks "ridiculous", but I suppose we're in to subjective stuff now. :)

In principle this isn't really any different from GTK or Qt theming (where it's up to users to go forth and find themes they like, and set the default as desired), but in those cases you tend to get themes packaged up by distributions and GUI configuration support from desktop environments, and neither seems likely to happen for Tk.
Militaries increasingly use civilian technology instead of developing bespoke tools. For example the military could use some of their spectrum for proprietary wifi but it would be uneconomic.
> I don't think people realize the sheer magnitude of reaching $3B ARR in under two years.

These things impress people who fail to digest business fundamentals. Anyone with a suit and a slick powerpoint preso can in theory start a money-incinerating machine. The real measurement is the profit. And before someone makes the "capture the market" comment - this isn't ZIRP anymore. Money costs fuckin money now.
Fight between original content creator and AI data Scraper
so large corporate created data centers with lots of money thinking they own internet having AI data Scraper that feed knowledge to their AI program
result is personal blogger would loose audience to own website, web properties.

what do you think what are the chances that original content creator would add up AI blocker for their web properties and after some time it is almost like AI is cutoff from new knowledge.

some of the top hosting providers already started with one click AI blockers.
>That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics.

To quote someone about this:

>>All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.

A book looking legit, a paper being peer reviewed, an expert saying something, none of those things were _ever_ good heuristics. It's just that it was the done thing. Now we have to face the fact that our heuristics are obviously broken and we have to start thinking about every topic.

To quote someone else about this:

>>Most people would rather die than think.

Which explains neatly the politics of the last 10 years.
>elites stealing everything

> a billion thefts

>The biggest theft

>what’s been stolen

I do like how the internet has suddenly acknowledged that pirating is theft and torrenting IS a criminal activity. To your point, I'd love to see a massive operation to arrest everyone who has downloaded copyrighted material illegal (aka stolen), for the public interest.
AI expansion: take a few bullet points and have ChatGPT expand it into several pages of text

AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points

We need to stop being impressed with long documents.
> LLM Code Assistants have succeeded at facilitating reusable code.

I'd have said the opposite. I think LLMs facilitate disposable code. It might use the same paradigms and patterns, but my bet is that most LLM written code is written specifically for the app under development. Are there LLM written libraries that are eating the world?
how come MS Teams is still trash when everyone is being so much more productive? Shouldn't MS - sitting at the source - be able to create software wonders like all the weekend warriors using AI?
I'm assuming for the sake of argument here that doctors actually are diligently checking LLM-generated responses before they get sent.

> Other systems — including Stanford Health Care, U.W. Health, U.N.C. Health and N.Y.U. Langone Health — decided that notifying patients would do more harm than good.

This is my primary problem (which goes hand-in-hand with efforts to make the LLM speak "in the voice of the doctor) with this whole thing. Not notifying patients that they're interacting with a machine is just deceptive. It's lying.

That some hospitals are OK with this behavior doesn't just affect those specific hospitals. It means that no communications from any "doctor" can be trusted unless the doctor is speaking to you in person.

Regarding speaking in the voice of the doctor:

> Brent Lamm, chief information officer for U.N.C. Health, said this addressed common complaints he heard from doctors: “My personal voice is not coming through” or “I’ve known this patient for seven years. They’re going to know it’s not me.”

So they implemented this level of deception because doctors were complaining that the system wasn't deceptive enough. Nice.
It's not rare at all. It happens all the time, everywhere. There are hundreds of games nobody can play anymore because servers got shutdown.
Internet connected vehicles are a mistake. Enough time out there and mistakes will get re-introduced. If it’s not Kia, it will be someone else.

You should be able to take out the internet connectivity as a consumer. The fact that this exploit worked even if the consumer wasn’t subscribed is wild.

Car companies just can’t do tech.
West Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asia

Southwest Asia: https://www.britannica.com/place/Southwest-Asia
Good luck with all your less profitable options: have a look at how much lobbying the sector does.
yeah no shit, initially got same treatment from hetzner and it put me off.
How is this considered "lost" knowledge there are (large) Wikipedia pages about those languages (which is of course what the LLM is cribbing from)?

"Human-curated encycolpedias are a great onramp to filling in knowledge gaps", that I can go with.
This is going to be the xerox copier bug all over again, isn’t it.
CouchDB dev here. 2.x only added new features, not sure what you’re referring to that was removed. The only on incompatibility was the changes feed ids moving from numbers to strings, which is hardly a huge migration :)
>> would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.

And an amazing resource for organizing street racing or any other event where knowledge of average police response times might be useful. Playtesting exactly how one can best evade pursuing police on realworld streets would be very fun.
still does (in a limited capacity :)
The references linked to are also a pretty good source of similar info.
Kia is a joke car manufacturer. It’s surprising that they are still able to sell cars and stay in business