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bentt

2,076 karma · joined September 6, 2022

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bentt··on Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
At this point just have the car tell the cops when the driver is misbehaving. And get the taxpayers to fund it!
bentt··on Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
Yep, this is what we did. Both my kids are computer kids now and look down (nicely) on the "iPad kids".

The Amazon product is fine. It's really a question of how often they use it, and how early. I agree that any screens before 2 risks screwing up a human's idea of what's real.

bentt··on What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us
The article is wrong. Adobe charged rent to create profit to send to shareholders. Paying engineers was not the major cost center other than that it needed to _seem_ like it was, to justify the subscription price.

Ultimately Photoshop as an idea stopped creatively evolving and Adobe created a tenuous pricing scheme that disincentivized competition, locked in users, and made most customers resentful. What this taught many of us is that this is a cautionary tale.

Mind you Adobe could have made CC free, built a healthy ecosystem around it, and created a lot of value in network effects, standards, plugins, etc. But they chose the dark path and they deserve to pay for it.

bentt··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
Current evidence is compelling us towards the shared opinion that AI is changing coding and nothing else… but do remember that AI itself is code and we are in an early phase of recursive AI improvement.

We have no idea where this will take us but it’s like measuring the effects of COVID in 2020. The immediate outcomes (temporary unemployment, massive stimulus) created long waves that we are still encountering (inflation, global instability).

bentt··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
There's so much talent overseas and it's so much cheaper. The entire reason for this change is the growth of remote work since COVID + economics.
bentt··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
No municipal or public entity should use Facebook as a means of distributing information.
bentt··on $137M in A.I.-Generated Ads Flood the Midterms
We could really use some laws to prevent this. Too bad the people that make the laws really enjoy lying with deepfakes.
bentt··on I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep
Not following...
bentt··on I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep
I wonder how much this is like a tremendous telescope being invented which can see new worlds with utter clarity. We could verify that a planet was habitable... but it wouldn't bring us any closer to visiting it.
bentt··on I know why the mathematicians weep
OpenAI didn't have to mass publish these solutions. They did it to make themselves look good. They are ostensibly making a tool for people, to better humanity. Instead, they chose hubris and self-interest.

Letting mathemeticians use these tools to reach the same conclusions would have been far less destructive, and potentially, even exciting. Shame on OpenAI.

bentt··on Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
My buddy and I bought these to play Quake3. It was a step change in performance no doubt.
bentt··on AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
I haven't read the article, but that title could not be more wrong.
bentt··on Thinking will become a hobby
Even if they did exactly what you wanted, you need to want something. To decide what you want, the thinking shifts from how and when to what and why.
bentt··on Thinking Will Become a Hobby
If you have responsibility for things, you want to make the best choices. At some level, this involves thinking. It is responsibility that should not be delegated to AI. The thinking required of the responsible human changes, but is not eliminated.
bentt··on Local Indexing to reduce tool calling and token usage
At some point if these types of front pages that are promoting a tool like this will be optimized for the agent itself to make the decision to install and use it. The human just says "please optimize for cost" and then the agent finds this thing and starts using it without the human even knowing or caring.
bentt··on Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity
> “The two meals are matched within 1 percent of carbs, fat, proteins, calories, water, and salt,” said Zach Hutelin, a researcher at the institute and the study’s first author.

Note that fiber is not part of that list. Stripping out fiber essentially means that our gut microbiome is starved. Not coincidentally, it also means that these foods are much less prone to spoilage.

bentt··on Programming Isn't Special
> Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.

This is the key point to argue. I say that it IS different. AI is giving us fits because AI generated works create congnitive dissonance. Knowing a human made something at all is what allows us to connect to it as art. We don't need to know anything about them other than that they are a human, they existed.

The crazy part about it is that it is possible for a human to use AI to make art. It's the intention and the human that make it possible. Where it breaks down is when there's no intention.

bentt··on Triple-A Minesweeper
Art
bentt··on Programming Isn't Special
There's not one answer.
bentt··on Programming Isn't Special
When something is brought into the world through human intention, it has the possibility of being art. A human must stand next to it and say "This is mine."

The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.

bentt··on I gave four coding agents $100 budget to build a PDF editor
Give us a PDF App we can use to scribble a signature and we're mostly good, ya?
bentt··on Yes, and
Great point about the value of knowing the deep stuff.
bentt··on Yes, and
I am in a similar position. My son is a talented high school programmer considering colleges. He has expressed Anti AI sentiment to me. This article gives us a useful lens and I appreciated it a lot.
bentt··on Why people don't want to have children any more
Society just doesn’t expect it of people any longer. I know many young people who just don’t want kids, and they are empowered to make that decision.

At some level, the beauty of having a family has ceased to be communicated.

bentt··on "I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry"
I have a model year 2025 car and it's astounding to switch the media system over to FM and flip between the stations. Instantaneous. We never get that feeling any more.
bentt··on Spending on AI is becoming almost impossible for businesses to budget
I do quite a bit of coding with Claude but am perfectly fine on the $20/mo plan. You people who just let agents go for hours on end... I'm not sure you're doing it right.
bentt··on Study of 2.5M children finds no link between MMR vaccine and autism
It's heartbreaking to see a child with severe autism. In many cases it does seem to emerge after a regression in a child's development. I don't doubt parents that describe this. We must be sensitive to what these people have experienced. They want to understand what happened. For any of you on the site that have been through this, I'm truly sorry and I hope that some day you get some answers.
bentt··on LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
I like the sentiment, but when I hear these big public facing AI guys speak, I always run it through the filter of "How does this make me look?". In LeCun's case, he publicly admonished LLMs and went in a radically different direction. When he says LLMs won't lead to a doomsday scenario, I can't help but think that saying otherwise would invalidate his decision to abandon the paradigm.
bentt··on City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
This sounds like a legit use case for DLSS 5.
bentt··on Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code
These types of “how to” posts from the source lose some credibility when they don’t factor in how to efficiently spend tokens. When they say “have it fire up agents” without recognition that it’s expensive, I stop listening.
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