SequoiaHope

I do believe that the exponential improvement will continue at least for another year and likely farther than we expect, such that today’s open models, while being very impressive by today’s standards, will soon show their age as they are eclipsed by newer models in 6 and 12 months.

The thing here for me is not that I’m unable to solve problems with my brain, it’s that I value the automation in labor provided by coding agents. I do not want future advancements to be locked behind proprietary doors.

Same! First learned of these maybe one year ago. Need a spare microwave for experiments…

YouTube link

https://www.youtube.com/live/qt5p-_tE8d0

“…climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems…”

Very weak opening. These were never separate problems. If the author is just beginning to notice, it doesn’t bode well for what insights they have to share.

I’m constantly learning from LLMs. Claude Opus is like a Wikipedia I can talk to while I am riding my bike. I can learn all about optics, point spread function and FWHM, and more. My mechanical engineer coworkers are using the tools to learn how our software system works.

Sure you don’t need to learn coding syntax anymore. I mean some knowledge is helpful but the machine can explain it. I never learned assembly language - compilers were doing a great job with that by the time I started. Not to say it isn’t useful, but I learned a lot about higher level concepts instead.

Sure but it also means these companies nvidia buys don’t work with AMD and other competitors anymore. There are myriad motivations and it’s not all one or the other but this is a classic component of Silicon Valley acquisition strategies.

I am certainly experiencing what seems like some mania or computer addiction from these technologies. I’ve never been able to produce such results as I can today. I lose sleep staying up late working on it (though to be fair this has always been an issue). But the volume of work is so hard to audit. It makes it difficult to make flawless results. That doesn’t excuse the mode of publication. They could have had humility in their announcement. “We are seeing some interesting results and seeking community validation.” Maybe they did, I did not read their full announcement. But that would have been the right move if they can’t verify something fully.

It sounds like part of the problem is that AI tools are machine generated content acting like humans in a comment forum designed for humans. GitHub already has a variety of CI tools which generate huge volumes of machine generated text, and that text is appropriately buries for those that want it without spewing all of it in a developer’s discussion forum.

While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.

I have coworkers who report learning a lot about some system by using Claude to do things they would not be able to do on their own, and subsequently seeing more about how the system works.

I suspect that literacy will not go down, but what we become literate in will change. Just as compilers reduced literacy in assembly language, automatic code generation will reduce literacy in code syntax. But then, other forms of literacy will replace that. High level system design, etc.

I agree with others this is reductive. Eg a person is “just some molecules” and this simple fact has no bearing on their moral standing.

This concept is discussed at length in the article. I encourage you to read it. I honestly don’t read many full articles here but this one was good.

Ya the article covers this concept in depth. Doesn’t seem like that commenter got that far…

Same lol. You can email HN and they will change your username if you ask. They did it for me!

It used to be but in my circles defaulting to he/him for everyone is considered bad form and foolish.

Very irritating tendency of people here to assume everyone on the internet is “he”.

One might say showmanship.

Obviously lying to people you know is generally unhealthy but when you are putting on a performance to an audience I don’t judge so harshly. Of course I imagine he did both.

Ya so you can bill twice! Once to do it the way the customer wants and a second time to do it right once they realize their mistake.

That’s great! Nice work thanks for sharing. I’ve never heard of FoxPro but I’ve seen how businesses need some app for 30+ years. Cool to see this happen.

Can you elaborate on the mechanism of this degradation? If resources are not available I would expect a request to fail with a message about resources not available. Do they tweak back end model capabilities to maintain service in a degraded state?

I actually just think every person should have their basic survival provided for efficiently by society. My argument is that most people only veg out because they are tired of a hectic work life, but if given the chance to coast for a long time they would find productive work voluntarily and be more inclined to share their work. My claim then, is that society would net a benefit from this arrangement which would more than pay for itself. And you don’t have to try to pick winners and losers.

I got the Garmin Lily 2 Active. It’s an attractive simple watch. For sleep and activity tracking without GPS it’s great. It also has GPS but I use my phone for tracking biking. The big thing is that after configuring it with the Garmin app you can tell Garmin they don’t have permission to store your data in the cloud, and then use iOS settings to block the app from even talking to the watch. Then I vibe coded an app for my Linux system that syncs over Bluetooth. Once per day I turn off Bluetooth on my phone and press the button in the web app and my Ubuntu desktop pulls all the files and displays them in my web ui. It’s really nice and my data is reasonably private (Claude can see it though I could fix that). I recommend the watch!

I was careful in my wording - the benefit is the freedom. Many people will appreciate that, simply by being able to install what you want. That goes well beyond the benefits to Linux users, but as a Linux user I really appreciate it.

For me a lot of the value comes from the freedom you get with frame. Valve says “it’s your PC, install what you want” and it runs an open source OS. It’s the first truly Linux friendly headset (it runs arch btw) and I don’t have to send my data to Meta. Also foveated streaming means, according to reviewers, a pretty decent wireless PCVR experience. I can’t wait to play half life Alyx without a tether. Valve is just doing something very different from meta.

Hard to imagine Apple would not remove damaged devices from the floor.

In this case it’s not AI that helps its full service board fab and assembly shops like JLCPCB. It’s so cheap to order fully assembled boards there I don’t bother assembling mine at home anymore. Bonus is you don’t need to mess with tiny components. You can put a 1x1mm 4 pin BGA on there and they will happily solder it for you.

At the robotics lab I work with it’s not uncommon for a piece of electronics to require a multi thousand dollar voltmeter, because they need to measure precisely extremely small voltages. We have a bunch of these in our lab for example: https://www.tek.com/en/products/keithley/digital-multimeter/...

Your series of comments in this thread frankly demonstrate a lack of understanding of what electrical engineering is. Yes if you want to make glowing LEDs then a multimeter and other cheap equipment are all you need, and you might be able to learn that in a month. But electrical engineering is so much deeper than that. Trouble comes when you have things like high power circuits right next to sensitive high speed signals. Eg a compact drone motherboard could be driving potentially hundreds of watts of switching currents right next to high speed camera sensor data streams.

There’s countless examples of what can make electrical engineering hard. If you don’t understand, don’t argue with people online - listen to people with experience and seek to understand why without challenging what surprises you. It’s all very interesting if you want to learn it.

Yes! They’re good at reading data sheets and finding things to add, locating LCSC parts, and making sure they’re connected in the schematic. They don’t always make a pretty schematic but they can be convinced to make the look a bit better than their default attempts will produce.

Ya it can

I have it convert Altium files to Kicad and then it uses the Kicad api to control things. If you give it encouragement it should be able to convert back to Altium by parsing the format and building a tool. Supposedly I have this built though I have not validated it. You can also ask it how it would do this and it will have ideas.