stephc_int13

It is never really “for free”.

It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.

They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.

No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.

I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen.

And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges.

This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.

No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.

Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.

I have not, but I am curious.

I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.

The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.

This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.

The issue with billionaires is that some of them got insanely rich while being net negative from a societal perspective.

The most famous ones ended-up in prison (Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Epstein, Bernie Madoff) but anyone with a basic grasp of statistics and criminal behavior know that many others will escape the justice system forever.

It does not mean that all billionaires are bad, the criminals are not the majority, but there are enough criminals to justify skepticism and scrutiny.

The merge could be named Musk Industries, quite fitting considering his hubris and association with comic books.

Not the same solar panels. As with most equipment, the constraints are very different in space/orbit, and the suppliers are not the same.

They probably have some kind of fallback system, but the visual-inertial odometry they are using for spatial positioning that is working pretty well when stationary (at home) tend to break badly on a train or plane.

His rhetoric is a bit obsessive and frankly biased against AI.

That said, I think his voice is useful as a counter to the mainstream opinion.

Given the amount of investments, approaching AI from the angle of economics seems correct.

We all have some level of personal experience using AI/LLMs, both chatbots and coding tools, and I personally enjoy using them, but I am sure this experience is relevant in this discussion.

I also enjoy luxury hotels, gourmet food, jet skis and helicopters, but this is not something I indulge in often because of the cost-utility ratio.

The real cost of AI may or may not be lower than its utility. The bet is that utility is increasing while cost is falling.

I agree about the C stdlib being outdated and the worst part of C. This is why I don't use it.

A new modern C standard library would be a very good thing. But I am ok writing my own, tailored for my own needs and style.

Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.

I am generally against the idea of language support for meta-programming, even using C macros or C++ templates.

I do a lot of meta-programming/codegen with external tooling.

I know, and I don't see unused return values as an error, it should be a warning at best.

And the compiler should be just a bit smarter to avoid the .{} thing when it is not strictly necessary.

Lindy effect is very strong in the programming languages world.

Zig is a very interesting and well built language, but it is also niche, unstable and not offering radical improvements over C.

C, as the foundation of all modern kernels and system tools, among many other things, is extremely unlikely to go away soon.

Everything you do in Zig can be done almost in the same way in C or C++.

I would say the real value of Zig is in the standard library that is more modern and arguably better.

Encapsulating arguments inside .{} seems superfluous and noisy.

I'm sure this can be rationalized in some way, to either simplify parsing or solve some rare ambiguity, but I just don't see it.

I know this is a minor thing and can be considered as nitpicky, and I expect some friction with syntax when learning a new language, but I just can't stand things I see as gratuitous. Same with the forced use of _ = foo(.{}); to avoid compiling errors...

It is not about sunlight or UV. And it is not "just genetics".

The natural rest position of the human eye is to focus at the infinite. Focusing on closer objects like books or screens requires a constant effort (we don't feel it).

The eye simply adapts and elongate to relieve some of the strain. Wearing corrective lenses further amplify the process.

If you want your kids to have perfect vision they should spend a lot of time playing outside, until early adulthood.

I am guessing that Bitcoin crashing would be bad new for ya.

It seems that the main issue with AI is often not what sci-fi or EA-adjacent prophets are trying to warn us about, but the insidious dangers of the failure modes.

We are collectively not well calibrated to deal with systems that seems capable but fails in surprising ways.

Commercial planes are still under the responsibility and control of highly trained human pilots, even if I am pretty sure that full automation would be technically feasible, even without relying on modern AI, I don't think any companies would be comfortable with the liability.

Here is a prediction about Bitcoin: there will be a financial crash at some point in the future, maybe it will be the AI bubble, maybe because of oil, shortages, something entirely unforeseen or some combination of those things, but if there is something to know about cycles is that crashes happens.

And because Bitcoin is now old enough that most people understand what it is, the hype has vanished, it won't survive the global fear or losing it all.

I see any kind automation as a good thing as long as it is reliable enough. We stopped copying books manually a long time ago, and the craft was lost, most of us can't do complex calculations manually etc. but it does not matter as long as we can rely on calculators and computers to do it.

At this stage, the current wave of AI is not reliable enough that it would be safe to lose the abilities it can replace.

The failures modes are often turned into memes and jokes, but they are the thing we should really pay attention to, IMO.

There is not enough pushback against this.

I don't think anyone is fully comfortable with it but it is considered "standard practice".

It wasn't such a huge issue until recently because processing all of this was a burden, but obviously this can be automated very well now.

The trend is genuinely dystopian.

The reality is that many CEOs don't really know what they are doing.

The disruption is not following their playbook.

When faced with uncertainty we tend to look at past examples, the industrial revolution, the internet, electrification, etc. I think it is a weak predictor.

We don't know. But I have the feeling that it is going to be worse before it is getting better.

There are huge signs of capital misallocation and public sentiment backlash, the curve ahead seems likely to look a lot more like a roller coaster than a smooth ride.

C++ being more performant than C is not something that I've seen in any benchmarks or personal experience.

In practice, some of the cases about specialization that was made possible with C++ constructs is also achieved by modern C compilers.

The takeoff looked almost normal but I noticed a slight drift from vertical, likely because one of the engines was dead or dying. Overall the V3 is supposed to be an upgrade but actual progress is more or less stalling compared V2.

The main issue with this reasoning is that the hardware substrate for AI and good old computing is the same.

All governed by Moore's Law, what happened then seems extremely unlikely to happen again, the curve is a sigmoid and we're much closer to the flat end now.

I agree with both the gist of the article and your comment.

In the case of the well known FAANG and other similarly structured large software companies, everyone working there or having approached them know how bloated and inefficient they are.

What is happening is likely a long-term plan to completely restructure themselves, progressively shedding headcount while using it as a disciplinary tactic.

I am sure they understand the cost and the effect on morale.

But they are foreseeing radical changes and they want to be ready and slim before the storm.

The thing is that while EU is allied with the US, they are also competitors in many markets.

Airbus is using Palantir services. The competition between Boeing and Airbus has often be brutal and dirty, and considered significant at the state level.

The fact that a company like Palantir be allowed to insert themselves in the software infrastructure of a critical company that is often working against the interest of the US seems very weird to me.

I don't understand how Palantir managed to sell their services outside of the US, given their deep ties to CIA, political positions and involment with US goverments.

My intuition would be that the resistance would come from grumpy old guys like me who spent most of their lives perfecting their craft.