HN user
Low effort products will be used by low effort companies. In the case of restaurants, this might not necessarily be bad - I’ve been to amazing taco/burrito shops w abysmal menus. But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.
I genuinely think AI companies need to worry more about their brand. Just through how their products are used, they are perceived as a marker for low quality.
I did the same research in elementary school! My parents were my seed investors. They asked for 25% of equity - all I ended up giving them was some collectible artwork for the fridge.
Isn't it just a different form of private capital designed for the later stage of a tech company? I'm not saying its good, but I am not remotely surprised by tech's transition from growth/disruption/hiring to cost-cutting/M&A.
Do you remember some of the studies this book cites? I always thought the drug development lag times and success rate made patents necessary. Do the authors make exceptions for rare disease or CNS therapies?
Give me a break - tech is not remotely interested in comprehensive “systems” thinking about the problems that motivated these age verification policies
I agree with this (I want to be a parent very soon). I think I'm trying to articulate that while its possible to make a quiet place for your kid at home, they still live in a very internet-driven world.
I actually am curious about your experience on this. Basically, I'm worried that I'll try to make restrictions in the future, and it'll just be a war of attrition that I lose, since internet platforms touch so many parts of social life, especially for the young. Maybe things will be different in a decade.
In my opinion, none, but many parents disagree. Also, its more about the secondary effects, where all of their friends at school are talking about internet things they are unfamiliar with.
Its a tragedy of the commons situation. The benefits of being offline are dampened by the kid being out of the loop
Bell labs and IBM made gobs of money in their respective hey days
Yes exactly. It’s like advertising a car by saying “it uses gasoline!” Obviously gas helps the car go, but the user of the car just wants to go places cheaply and reliably
Thats very interesting to me that Watterson remembers his childhood as a difficult time. Calvin’s moments of sadness/anxiety/anger are a big part of why I found those comics so relatable and endearing as a kid.
Two things can be true at once: one group cut funding early 2025, and another group added funding later. The former group, DOGE, was less responsible, and the latter group, USDA, is more responsible. I do not know why I have to ignore the former group to be fair to the latter.
The argument is not that cutting funding caused the problem; the argument is that you have to use money to solve the problem.
I used to order $10 oligos all the time. The extra length is cool, but I was honestly more impressed by the claims on sequence accuracy in the article. Even a single base pair change can affect the genetics and physics of DNA.
I broadly agree with you on the AI hyping. Data quality and quantity is not high enough in my opinion.
That number is for the United States, not the United States government
There is evidence that high-frequency, 50% accurate bot traders make most of the money on prediction markets simply due to being able to make bets faster.
Is the 5% rule for total rent per year?
Protein structure is not a rate-limiting step in drug discovery.
The way I put this to myself is that AI gives “correct correct answers and incorrect correct answers”.
They almost always generate logically correct text, but sometimes that text has a set of incorrect implicit assumptions and decisions that may not be valid for the use case.
Generating a correct correct solution requires proper definition of the problem, which is arguably more challenging than creating the solution.
Yes, I hear you on how academia chases metrics. I would argue this phenomena is not worse than Company Z making a boilerplate AI chat tool that is no more useful than the flagship popular products. I think the fairest comparison is comparing the best researchers in academia/industry. I think they accomplish different things because they have different goals/incentives.
Transformers are an applied science: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en
Basic research would be something like optimal control theory, which came well before the transformer design.
I'm not trying to be evasive; I can see how my distinction could be seen as conveniently just outside industry's purview. Put it this way: I think companies, particularly small ones, are incentivized to pursue well-known methods/materials. Innovation modulates and optimizes.
Departments base grad school admissions on grant awards. The article states: grant awards for MIT went down more than 20%, then new MIT grad students went down 20%. The decrease in students has nothing to do with academia being detached from industry.
It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.
Obviously there is a selection effect that confounds any causal comparisons between those who do and do not get into MIT. But the better counterfactual is students who are accepted but do not attend. A diff-in-diff study with these two groups would be a better test. There are unique features of MIT: more money, elite network, etc. I do share your skepticism though - I've worked w/ MIT people before. I think they are very smart but also very lucky.
This is all true, but I think the main cost is the time wasted. The opportunity cost is enormous for humanity.
Albert Hirschman wrote a great book about the rhetoric people use to stifle policy proposals 35 years ago. “It’s futile; it won’t ever work” is one common argument. It’s not a meme so much as a cynical reflexive intuition
pulling back as in setting more realistic token budgets, or something more drastic? I'm curious
Entry ticket, basically. I went to Olympic Natl park recently and had the pass added to my Apple Wallet.
I don't really think of it as an app; I think of it as the "double-tap side button to do tap to pay or present my ticket" iPhone feature
Fair point - a combo might be the best approach.. I understand the idea of accidents correlating w/ miles driven, but it seems to be optimizing for driving safety rather than human life? Does that make sense?