48terry

Is this the same Anthropic speaking as the one that's constantly terrified their newest thing is too dangerous and might destroy humanity (now available for $20/month or pay-as-you-go usage credits)?

Weird how every new model seems hyped up as the most dangerous yet and the one that will destroy society as we know it. They are also a commercial product.

Just 5 more years and $500 billion more, bro. We're still so early.

Your second paragraph appears to be 3 different instances of saying "X does not necessarily point to productivity gains... but in the case of AI, X definitely means productivity" without really saying why that is true or why other explanations do not fit.

Adoption meaning productivity supposes there are no other dominant factors for the AI push nor AI retention. It is possible for practices to be picked up or continued in spite of causing productivity DROPS. What studies have suggested are factors that make for productive work environments and what is actually enforced in the workplace are different things.

The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt.

Worthless statement. Wow, you suspect something can make things better, worse, or both? That's a keen insight there.

For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wireless technologies started picking up.

We are still so early.

I mean, we have advertised them in multiple super bowls, have companies that basically own tech news (incredulous journalists will repeat any stupid insane shit a CEO wants to say), that say they're valued at over a trillion dollars and nobody with the power to argue those finances seems willing to do anything but agree. We have built hundreds and hundreds of acres of data centers (and made deals for data centers that are never going to happen) that demand *billions* per month. They are devouring all the silicon to where people are visibly seeing the price of hardware double, triple, more in price. Work places insist on employees using AI (then pulled back because it turns out this stuff costs money and it's not fun anymore when it's not subsidized).

But we just need more time, more eyes, more people looking at it.

Where in the radio wave timeline did this happen?

In every of these threads there's a bunch of snarky comments, either acting like this class of attack is exclusive to npm, or that nothing has been done about it. I don't think that's fair.

I mean it keeps happening lmao. You can track npm attacks these on a calendar. Someone made a npm parody of the classic "no way to avoid this" The Onion article.

It's great there's work to stop it all but also... it keeps happening. I find it funny in a "here we go again" way.

Plus the dozens of other means of changing a website's styling from the user's side.

Does anything wrap up the AI craze more succinctly than boldly calling AI the perfect use case for an already-solved problem?

Right? Yeah, everything's decoupled and "flexible", but if your stack is dependent on half a dozen different third parties uninterested or uninvested in your project, you gotta watch like a hawk for when those services decide they need to be worse and charge more.

I was assured last week that things like this are fine and we should be responsible adults by settling for "good enough" when it comes to self-driving cars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226864

Yeah, nothing to suggest that here. We went from some commits every so often (because rsync was basically finished software) with a handful of issues a month, to "a bajillion Claude commits then a release" with a pile of issues within weeks, at least one of which is about how the goddamn thing doesn't build.

I can't possibly see a correlation.

Weird how 3.4.2. didn't have a similar deluge of issue reports, though.

using chips for AI is bad. Chips should be used for good things like playing video games

This is correct. Playing Final Fantasy XIV has done exponentially more good, and provided more value, than anything LLMs have ever produced. Thank you for your post.

[flagged]

if they had to get permission we wouldn't have frontier LLMs at all

Don't threaten me with a good time.

Why this is opt out, not opt in

Put simply, because otherwise we will not have enough data to train a model that's actually useful.

Hmm, when asked to opt-in to giving their data away for yet another AI non-service, people don't want to. That's strange! The only way to get their data is to assume you can take it and force them to tell you to stop. Wonder what that could mean? Oh well, it's a mystery no one will be able to solve.

search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence

How do you know the answer is exact?

or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.

Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?

It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.

Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.

You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

Uh, people do say this thing. It is a basic factor and question asked during technology procurement. Uptime and fail states matter.

AI just seems exempt from all the questions people usually ask about relying on other people's software.

Those people obviously don't want to talk to you/"other people" or not interested in the topic you're talking about or both.

Great suggestion. Problem: these are bosses and coworkers and people you need to work with to keep receiving income to live, and the topics talked about are things important to the place of work.

I may have to break the news to you that the LMGTFY was also rude. Both LMGTFY and AI copypastes are rude and dismissive answers that are intended to make the person asking the question feel stupid and bad. It only provides value in making you feel really smart and possibly smug about showing that question-asker what's up, and offers nothing in the short term about their problem (or in the long term about their comfort in turning to you for help).

you can get a straight answer from an LLM

By definition, LLMs cannot give a straight answer. They give you text based off next token probabilities.

I thought the LLM promise was that people could do things easily because conversation is the most intuitive input there is. If we still have to "figure out how to get it out", what if we put that educational effort into... I don't know, learning search or queries or something that gives concrete answers and not statistically-average-probability answers?

...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.

Famously honest and on-the-level company Meta, who we can parrot the word of uncritically and unquestioningly.

And also: AI is basically the only thing anyone is talking about. Yeah, Uber existed and it's known about and was advertised and such. It has not overwhelmed every topic ever like the current LLM mandate has been. People are getting sit down and told they MUST engage with this stuff.

How has the sheer saturation of LLMs not resulted in profit? It has dominated the conversation, center stage, of every news outlet for like 4 years now. It is the most known-about thing currently out there.

And we haven't been able to convert that much captured attention into profitability yet? That seems... bad?

Indeed. I've heard a lot of words about how trivially easy vibe coding makes building software, and how just about anyone can build something in no time at all anymore. Even stuff about how people will vibe code one-off private software for everything at all times, and such.

There really shouldn't be a reason for vibe coders to complain about any software decisions. Vibe coding a personal fork you better agree with should be a piece of cake. Isn't that part of the vibe code promise?

I don't know how to tell you this, but people actually can and do, in fact, worry about the methods things come to be made with, and make decisions based on if they approve of that process or not. Otherwise the idea of free trade chocolate/coffee/other shit would not exist.

A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".

"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla

Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.

What in the hell are you babbling about? Talking about what public companies do versus what the black mystery box with a question mark on it does is asinine. The entire point of this shit is that Anthropic's numbers AREN'T available. They can say whatever the fuck they want. This is why trying to get a straight answer out of them about their revenues and profits and overall business model is like the riddle of the sphinx. They have no obligation to report finances in the same way public companies are obligated to.

Ever notice that, by the way? There's a lot of exciting, non-GAAP shit going around in this field.

You're looking at this on the idea of a missed prediction. That's not where I'm at with this. I think Anthropic is straight-up lying. I think they are genuinely making shit up. This isn't a financial forecast, it's bullshit to hype up investors without actually having to prove it's based on anything whatsoever. It's either pure bullshit, or the numbers are so massaged and delivered at such a highly specific angle that it only becomes a logical way to display data if you're an MBA with a concussion.

We have absolutely 0 reason to believe what they're saying is true. We have lots of reasons to believe they'll say shit if they think they'll get more money out of it (see: every time they open their mouths and journalists rush to copy-paste the quote into headlines).

its June quarter sales could reach at least $10.9 billion

It COULD reach $10.9 billion. It COULD also completely shit itself and go bust. We'll just all have a fun time finding out together, won't we, investors?

The direct and unambiguous purpose of AI as a tool has been to replace labor and treat workers badly. This is not some doomsaying thing. This is literally what CEOs and billionares creating and pushing this shit have openly discussed and shared with reporters (who proceed to publish the quotes 100% uncritically and with no investigative sense of curiosity to ask further questions about it). They are excited at the idea that AI means they can cull millions and millions of jobs.

Let's add to this comparison a bit.

Said farm workers have also been noticing headlines over the last years like:

"Crop harvester CEO predicts crop harvesting machine will wipe out millions of jobs within months"

"Crop harvester CEO: 'the crop harvester could destroy the world economy'."

"Farm lays off half its employees, pivots to crop harvester" (repeat this one about 10 times a week for months)

Then some idiot walks up to a crowd of farm hands talking about how awesome the crop harvester is.

No shit he's going to get booed lmao. He's fucking lucky they're not beating his ass into a shallow grave.