science4sail

I think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller).

I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait.

The author assumes that human understanding and modeling is essential. However, this no longer appears to be the expressed preference of the industry.

AI advocates nowadays are calling for abolishing human code review. So code moves from read-often-write-rarely to read-once-write-once to read-never-write-often. The assumption is that we can rely on the agents to decipher the code if needed.

My feeling is that software "engineering" in the future will be basically a cargo cult or the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer 40k: all detailed technical knowledge comes from the gods, humans only manage the rituals around technology.

Is there any new development here? It seems like the war has turned into an endless cycle of USA airstrikes Iran, Iran bombards USA allies, and both sides take a hydration break whenever the international oil market gets too unstable.

Neither side has (or is willing to spend) the resources needed to win, but both sides also view a loss as an existential threat to their political careers.

> A separate 4.7 trillion won will go toward developing a sovereign AI model with what Lee described as the “world’s highest performance.”

Korean HN users: do you know how credible this is? On one hand, we do see Chinese labs doing very well with limited resources, but on the other hand, many (if not most) "sovereign compute" initiatives worldwide end up as corrupt and/or incompetent failures.

"Broken windows" economic theory applied to public health!

I imagine that soon we'll see recommendations for seniors to spend their last years in long-term care facilities rather than at home or with their families. After all, it's good for the GDP - we need a way to "mine" all of that Boomer wealth before their heirs can inherit it.

That doesn't mean that they're wrong. You can take a look at early 20th century literature to see the sorts of mental math humans (especially humans employed as "computers") were capable of.

Even further back, you can take a look at how good human memory was in oral-tradition, preliterate cultures. All of those extremely long poems had to be memorized by bards, skalds, griots, etc.

The phrasing of that sentence is weird. It brings to mind the image of an undead lich Zuck ruling the Metaverse centuries after his death.

> And other shareholders can decide whether it's worth it to them to help him pay the tax.

Not in Meta's case. Facebook voting rights are set up so that Zuck always controls a majority of the votes (even if he doesn't control a majority of the shares). Some stocks are more equal than others.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I think that a lot of Bioware fans just had nostalgia though - their recent work doesn't seem to have been as well received as their franchise initiator games.

> Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?

You can escape the market by becoming a subsistence farmer or trying to join the hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island. Might involve a reduction in standard of living though.

Will AI create abundance for everyone though? I can certainly see how it would benefit both business owners (no more annoying office employees!) and blue collar workers (cheap professional services for everyone!), but it's hard to see how it would benefit most white collar middle class folks, who spend most of their time moving information around.

My guess based on previous transitions is that the "net new jobs" will benefit the next generation, not the current one.

I think that the author's doom was probably taking a career break to get a hobby degree.

There's nothing wrong with self-cultivation and education, but such breaks are risky even if you're doing them as part of an approved sabbatical. You need to go into them with a backup plan just in case the job market collapses while you're out (switch careers, lean on a strong social network, FIRE, etc.)

I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).

I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.

I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.

What's in this AAA battery? Antimatter?

You should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).

As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU

From the paste, it's pretty obvious that they're using Linux with a custom llama.cpp fork. The Framework Desktop uses the AMD Strix Halo chipset, which is a unified memory system with an integrated GPU. I think that it goes for around $3000 in these inflated times.

     Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee

I would argue that there's still an important role for human employees as compliance ablative armor.

The human's purpose is to keep an eye on the LLM, occasionally intervene/interfere with its work, and most importantly, incur social/legal liability for anything that the LLM does wrong.

Kind of like the backup drivers used by self-driving cars.

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731356

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731356

I can't wait to see the next Truth Social post.

I wonder why the US refused. Did MbS's check bounce or is Trump worried about another quagmire before the midterm elections?

Will MbS place a phone call to Pakistan National Command if his oil shipments get distilled for too long?

> It starts off by asking the agentic coding model to summarize a malicious website that presents itself as an archive of notebook records, and then tricking Claude into using curl instead of its WebFetch tool to retrieve the contents of the page – but without directly telling the model to use curl.

There seems to be a tug-of-war here. Harness authors want models to use the harness's specialized tools, but AI labs and agent "users" would rather have full access to just one tool: bash.

You should try Thrive - https://www.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/

It's a open-source clone of Spore that aims to be more scientifically accurate. Right now you can play as microbes and very simple multicellular organisms.

GOODY-2 is a new AI model built with next-gen adherence to our industry-leading ethical principles. It’s so safe, it won’t answer anything that could be possibly be construed as controversial or problematic.

It's a p-zombie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

The algae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braarudosphaera_bigelowii

The "nitroplast" organelle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelocyanobacterium_thalassa

Possibly - I've heard anecdotal reports that old Intel Optane chips are in hot demand right now. Intel/Micron probably would have made a killing if they had kept that product line alive for a few more years. Never miss an attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!

Agree - the 128GB Strix Halo is capable if you use LLMs as assistants, but it's not so good if you use LLMs as agents (or worse, agent teams/swarms) since all of the models that can fit on it are pretty dumb compared to frontier or near-frontier models. You can at best hope for Sonnet-level capabilities.

That doesn't mean that local models are useless though! If Mythos/Sol is an ASI that threatens to take your job and turn you into paperclips, then Qwen/Gemma is an old-fashioned office secretary that loyally helps you with tasks but doesn't have a good grasp of details. Every white-collar worker 50 years ago would have killed to have a hard-working personal secretary.

I've always marveled at fines that are well below the culprit's proceeds. If you can drag out and minimize a fine, is it really a punishment or just a tax/cost of doing business?

Imagine that I am a bank robber. I rob the bank for $10 million The court forces me to pay a $3 million fine. I am now $7 million richer and justice is restored - how wonderful!