Hacker News Reader

bilateron Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

No that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should.

The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.

bilateron Creepy Crawlies

Instead of trying to block why not monetize? So the proof of work can be directed at something you can be paid for (bitcoin mining)?

bilateron Microduck

Yes, and robot pets aren’t going to look like clankers. They’ll be warm and furry and imitate the sounds and movements of real pets. I think people still imagine robots as some cold metallic insert-Stephen-Hawking-voice thing, and it’s pretty clear even with today’s tech that’s just not what they’re going to be.

bilateron Microduck

I know the history. We bred them to be our pets and normalized this relationship. Your pet might even love his life. But we can do the same with robot AIs, and it will be a better relationship. Your robot can talk to you. It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.

bilateron Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) Microduck

yup!

bilateron Microduck

I detest the vegan movement. I'm not an animal lover. Pets are unsanitary nuisances. Robots are better. We don't need to commit a genocide against domestic pets for the transition. Just breed less.

bilateron Microduck

I think in the future we'll have robot pets and look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats and normalized (even glorified) it.

bilateron SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

This isn't great but a negative side effect of an otherwise positive change. I know a lot of comments will try to make this into a gotcha but its really not. Decreased friction leads to misuse. Just like before we'll figure out ways (reputation, light filter pass) to deal with it.

bilateron Hacker Public Radio

Wouldn't it be cool if hackers talked to each other like truckers in their own language?

bilateron I Want to Leave the Internet

I love the internet. Its way more interesting than the world outside. Its not cool to say this yet people vote with their attention everyday. What's missing is a tech problem (touch, smell etc). Full matrix style immersion will solve that.

Would be an interesting world where we all live in chambers connected to the cloud. Would take care of overcrowded city problems with everyone trying to move to one place and driving up the cost of living. You can live on a farm in Ohio and have the New York experience.

You could be born in a poor country who's values you do not align with and become a citizen of one (hosted on a discord server) that feels like home.

Tech is beautiful. The ugly parts are just a midwit problem you falsely ascribe to runaway capitalism, other bogeymen, ludditism, a false shiny view of the past and projection of whatever thing isn't quite working out for you (your job, your relationship etc).

The irony is the best place to complain about it is on the internet.

bilateron Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2077216959930728889

Ya'll are not ready for AI to just keep getting better and better. The slop-midwit-doomerism you are being fed as part of some last ditch copium that your SE identity matters and is going to be needed prevents you from seeing what is inevitable. You can't beat em. Try joining em.

bilateron Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

This is actually a very hard question to answer. If you’re truly AGI-pilled and believe in this progress continuing, then you basically have to contend with a scenario where AI is better than you at doing anything by an order of magnitude. And doing things suboptimally just for the sake of some notion of human independence doesn’t feel right to me.

Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.

bilateron Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

yup - its the j curve of productivity phenomenon in action. and we'll see smaller companies reaping benefits faster becasue they can start with AI native development.

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

The line is not just AI. It’s our whole story. You can extrapolate it to Moore’s law, automation, agriculture, and so on. And there's no decay. It's just perception.

We are already in the singularity. We’ve always been. It just gets faster at each step.

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

I reject the premise that we need to go back to some old ways of living to find meaning. My life is full of meaning, but it would probably look like meaningless abundance to someone who was toiling on a farm 18 hours a day or being chased by saber-toothed tigers.

The next paradigm will be similar. It might seem meaningless to us. For example, most of our identity is tied to our jobs in our current society. This will have to change. What does that look like? Do we create content and share our art? Do followers and attention become the new currency?

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/next-token-predictor-is-an-...

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

I agree with you that there is no certainty, and in fact the future will almost certainly not look like anything we imagine. I think that's what makes it exciting.

We think about starships and humans mining Mars, and it'll probably be nothing like that. It might just be humanoids or AI drones that actually end up colonizing the solar system, with the humans never really leaving earth except as mind uploads...

But at the end of the day, things are changing. Things are accelerating. And our mental models of what works or doesn't work will almost certainly break. I don't fear the future, nor do I project any confidence on what that's going to look like, but I know I want to be part of it.

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

The demand for frontier intelligence is basically infinite. The frontier doesn't just complete a task more effectively, it creates new tasks and new problems and new solutions. It grows the pie exponentially. It's like looking at the internet the first time and trying to imagine the economy that will be built using it: social media, YouTube, Online job boards, Blogs etc.

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

I encourage you to use your imagination once in a while.

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

woa your nephew lives inside a height-optimization machine that gets redesigned every few months (weeks), learns from every growth chart on Earth, and keeps proving it can grow faster?

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

That is the question, and it does f** with me. But the existential nihilism that comes with it is not an argument against it not happening.

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

At least I have trends backing up my claim. What precedent is there for saying, "Yeah, AI has kept getting better, and keeps doing things that we thought it would never be able to do, but now I think it’s going to plateau because I just can’t see the model writing good poetry or being smart enough to make determinsitic tool calls" or whatever?

bilateron Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?

AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?

No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.

bilateron GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/2064210146558136827

bilateron GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

Yeah not only is it totally unsubstantiated, the benchmarks are getting less useful to really show the difference between these models. Big model smell is still a thing and GLM 5.2 while impressive is not Fable class.

Here is something I would like people to chew on. Perhaps the smartest researchers in the world across multiple labs know more about this than we do? Perhaps they are aware of issues like the data wall and diminishing marginal returns. And perhaps they are being honest when they tell you there is no wall?

bilateron AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

If you ask a surgeon if you need surgery...

In general most developers are going to find themselves fighting incentives which will color their opinion. AI isn't there yet but if you are going to abase your whole world view on a point on a graph and not on the trajectory you are in for a bad time.

bilateron Openrouter Fusion API

Nice - I built an npm package in a similar fashion called Agent Order: https://github.com/btahir/agent-order

I think there is alpha just have to be very careful how you let the models com up with solutions and collaborate.

bilateron Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

This is like saying we only need 100 websites when the internet came out. We have no idea what second third fourth order effects of frictionless and abundance are. What you think is software itself will change.

bilateron The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

I’m so sick of this scarcity mindset.

We will have better and cheaper intelligence in the future than we have now. This is not Uber. Inference is profitable for these companies. Looking at API pricing and assuming that reflects the cost basis is dumb.

It costs less for OpenAI to serve GPT-5.5 than it did to serve GPT-4. An H100 is more valuable today than it was five years ago because it can serve more intelligence per token.

Jevons paradox and short-term crunches may cause some swings, but the value of a token keeps increasing while the average token price decreases.

Chinese models are already a fraction of the cost, and we will have a mythos/fable-level open-source model by the end of the year. There is no “gotcha” where every AI company rugs you in unison.

Stop trying to figure out how this screws you. Start figuring out what cool shit you can build with it.

bilateron I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

That's fair but I felt you held up these companies and founders as these demigods running this well oiled operation and yet I remember looking up those companies and all quietly folded within a few years of your book coming out.

My point is you were not able to demonstrate any correlation with your suggested methods with startup success. A company could do the exact opposite of what you recommend and be successful. Or follow it to a tee and fail which is what all of them did (happy to hear about any counter examples here from the original book). So what exactly is the point if you can't even move the needle a little bit?