aerhardt

The website linked is an utter mess. In design and performance.

AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy.

In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.

This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!

His criticism of characters being laid bare at the beginning of the novel is fair, especially in Karamazov. Unlike Nabokov I don't think it detracts from the work.

Dostoyevsky was massively popular way before the USSR. Nietzsche and Freud were huge admirers. His book sold well in Europe in his lifetime. Same with Tolstoy. Sincerely doubt the USSR soft power moved the needle in any meaningful sense.

I'm reading Crime and Punishment now. I've previously read Karamazov. I agree that it's not particularly hard reading other than the names. And also, maybe, the characters tend to go on long tirades. And I guess you need to know a little bit of Russian history, too. But they're not that difficult. Otherwise his books wouldn't have been that popular. They sold phenomenally well in his lifetime and continue to do so.

Google Stadia worked like a charm. I put hundreds of hours into it without a single problem. The tech felt like magic.

I studied in a French Lycée in Spain. We did dissertations, brutal 3h live writing tests. There was no problem with it other than the difficulty. Kids didn’t come out screwed up or impaired.

The parent comment is AI generated drivel, that’s why. Incredible that it has generated such a lively discussion.

I don't know what to tell you bro. I type much less code but I haven't stopped thinking altogether. I still write to myself and to others. I read longform. I walk and introspect. I think about high level problems. Any general cognitive decline I ever notice, I attribute to having a bad day or getting old...

I'm sure they think of them as a matter of national security, because they think of everything as a matter of national security, but a few analysts I respect say that the mood there is not nearly as AGI-pilled, and I have no trouble believing that.

You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.

I’ve seen analyses pointing to the fact that the gap is growing, which would be worrying. I think all the benchmarking and whatnot is not reliable so who knows, but we’ll definitely have a good feel in a couple of years.

Well, if you believe the people who sell the tokens, you should be creating loops that keep yanking the bandit’s arm.

This is utopian thinking. The products are way too useful to not subscribe. The argument presupposes the worst-case negative-utility in the long-term scenario (AI companies will create a totalitarian nightmare) and pits it against the radical usefulness that the products are creating right now.

It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that a law of marginal decreasing returns will kick in at some point (if it hasn’t already), and that what one point looked like an exponential may start looking like an s-curve.

I do not see how being experienced in engineering, or having higher studies in computer science and economics should make that view less common.

It tests general reading comprehension. Is it possible that a generation with abysmal reading comprehension and attention copiously reads for pleasure? Yes, but I’m very doubtful.

They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].

Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.

[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...

Why are they not preaching for protected weights, but public, ie, under state control? What do you feel his posture will be if that is starting to be discussed?

Also, on an unrelated note, why would you have an account for 5 years and only now post your second comment? AI has been an existential threat for years, why only now?

This is a pattern I am seeing all over the place on HN in the last year in AI threads, and I have to admit that I am starting to become paranoid and my feels need some assuaging.

So this is the one, huh?

I don't think at $1,500 you're not forced to code on your own at all, in the sense of typing code. You're simply forced to not yolo-max twelve parallel agents at all times.

Classical supply and demand models do not show that increasing the price of x causes quantities to first go up then down after a certain inflection point…

You could probably make the relationship through utility rather or a proxy model (you can model anything with enough imagination in economics) but to call it “the result of” as if it is immediately related is not accurate. It is apparent at first sight when you compare the curves…

They’re possibly great at generating alpha in highly complex systems that compose LLMs with tabular machine learning and other analytical techniques at a large scale. So yea, certainly not for these users.

You could maybe somehow relate it to supply and demand dynamics, but the idea that that higher taxes can start reducing receipts after a certain point is widely credited to Laffer (although apparently there are signals of others saying similar things throughout the history of economics). The Laffer model displays an inverted U curve.

France's government expenditure is 57% of its GDP according to th OECD. It's probably an all-time record in the annals of global economic history in peacetime. It's more than the late Soviet Union spent around 1985-1990 according to the IMF / World Bank.

The 2025 deficit ran at around ~150 billion euros. The Zucman wealth tax would raise 25 billion in the most optimistic projected scenario (so, one sixth of the deficit at most). This is the very best case as projected by its proponents - there's a decent chance receipts would be significantly lower than that.

You're absolutely right that right wing parties did not, and almost certainly will not, solve any of these issues. Neither will a wealth tax. In my opinion, this is only solved in a bang.

That's how I feel about most of your writing. I click through most times when I see you either on the front page or in the comments, and I generally walk away feeling like I have food for thought, without necessarily buying everything wholesale. It's part of why I keep coming back.

My root comment simply represented my two cents about the current post. I don't think anything about the post is outrageously incorrect or anything, just somewhat confusing. You're a very prolific contributor in this community and I don't think me or anyone else that welcomes your takes expects everything you write to rock our collective socks every single time, anyway.

I like his other posts. He's bullish on AI, which is fine. I'd like to read a mix of bearish and bullish level-headed takes from people who are subject matter experts. His technical credentials are well past discussion - I love Django, and he comes across as a pretty upbeat but level-headed guy. Certainly beats radical takes in either direction from people who have no clue what they're talking about. It's just this article that I find rather confusing.

I find this analysis confusing. PMF for coding was likely reached some time last year. Profitability, which is different, we don’t know. The article kind of confuses both without making a strong economic case or using numbers in a compelling way. I don’t understand what the Uber case has to do with this either. The Uber COO clearly said that at least in terms of ROI he’s not seeing the results either.

My take is the product has been very useful for coding (PMF) for months. But it’s certainly not useful at any cost…

What they told me and I can read online is that they don’t because they can’t operate on the Austin highways. Have you read anything that’s more detailed?

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.

To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

You’re trying to tell me, in an infinitely smug, condescending, and unnecessarily long-winded manner that you know as a clinical fact that Sam Altman is a psycopath?