narrator

Engineering has kind of moved on in a weird way from web frameworks. Now AI just writes document.getElementById('longVariableName') javascript and straight SQL without complaining at all. The abstraction isn't as important as it used to be because AI doesn't mind typing.

Performative ignorance is when you dispute something supported by tons of empirical evidence with a few anecdotes and whatever you just made up and expect me to spend time refuting it. It's the same technique flat earthers and young earth creationists use.

They actually learned it from Stalin who ran organized crime gangs before the revolution that did extortion, racketeering, armed robbery, and piracy on the high seas among other things to fund Lenin's revolution. Young Stalin by Montefiore gets really deep into this. It's a very interesting read.

North Korea runs like a big organized crime family that specializes in forced labor human trafficking and drugs. I've read that they even operate overseas businesses that send slaves that aren't allowed to leave those businesses such as for timber harvesting in the Russian far east and various businesses in South East Asia.

The Latin American cartels operate almost like miniature North Koreas.

Also on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313090844/https://www.reddi...

The wayback machine got it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313090844/https://www.reddi...

I mean you're all going to get killed by fully autonomous China AI war robots in 10 years anyway if you're not pure blood Han Chinese, but hey at least you'll provide something to laugh at for future Chinese Communist party history scholars. They will say, "Look at the stupid Baizuos, our propaganda ops convinced them all to commit collective suicide. Stupid barbarians. They proved they are an inferior race."

Not joking, I've heard from sources that hardliners in the CCP think they can exterminate all white people followed later by all non-Han, but just keep on going along disarming yourselves for woke points. This is like unilaterally destroying all your nuclear weapons in 1946 and hoping the Soviets do to.

I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know.

There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.

Wait till we get ubiquitous physical robots. The crime at scale potential will be completely apocalyptic. In some places around the world, I imagine you won't be able to go outside without a bodyguard robot.

Anyone who regularly tries to rent GPUs on VPS providers knows that they often sell out. This isn't a market with lots of capacity nobody needs. In the dot.com bubble there was lots of dark fiber nobody was using. In this bubble, almost every high-end GPU is being used fully by someone.

Yup, just ask Maduro. He called Trump's bluff and he's doing fine.

As an old-timer, the biggest difference between now and the 80s and 90s is that in the 80s and 90s entertainment was relatively scarce. An album cost $20, which was a lot in those days. You could get movies, but you had to go to the video store and remember to return them, and the selection was often limited. If you liked some weird band, most record stores didn't have it. In the 80s TV was very limited and you had to get home in time.

So today entertainment is unlimited and everywhere, personalized and you can have more free entertainment than you could ever watch in a million years. This means other forms of entertainment like hanging out with friends, going to the symphony, the opera, or out to the movies, or just hanging out in public are much less valuable than they used to be.

One example: As a teenager, I used to go to a special screening of a Warren Miller film about extreme skiing that they would do once a year. This was a big annual event where we would watch daredevils ski and do tricks with old Warren narrating and pay $12 to get in. They wouldn't have anything like that on regular TV. Now, there is an unlimited amount of that stuff on almost every single video platform on the internet.

Also, one other huge notable difference was pornography was very hard to get a hold of, and now it's available in unlimited amounts for free. This warps society in all kinds of weird ways. For instance, women were mysterious, incredibly alluring, and much more irresistable in those days. Just seeing cleavage was a big deal! Now all that mystery is totally gone for men who don't abstain from pornography, and young men seem hugely demotivated to date.

Performative ignorance. Look it up.

That lesson plan is a good practical start. I think it misses the very big picture of what we've created and the awesomeness of it.

The simplest explanation I can give is we have a machine that you feed it some text from the internet, and you turn the crank. Most machines we've had previously would stop getting better at predicting the next word after a few thousand cranks. You can crank the crank on an LLM 10^20 times and it will still get smarter. It will get so smart so quickly that no human can fit in their mind all the complexity of what it's built inside of it except through indirect methods but we know that it's getting smarter through benchmarks and some reasonably simple proofs that it can simulate any electronic circuit. We only understand how it works by the smallest increment of its intelligence improvement and through induction understanding that that should lead to further improvements in its intelligence.

Unlike biological organisms, AI has no time preference. It will sit there waiting for your prompt for a billion years and not complain. However, time passing is very important to biological organisms.

It's more than that. If you ask ChatGPT what's the quickest legal way to get huge muscles, or live as long as possible it will tell you diet and exercise. If you ask Grok, it will mention peptides, gene therapy, various supplements, testosterone therapy, etc. ChatGPT ignores these or even says they are bad. It basically treats its audience as a bunch of suicidally reckless teenagers.

Fair point actually. touché.

This reminds me about how Soulja Boy just used a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and a cheap microphone and recorded all his songs that made him millions.[1] Edit: Ok this was a big team of VFX producers who did this. Still, prices are coming down dramatically in general, but yeah that idea is a bit of an underfit to this case.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1rjhVe59ek

What "Star Trek Academy" that Paramount just put out did to the Star Trek franchise is what I'm expecting them to do to Dilbert.

You can hate the United States all you want, memorize your little red book of Mao, but you still can't become a naturalized citizen in China cause you aren't Chinese by blood.

However, you can't emigrate to China. There are less than 20,000 naturalized citizens in the whole country. You will always be a barbarian, bro.

The code that's assembling the context to send to the LLM and gating its access to tools can check these deterministically.

I think what we have to do is making each piece of context have a permission level. That context that contains our AWS key is not permitted to be used when calling evil.com webservices. Claude will look at all the permissions used to create the current context and it's about to call evil.com and it will say whoops, can't call evil.com, let me regenerate the context from any context I have that is ok to call evil.com with like the text of a wikipedia article or something like that.

I always said that Apple does not have the cloud GPU power to deliver a good AI experience to their huge customer base, no matter how good their developers are. They have to find someone with a lot of GPUs that can handle the workload, and that's Google.

The tokens cost the same in Bangalore as they do in San Francisco. The robots will be able to make stuff in San Francisco just as well as they do in Bangalore. The only thing that will matters is natural resource availability and who has more fierce NIMBYs.

Non-performing loans of state-owned entities get bought by asset management companies (AMCs) with AMC liabilities. People's Bank of China liquifies AMC Liabilities so the banks keep lending.[1] AMCs often then can't pay because the state-owned entity isn't able to pay on the loan it bought. They then get bailed out by the Ministry of Finance, but the actual source of funds inside the government is difficult to discern [2].

[1] https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2024/apr/chinas... [2] https://newbagehot.yale.edu/docs/china-1999-asset-management...

How they do financial bailouts by printing their own debt-free money and having fine-grained control of the banking system is also something that the west doesn't do.

Hughes had untreated syphilis. He was highly promiscuous before modern antibiotics and he paid for it.

Hey, with all the de-industrializing Europe has been doing, everything is now made in China and the only decision western civilization has to make is how do we equally distribute those goods. I mean why do absolutely anything if they just do it China? You can just demand your share of the goods as a human right. They can't shut you down, you're the heroic consumer after all without which the economy wouldn't exist. /s

The haters on here are ridiculous. If everyone who ever had a product that failed in the market was called a fraud on HN then probably almost everyone would be. SpaceX failed on their first three launches. All the haters here would have voted to shut it all down. Glad Elon's able to recover from business failures without going to the HN comments section to find out what he should do next.