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I think this is a category error. Homer is the iconic writer of the Ancient Greek language and culture, not the modern nation of Greece. Cervantes and Dante are the iconic writers in the Spanish and Italian languages, respectively, not the nations of Spain or Italy. Italy wouldn't even exist as a nation until 500 years after Dante.
The American equivalent of Homer, Dante, or Cervantes is Shakespeare.
Do you consider Frost inaccessible (or for that matter politically-charged)? I think every kid who grows up in New England reads him in elementary or middle school.
As long as the leadership of AI companies and the prominent AI researchers are talking about P(doom) and eliminating 50% of white collar jobs, there will be a backlash. As long as the leadership of corporate America is using AI usage in performance metrics and shoving AI into every single product regardless of whether it actually helps the product, there will be a backlash.
If you tell people that there's a technology that's going to change every aspect of their lives whether they like it or not (and has a non-zero chance of ending humanity entirely) and you want to throw all available resources into building this technology as fast as possible, do not be surprised if people start instinctively cringing every time your technology is mentioned.
If Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg, Amodei, or any of these other people had been half as smart as Steve Jobs, they would have adopted his worldview of computing as a "bicycle for the mind" that enhances rather than replaces humans.
@dang I don't understand why we're talking about some random posts from 12 years ago.
I made a very simple point in the comments here - the headline and article make extraordinary, shocking claims that are not supported by the text of the legislation. For this I get accused of being a sock puppet or a paid foreign agent, despite the fact that I rarely comment on this topic, have a long comment history on a variety of topics, and didn't even say anything in support of Israel, I simply pointed out that the premise of the article is not just incorrect, but laughably so.
I would also like to point out that other comments in this thread include references to 1950s propaganda about Jews controlling the US government, references to how people who support this legislation are "Epstein-bought politicians" and other anti-semitic (not anti-Israel) trash. The far-right 1950s US politician quoted elsewhere in these comments was not anti-Israel - Israel barely existed at that time - he was just an old-fashioned Jew-baiter of a kind that was common in that era (he's mostly remembered for his McCarthyist campaigns against celebrities, but that's another story).
This article is just a new version of those ancient "a secret cabal of Jews control the world" conspiracy theories. The legislation is the equivalent of, say, an HN-funded company signing an MOU with a university to collaborate on R&D. Nobody would describe that as a "merger" between the company and the university. To go from "the DOD will appoint someone in it's vast bureaucracy to supervise research collaborations with Israel" to "the entire vast US and Israeli militaries will merge into one" is absurd and you only get there if you're primed to see the world through this conspiracy-tinted lens.
Do people unfairly conflate legitimate criticism of Israeli actions with anti-semitism? Sure, but then you look at a post like this and commenters are immediately jumping to how the US has been a "puppet state" of the Jews for "generations" (to quote another commenter), and then any pushback is immediately attacked as illegitimate, paid shilling.
@dang you want to weigh in here?
Not really sure how you have a productive conversation when one party says that not only will they consider that anyone who disagrees with them is acting on bad faith, but they intend to disregard all rules and circumvent any bans.
Anyway it's pretty obvious that talking about this topic is completely pointless so I'm going to quit for now because I'm not actually a sock puppet or a paid shill or whatever, I'm just a human being who has a differing opinion.
This is factually wrong. Israel is a "major non-NATO ally" https://www.state.gov/major-non-nato-ally-status
Where in the text do you see anything about a "merger"? Bilateral agreements to develop technology are common between countries. That is nothing resembling a merger. There is no discussion of joint command structure, joint budgeting, etc.
To quote the HN guidelines:
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
There's a reason this article doesn't actually quote the text of this provision. The text itself is pretty boilerplate and has nothing to do with a "merger" of the US and Israeli militaries. It basically just tells the Secretary of Defense to appoint someone to coordinate research and development efforts in certain areas.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8800...
The idea that this bill would make the US and Israeli militaries more integrated than the US is with any other allies is just bullshit. We literally have a joint legal and command structure in place for the US to fight alongside NATO allies.
This is fucking dystopian.
You're telling me that the people that I hired and that I work with don't have any knowledge or opinions of any value, and 90% of the time I can just ask a machine instead of talking to them.
If that's the world we live in I fucking hate it. It's so solipsistic and dehumanizing.
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.
The best Anthropic models on VendingBench2 are Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Sonnet 5. Opus 4.7 scored more than twice Fable 5 max. Fable 5 - Low outperforms Fable 5 - Max, with Opus 4.5 in the middle. This seems to break the narrative, which is maybe why Andon Labs doesn't seem to have updated the trend lines on their graphs.
One massive change is that there is almost no ethnic food on these menus (unless you include French). I looked at some of the LA menus and there were zero Asian, Mexican, or Italian dishes. It's impossible to imagine today that you could look at a bunch of hotel restaurant menus in LA and not find at least some dishes that were inspired by those cultures.
A tongue sandwich is still pretty popular in some cultures. My parents and some of their friends served it sometimes when I was growing up.
Given the work that Meta does and the scale that they operate at, there are absolutely real concerns about providing internal access to the activity on someone's work computer. To take an extreme example, Meta has employees who investigate reports of CSAM or other criminal activity on their platform. There have to be very strict controls over who has access to that information.
Typically "candid" in photography means something like spontaneous and unposed (and therefore capturing something honest about the subject rather than unrehearsed). It doesn't imply that the camera is hidden, they just hid it in the TV show to make it easier to get those kinds of shots.
I don't know that one, but I do know gargantuan, and pantagruelian, which come from a 17th century novel by Rabelais as well as yahoo and Lilliputian, which come from a 1726 novel by Swift.
plenty of words and phrases originate from fiction
quixotic, scrooge, shangri-la, Uncle Tom, gargantuan, kafkaesque, blurb, milquetoast
and words like cyberspace were first used in fiction
once real people use them, they stop being fictional words
This is getting downvoted, but it's actually true. DOGE repeatedly used naive keyword searches to kill funding for projects that often had nothing to do with DEI.
Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.
Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...
Altman, Amodei, Musk and other tech industry leaders (not to mention technologists like Hinton) are constantly making public statements that predict everything from massive job loss, to restructuring of society to the possibility of an end to our species. The media is taking their cue from the tech industry itself.
And I'm sure the 50 year-old guy with the nice job at the stables just loved hearing Henry Ford talk about how nobody was going to own horses anymore.
This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.
I had someone submit a PR that was 3000 lines of shell scripts. Totally useless crap. I tried repeatedly asking him why he made particular choices and it was so painfully obvious that he had absolutely no idea and was just inventing bullshit answers. I would rather he have just said "I don't know, Claude added that", then tell obvious lies to my face.
A better way to put it is that these things do have value to the customer, the customer just doesn't have a way to understand how the work you're doing provides value because it's the part of the product you don't see. If you clean up technical debt, improve test coverage, improve your deployment systems, etc, it doesn't change the immediate customer experience in a meaningful way, but it does allow you to deliver the changes that customers do see faster and with fewer risks.
This quote makes it seem like the work is self-indulgent, and I have seen that happen sometimes, but it's not half of what we do.
I worked for a lean startup that built a very expensive hardware product. The company kept the team as small as possible and took a ship fast and iterate approach. They shipped hardware that had numerous design and manufacturing defects and failure rates were very high, over 50% required replacement after 2.5 years. For a while the company was relatively generous with out-of-warranty replacements, which helped mitigate the issue, but that became too expensive. So customers spent thousands of dollars on a hardware product that was likely to fail in the year after the warranty expired. The company was also very reluctant to spend on customer service and QA, but spent very generously on marketing.
I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.
That's true now. But in the world of this article, it's also the senior engineers that get nailed. In the world of this article, all code is like what machine code or bytecode is now - it's designed to be used by the machine, not the human, because the expectation is that humans will rarely, if ever, touch it.
This is the case now - I can explain to the AI that I want to re-factor a component to support different implementations using a strategy pattern, and I can get a similar outcome to what I would have written, just implemented a bit faster. My expertise brings value.
But that's not what this specific article is describing. The world this article is describing is one where you describe the business requirements, and you don't think about how it's implemented. You don't write the code, you don't review the code, you don't test the code. You give the AI business requirements and you give it access to sources of context (slack, meeting notes, etc). Every place where the human would act as a gate reduces throughput, so it should be eliminated through building harnesses and providing context.
What they're doing here is the equivalent of taking a factory where you have 2 process engineers and 100 operators, and replacing all the operators with robots. They want to automate the whole process of making the software and just leave the part that figures out how to make the automation work effectively.
In this world, the average software company doesn't need people who know how to write good software, because writing, reviewing, maintaining, and testing the software will be entirely automated. There will be a small number of people at companies like OpenAI that need to know how to write good software in order to supervise training the models, and there will be a small number of people at the software companies who have expertise in setting up the automation.
I wonder why we as engineers aren't protesting AI in the same way that artists and people in film and television are. This post should instill the same terror that visual artists feel.
If you're a more senior person in tech, this post is effectively saying that a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless. This goes beyond the skills involved in writing the code. Everything that you've learned over years about how to determine whether code is good or bad, and what practices make an engineering team effective is not just obsolete, it's fundamentally counter-productive because it assumes a slow, human-centric process that requires you to actually review and understand the code. Even your ability to mentor junior engineers is now obsolete, because all that experience you've built up is now worthless to them.
If this is the approach the industry takes, particularly when combined with a lack of interest in quality from the business (and let's face it, consumers have shown us that they're happy to pay for cheap crap), it's hard to see much of a future for software engineers. You don't need thousands of people with deep technical expertise, you need a handful of manager-types, who will focus on defining product and business requirements and configuring how the AI gets enough context to implement the requirements.
Maybe, if we're extremely lucky, there's so much demand for software that total employment doesn't fall off a cliff, but the nature of the work will change so much that many older, more expensive engineers will become unemployable. Those who remain will have to accept that the skills they spend decades developing are now worthless, that younger engineers no longer respect or listen to them, that the business no longer sees them as experts worthy of respect, but old fogies who grew up in a different world.
Joe Biden liked to say that a job is more than just a paycheck, it's part of your identity and your sense of self-worth. We're all very used to a certain level of respect (and commensurate remuneration). If you don't think that's true, compare how a software engineer is treated to how a warehouse worker is treated. What happens when we lose that?
You probably mean USAGM (US Agency for Global Media) and its affiliated programs (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc) rather than USAID.
USAID was a humanitarian aid agency that focused on programs like famine relief, disaster response, and medical aid in some of the poorest countries on Earth.
There are a number of significant differences. For one thing, physical libraries have to purchase the books that they own.
The content you're describing is a minuscule fraction of what's available on Anna's Archive.