jiggawatts

I don’t want to be aroused by my turn-by-turn street directions, thanks.

Now it just says something like "A message in a different language".

"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.

For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!

It reminds me of the export controls on PlayStation 2 consoles because it was deemed that 6 gigaflops was a "dangerous" amount of computer power, and it couldn't be allowed to fall into the hands of opposing militaries: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...

Now the phone in my pocket does 2,500 gigaflops on battery power, and nobody seems interested in banning its export because of that.

Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.

Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.

A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.

Etc…

The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.

It gave me the verbal answer in miles, but the on-screen pop up showed the answer in kilometres.

Never mind that this is a failure of internationalisation (because I live outside one of the two backwards places that hasn’t yet caught up to metric.)

The inconsistency between verbal and written answers is just… bizarre. I’ve never seen an AI agentic system wired like this!

I have heard that shadow banning is more commonly used on Reddit than here, which just makes the problem worse: banning humans but allowing bots through.

PS: someone showed that around the time GPT 4 was released the use of em-dash on Reddit increased from 5% to 20% of comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1kfg9b8/oc...

The only way these companies get put in their place is if their products are used to exfiltrate the video or audio of a powerful politician doing something compromising.

Here in Australia cops liked to hide behind bushes at the bottom of a hill with a speed camera / radar as a revenue collection exercise. They kept fining politicians speeding between Sydney and Canberra, and used photos as evidence showing said politicians with women other than their wives in the passenger seats. So the rules were changed so every speed camera needs at least three warning signs before you reach it.

Yeah, it’s naked self interest but it’s the only way things get done in the world.

Someone, perhaps a white hat hacker, needs to start hacking into LG TVs and publishing senators’ wives screaming the name of “the help” in ecstasy while the man of the house is in DC. Or post audio of senators accepting bribes. Whatever, use your imagination!

Suddenly, almost miraculously, privacy will matter, LG executives will be dragged over hot coals, some might even go to federal prison over wire tapping or espionage charges. Same as Huawei.

But my mark words, until a Senator feels burning hot shame over something exfiltrated from their TV, exactly zero changes will happen to consumer protection laws.

LG will do damage control for a few days.

By next week you will all forget this.

Nothing will change.

Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.

On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.

I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.

That's an excuse, not the reason.

IntelliJ RustRover has been around for years.

Similarly, VS Code has had Rust plugins written by the community in their spare time years ago.

By that I mean that I really do understand your position, but I also deeply understand the flawed logic that created that attitude in you. I can't agree with it, because I see the inconsistency, I recognise the motivation, and I know that it is fundamentally about something else entirely.

The angry soccer mom shouting at the dad with the DSLR camera isn't angry about her kid's picture getting taken.

She's scared of the pedophiles and her children's innocence being violated by forces beyond her control. The big camera is a symbol to fight against, something out-of-place and even vulgar in its nature.

That same person won't even notice the half a dozen phones people pull out to take pictures of her kid at the game. Won't bat an eye. No complaints. That's normal, that's fine, that's just for social media!

This watch thing is just an accessibility feature. That's all it is. Nothing more. Trust me: NOBODY will ever use it to spy on you, or snoop on you, or furtively check past conversations they had with you. Ever. It... just won't happen. That's not a thing, will never be a thing, and is in no shape, way, or form harmful to your organic human conversations, or whatever.

You're upset about something else. I don't know what it is specifically, but if I dare guess, it's something like the Flock cameras. The surveillance state. Meta and Google hoovering up everyone's personal data by the exabyte, and weaponising it against them. Our children's innocence ruined by algorithms tuned to addict them. "Smart" televisions taking screenshots and even sending audio recordings to foreign data centres. Car navigation camera images uploaded for AI training, or who knows what else. On and on, and on!

I get it, I do.

We're losing our privacy. We're increasingly monitored and controlled.

We live in a world that George Orwell could not have imagined in his worst nightmares.

We have files on us so detailed that it would make a KGB spook blush.

Unless you live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, you've already bathed in a sea of cameras and microphones, many of which are always on in some sense or another.

Apple Watch isn't the problem here. It already had a microphone, in every edition, going back to the first one. It could already "surreptitiously" record you!

What Apple's engineers have done is add an accessibility feature for the old and hard of hearing in the most secure and privacy-preserving way imaginable.

You're getting worked up about it to a level that makes no logical sense whatsoever because you're not upset about it, you're not upset about the specifics of its privacy, you're upset about... <waves hands>... everything.

I get it.

The AIs are already beyond human capability in some areas, and will be beyond human in all areas within single-digit years.

If someone is following you around within earshot and fiddling with... a notepad and pencil or a watch or a phone or a tape recorder, then yes, you have reason to be upset. I agree.

The ability of the Apple Watch to do what has always been possible doesn't materially change your privacy. [1]

Fundamentally, this is an accessibility feature, and Apple -- and other vendors -- have already shipped several similar ones. Were you equally upset by those too? AirProds already 'record' all audio around them! They can even be used as listening devices! https://support.apple.com/en-au/102479

This reminds me of parents getting hysterical when someone pulls out a DSLR at a kid's soccer game, while standing next to half a dozen parents who are all taking pictures with the phones and immediately uploading them to Meta.

[1] There are valid arguments to be made that this will be normalised and cloned... badly by Chinese and South Korean vendors without the privacy safeguards, at which point it is "too late" to put the genie back in the bottle.

You’re sounding… hysterical.

Even if you regularly say things that must never be tied back to you, like.. you are in the mafia or you’re an actual spy or whatever, and every single person around you has this on their wrist listening to every word you say all of the time… Nothing changes for you.

The users of the watches still have to take action to use the audio, which they too would have heard anyway, and could have transcribed and texted to someone or written down.

Oh… wait… are you MIB? Are you concerned that your memory eraser wand won’t wipe Apple Watch recordings of the last 15 seconds, allowing the public to finally know about aliens amongst us?

I know that sounds silly, but unless you can erase the memories stored in human brains, then you must realise that everything you say in the presence of meat computers with audio listening devices attached (ears) can be recorded (memorised).

Just because your voice was recorded doesn’t necessarily mean it can be played back and/or “stolen”.

Your soul won’t be sucked out through Apple Watches.

People love to get worked up over technology that is actually private and secure.

Meanwhile they’ll use Google and Facebook without a second thought.

Is a load bearing term! (pardon the pun).

AIs are now tackling Millennium Prize Problems, which our best and brightest have failed to solve, despite trying very hard for decades to claim the $1 million reward money, not to mention the fame!

You have no way to judge from the AIs of "today" what the AIs of... literally tomorrow (not even next year) will be able to do in terms of replacing humans.

The supposed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem was done with an unreleased OpenAI model that is already 2x as good at mathematics as GPT Astra, which was released mere days ago!

I'm already seeing comments by distraught mathematicians saying that they feel like they've made a mistake in their career choices.

Others are saying that their joy for their work has turned to ashes because "why bother" when an AI can do the same, but a thousand times faster!?

The retail price is not the cost.

Not to mention that the exponential plummeting cost of tokens means that that $15 million will be a "pocket change" within a decade or less: https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/

It feels like the "tide is rising" where the minimum level of skill applied to every aspect of everything will inexorably rise to "whatever an LLM can do", which is already pushing past PhD level.

I noticed the overuse of the word "sharper" or "sharp" in a science paper on ArXiV and my first reaction was "Ewww... AI slop!", but then I checked the date and it was 2020.

It looks like at least some AI-isms stem from the particular style of language commonly used in science papers. Several frontier labs have mentioned heavily weighting those during pre-training because higher quality inputs result in a higher quality model.

It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure.

They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site.

Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase.

This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners.

The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.

The problem is that they all utilise a different 10%.

That’s the whole point of this approach — women don’t get drowned in spam from men.

Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you.

Evidence is that that works out better.

This leads to difficulties running a dating site because women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations.

Many women only ever join dating sites as an ego boost, with no intention to actually go on dates.

I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you.

Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date.

Etc…

It would be very hard to bootstrap, but once going it would produce many more long term partnerships than “swipe right” style apps.

We already have sufficient hardware that algorithmic (software) improvements alone should get us to GPT 7 / Greek Reference 6 even if not a single new chip is delivered to an AI data center ever again, starting today.