ticulatedspline

The read was very interesting, and I think you're right, mathematicians are still very much needed, in some sense now more than ever.

But the effect is the same across other professions. We need mathematicians, we need professional grounding but we only "need" experts.

Every step AI takes feels like it slices people off the bottom of a profession, making them less relevant, while simultaneously increasing demand for the top.

the vicious cycle I see is it will "Eat the middle", you need people with juuust enough acumen in a subject to drive the AI, to set a goal and nudge to a direction, and you need a real expert to look at the results with a critical eye but you don't need the middle of the curve. I think over time this will depress hiring and wages of new people, and stunt their progress towards expertise by destroying the middle ground. Then when our current experts retire we'll be left in a lurch.

> Computing has historically been a field of wizardry.

Counter argument, "historically" is not last year but closer to 2 decades ago.

modern computing has sat atop a mountain of sorcery for ages. You may be able to squint and call a good compiler a "tool of power" more than sorcery but there are plenty of other tech stacks that simply sit upon one opaque box after another.

And it's not unusual for sorcery to produce crap, even if it's production worth crap. Dreamweaver had a WYSIWYG editor ages ago and as someone who was hand crafting HTML in that era it's code was typically a mess.

Now that's the norm, almost nobody makes HTML by hand, some js framework does. And it's often shit, I've seen entire sources of nothing but <div> nested ad-nauseam, conjured up from the depths of "I-don't-care-as-long-as-it-works"

As an old curmudgeon I recoil at any service I can't interact with sans-phone. I hardly use mine for anything.

Just be glad your phone number is tied to your account, if you lose the number itself you are royally screwed, and basically anyone who gets your old number owns all your accounts now.

Isn't there an SMS option? buy a new phone and have them send you an OTP via SMS.

> once you're phone is gone, you are completely over with society?

yes, I'm waiting for the Black-Mirror episode where someone drops their phone and basically dies, can't contact anyone, can't unlock or start their car, can't get an uber, can't pay for anything, can't navigate without gps, can't log into anything etc.

Can you provide a compelling argument for why it should be illegal?

Isn't this basically the WebMD effect migrating to other domains?

feels like the same lament doctors have had for ages after anyone could google their symptoms then self-diagnose.

While AI is driving it the foundational cause feels like people having easy access to data/opinion that they trust but don't fully comprehend (or have bias towards). People do this in meat-space too, will confidently regurgitate garbage if they were told it from a person they trust as an expert.

just a guess that they're saturated and they don't want to take on a bunch of new subscriptions that they can't sustain

also possible we'll see a restructure. Limits on that plan might be too high, possible we'll see that plan go up in price and a new mid tier appear.

meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration.

You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99

Looks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time.

I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.

I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.

There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.

dug up the story to read myself, nothing like labeling something "taboo" to make it more compelling.

The story itself is, meh. It's a pretty straightforward Day-in-the-life-of jaunt involving a rather dysfunctional teacher. Doesn't really start anywhere go anywhere or end anywhere. The narrator is pretty candid about that dysfunction and does reference sex and drugs but honestly it's pretty tame I think with a couple small edits it would be solidly PG-13.

Overall I wouldn't ever recommend this story to anyone I know. But I can absolutely see why it was used in the class. It's rife with conversation starters, and often feels purpose built for the type of pick-it-apart analysis that you would find in school. It has just enough shock value to wake up sleepy students, features both bad teachers and institutions as well as bad students which humanizes the meta-context in the real classroom.

I wouldn't recommend it in middle school, High school would be a big maybe for later years. As college curriculum, being taught to literal legal adults, that it was controversial at all seems bonkers, honestly it's categorization as "difficult material" by the author I find rather sad. In the end I'm not even sure what's "political" about it.

Seems the most telling real reason was from the president “I don’t ever want to see this story again, I wouldn’t want my daughter reading this,”. He's apparently too busy raising a snowflake to handle a story that simply states that "things exist" that he may find unsavory.

I'm surprised this hasn't run afoul of all-party wiretap laws. Even if you could waive your own rights via ToS other people in the house may not have agreed.

Theoretically I could see LG or even the TV's owner being culpable.

I'd love to see that case hit the media. Average citizen jailed over wiretap violations because they let their TV record a guest.

This graphic always reminds me why it's so hard to beat gasoline and that batteries kinda suck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...

10 years later I can say they spent a lot of time putting lipstick on that pig, maybe even a dress and a tiara. Probably one of the nicest pigs out there, but it's still a pig and always will be.

So imma play devil's advocate a bit, cuz I think it's fun, also I dislike bandwagoning.

Meta may not be a great company but I don't think their loss here is all that great either:

>In New Mexico, Meta is being required to improve "age assurance models and tools" using AI, and to attempt "to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model."

None of that sounds really desirable to me. I read that as "death of the anonymous internet", Meta's loss (to the cheers of everyone) is ushering in ubiquitous age verification.

I also see stuff like this:

> [google and youtube were] negligent and failed to warn users of the dangers associated with using their platforms.

and

> Industry experts are calling it social media's "Big Tobacco" moment, with Meta as the centerpiece

While psychological addiction is a thing lets not conflate that with literal physical addiction to a chemical. "warn users of the dangers",really? what do they want; a big banner that says "Warning! youtube might be too entertaining"?

While I don't doubt Meta's done some shady stuff, or at least mildly negligent stuff because it benefits them I think in some respects they have an impossible task. I also thing they've become a scapegoat such that lazy parents and bored adults can eschew any personal responsibility for their actions. "its not my fault I let my kid on Facebook unfettered, or spent all Tuesday doomscrolling, it's these damn companies giving me everything I want!", hell I do it here on HN which barely even has "an algorithm" it's such an easy trap to fall into companies barely need to even try.

Author might have a bit more luck if they had some focus. That post kinda meandered all over and ended in an off topic joke about a nun's name.

Also unless she's trying to convince orthodox Christians to read the bible being a woman isn't likely to make a lick of difference to whomever she's imploring to read it.

Curious how this material compares to just a mirror like surface, both in performance as well as durability/practicality/aesthetics/cost

>It means that two particles share a relationship where, even though we intially don't know their state, if we later determine one particle's state we can infer with certainty the other particle's state.

except that's not the whole truth either. A pair of gloves in separate boxes fits your description but aren't entangled, they always have a concrete state (hidden variables).

Normally I would expect this to be self-rectifying, that students without the background for the curriculum would cause graduation rates to drop enough to be a problem.

And maybe that's the case but needs more time. More likely (as the article hints) the school will bend it's teaching to get these students through the program, which is short-sighted as it will erode the brand when mediocre graduates enter the workforce.

yep, and depending on what meaning you want to derive population matters too. also kinda like all kinds of movies have been breaking sales "Records" but if you look at the inflation adjusted top ten, #1 is still "Gone With the Wind".

while true the connotation of the title would imply meaningful debt. And people who simply use cards for convenience and never hold a past due balance isn't really meaningful debt.

It's almost like counting the "debt" between ringing up your items at wal-mart and paying. For those 30 seconds you owe money.

Based on some quick stats you could totally turn that into a useless headline "Americans accrued 4.1 billion dollars of debt every 30 seconds in 2025"

Fun, though a bit much for eye candy that doesn't really serve any purpose. https://gatherer.wizards.com/ has all the same info in a much snappier package.

offhand 2 complaints. that particle logo eats 5% of my CPU while it's visible. clicking a card is full screen like I left the page, but didn't so I can't use the back on my browser to go back to the grid.

Technically Firefox isn't a major browser either.

Lots of things,

Writ large you can look at data across all people and spot trends (upward or downward), if you have a bunch of die hard customers that suddenly change behavior that's a warning sign. or you can see the effect of larger ad campaigns. If Target could figure out you might be pregnant from buying some hand lotion I have no doubt a good analyst with this data set across millions of users could extract a wealth of information. It probably also helps them judge revenue, if they know they can expect 2.16 visits over the next 6 weeks from 10,000 people and about how much they're going to spend you can extrapolate your future earnings with more precision than ever before.

At the micro level it's used to manipulate behavior, knowing your favorite items to give you discounts or to ping you when you might be most vulnerable. Maybe you have data that shows a customer spending more on particular days amid fairly random purchases, you might be able to construe those days are after payday and the customer is more confident purchasing larger ticket items. you might then target coupons for the days they might be getting paid.

Or maybe you see a trend where the person is clearly buying for 2, or 3 people and that changes. or suddenly they're getting happy meals implying they may have a kid now and you can send ads for the latest Disney toy.

Gather enough boring data over long enough and you can learn a great deal about someone.

People definitely want it. I can say I want to see it happen. Also people don't know to want what they don't know exists.

There just hasn't been the Edison light-bulb/Watt's steam engine/Apple iPhone moment yet. I'm not even sure generative AI is capable of it yet but I see the potential there. While not all dynamic games are "not fun" (lotta people really like Rimworld) that kind of content tends to feel flat, like the never-ending quests in Skyrim. But I think it's easy to squint and see how those shallow Skyrim quests could become far more interesting with a system that was capable of basically writing a story as you play.

IMHO It's only a matter of time before someone gets it right.

I suspect that won't last long for a number of reasons

- AI is already capable of creating some assets that are indistinguishable from human made ones. Anti-AI sentiment is pointless if they can't tell the difference.

- devs in Countries that care a lot less about the legal stuff are going to be cranking out and studios will want in on it.

- If the primary blocker is legal someone will find a way to get around it and provide a model/service/workflow that allows a game with AI assets to claim copyright on said assets.

- Games are literally one of the absolute best uses for this tech. Someone is going to figure out a way to leverage this stuff as a first class function of the gameplay. Player directed assets or procedural world creation, dynamic quests like never before seen. They're going to hit the nail on the head and produce a banger with this tech and the landscape is never going to be the same again.

Probably because individually it's rather banal:

> While many of the data points in my McDonald’s report, when viewed individually, seem innocuous, the accumulation of information over years creates a creepily accurate picture of my habits.

They couldn't even really knock what data was being tracked. Like the app wasn't grabbing GPS or microphone sample just all the interaction data, things you would expect them to track but it creates an absurd corpus of personal information.

yeah I've seen birds nesting on the device itself in places. Other animals acclimate to them, they might work if the animal has basically no reason to want to go there, if they want to they will.

The Home Depot here uses one in the garden area and I can't shop there for more than a couple minutes. our wal-mart used to have one in the produce section, fortunately finally removed.

Worst superpower ever.

At this point possibly technically none. Anthropic recently made a deal to basically pay out for their piracy, and all the big groups have purchased shit tons of used books.

wouldn't be surprised if pretty much all the training data is legal now, at least retroactively from having obtained copies later.

As someone frequently annoyed by those stupid bird/deer/insect ultrasound emitters I hope this doesn't become common, with my luck I'll be able to hear them.

Which could be a "change to the game" but that might be worse. Protections like Section 230 are absolutely abused by large companies. But protections like that are also what has made the internet even possible

Overly strict rules can also be weaponized. Imagine running a site that supports user content, but any appearance of CSAM on your site was jail-worthy, and you get an email demanding bitcoin or you're about to get hit with some posts that will shut you down. You have good moderation but you know you can't withstand a literal attack, someone who can automate that attack and has a financial motive to get illegal content onto your site. what do you do?