Jonanin

What's truly bizarre is the popularity on this site of questioning someone's own stated experience with finding LLM tools useful. On a site called hacker news, that usually celebrates useful computer tools. I'll never understand the obvious luddism here.

Except that many of the people involved do think of it like a football game, and thus it actually is like one. Of course the researchers and engineers at both OpenAI and Google DeepMind have a sense of rivalry and strive to one up another. They definitely feel like they are in a competition.

It's very humorous, though not unexpected, to see a reply about revenue numbers to a post that was mainly speaking about Tesla's superior margins.

It is surprising how willing Google is to stretch the truth in the marketing for its AI initiatives. Although it's being compared against 7B models, Gemma "7B" is actually much more than 8B parameters in total.

FWIW, Tesla's market cap is almost 10x BYD's. So the market does not necessarily agree with this assessment. One reason is that Tesla competes exceptionally well in the international luxury car market. BYD pushes a lot of metal at low margins.

Props to the founders for trying, but news is a bad business that is already very crowded, so I'm not super surprised.

This may be a well informed take (or not), but it's hard to think he doesn't have an axe to grind when the first sentence is an information-free put down ending in a clown emoji. Would love to see a more neutral analysis.

One thing worth noting is that one minor reason the dollar is very strong now is that the Fed was actually the first central bank to start raising rates. A better title is probably: "Central banks around the world have made a historic mistake on inflation"

Just like cryptocurrency mining, it certainly drives shortages and high prices.

The prices for state of the art graphics cards which are only required for mining or gaming are high, but these products actually -subsidize- or lower prices of more generally useful, simpler tech. Please look into the price history of RAM, simple graphics cards (now builtin to many CPUs, which is very economical!) or any other basic computing components.

Most people who want a car/truck/tractor want a reliable mechanical device

Please find me any source or other evidence that tractors or cars have gotten any less reliable. All studies done indicate the exact opposite of what you are saying. This sounds like a made-up narrative that you happen to want to be true. See: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/cars-reliability-higher-jd-powe...

And I think you are losing track of the original claims you were making about taxes here. For example:

Do the countries in question actually only tax new products, or ALL tech products?

Tech may be a polluter, but again, your claim was that this is what drives the tax policy. Tell me, do these countries tax oil by the same or a greater amount? It's obviously true that environmental concerns _do not_ drive these tax policies.

Are you going to provide an example of tech hardware being used to "control" people? Would love to see some evidence of this outrageous claim.

And I'm really begging you, when you are about to advocate for very high taxes in this area, to consider the effect it has on small businesses.

Wow, I have to say I strongly disagree with every single thing you said.

Video games are a small niche in the universe of technology products. To use them as a justification for classifying all tech as luxury seems, well, extremely stupid and misguided.

I’m surprised you don’t know, but the vast majority of businesses are small businesses with low profits, to act like they have plenty of extra money to spend on heavily taxed goods is ignorant at best. Tech is a productivity multiplier for many businesses, this is not really an arguable point as it is well studied.

By the way, no one is forced to buy tech enabled products (despite the implication in your “crazy show”). People buy tech enabled products over others because they solve their problems better.

And tech products are very low on the list of environmental issues in the world. If the tax was actually structured to promote eco friendly behavior in these countries it’d look wildly different.

You seem to have an axe to grind here but nothing you claim really holds up to a bit of critical thinking. Not sure why an extreme tech pessimist is on HN anyways :)

Why are the import taxes so high?

The pages are littered with warnings that it's vile, so not sure why the top comment is basically repeating that fact without adding any information.

No, it is clear that that’s Putin’s intention. What on earth are you talking about?

Everyone criticizing the war in the middle east always seems to casually forget that terrorists from this region hijacked airplanes and destroyed the two tallest buildings in the US with them, killing thousands.

Did Ukraine do anything like that to Russia?

Exactly, the justification for silencing people based on threats from artists makes no sense and relies on circular logic :) Hopefully now you understand why being quick to deplatform anyone who is mildly controversial is a bad idea and too morally absolutist. Here’s a better idea: don’t worry so much about speech you don’t like. The connection between them and actions (what actually matter) is weak at best.

What is considered morally decent or “dangerous” nonsense varies wildly from person to person. Why should Spotify apply Neil Young’s set of morals above all others’ to their platform? Because he said so?

I think removing from their platform whoever Neil Young tells them to would be much more of a special relationship. Do you really think Spotify is inclined to deplatform any podcaster because of threats from an artist? That’d just encourage more and more threats to remove whoever the next artist doesn’t happen to like.

This isn’t really a plausible root cause. These companies in the U.S. that are supposedly acquiring everyone (and they aren’t: there are record numbers of unacquired unicorns and IPOs recently) were small once too. That just begs the question: How did the U.S. get all the large acquirers in the first place?

It's not that weird; longer prompts require more compute. This pricing is directly proportional to the total compute required for a query, which scales with the sum of the input and output sequence lengths.

I'm half surprised that this is one of the most upvoted comments, but also not really because the comments for any FB-related article here are typically a race to the fastest dunk. But there is zero substance to this comment. What specifically did you find audacious? Why did it make you want to take a walk?

I'm impressed by the extent to which people actually believe media narratives match reality.

Because people's stated and revealed preferences on this topic are drastically different.

I find it strange that everyone loses their mind at the prospect of IG for kids, but no one bats an eye at the already-released YouTube for kids or TikTok for kids. The latter, of course, is built by a company entirely beholden to the Chinese government. That sounds pretty scary to me. I guess it's just a matter of what will make the best headline.

I think you are reading too much into the exact wording of the OP's comment. You can replace "the internet" with "social media" or even "Facebook" and it still makes sense. Internet platforms for communicating with others (the use case that is being described in the OP) is literally the definition of social media.

This implies that there were a couple of AI systems that actually beat a radiologist, which I take as extremely promising for the field of AI radiology.

Like any domain in applied AI, there will be a lot of approaches that miss the mark, or are simply stepping stones to better approaches. There are thousands and thousands of papers on language modeling, but we only needed one superior approach (GPT) to change the game entirely.

The search through any cutting edge problem space is messy and full of failure, and that's fine. You only need one breakthrough.

why is “benign garbage” (in your completely subjective opinion) “damning”? That implies a certain level of intentional wrongdoing on behalf of FB. What did you expect the typical online social content to look like?

this transparency report is also damning of the typical content on Facebook, but in a different way.

And in what way is that, exactly? I’m not seeing what you’re seeing apparently. It looks fairly benign.

It's fascinating (and really quite unfortunate) how often articles driven by what I'd call "hate upvotes" make it to the front page of HN. We're awash in links to pessimistic anecdotes that suit a narrative driven by dislike of a certain company or person, but which don't provide any useful knowledge. I think our time is probably better spent on more positive and insightful articles.

“Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.” - Thomas Friedman

This comment is wrong on nearly every front.

1) No money has been received. USICA ($52b number) has not even been passed through congress yet.

2) 12nm is hardly “outdated”, not every use case requires the most cutting edge node. There is plenty of value to be had at that process size.

3) There is more to running a foundry than process size, and Intel is likely interested as much/more in the customer relationship parts, as elaborated extensively in other threads

Do you have any evidence for this, or are you guessing?

Going back to your original analogy about a telephone that calls you, Facebook doesn't preferentially show notifications. They show notifications whenever something happens according to how you have your notifications set.

Anyways, you have the causality completely incorrect here. It is the person that has the preference, and Facebook caters to that preference, regardless of what it is. If your point is just that people cared most about their conversations related to the capital riot on Jan 6, of course you are correct. It was the most important event of that day, month, and maybe even year.

But maybe, just maybe, if you keep blaming FB hard enough, you'll fix society's problems.