falcor84

> Make as much money as you can, starting now.

It's such an uninspired prompt. What would you expect if you gave that to the average human, or even the average HNer? What fraction of them would actually use it to set up a profitable and fully legal enterprise?

But the goal here is not to run 42km; to stay with the outdoors metaphor, it's more like deciding where and how to set up a bivouac - use whatever tools you have at your disposal to analyze the area you're in, and find the best site to stay in overnight.

But it's not "waiting on the output of an LLM for 40 hours" any more than a regular hackathon is "waiting for my damn teammates to finish their part for 40 hours". From my experience using agentic coding for hackathons, the best teams are those that coordinate with the AI agents in relatively quick cadence, generally giving it small tasks and steering it often. Teams may want to run some long-running sessions too, especially closer to the deadline, but even then, they'd probably want to run and follow several sessions in parallel, and continuously inspect their work so that they have reasonable confidence that their main efforts will wrap up before the deadline. There is an art to it.

Yes, but that sounds to me exactly the process vs. outcome distinction that the parent made, rather than a difference in the intent to communicate.

> droplets which travel back onto the floor and user

I suppose this disproves Tufte's "There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software."

I think we are finally seeing the realization of https://xkcd.com/810/

> For AGI to benefit all of humanity, we believe it must be democratically governed.

That's a very bold opening statement that they don't really come back to. What would that mean? Who would this demos include?

> somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me

I don't see why that would exclude GenAI - you have an idea, you write a prompt, you get something that's sort of but not quite what you were going for, so you iterate a bit until it's good enough to communicate what you wanted.

> If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans

I apologise for the tactlessness, but it just made me think of Tom Lehrer's lyrics about Wernher von Braun:

> "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun.

All of those charts seem to have a lot more noise than signal.

But what does it mean in practice? Obviously we humans also have a limited cognitive capacity.

Let me offer a thought experiment: Let's say that tomorrow we discover Atlantis, with a treasure trove of books about their culture and science, written in a dialect of ancient Greek that we know how to start to analyze, but no one can read fluently. And let's say that you are a billionaire really curious about their culture and want to converse with an "Atlantean expert" as soon as possible. Would you invest your money in a "we-hate-ai-slop(tm)" group of researchers who would abhor AI and instead delegate the books to a massive number of human grad students? Or in a small group of researchers who are willing to use AI agents to go over these? Or maybe just open a chat session with GPT-6 yourself immediately? What would most effectively assuage your curiosity?

Yes, this, and we need to have this progressive tax be over the company's total assets, including subsidiaries.

Sorry, yes, I genuinely took a long time to understand, and this then took me on quite the rabbit hole, thanks, to you and the others on the thread.

Oh, I'm familiar with that; I thought that the parent meant that there are people who make money directly from the copyright on the patterns rather than the artifacts they sell. Are there?

Maybe not the strongest, but definitely a case. For example, it's my understanding that many scholars believe that The Odyssey is fan fiction by a separate author(s) to that/those of The Iliad.

> Knitters and crocheters who create patterns?

Wow, is that a thing? If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear more about these vocations and how they make money.

I can assure you that people had original ideas before the invention of copyright 300 years ago.

From my perspective from reading and watching fan fiction, these unofficial derived works are typically significantly more distinct and interesting than the official sequels, and I'd be cool with these getting bigger budgets.

I'm not an artist and might be entirely wrong, but my understanding is that for 99% of artists, over 99% of their revenue is from concerts tickets, merch and other physical products, rather than digital/broadcast plays, so changing this to zero wouldn't really affect them, but would act to reduce the power of the labels and other intermediaries over them.

> it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes

Why? I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities. And we already have autonomous cars and drones navigate and function reasonably well. So I don't see any reason to believe it's impossible. And even if terabytes aren't sufficient, there's no real barrier to increasing capacity.

If we're doing book recommendations, I quite recommend the essays in https://academic.oup.com/mit-press-scholarship-online/book/1... and particularly the philosophical discussion there of whether "robot sex" is an oxymoron, as a robot almost by definition cannot dissent, so it might only be "robot-assisted masturbation"

That's not obvious at all, particularly given the myriad movies trying to scare us about the dangers of robots taking over that.

Thinking about the primitive command verbs that they mention:

> The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like “read” (for example, “get temperature”) or “write” (for example, “set temperature”)—that any hardware device can understand and act on.

... I'm now wondering, what is the proper verb for launching a nuclear weapon? I suppose in HTTP it would be a POST, but should we be more specific here? /s

Direct Link to the open letter:

https://openai.com/collective-cyberdefense

To the best of my knowledge, that isn't true anymore, and nowadays you'd only get hired to do RLHF if you have particular skills beyond what can be achieved by just running other models against it.

What exactly are you questioning?

For what it's worth, LLMs don't really suffer from incontinence, so at least that part is pretty much a solved problem.

Not everyone in the world has $20/month of disposable income, nor does everyone have the disposable time to learn how to make it hugely useful to them.

Also, these are just the numbers for OpenAI. A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.

> why aren't people buying?

They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud.

[0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

What do you mean? I don't see how Amazon would go out of business if they show the best match for the thing you just searched for higher than the ads.