140 karma · joined October 21, 2025
I just can not do it. It is just not the same sitting here without the taste, smell and sensory experience completely divorced from the actual caffeine. That is with even taking more caffeine than I would get from my brew coffee.
It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.
The characters and plots are obviously all exaggerations and fabrications of reality but there are many interesting themes in his novels.
Of course, reading him like he is Edward Gibbon would be pretty foolish but The End of the World is just the Beginning is a great book.
A logical type or a specific conceptual classification dictated by the rules of language and logic.
This is exactly getting hung up on the precise semantic meaning of the words being used.
The lack of precision is going to have huge consequences with this large of bets on the idea that we have "intelligent" machines that "think" or have "cognition" when in reality we have probabilistic language models and all kinds of category errors in the language surrounding these models.
Probably a better example here is that category in this sense is lifted from Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Types.
It is the loose equivalent of asking why are you getting hung up on the type of a variable in a programming language? A float or a string? Who cares if it works?
The problem is in introducing non-obvious bugs.
I paid almost every month since gpt4 came out but mine lapsed when Gemini was released and I haven't even thought of logging in.
The subscribers are exactly the users who would migrate to Gemini. Then your left with the prospect of this giant free chatgpt user base setting money fire.
Wouldn't be shocking at all looking back 10 years from now that maybe the path that Altman stays fired would have been the better path.
I hate Microsoft but love Excel. I was hoping python in excel would be this but I don't think it quite is.
No one that played high school sports can possibly believe this.
Everyone knows by day two who the gifted players are, who is average and who sucks. The good players are never bench warmers because everyone wants to win.
The world is made up of a bunch of average people by definition but there is a percentage of those average people that think they are gifted when they are not.
Then they blame the world for not understanding their "genius".
The most brilliant person I know dropped out of medical school and just raced up the corporate ladder. It took her about 2 months in any role for management to see she should move up. Myself on the other hand have had to really grind it out, constantly learning and networking to improve my luck because I am just so very average.
Priming has issues with repeatability in experiments.
To believe that "debunks" the entirety of heuristics and bias is completely absurd. The author literally won a Nobel prize for Prospect Theory.
I think that book sucks personally. Just an incredibly dull book to read. The online social contagion that it is a work of fiction might actually be more interesting.
Putting it on for the first time was such a mind blowing experience. It is obviously the future, for about 1-2 months.
Before I tried one, I thought people might not like wearing the headset and that would be a problem. That for me is not a problem at all with the quest 3. It is super comfortable.
The VR experience itself just becomes uninteresting. It is the darnedest thing. That for me was with waiting over 30 years to try VR and the first week it completely delivered even beyond my expectations. Now I can't remember the last time I bothered to charge the headset. All in about 8 months time.
I am much more worried looking at these ridiculous prices on newegg that memory will be dirt cheap 3 years from now because the economy has imploded from this mass stupidity.
I was blown away by Gemini 3 at first but now from using it I have ran into all the dumb things it does because it is a large language model.
What I notice getting shorter is the time between the frontier model making me feel I will have no job prospects in the future to the model reminding me that LLMs are fundamentally flawed.
It is because I want to believe in AGI. I love the holy shit moment of a new model, it is so exciting. I don't want to face the reality that we have made an enormous mistake. I want to believe OpenAI will take over computing because the alternative of some kind of Great AI winter bubble burst would be such a horrible experience to go through.
In general, I can't but help think it feels like something we will remember in the future as a marker of the peak of the LLM bubble.
-Thoughtless, deluded, Homo economicus religion, idiot
Even beyond that, why would an adversarial nation state to the US not do this? It is extremely asymmetrical, effective and cheap.
The parent comment shows how easy it is to manipulate smart people away from their common sense into believing obvious nonsense if you use your brain for 2 seconds.
LLMs have absolutely killed any interest I use to have in the max/pd/reaktor wiring up boxes UI.
I have really gone further though and thought why do I even care about VST or a DAW or anything like this? Why not break completely free of everything?
I take inspiration from Trevor Wishart and the Composers Desktop Project for this. Wishart's music could only really be made with his own tools.
It is easy to sound original when using a tool no one else has.
I know I don't. I have never been paid to write anything beyond a short script.
I actually can't even picture what a professional software engineer actually works on day to day.
From my perspective, it is completely mind blowing to write my own audio synth in python with Librosa. A library I didn't know existed before LLMs and now I have a full blown audio mangling tool that I would have never been able to figure out on my own.
It seems to me professional software engineering must be at least as different to vibe coding as my audio noodlings are to being a professional concert pianist. Both are audio and music related but really two different activities entirely.
Yahoo was always more a directory of websites.
AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either.
I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.
Imagine a chef making a dish of just an empty plate. It is just stupid. Even the biggest food hipsters wouldn't fall for something that stupid.
At some point one should have listened to enough music in their life to call 4'33" out for the bullshit that it is.
I just don't understand how anyone who actually uses the models all the time can think this.
The current models themselves can even explain what a stupid idea this is.
It is really one of the few great examples that LLMs are good for in an economic sense.
In a different industry, such inefficiency would have been put out of business.
It is a unique economic condition that makes LLMs valuable. It makes complete sense.
To the wider economy though, it is hard to ignore the unreasonable uselessness of LLMs. The unreasonable uselessness points to some kind of fundamental problems with the models that are unlikely to be solved by scaling.
We need HAL to solve our problems but instead we have probabilistic language models that somehow have to grow into HAL.
The standard, meaningless, HN appeal to authority. "I worked at Google, therefore I am an expert on both stringing a baroque lute and the finer points of Lao cooking. "
Gemini 3 gives a nice explanation if asked "can you explain how you don't really understand anything"
I know people love Music for Airports but I think it is incredibly boring compared to what Eno did with Bowie.
Beyond that the first few albums by The Orb are top notch.
Balam Acab - See Birds and Wander/Wonder are incredible.
I have figured out my father working an unskilled factory job in 1970 made about $40k adjusted for inflation in order to buy a $40k starter home in early 20s.
Union job with a pension that he is still collecting right now after retiring at 55.
No college. Not even sure he has ever read a book in his life. I would say all you had to do was not be an alcoholic and you would be fine but even that is not true. Even the boomer alcoholic fuck ups I know did pretty well and retired early.
It actually doesn't help me at all at anything at my job and I really wish it could.
That isn't really goal post moving as much as a very strange shape to the goal post.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
The retired middle class boomers I know are completely outside the business cycle.
While I don't think they have enough to really be considered wealthy, they have no mortgage payment, a social security check, a pension and most have a 401k.
The business cycle will not change their spending one bit.
The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.
Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.