They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.
I’m in month 5 of not having access to any social network, and although the first weeks I felt tempted to reinstall X and Reddit, I’m at a point where I don’t think I’m ever coming back. There are still great spaces like HN where you can consume content and participate in debates. I do miss some of the fun stuff, but it wasn’t worth being exposed to all the other crap for a few laughs a day.
With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.
Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it
“ This time he didn’t have a choice. He was loaded into an ambulance for a six-mile transfer, evaluated without additional treatment, and sent home the same night.”
This is weird, why didn’t he have a choice? I have literally walked out of a hospital with IVs still attached to my arms when I disagreed on course of treatment that included hospitalization for a case of white coat syndrome. They also wanted me to wait one hour to sign a waiver, which I unkindly refused.
Land is not very expensive in most suburbs, but houses have become huge, the average size in the area where I live is 2700 sf. That’s because building a 3000 sf home doesn’t take twice the time and labor a 1500 sf takes, so there’s an economic incentive to build bigger homes. People also look for more space today than 40 years ago. A 1500 sf house would be considered a very small house and would likely be very hard to sell. Again, the average sf price remains in the low $200, so that’s not a huge difference to 40-50 years ago, factoring inflation. Not to mention you get much better quality materials, appliances and construction today. So, the fix appears to be more small homes, ideally condos, in urban areas just like many other countries do. The problem is, it is technically impossible to build multi family in most cities in America due to the ridiculous zoning laws and ordinances by city governments and neighborhood associations. If you own a lot in a city neighborhood and try to build an apartment building you will likely face years of court battles.
It seems that per sf house prices haven’t gone up that much. We romanticize the idea of older generations being able up afford a home, but those houses were a lot smaller than they are today, the average size I think was around 1500 sf, and a family of 5 lived there. Cities were also not as livable as they are today. Take for example NYC in the 1970s and 80s, where a young photographer could afford an apartment in Manhattan, with the caveat that the area was riddled with crime. Then there are the city ordinances that discourage multi family housing, so if you are a builder and you need to decide whether spend years fighting in court vs going to the suburbs and build large homes, that’s a very easy decision to make. The current housing deficit sits around 3-4 million homes.
This could work with someone you don’t know well and should be the default approach. But you also need to trust your instinct and know when debating it’s not worth pursuing. It could be a coworker you have known for years who has certain toxic attitude. Humans are complex beings, we don’t know what’s going on with other people’s lives and minds. It takes years of dedicated study and experience to attempt to understand other people’s issues. You are not going to suddenly become a psychologist or behavioral therapist by just listening and kindly discussing. Some of these attitudes have an underlying problem that has nothing to do with work, it could be upbringing or mental health, or a combination. It just happens that Software Engineers may be more likely to suffer from these problems than people in other professions, just by the nature of it.
Having gone through IVF multiple times, there’s usually a pretty rigorous process and it is highly regulated in many countries. In some places you need genetic screenings when using donors. I was unaware that I was carrying a mutation for a difficult to diagnose, fatal but relatively easy to treat disease if caught early, which explained at least two cases in my family history. If the donor happened to carry the same mutation, the chances of having an offspring with the disease was around 25%. So in my view, IVF if done right, could actually make healthier humans. And yes, this genetic screenings are available to anyone not only IVF patients, but it is extremely unlikely that people will use them when conceiving naturally, because first, they aren’t cheap and secondly there’s some sort of tabu about asking your partner for genetic testing, and even if the test comes back positive for some type of disease, what would people do anyway?
You always buy fossil fuels with an EV, not directly but you do. When you stop at the plaza for a quick super charge there’s no way to tell where is the energy sourced from, it could very well be from a diesel generator a few miles down the road. The value is in all the parts found in an ICE that need servicing or replacement that you don’t have in an EV. With an EV you basically need tires and maybe brakes once every 8-10 years, no oil and fluids, no oil or engine filters, water pumps, spark plugs, valves, seals, etc etc
“…live video interviews are now easily gamed by real-time assistance tools.”
I am not too sure about that. Possible, yes. Easily? only if the interviewer sucks at interviewing. If are “gamed” during live interviews, you probably should not be interviewing.
"if you ever need a copy of your data, members can always request and download their content, including original files, through the Flickr Data section of your settings."
This seems besides unethical also illegal. Never assume companies have good legal counsel, particularly in the LLMs era. There are consumer protection laws and in the US they are by state. Sometimes all it takes is completing a 5 min form in the state AG’s website. Sure, $5 is not a lot of money, but screw them.
Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?
I haven’t fact checked, but according to Evans big telecom builders didn’t make a lot of money after all the capacity investment. Some actually went bankrupt or got acquired as distressed assets. Big tech was very profitable monetizing that same infrastructure.
I have used Fable only once to do an in depth codebase review of a complex system. I asked it to flag deviations from a particular design and also compile a list of vulnerabilities. It took about 15-20 minutes. The result was very similar to Codex for the most critical findings, different suggestions on how to address them but it found exactly the same critical issues as Codex. This is still not a good test to evaluate Fable. But my feeling is that the latest models are all pretty good and now it comes down to your personal setup and workflow, that’s where you can get the productivity gains IMO. It’s like picking between MacOS or Windows as development environment. For some Windows sucks and for a some is the opposite, but both groups of people can be equally productive if they know their environments well and know how to go around their respective limitations.
Yes, and pricing is one of the features of a commodity, because users can jump back and forth between services, it becomes a pricing race to the bottom. Agree also that you don’t need the best model all the time. You could have the most powerful model draft the design, requirements, guidelines, policies or whatnot then get the lower tier models execute it. Then again you can have the most powerful model do the testing and review, and give back feedback, rinse and repeat. Just like in the real world you don’t need an entire staff of lead engineers.
I use both Claude and Codex and don’t see any meaningful difference between the two. My use case is modeling semi complex physical processes (energy and manufacturing) in code for simulations. I also have to do a good fair of automation via scripting in Python or PowerShell for manipulating data as well as legacy code analysis (C, Fortran, COBOL). Given I provide the models with the information and documentation they need, both perform very similarly. I recently did a full codebase review (for design patterns and vulnerabilities) and both Codex and Fable agreed 100% about the most critical findings. I do very little front end development, although some of my automation scripts have TUIs and again no problem with either Claude or Codex generating them for me. At this point I go with the less expensive, which seems to be Codex. With the $100 plan I rarely hit the limits. With Claude I max out my plan in about 4-6 hours of work.
Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
With Anthropic history of using the news as their free marketing agency, I remain a bit skeptical. My guess is that something will be worked out in the next hours or days and Fable will be back.
A lot of comes from state initiatives too. Texas being conservative also happens to be very pro solar. I’m in the business and we have some great projects there. The US military is also pushing solar at their facilities. Then you have many private-state partnerships like tolls investing a lot in solar. The outlook in general is pretty positive in the US, a lot more than what people would think.
If your A+ senior developer spends 8 months working on a feature that ultimately doesn’t get shipped or a MVP that gets killed, then you wasted that A+ senior developer and their productivity was the same as the other two B+ engineers that also worked on the project. This is actually a very common issue and usually ignored when it comes to things like hiring or assigning resources to a project. AI won’t change that in a meaningful way, your team may just finish their tasks a lot faster but the bureaucratic layer above will likely remain the same, which will make any AI coding gains negligible. Companies would have to be rebuilt from the top down for AI and that’s very unlikely to happen.