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No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.
I largely agree. Plato leveled somewhat similar criticisms at the early use of the written word millenia ago. I think what's fundamentally different with internet communication is the timed nature of the medium, conveying a sense of pseudo-urgency that necessitates disagreements be input in a timely fashion, and that failure to do so will imply correctness or at least tacit agreement.
Incidentally, I find your comment significantly more substantive and thoughtful than Weinstein's.
We surely have, Metal, CUDA, Pix, and PS/Switch also have their.
This is exactly yet another reason why researchers prefer CUDA, to the alternatives.
> I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.
Good luck. After the first few paragraphs I though of a great quote that I heard somewhere: "Twitter ruined my reading skills, but it vastly improved my writing skills."
If you're trying to actually get a point across (vs. writing something that is just read for pleasure) GET TO THE DAMN POINT.
> plenty of developer talent
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once."
I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized.
Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".
I read the abstract (not the whole paper) and the great summarizing comments here.
Beyond the practical implications of this (i.e. reduced training and inference costs), I'm curious if this has any consequences for "philosophy of the mind"-type of stuff. That is, does this sentence from the abstract, "we identify universal subspaces capturing majority variance in just a few principal directions", imply that all of these various models, across vastly different domains, share a large set of common "plumbing", if you will? Am I understanding that correctly? It just sounds like it could have huge relevance to how various "thinking" (and I know, I know, those scare quotes are doing a lot of work) systems compose their knowledge.
What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well.
[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...
> extend to which some people get food delivered is absurd
More than getting uppity online about others' personal dining choices?
I think by the time the wealthy realize they're setting themselves up for the local equivalent of the French Revolution it will be a bit late. It's a really bad idea to create a large number of people with absolutely nothing to lose.
> PA tried to clean hamas from those areas, got it ass kicked and asked Israel for help.
PA has to ask Israel to do anything of substance in the WB, because the WB is a mix of Israeli and PA controlled areas, with Israel controlling internal boundaries even between adjacent PA-controlled areas.
> Major reason why there are no elections in west bank, it's because current palestinian government knows that hamas will win
No, the only reason is that Israel has refused to cooperate with all-Palestine elections negotiated and agreed to between Fatah (the party in control of the PA government) and Hamas, on multiple occasions (because Israel administers parts of the WB, and for other reasons, active Israeli cooperation would be necessary.)
Most likely because the divide between the Fatah-led PA and Hamas, and the ability to portray both as undemocratic, serves Israeli's propaganda and other interests.
H.T.M.L. I'll grant it's a little awkward on a phone but I never get tired of using the usual HN web interface on a tablet.
> Authored by global consulting firm Deloitte and published by the Department of Health and Community Services in May, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Human Resources Plan contains at least four citations which do not, or appear not to, exist. The report cost the province nearly $1.6M, according to documents obtained through an access to information request and published on blogger Matt Barter’s website.
But that's the point. The icons help you find the "delete" section.
Icons aren't large enough to then also distinguish between deleting a row or column or table. That's what the label is for.
It's not laziness, it's good design.
I've seen some apps that have icons on menu items when those icons are used for the same functions in other UI elements (shortcut bars, etc.) that don't require digging into the menus, functioning as kind of a reminder that "you can do this elsewhere where you see this symbol". It is kind of like an inverse tooltip (where a tooltip you get by checking the icon and discovering the action description, this you get to by going to the action in the menu and discovering the icon.)
I think this is a useful pattern, but I'm not convinced that having specific distinct icons for menu items to highlight them as important is useful. Presentation order and/or simply a consistent difference in presentation for the highlighted items makes more sense.
My grandfather started his career in the Polish mafia and eventually went straight to work as a laborer and then a bricklayer, he was told he had an "enlarged heart".
I got a bunch of workups because I fainted when exercising on a hot day when I'd eaten a bit too much and was a little infatuated with the instructor (I was the only student.) I got the plain echo and a stress echo and was told I had athlete's heart which they are not so sure if it is good or bad. I also wore a Holter monitor for 30 days and literally at the last 5 minutes of the period I had two bad heart beats so now I have A-Fib on my chart and my doc says the athlete's heart can make it worse so since then I'm only supposed to do an hour a day of cardio.
When all this was going on I had manifested an "evil twin" whose harebraned scheme had just blown up right at the time I had those two bad heartbeats and I can't believe the emotional distress I'd caused myself hadn't had anything to do it. I have one of those Kardia cards and haven't seen it happen again.
>For example, the “Settings” menu item (third from the top) has an icon. But the other item in its grouping “Privacy Report” does not. I wonder why?
Isn't it obvious? Because compared to "Settings" it is a far less important infrequently used setting.
More than that, Trump said yesterday that Netflix's purchase of WB "might be problematic" and that he would be "personally involved in the decision of approving it".
He's trying to shakedown Netflix to pay fealty.
California is now coal free as the world’s fourth largest economy.
Spotify is trying to avoid paying artists and keep revenue from Spotify customers for itself.
Yes! I wouldn't want to be the last patient to not be revived, but that's just regular death anyway.
> Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places
/s? This is literally a Monty Python sketch.
In fact that is where AI could win. An in house system only needs to serve the needs of one customer whereas the SAAS has to be built for the imagined needs of many customers —- when you’re lucky you can “build one to throw away” and not throw it away.
Nobody wants to ship that! They want perpetually upgraded live service games instead, because that's recurring revenue.
“The green groups, including Greenpeace…”
You'd be hearing a few more hair raising failure stories if they hadn't done that. And possibly a few big customers institute Win11 or Copilot site wide bans. Or just straight up going out of business. In businesses other than software, it's possible to be legally liable for mistakes.
The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.
If you can reduce a problem to a point where it can be solved by simple code you can get the rest of the solution very quickly.
Reducing a problem to a point where it can be solved with simple code takes a lot of skill and experience and is generally still quite a time-consuming process.
> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI
Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
> the midterms runoffs
Do you mean primaries? Runoffs are a thing in some elections in the US, but not a thing that would start in spring for the congressional midterms.
This is just a tl;dr of the article with a mean-spirited barb added.
I've settled in on this as well for most of my day-to-day coding. A lot of extremely fancy tab completion, using the agent only for manipulation tasks I can carefully define. I'm currently in a "write lots of code" mode which affects that, I think. In a maintenance mode I could see doing more agent prompting. It gives me a chance to catch things early and then put in a correct pattern for it to continue forward with. And honestly for a lot of tasks it's not particularly slower than "ask it to do something, correct its five errors, tweak the prompt" work flow.
I've had net-time-savings with bigger agentic tasks, but I still have to check it line-by-line when it is done, because it takes lazy shortcuts and sometimes just outright gets things wrong.
Big productivity boost, it takes out the worst of my job, but I still can't trust it at much above the micro scale.
I wish I could give a system prompt for the tab complete; there's a couple of things it does over and over that I'm sure I could prompt away but there's no way to feed that in that I know of.
And the US is for young people? Europe is for citizens, the US is an exploitation engine for consumers.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...
(Doesn’t touch on unaffordable housing prices, social security benefits being cut 20% in a decade when the “trust fund” is exhausted, lack of opportunity and living wages, etc in the US)
It's so broken. I have a suspicion the AI teams are in some kind of an internal standoff with privacy/compliance teams, and Copilot simply never gets access to any tools or data.
Because if not that, then I don't know what. I can half-ass a better product with ChatGPT API and a PowerShell script, and I could've since GPT-4 was released; in fact the product can actually write itself, it's that simple to do a better job.
It is discouraged to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News, even if disclosed.
I think all the em-dashes came from scraping Wordpress blogs. Wordpress editor does "typography", then thus introduced em-dashes survive HTML to Markdown process used to scrap them, and end up in datasets.
EDIT: Also PDFs authored in MS Word.
"The rise in early-onset cancer incidence does not consistently signal a rise in the occurrence of clinically meaningful cancer. While some of the increase in early-onset cancer is likely clinically meaningful, it appears small and limited to a few cancer sites. Much of the increase appears to reflect increased diagnostic scrutiny and overdiagnosis. Interpreting rising incidence as an epidemic of disease may lead to unnecessary screening and treatment while also diverting attention from other more pressing health threats in young adults" [1].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
Are we treating MS like a start-up now?
No, but the biggest users who pay the most do.
Can you buy Uber's "Ride of Glory" data? [1]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/uber-crunches-user...
The proposed solution only works for answers where objective validation is easy. That's a start, but it's not going to make a big dent in the hallucination problem.
There's a principle in distributed systems that you can't really count on clocks to be synchronized in a very large system but the thing about Parallel Sysplex is that it is not particularly scalable, it maxes out at 32 nodes but those nodes are pretty big -- the system overall is big enough for most of what the Fortune 500 does but tiny compared to Google, Facebook or a handful of really big systems. Sysplex revolves around distributed data structures similar to what Hazelcast provided in the beginning.
> The judge has the power to declare the Sheriff professionally incompetent
Do they?
In safety critical contexts, you're not usually using the standard library. Or at least, you're using core, not alloc or std.
Panics can still exist, of course, but depending on the system design you probably don't want them either, which is a bit more difficult to remove but not the end of the world.
I hadn't seen that addendum though yet, that's very cool!
I read all about the Hills when I was a kid, also in NH.
The basic thing I’d say is you cannot trust memories “recovered” under hypnosis at all. See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder
which is also a product of hypnosis therapy. I mean, it works for a lot of things, but not for getting the truth.
And then you install that 'security patch' and end up with a borked phone, apps that no longer work, new apps that you didn't ask for and so on.
Give me just the security updates please.
I’m actually somewhat stoked about generative AI from a “good enough” perspective, because at this inflection point where a lot of countries and organizations are looking for Microsoft alternatives (digital sovereignty, etc), this is the best time to be able to build and deploy alternatives with the productivity advantages (if any) AI might provide.
Big Tech thinks they have a moat, when it’s really diffuse power being made available via genAI to build software good enough to replace them.
I vote to just change the spelling to what almost everyone already thinks it is anyways.
It'll still be just as weird. But "chs" is just nonsensical. The idea that it would sound like "sh" is baffling. I mean, I know this is English spelling which is not known for its regularity, but this is just too much.
That doesn't sound like a problem with twin studies exploring the degree to which IQ is genetic, that sounds like a problem with people treating aggregate tendencies and associations as a basis for individual discrimination.
"Neurotypical"/"Neurodivergent" does the same thing, it just specifies the domain of abnormality. It is still better than "normal", but the difference is of degree rather than kind.
If you are specifically distinguishing autistic and not-autistic, "allistic" is more specific than "neurotypical" (one can be neurodivergent and not autistic) and also avoids any implication than one side is normal and the other is not. (Unfortunately, there is no very good direct replacement for "neurotypical"/"neurodivergent", but one can minimize the impact of that problem by not using them when the real concern is about presence or absence of a particular trait that is within the broad array deemed "neurodivergent".)
> So your comment boils down to; plagiarism is fine as long as I don't have to think about it.
It is actually worse: plagiarism is fine if I'm shielded from such claims by using a digital mixer. When criminals use crypto tumblers to hide their involvement we tend to see that as proof of intent, not as absolution.
LLMs are copyright tumblers.
> The "world model" is what we often refer to as the "context".
No, we often do not, and when we do that's just plain wrong.
> Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all.
To be fair, there is a significant amount of disagreement about what a "currency" is supposed to be, and there is a large subset of people who believe that the desirable traits in a currency are exactly those things that make it function well as a speculative asset (notably, on average over a long time, value with respect to goods is at least flat and preferrably increasing) while simultaneously not thinking the things that another large group of people sees as desirable for a currency (e.g., lack of extreme short-term volatility) are important.
I can't speak to the original designer of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it and most cryptocurrencies were designed to be currencies, just by people who have a very specific (and, IMV, wrong) idea of what a currency ought to be.
(David Bessis is a fan favorite here, and Paul Graham makes an appearance.)
Related, from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42200209
Exactly, even those of us that like Windows have a hard time talking about it when Microsoft treats it so badly, I really miss Balmer era in regards to Windows.
The only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL.
> In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials.
No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.
Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.
Because they so much want to be a service business than a software business. Microsoft execs are losing sleep over becoming the next IBM, not realizing they are already there and have been for a long time.
Their main problem is that they never really learned how to compete on merit, just on first-to-market and all kinds of legal (and illegal) tricks.
The fix for having worktrees be colocated is in progress. Not sure when it’ll be done but it’s coming.
Wow! I liked https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35408868/
Which is why I don't pay to remove ads on YouTube, nor I give Amazon the pleasure to see more from my money than what I need to pay for prime deliveries.
Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.
> Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe
More of an in addition to than instead.
Employees are not IT and Infosec teams. What an employee wants as it relates to a corp system is mostly irrelevant, as the company owns and governs access to the system. It is not the employee’s data, broadly speaking.
You think data tied to individual users isn't any worse? That privacy has no value?
>LLMs are text model, not world models and that is the root cause of the problem.
Is it though? In the end, the information in the training texts is a distilled proxy for the world, and the weighted model ends up being a world model, just an once-removed one.
Text is not that different to visual information in that regard (and humans base their world model on both).
>Not having a world model is a massive disadvantage when dealing with facts, the facts are supposed to re-inforce each other, if you allow even a single fact that is nonsense then you can very confidently deviate into what at best would be misguided science fiction, and at worst is going to end up being used as a basis to build an edifice on that simply has no support.
Regular humans believe all kinds of facts that are nonsense, many others that are wrong, and quite a few that are even counter to logic too.
And short of omnipresense and omniscience, directly examining the whole world, any world model (human or AI), is built on sets of facts many of which might not be true or valid to begin with.
Seriously. I don't understand why this is even news or posted here.
If they were doubling prices or something then of course, raise the alarms. This is not that.
Let's call it "token representation not based on merit" and it doesn't sound that back walking them back
Paramount bids $30 all cash for all of Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix bids $27.75 “for Warner’s studio and HBO Max streaming business” only [1]. (“$23.25 in cash and $4.50 in shares” [2].)
The latter leaves behind “sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the profitable Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report (B/R)” [3]. (Paramount is effectively bidding $5.9bn for these assets.)
Note that Zaslav, Warner’s CEO, is a prominent donor to Democrats [4], as is Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder [5]. (Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO with Greg Peters, is mixed, leaning Dem [6]. No clue on the latter.) Ellison is a staunch Trump ally. The partisan tinge will be difficult to ignore.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/media/paramount-makes-hostile-t...
[2] https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-...
[3] https://www.wbd.com/news/warner-bros-discovery-separate-two-...
[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=david+...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/reed-hastings...
[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Ted+Sa...
I don't think basic color accuracy matters for this, it's more macro. In other words, two professionally taken images of a painting aren't going to make it look bright and colorful in one, and dark and somber in another.
Whether there's a slight green tint, or a certain blue doesn't pop quite as much, doesn't seem like it would affect the findings.
It's a drug that is often diverted by people who have a prescription in order to make money.
The monkey's paw curls. Wish granted... but in the form of Palantir, Flock, etc. tracking your every move so those cash transactions can be just as anonymous as a credit card transaction.
Escalation meetings when you are asked to prove where all the money went in those 40 hours each project week, with endless rows in Excel sheets.
IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash.
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
The tax level is about as high as it ever has been: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
(1) Multi-modal is where a lot of these things go to die. You will hear people talk about the occasional striking success but so often I show Copilot an easily identifiable flower image and it gets it wrong even though Google Lens will get it right
(2) The kind of dialog he's having with Claude is a kind of communication pattern I've found never works with LLMs. Sure there is the kind of conversation that goes
Do X
... that's pretty good except for Y
Great!
Do X
That's actually fascinating, because they surely weren't tracking the actual Office license keys, and getting their money back. The manager literally uninstalled Office just to spite you. That's super funny! Especially since it made zero difference to you in the end.
The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.
But your assertion is merely semantic. It doesn't say anything substantive.
I could also say a motorcycle "moves forward" just like a person "moves forward". Whether we use the same or different words for same or different concepts doesn't say anything about the actual underlying similarity.
And please don't call stuff "dumb shit" here. Not appropriate for HN.
I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.
Developers get to use the architectures OEM vendors make available to them.
> there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin
It turns out this doesn't matter: you can't hear the inflation argument over the volatility. The amount of goods you can buy per Bitcoin changes dramatically on a month by month basis. It's just that everyone loved it while it was going up, but that's not actually guaranteed!
Also, you can't print more Bitcoin, but that doesn't matter: you can fork it (people have, BCH), or you can just endlessly spawn new token chains, or you can have things which both sides regard as abominations but are somehow immensely popular: stablecoins. These give you the legal stability of crypto tied to the price stability of the dollar. It turns out that what people actually wanted was several hundred billion dollars of virtual poker chips.
The one technology that I thought might work really well here is flow batteries. You need a couple of sets of tanks, but then you can do charging by pumping out the old electrolyte and pumping in charged electrolyte. But these seem to have stagnated, possibly because they're dependent on expensive short lived membranes.
I wonder if there's significant scope for offsetting electricity consumption by adding deck renewables. Not for container ships, but maybe for tankers .. which are only needed because of fossil fuel consumption elsewhere. Hmm.
Other way round: the only way any company other than Intel was able to get a new instruction set launched into the PC space was because Intel face-planted so hard with Itanium, and AMD64 was the architecture developers actually wanted to use - just make the registers wider and have more of them, and make it slightly more orthogonal.
As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.
What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?
What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?
One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.