NikolaNovak

I work in IT, have all my life, but these stories still have a sense of bizarre unreality to me, a dream sequence that isn't of real world.

I understand that some companies and people find it extremely empowering and accelerating and convenient to plug AI into prod, but I come from diametrically opposite culture of old school DBA / sysadmin mentality, rather than "move fast and break things" modern dev mentality.

Once it was explained to me, authoritatovely, that hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate, there's just no way I'm not "air / human gapping" any kind of LLM from any kind of prod.

I get these headlines are sensationalist and these cases may or may not be extreme or unusual/unrepresentative, but it's stunning to me how many people go through mandatory AI 101 training, are basically made to acknowledge that LLM will make things up confidently, and promptly forget that. I have executives sending me market research that's fully made-up and techies that are saying software is dead AI can make a payroll system in 5 minutes and everybody wanting to plug LLM into everything. And I'm not saying LLM is useless like some people, I use it multiple times a day for various things - I just cannot imagine giving it root / sysadm access to prod system and database :-/

(even The "unhinged apologies" - unless I'm mistaken, that too is basically fancy autocomplete, correct? It's not that AI "acknowledges" or "understands" or "fesses up" when things went wrong, as even technical media presents it as. It's just what training material / RLHF built as statistical response to a mistake. )

Sorry, are we saying Valve Gabe Newell? That's blowing my mind from both timeline and area perspective.

Doesn't a headset with directional boom microphone do the trick? I may be misinterpreting the problem statement though :-).

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I don't think this is going to be Hacker News fascinating discourse, but the current USA administration is so openly, brazenly, continuously, gleefully corrupt; continuously fire people with ethics and competence and bring in the in-group of equally corrupt ; and have continuously been rewarded for that behaviour; that I feel the OP is merely observationally factual.

I think we are conflating usage vs consumption.

I think HN probably uses GenAI more than average population.

But I think HN consumes less GenAI content than average population.

Look at Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, etc. All I see is my non-techie friends being amazed and mesmerized by - cute animals, creepy animals, political events, jokes, comedy, outrage, events, speeches - that never ever happened. As if we don't have actual real puppies that are cute, my acquintenances and family are oooing and awwwing at fake howling huskies, fake animals being jump-scared by fake surprises.

HN may be amazed by potential of AI output the improve the world more than average person. But hustlers are laughing their way to the bank as they actually use AI to make ridiculous, and I do mean ridiculous, amount of "content" for cheap, that is, absolutely is, being consumed at prodigious rate with no sign of stopping. This is not 7-second trailers and concepts for some future years - this is mega-years of actual content being liked, shared, engaged with and consumed, right now. This is what OP is hoping that tides will turn against, and this is what I see no sign of rejection in my non-techie/non-geeky circles :(

Well, I mean, drats. I too always assumed Ibuprofen was safer than Acetaminophen; not the least because of massively oversimplificatic "reduced inflammation - GOOD!" 'Logic'. I'm 47 now and have probably preferred ibuprofen for last 27 or so.

While I agree with you, hacker news audience is not in the middle of the bell curve.

I get this sounds elitist - but tremendous percentage of population is happily and eagerly engaging with fake religious images, funny AI videos, horrible AI memes, etc. Trying to mention that this video of puppy is completely AI generated results in vicious defense and mansplaining of why this video is totally real (I love it when video has e.g. Sora watermarks... This does not stop the defenders).

I agree with you that human connection and artist intent is what I'm looking for in art, music, video games, etc... But gawd, lowest common denominator is and always has been SO much lower than we want to admit to ourselves.

Very few people want thoughtful analysis that contradicts their world view, very few people care about privacy or rights or future or using the right tool, very few people are interested in moral frameworks or ethical philosophy, and very few people care about real and verifiable human connection in their "content" :-/

It's a work laptop - I'm surprised none of the coworkers said "you'll get in trouble when you return it".

I don't know WHY... But corporate bureaucracies have logic of their own.

One of first games I ever played at my dad's work when I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I've always enjoyed flight Sims, understanding this dubiously qualifies :). I've enjoyed the strategic aspect of fuel and bomb management and while the ai is simple, it provided a challenge.

I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.

My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:

"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."

Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)

Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)

I use onenote as a personal note taking system.

For shared artifacts we use word, excel or PowerPoint in corporate onedrive and it works shockingly well, with minor but important caveats - you can't usually edit the same exact box at the same time, and it can get confused with offline changes by multiple people. But online changes by multiple simultaneous people seems to work really well. I especially enjoy when one person is presenting slides, an executive makes a suggestion, and another team member makes the change real time on the same deck and it shows up in presentation.

We are just starting to experiment with some shared onenote notebooks, it seems to have a bit more learning curve and needs more discipline and structure than the rest of ms office.

What's your viewing distance? I currently have a 32" at about 80cm or so. Did not like the 34" as it has actually less vertical space despite having more area technically.

Is the 49" ultra wide or more 16:9/16:10?

Like everything else in life, it depends :

* I feel the key message here is "single vs multiple windows", not small vs big monitor. I love my 32" curved monitor. I too switched from having three monitors to having just one big monitor and staying with one maximizing window majority of time.

It's also role dependant. I spent few years as ops manager and multiple windows and situational awareness / task parallelization were important. Not saying it's a good thing but it was the name of the game.

Even without task parallelization, multiple windows are important for some roles. If I'm transforming a working excel into executive slide, it's nice to have them both up. If you are good at taking notes, having teams meeting and one note up is a life saver and super power. Etc

But yes - I think core message is "do not assume that prevalent wisdom or what others do, works for your task, job, and personality". As another example, I think dark mode is cool, all my cool friends use it, and it does not work for me on majority of applications. And that's ok... Not everybody is cool like that :-)

What is the current best way to watch the take off? I was out of town and want to watch it with family this weekend in fake/pretend real time, so would love a good YouTube or otherwise source :)

1. Awesome!

2. Thank you for collecting and providing context :)

3. How come examples are in PNG? Is that the only format you have available, or is there a technical limitation or risk in making them available in original ASCII format?

(Seems pedantic, but I noticed because I'm at the airport -- The article loaded near instantly, but the actual art took a couple of minutes and still loading mid way through :)

I'm an immigrant to Canada, and yes, English has both literal meanings and colloquial meanings.

In the most literal meaning, absolutely, "Enthusiast" just means a person who likes something, is excited about something.

When it comes to market and products though, typically you'll see the word "Enthusiast" as mid-tier - something like: Consumer --> Enthusiast --> Professional (may have words like "Prosumer" in there as well etc:)

In that context, which is typically the one people will use when discussing product pricing and placement, "Enthusiast" is somebody who yes enjoys something, but does it sufficiently to be discerning and capable of purchasing mid-tier or above hardware.

So while a consumer photographer, may use their phone or compact or all-in-one camera, enthusiast photographer will probably spend $3000 - $5000 in camera gear. Equivalently, there are myriad gamers out there (on phones, consoles, Geforce Now, whatever:), an enthusiast gamer is assumed to have a dedicated gaming computer, probably a tower, with a dedicated video card, likely say a 5070ti or above, probably 32GB+ RAM, couple of SSDs which are not entry level, etc.

Again, this is not to say a person with limited budget is "not a real enthusiast", no gatekeeping is intended here; simply, if it may help, what the word means when it comes to market segmentation and product pricing :)

1. I understand the truth of it

2. The inefficiency bugs me

I.e. I want to support the band, but feel like only a fraction of the money spent on merch goes to the target. Same with websites that have mugs and such. I don't want another mug, I don't want to pay 5.99 for shipping, I don't need to support the white box oem mug manufacturer.

But I guess in the real pragmatical world, that's the support mechanism that actually works :)

I am astonished how many people now use speakerphone as their default interaction. On subway, go train, in grocery stores, on the streets, sometimes even in the office, they blast their conversations with zero care.

And so yes, I've definitely seen and experienced people watching inane tiktoks on speaker in subway or bus or airplane. It's the epitome of complete lack of empathy or self awareness to me, but I guess that's the way culture is going.

I assume post used extreme example to demonstrate that wise-sounding metaphors may not have inherent point or value.

It's just a subjective perception of what makes something "cartoonishly expensive".

These types of watches are interesting, clearly making things hard for the sake of being hard. 60 years ago the quest for accuracy got pretty extreme but there was theoretically a practical goal. After quartz movement, that pretence disappeared. I'm in the mindset that up to several hundred bucks, you're paying for something in a watch - accuracy, options, durability, style, whatever it may be. At some point afterwards, and certainly at 50k, you're paying price for sake of paying the price. I don't see the problem that watch is trying to solve, I see it as what can we do for 50k. And that's cool and all, some of them are interesting, but for me, definitely in the cartoonishly expensive category :-)

>"It's very expensive, but not cartoonishly expensive."

When I click the link it said about fifty thousand dollars.

I love that everybody can enjoy watches differently :-).

There are people thay get a rolex. And good on them and they certainly send a message O:-)

There are people who like obscure Soviet watches, or hyper expensive ridiculously over complicated modern marvels, or just a few solid units from citizen and Seiko, etc etc.

I have a nice citizen blue angels navihawk with a tremendously useful ;) circular slide rule - but have much more enjoyed finding cool weird little Chinese semi-brand-name watches. Most of them will have a Seiko movement anyway, but without the brand / prestige surcharge. They're really the only jewelry / vanity thing I do - I have ten copies of same t-shirt because it's comfortable and fits me well, but I also have a watches for every occasion to match when I want to "dress up", and dozen of them cost me as much as that single citizen.

Think payroll. I used to think payroll is relatively simple. Then I spent some time on government of Canada Phoenix pay system (go ahead... Google and weep). And it's... Insane. System has been live for a decade and still regularly gets hit with some weird scenario from some department that nobody foresaw, it wasn't captured in requirements, but upon review by business analysts is a valid scenario. Bob was a CS5 in department of defense and speaks French so gets bilingual bonus and his boss was away for half a day so Bob gets acting cs5 pay and is in public alliance union so these are the dues, and it is second Tuesday of a month and blue moon, but then Bob got moved to department of agriculture and then 3 months later realized that his previous manager at defense didn't put in his promotion on time so now you have to figure out his retro pay for when he was in defense even though everything on his file now has agriculture labour agreement and codes and rates etc etc etc. And this made up example is a fraction of the complex examples.

Clear and comprehensive Requirements are always the tricky bit, at least in business software. Twilight zone covered it perfectly and presciently decades before AI, with genies taking your requests literally and giving you unpredictable and usually negative outcomes.

I am genuinely curious if you are trolling, or putting that forward as a genuine argument?

Trivially, it's the difference between medium, and message/content.

On one axis, whether message is spoken, written via pen or typewriter or word processor, sent electronically, faxed,mailed, etc - it is fundamentally a communication from one human being to another, even if medium / mechanics differ.

The other axis is actual content - genuine human interaction, intent, message and connection, vs a result of a prompt.

Can you tell me more?

As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime. What scenarios relating to authoritarian regimes (be specific) do you find having a gun at home would help with?

I have a potentially silly question, and obviously naive - but why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here? Were they coming in on a Massive gang fortress? Or are all the stereotypes of American police forces true and they just come guns a-blazing all the time? I mean, that wasn't even police officers with hand guns, they have army-like guys with massive automatic rifles, and they seem to keep them drawn and hair triggered throughout the search? :O

(on aside, I do enjoy watching British crime procedural shows as contrast, where seemingly nobody has guns and they have to call in a special unit if they actually need somebody with a handgun)

USA cannot go back to normal. The internal damage / changeover is massive - everybody disagreing with current administration policies has either been removed or departed - whether in health or defense (I'm sorry, War) or science or education or other departments.

Oh, there's a name for it! I've sometimes been struggling to verbalize in the past the logical issue I perceived with the "immigrants steal are jobs" absolutists, and this is a useful reference.

Can you tell me more? I'm curious about motivations.

* I use easy cheats for single player games - for example, infinite jumps in cyberpunk 2077 are just huge amounts of fun :)

* I have zero desire for cheating in multilayer games. Not some high morality righteous horse, just, what's the point? I have fun even when I lose, and having something else play for you takes away from visceral fun that I get.

* I could understand, even if not agree, people who cheat for profit. That's the basis of all crime everywhere.

* I do not understand people who cheat in multilayer games not-for-profit. It feel you need to have both a) some sort of anti social / non social tendency, and b) dopamine rushes along pathways I don't.

I'd be genuinely curious to hear about your acquaintances who cheat in multilayer for no profit and why they do it :-)

Background noise is the key part though - without a directional boom microphone, people rely on dsp/ai to deal with wind, dogs, kids, TV in other room, loud keyboards, rustling paper, etc, and it never works perfect / always has trade offs.

For people who join online meeting once in a blue moon, ehh, whatever. For people who are on online meetings hours a day, good headset with a boom mic seems like the price of entry - but I understand I'm in the minority on that one :-).

Yeah, i got couple of third party replacements recently for my 2 hd380pros.

The leatherette one was useless within 2 years. Outside became slimey / sticky, the inside just shrunk.

The velour one works fine but feels different to original. I just ordered a mesh one to try too.