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This is slacktivism. I can kind of understand someone coming to the conclusion that we're replacing working class jobs with compute (caveat, I use working class more broadly than you), and that compute is pure capital. So essentially the capital class are wringing the neck of the working class. I think that, at the very least, is what the capital class is hoping for. If that's what you believe though, slightly poisoning a model is not even close to grappling with what is going on.

Even if you buy the idea that Kalshi is a prediction market whose mechanism is gambling but whose product is accurate predictions, you don't have to buy the idea that insider trading is a good thing. Yes, in the rare occasion there exists someone with (a) insider information (b) confidence their actions won't impact their insider position and (c) access to capital - then you get extremely accurate predictions.

In every other case you get worse predictions. Since those who are predicting have to now construct their bets such that they know they can always get run over by an insider. So in the general case it reduces the ability of the predictors to push the market in the right direction, because they always have to risk manage the fact that someone out there might run them over with insider information.

Yeah to zoom out, I think it was less specifically search and more generally: There was the PC, the winner became a behemoth. Then was Search, the winner became a behemoth. Then smartphones, the winner became a behemoth, Then there was social media and the winner became a behemoth.

The logic was basically "AI is going to be the next thing. The winner is going to be massive, let's back the person who looks best placed to do that". To be fair, it's probably correct. The people betting on OpenAI probably have plenty of money in Google shares and almost certainly have a share of Anthropic, grok, you name it. Most of them will go to 0, but the 1 winner could pay off. I'm not sure even 1 will pay off.

People can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the core logic behind OpenAI's valuation was essentially that AI would work like search. Google had the best search engine, it became a centre of gravity that sucked everything in and suddenly network effects meant it was the centre of the universe. There seem to be 2 big problems with that though. The first is that for search, queries are both demand for the product and a way of making the product better. The second, is that Google was genuinely the best product for a very long time.

Maybe point (1) was unclear at some point, but I think it's mostly clear today that's not happening. Training the model is modestly distinct from inference.

Point (2) is really funny - because sure, at some point OpenAI was the best, and then Sam Altman blew the place up and spawned a whole host of competitors who could replicate and eventually surpass OpenAI's state of the art.

It now looks like AI is a death march. You must spend billions of dollars to have the best model or you won't be able to sell inference. But even if you do, a whole host of better funded competitors are going to beat you within months so your inference charges better pay off extremely quickly. When the gap between models starts to drop, distribution becomes king and OpenAI can't compete in that field either.

Google can do that. Meta can do that. MSFT probably can do that. Amazon can do that. OpenAI cannot. They do not have the cash to do it.

And as we all know, if you're smart enough to get root access, your neighbours children playing football in the street should be subject to the risk of you driven a car that claims to have full self driving with custom code on it.

This is just Apple saying "We own all user compute now". Yeah you guys can fight over data centres. But every device that a user physically has will be an Apple device. They've now got the full range of price points from low cost to prosumer, and they've got the software stack to back it up so you can have your sales staff running neos logging in to their CRM, engineers running their Mabcook Pros.

It's kind of insane the advantage Apple Silicon has brought along with the brutal price competition PC sales. The only question I have is whether this touches the sides. That is to say - they sell a billion iPhones, is the consumer laptop and low end business sales enough to bump the numbers. They're thinner margins, and that market has to some extent been on a downward trend (which is why the stock market is running to data centres where the compute actually happens).

At the end of the day the core business is throwing off tonnes of money and is run fine. Would it be better not to throw billions at the next cool thing? Who knows. Probably. But Google does the same thing and they've actually built some cool stuff.

I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once...

So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business.

In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.

Well what do you mean by "works" the guys on twitter screaming about "Have fun being poor", were by and large just trying to scam you. Like, I could phone up your grandmother and convince her she's got a virus and she needs to transfer her life savings to me before the hackers get it, that could make me rich, does that "work". I don't know what Crypto actually worked for beyond - creating a target rich environment for scammers, a neat way to buy drugs, and good way for criminals and rogue nations to launder money.

I was going to say I disagree, that I think that at least some level of discussion on HN about important things going on is important. Israel is actually a tech powerhouse and a lot of this is seriously shaping the defence technology policy and is telling a lot about how power dynamics actually can play out.

Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.

It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.

I feel something very similar. I have strong views that what Israel is doing is wrong. But I look around at our politics (in the UK), and there is such a well oiled Israeli PR operation that is very happy making career ending accusations that talking publicly about this is actually quite dangerous (Not helped by the loonies who are, and have always been disgusting anti-semites). And you look at our politician's stance on it - and the career of people like Lord Walney, and it's clear we're in a very dangerous place. I think there is a very wide gap between what the average British person actually believes about Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians, and the acceptable positions you can express in Westminster. I also fear that once the dam breaks, and it's no longer the case, that the swing back against Israel is going to be quick harsh, and that's difficult because I have friends and family in Israel - I would like to see Israel be a free and open liberal democracy that shares what used to be western values, but maybe we're too late for that.

I think a lot of the pushback comes down to your attitude. The way you're talking about AI is like how the crypto bros talked about bitcoin. Just being very insistent on your point of view is a red flag. Either you can present new data to convince people, or your insistence will just look like it's emotional rather than rational.

I use AI every day as part of my work, it's very unclear to me where it's going and we have no idea if we're on an exponent or S-curve. Now, normally people talk with conviction because they have more data. But one of the breakthroughs of crypto was this social convention of just have very strong opinions based on nothing. A lot of that culture has come over to AI.

Your comment typifies this, it's all about I need to get on board, AI has already won, you've got an advantage over me because you realise this.

Go back, look at the actual article you're commenting on. Did the AI analysis of job exposure provide anything of value. I'm not totally convinced it did, and you didn't even think about it. What critical thinking did you do about the data that came out of this dashboard.

This seems odd. I think broadly there are two ways of structuring how you interact with AI agents:

* The first is where there's you and your computer, and you're doing pre-AI work. You hit some hotkey and pass off some task to AI.

* The second - and where I think we should probably be going, is there's you and you interact with the an agent. You aren't handing the Q4 report off to the agent, the agent is bringing the Q4 report to you.

I think the first scenario is trying to pry agentic work into legacy workflows. It will be more powerful when we simply go straight to the second, where orchestration and interaction with your agents is the interface.

This article is answering a different question to what it is asking. It's asking "What is the most effective strategy to freeze your eggs if you're absolutely certain you will need to".

The reason women freeze their eggs in their early 30s is because they still have a good chance for it to be effective and they now have a strong idea they'll need to. You don't have that second piece of information at age 19.

Or to be specific: What is the size of the cohort of women you are expecting to freeze their eggs at the age of 19, who will use those frozen eggs. How many of them will give birth to children without the help of IVF, and how many will choose never to have children.

I think this article is a good example of rationalism. Which is basically getting very mathsy about 1 specific very of the data, without viewing the data in the context of the decision that is being made.

For example, what is the percentage of women you expect to freeze their eggs at age 19, who you then expect to be unable to afford the $500 every year to keep those eggs frozen over the next decade?

Given that the UK is structurally uncompetitive in industry because of extremely high energy costs, it would seem crazy to me to build a data centre here. Even if we did build plenty of data centres here, it's simply not a driver of employment. We used to have shops. Shops employed lots of people. Then we moved to out of town shopping centres, which were cheaper and employed fewer people. Then we moved to online food delivery which was more efficient and employed even fewer people. Now we're moving to data centres which are enormous and employ practically no one. You can inflate the numbers by 10x or 100x or 1000x but you're simply not going to get numbers comparable to a car production line or anything that's actually a big driver of employment.

>we're no longer hiring: specialists. In this new era, generalists win.

I am truly astonished someone said this. My experience with AI has been the opposite. It can knock up something reasonable given the right prompting. It can generate a lot of code. It will hit deliver whatever goal you have, but it won't do it in the simplest neatest way, it won't have context about how you way to grow the codebase in the future.

The inevitable result of this is that it produces much more complexity to do a given thing than a senior engineer will. This is a big problem, because their performance degrades as their context window fills. So you will reach a point where the AI has coded you into a corner, it has created such complexity that it can't understand what is going on without filling its context window, at which point it can't do anything and you're left with a massive stinking pile of slop that's too big for you to work on and too complex for it to unpick.

The only way of sustainably using AI to accelerate your productivity is to be the specialist who can give guidance on structure and approach so that the codebase doesn't spiral.

I'm kind of surprised there has been so much talk about benchmarks. The CPU is probably the single strongest part of the product. The RAM and SSD are clearly going to be limiting factors for a lot of people, but they're not crazy, they're reasonable minimums for a budget device. If you're thinking about performance this device just really isn't for you.

Isn't this just the obvious conclusion you would expect going in? Corporate bullshit is meant to sound impressive whilst simultaneously either saying nothing, or hiding the real meaning.

Synergy is a great example - what the person saying it hopes you understand is that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros have a complimentary set of skills that when put together will be more profitable. What they actually mean is that when we merge these two companies we're going to have two sets of sales teams, two sets of marketing teams, two production teams, two sets of HR, accounts, back office etc. And so we're going to be more efficient because everyone I just mentioned is going to be fired.

So yeah of course, the intent is to trick you and the likelihood of success is (inversely) proportional to how smart you are and it turns out if you're smart you probably also do other parts of your job well.

I'm in two minds about this. I think that by and large We Have A Problem. And i don't mean a problem with children on the internet. We have a problem with people on the internet. There are so many examples of grown adults who have clearly become addled.

I live in the UK, I work in London. I can go on X and look at what Elon Musk is posting about the UK and as a reasonable person I can quite reasonably say he's gone mental. The algorithm has broken that mans brain. And it's not just him, a whole slew of establishment women lost their absolute minds about the trans issue (and Graham Linehan). Mumsnet became a centre for radicalization. You know and some one who grew up on the internet at quite a sweet spot I'm very comfortable looking at that stuff and going "Oh yeah, you guys are being groomed by these algorithms and you're defenceless to it".

There's a whole load of "How do we protect the children from this", but I don't think there's actually been much a reckoning with how grown adults are getting sucked into this vortex. The algorithms on the internet clearly have some trap doors that just absolutely funnel people into crazy places.

All of which is to say: We have a serious problem that's effecting everyone not just kids, and I think we've got almost no answers for how to tackle it.

The result is this- poorly thought through sweeping laws that aren't solving the problem, and have massive negative side effects. I think Jonathon Haidt has a lot to answer for in funnelling this complex issue affecting everyone into this reactionary "won't someone think of the children!" campaign for banning technology for kids.

Well firstly, they don't charge $200 for them because they can't produce them for $200. But the point I'm making is he seems to be trying to say they aren't beautiful. He says he's describing this "dark" world or "strange" watches. I do actually think he probably thinks the watches look strange. I don't think he thinks they're beautiful, maybe he'll find a brand to fall in love with one day. I doubt it because he seems to have too much of himself invested in this. But the people buying them don't think they're strange, they think they're beautiful. I don't go out telling everyone that they shouldn't buy a Ferrari because my Honda Civic can do the same job.

>That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world.

This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.

But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?

You can buy a Claude Code subscription for $200 bucks and use way more tokens in Claude Code than if you pay for direct API usage. Anthopic decided you can't take your Auth key for Claude code and use it to hit the API via a different tool. They made that business decision, because they thought it was better for them strategically to do that. They're allowed to make that choice as a business.

Plenty of companies make the same choice about their API, they provide it for a specific purpose but they have good business reasons they want you using the website. Plenty of people write webcrawlers and it's been a cat and mouse game for decades for websites to block them.

This will just be one more step in that cat and mouse game, and if the AI really gets good enough to become a complete intermediary between you and the website? The website will just shutdown. We saw it happen before with the open web. These websites aren't here for some heroic purpose, if you screw their business model they will just go out of business. You won't be able to use their website because it won't exist and the website that do exist will either (a) be made by the same guys writing your agent, and (b) be highly highly optimized to get your agent to screw you.

Bollocks. <name> (optional) <email> (optional) join the boycott! 1.5m have essentially signed an e-petition. I hate this e-pteition things.

I didn't quite mean it that way. My question is basically asking "Does this hammer know that not every problem is a nail". To give a specific answer to your question, my accounting system is excel, and "everyone" is me. There are definitely plenty of places where a database makes sense. But it's also important for database engineers to understand where databases don't make sense. It's kind of like that old problem we had where people would keep on saying "We can do X with blockchain" and the typical answer is "ok but that's worse".

This is one of my favourite interview questions too. I ask a design question that technically could be solved using the specialist skillset I interview for but it would be insane to actually do that in the real world. It's a good opener to see how practical and open minded they really are.

Tesla doesn't have parking sensors. They're a safety feature. There's lots of safety features in cars that are optional, we've got an entire rating system for the safety of cars.

We're talking about an app that's controlled by the CCP, I do expect them to take a principled stance - stances like Taiwan is a part of China and you can't be openly critical of the leader of the party. They don't have the same principles as you. You can force them to put in E2EE, but you can't force them to be honest about it or competent about it. I would rather know what we're getting than to push them to lie.

This is the same thing as the OpenAI/Anthropic thing. You've got Anthropic taking a principled stance and getting pain for it, and you've got OpenAI claiming to take the same stance, but somehow agreeing to the terms of the DoW. Do you think it's more likely that Anthropic carelessly caused themselves massive trouble, or do you think OpenAI is claiming to have got the concessions that clearly won't work in practice. I think it's naive to think the former.

No, if you name your product literally Neo, you're indicating it's the latest and greatest, it will clearly have better specs than the pro.

Is your process mechnical or AI based. Ie, is it "Hey claude there's this citation, can you tell me which case it's from" and if it matches you accept. Or is it "advanced-grep-style-thing <text in citation> <caseid.txt>"?