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Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye? Letter for letter I can see the relation to the handwriting I was taught in Dutch in the 80s, but as a text it looks like sanskrit to me. Obviously learnable, like learning greek or other foreign ciphers. But I would not imagine a neighbouring language written down less than a century ago to seem so foreign.

Read it kindly, not literally. The missing word is probably “[persistent] consumption” and measurement in standard units of alcohol (not mmol or pl).

I even think there are a lot more geeks 'out of the closet' now. Gaming, board games, reading scifi/fantasy, programming and general tech interest - I think they've all massively increased in popularity when compared to the 90s? I for one have found that I can find 'regular people' sharing with me what used to be pretty much solo and online hobbies. Might also have been that life has forced me to develop new friendships and so I had to open up on my hidden hobbies.

This is a great question. Have been in insurance for 20 yrs now. Cannot phantom why f.e. insurers don’t hold manufacturers responsible for losses due to cloned car keys with inadequate protection. I do know that insurers are generally very hesitant to start legal procedures, especially those that end up in the news. Say, Volkswagen and Stellantis are formidable adversaries as well as national champions, so there is some presumption that getting your right might be difficult. And the bar as I understand it is not technical SOTA, but more something like acceptable practice, so the manufacturer could argue “hey everyone has shitty protection, so suck up the loss”. Perhaps the newest European legislation will help raise the bar / even the playing field.

People are average on average. OP is measuring LLM succes based on a super human test which most of us would likely fail. Creativity is just longer context and opinionated prompting. (For discussion purposes. I’m on 70% true.) Average Joe LLM and me are having a great time.

(I am not an AI bull.) I'd say current AI is already there. It's just that the personality of LLM is not what we would have expected from scifi. It's like an average IQ person with pleasing problems, problems being fair, trouble listening, problems in estimating what it can and cannot reasonably accomplish (overconfidence bias, very human indeed) and a very large, if somewhat shallow knowledge base. I'd argue it's human right now. The superhuman part, that will be akward. The Turing test isn't a good metric, now that we're close. Humans are bad at judging humans - we think too small from our personal beliefs.

A thought experiment. With an energy budget of about 20 euro a day, could a current level AI/LLM without the moral boundaries make money _anywhere_? Would it start robbing, stealing, spamming, phishing, lying? Hey, that's what a subset of humans is doing right now! Would it start an AI porn site? Would it find niches for fully vibe coded SAAS-applications? If AI isn't there yet currenly, it should fail on every dimension (not just some!). For the sake of discussion (too instrumental for my moral taste), about 5-10%? of humans in my country are actively and solely supported by other people. I think current AI could beat that hurdle.

Over the holidays I built a plan for an app that would be worthwhile to my children, oldest son first. That plan developed to several thousand words of planning documents (MVP, technical stack, layout). That was just me lying in the sun with Claude on mobile.

Today I (not a programmer, although programming for 20+ years, but mostly statistics) started building with Claude Code via Pro. Burned through my credits in about 3 hours. Got to MVP (happy tear in my eye). Actually one of the best looks I've ever gotten from my son. A look like, wow, dad, that's more than I'd ever think you could manage.

Tips:

- Plan ahead! I've had Claude tell me that a request would fit better way back on the roadmap. My roadmap manages me.

- Force Claude to build a test suite and give debugging info everywhere (backend, frontend).

- Claude and me work together on a clear TODO. He needs guidance as well as I do. It forgot a very central feature of my MVP. Do not yet know why. Asked kindly and it was built.

Questions (not specifically to you kind HN-folks, although tips are welcome):

- Why did I burn through my credits in 3 hours?

- How can I force Claude to keep committed to my plans, my CLAUDE.md, etc.

- Is there a way to ask Claude to check the entire project for consistency? And/Or should I accept that vibing will leave crusts spread around?

Thanks for your replies. I understand the worldview. We differ on a few points of view.

Large scale farming releases hands for more specialization. Specialization leads to interdependence and (in my naïveté) peace. ‘We’ did get a very large part of the world out of poverty. That was part of my optimism. And I thought we would reach peak oil faster and go for sustainable faster (batteries are still the major future potential upside for me).

Perhaps in a ‘might have been’-scenario 9/11 and the end of the end of history (Fukuyama), plus the antisocial tech are the turning points. Haven’t thought that shift from techno optimism to political, social and cultural negativity (in me, but it seems a trend as well) through enough. The whole bitcoin shebang, the return of the 80s American Psycho capitalism and consumerism, the wars just rub me the wrong way. I might be turning hippie in my second half of life.

As a child of the 80s I’ve never felt technology reducing social interaction. But that might have been a temporal sweet spot. Massive amounts of screen time, massive amounts of outside time (friends, sports).

Why? I see no arguments, only propositions. (I will bring little arguments myself below. Not flaming.)

Technological advancement is in my opinion unrelated to the way current “social” technologies impact “social relations”. Things are not going well, I’d agree. But I can imagine one hundred beautiful features (or historical technological advances) that have improved social relations, trust and general well-being.

Current big tech is dystopian and extraction based, but that’s not the general trend of the last two centuries. In the late ‘90s, early ‘00s I was actually very optimistic about technology and the state of the world (poverty, global village, war, climate).

Antisocial tech has put us back a long way. But that’s not technology general, ‘just’ Google, Apple, Meta and the app-0-sphere being or doing evil by extracting attention in finite time via small machines. The big machines have brought us much. And even then both ways; for good and for bad.

I read this as a poem to the French culture.

The absolute classic would be Hal Varian, afaik still chief economist at Google. Still proud of working through Microeconomic Analysis. He has an introduction into micro as well. His books are so full of worthwhile thoughts. Micro introduced me to platform economics before the internet was a big thing.

The article is missing some key points about insurance. An ideal book balances mortality and longevity risks. This cancels out the risk GLP-1s or many other actuarial shifts in mortality. Insurers swap risks, reinsure risks etc to move towards an ideal book. Nice products to balance are pensions and longevity. Problem is that the scale is quite different on a per policy basis, and also very location specific.

The article also misses regarding slippage is that Swiss Re in the link calls it a modest increase And that is mainly due to insurers Not performing the same level of medical intake (accelerated versus full underwriting). Increased competition leads to less profits. That’s pretty straightforward and not per se GLP-1s related.

And then the kicker. For not diversified portfolios of mortality risks. Those have been massively profitable for decades, in line with the general increase in age and health. GLP-1s just expands on that profitable aspect. Did I mention that the long term expected rate of return on an insurers book is quite good?

Insurers can weather a bit of slippage. Reinsurers will kick the worst offenders back in line with their AUC performance, because without diversification Or reinsurance it’s hard to stay in the market. (Capital requirements strongly favor diversification. Mono line is very hard.) That’s why Swiss Re is bringing out such rigorous studies of detailed policy events. Signaling to the reinsurance markets and the insurance companies and their actuaries!

This should even hold for non-US salaries? This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. What’s that 200k € in /median/ EU wages. Penny pinching. The thing is that consumer and prosumers vary and everybody wants to drive a Porsche to work And to leisure.

Not blaming anyone for wanting a machine like this. Trying to point out that tech has become so accessible that we all aspire to have a supercomputer as our daily driver.

When I was young a PC (xt and on) would set my dad back about a monthly wage. What I see is a huge compression of the price range. But the upper part of the range still exists (training LLM is not much different from the central computer at universities in the 70s/80s).

First introduced in 1914! Suppressing a current practice is way harder than suppressing an innovation via buy-and-die.

First law of dentistry: Any innovation that does not increase dentist margin, will not reach market.

To expand on this argument. I think even medical health care is more open to innovation that mainly benefits consumer health. Doctors are kind of oblivious of the cost of procedures. This has a host of other problems, but at least innovation and health outcomes are aligned (and less aligned with cost). Dentists are massively private equity owned where I live. Bottom line is everything. You notice that where you’re in the chair. Six minute procedures (the billing time) always take seven. Kids are state insured and always get upsold to whatever procedure is fashionable (or should I say: has the highest margin). I have a strong feeling innovations are swallowed up and shelved in this sector. It makes sense for the PE to kill innovation once you have a market cornered.

The only thing this anti market rant (not my usual spiel) does not have is an explanation for how PE coordinates the suppression of innovation. I should look into the owners of the parties that deliver the dentist supplies and machinery. That would be the best way to corner a market, by owning the supply chain as well.

“ How can a thinking person not understand this is beyond me.”

Measurement theory is not a subject taught pretty much anywhere? I have a masters in economics and the only reason I have more than an inkling of understanding of these things is via an internship at our nations statistical bureau.

You get taught to think With numbers. Thinking About numbers is pretty special! Physics, econometrics, abstract math, statistics - they force you to think About numbers. The rest is thinking With numbers.

Claude gave a great answer at the link, at least for me. There might be a plus in learning as well since the answer is well structured with a recognizable style. Say, the scientific article above, has a distinct style and really was not high school physics level.

This article could be so much better: How large are the estimated stores of ore that underwent natural fission? How much energy did it release and over how much time? When? Would this be noticable (and to whom)? So many questions, so little information.

I only know (or knew) high school physics, and when entering this in Claude I get an answer but am unable to verify the answer. Claude says 680 kWh gained per 0.03 grams of U-235 lost due to fission. I am left wondering into what the U-235 fizzed into (sorry, pun) and if I should take that into account.

Edit: There we go with modernity. I went to Claude instead of Wikipedia. Wikipedia at least has the answers. Thanks u/b800h. 100kW of heat on average. I can start filling in the blanks now.

Data drift is real! I’ve recently restored sanity in a medium sized enterprise where there were three concurrent financial data flows. Including people not understanding each other, projects to find out ground truth and triple the workload in maintaining the dataflows. I’ve quipped to the team that endless summer is near. What if we only work on business relevant development. I would dream that the bigcorp we are part of would do the same. They are more of a tack on another Excel based solution kind of firm.

Future: Cycle the power when profitable, replace the batteries when depleted enough? Batteries in cars are many times the domestic demand of a given home, at least in temperate climates.

About the weather patterns. We live near a large area of natural dunes. In school we were taught that the natural dunes reflect sunlight, leading to rising air. Although I can't remember the exact meteorology (rising air generally leads to rain) they showed us the precipitation patterns and the surrounding areas get more rain and the dunes less. As a layman, I except forest vs. concrete will lead to similar situations. More rain near forests, less near concrete. Is that what you see on radar?

I now see that u/steve_adams posted pretty much the same point. I wonder how I was taught this 25 years ago in high school, with local graphs for evidence, and it still isn't scientific consensus. Super local weather models aren't a thing? (This is in jest, they obviously are a thing. Perhaps it's harder than I imagine.)

Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).

Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this to happen, it even happens at the other end of the scale, but I would think the very basis (just any drivers, not even good ones) are an affordable investment? What use is your product if every review will say “good product, alas Windows and Linux won’t run”?

A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.

As a child of a scientist and teacher from the ‘40s and ‘50s I think there is some romanticism in your opinion. Can’t argue with your personal situation, but I know for a fact that writing notes, copywriting, stenciling, multiplying and distributing were all tasks my parents were very happy to see replaced by technology during their careers. They were early adopters of digital typewriters, pc’s, word processors and the internet and otherwise very much not technically inclined. Those were mostly chores. (I agree with your point, as an economist ;), that the average value of a word is higher when the cost are higher.) The one thing my mom did teach me very early was a zettelkasten-like system. Never appreciated that trial (unsuccessful, alas) enough until I read about zettelkasten.

Combine this with a -/- 10 km/h per speeding ticket for a year or two and you’ve got a pretty optimal situation!

This comes close to my hobby science of 20 yrs+! Toilet statistics! What distribution do people follow in choosing doors? Linear (no!), Negative Binomial (I think so, but which parameters? And do the number of stalls matter?), Gaussian? Do cleaners clean all stalls proportionally? Which urinal to choose? Never pick a neighbor? Is there an optimization there? Then the economics part…

Regarding OP. Splash isn’t the only factor in urinals alas. Ease of cleaning and the ability to stop junk. I’ve seen innovative splash less designs in bars. Usually a plastic cup upside down will seriously mess up the flow. People throw paper and gum and cigarettes in them. You need it splash free And robust.

I've listened to a series of podcasts (More Perfect) where it became clear to me that in the US to get lawsuits go all the way to the Supreme Court, you need both a case (de jure) and a plaintiff that is marketable. This is not a diss on Linda Martin. Going forward with this case in a attempt to get civil forfeiture more constrained after getting your money back is heroic. Just saying that the US legal system needs heroes and that there is a selection mechanism in place for heroes.

I am a total noob in chemistry and Claude said that it was a great question, but the answer were quite unclear about the feasibility. Mainly theoretical filters on lab scale. So that led me to put forward the thought.

Couldn’t there exist a chirality filter on earth?

Two hours is about movie or novella worth of content. Both are priced at about the same rate. Not all games have to have 10s or 100s of hours of content. Today, I expect a big(ger) part of gamers are like me: older people who like games, but can only game a few hours a week. Last non-4X game I fully played was CoD2. That was 2005.