globnomulous

Sorry, I don't follow. Did I make a dumb mistake and fail to notice? Am I a total hypocrite?

> A website shouldn't be pinning CPU or GPU.

That's exactly what I was saying. Rendering a few widgets shouldn't pin your CPU or GPU because it's so little work.

Your comment doesn't say this at all:

> This is the kind of thing usually a human notices and says 'dont do that, that is kind of crazy'.

It's not crazy. That is literally what 99.99% of video games do. They repaint everything constantly, only limited by either your vsync rate or hardware.

Am I missing something? Are you referring to some other part of the thread?

This is astonishing. How could a person go to the lengths of writing an entire book without ever looking up this sort of thing?

My mother?

There has never been a vaccine requirement for voting. It has never been voted on. It has never gone to committee. It has never been proposed.

If you nevertheless are certain that that was or is the goal of one of the US's two major political parties, then you've reached a perplexing conclusion based on, I can only guess, no evidence, evidence imagined, evidence misunderstood, or evidence contained in a source that should be tossed into the garbage can.

The choice between a galloping right wing and a stagnant center-right is no choice at all. American elections are a facade for decisions already made on top.

This critique had its heyday in the 2000 election. I can't fathom still holding fast to it. The last 26 years have been a continuing, relentless stream of evidence to the contrary.

This is nonsense. HN is very lightly, and fairly, moderated.

No, digital subscriber line, obviously

Interesting idea. How does it, or how should it, perform in huge monorepos, where git performance suffers? I spend most of my time in a repo that contains hundreds of thousands of files, where just a simple `git status` can take >3.5 seconds even on very fast consumer hardware. (Thank God for sparse-checkout.)

Agreed. Another comment in the thread describes the author's horrible, abuse-filled upbringing as the child of young parents who both weren't prepared for children and, in at least one case, didn't want them and blamed him for their circumstances. I can't fathom any of that and my heart breaks for the guy and the kid he used to be.

It's really unfortunate that people who are likeliest to make terrible choices are probably also likely to make the choice to have kids. A lot of people who choose not to have kids generally know themselves well enough to make the right choice, which also means that they'd probably be better parents than a lot of the clueless people who wind up with kids they never should have had.

Yeah, I don't agree with the guy you're answering. I know plenty of great people who just don't want kids and don't find time with them to be rewarding or gratifying, and there's nothing wrong with that. Having kids most definitely doesn't guarantee that old age will be any better either. Even if it did, it's not worth decades of labor and costs that you don't want. Saving for retirement/end of life care is much easier when you don't have kids, too. If you don't want kids, more power to you.

Alng the same lines: movies and tv shows have taught me that there are no door knobs in the future.

My love for my daughter and my wife enrich my life and contribute more to my happiness than anything else, by far. As you wrote, the majority of the very, very hard work has fallen to my wife. I wouldn't fault any woman, or man, for not wanting it.

Still, my wife and I both feel that parenting is the best thing we've ever done or will ever do. It's everything I hoped it would be -- and much more besides. The benefits are innumerable for us.

Whether anything is conscious is about as important and amorphous as whether God exists

Whether something is conscious is important for many reasons, not least the ethical implications. You and I have internal lives, and we expect others to respect that somewhat, because ignoring it is hypocrisy (if you ignore my wishes, should anybody care about yours?) and cruelty (ignoring my wishes causes me to suffer).

Something doesn't need to be empirically verifiable, let alone scientifically, to be true. Neither of us can prove that we have internal lives, but neither of us questions it -- and we consider it important enough that most of us think it entitles us to certain rights.

Absolutely none of this is amorphous. It's precise and unambiguous, and has enormous implications. History also shows everywhere that we're better, kinder, and more responsible when we choose to care about it.

Whether LLMs are conscious matters in more practical ways, too, because beliefs about these things alter the way people use and think about them. If I think an LLM is conscious, then I think it's capable of something like knowledge or values. Human beings, moreover, are social creatures. These tools are dangerous and seductive precisely because they tap into that part of us. Denying LLMs are conscious and rejecting the parts of them that take advantage of our social-animal wetware is intellectual self-defense. I'm not sure how effective it is (it doesn't stop us from responding to the convincing social cues that the tools feed us), but I have to think it's better than nothing, and it's certainly less dangerous than the belief that the tools are conscious.

If an LLM contributed to a piece of writing, the author should say so, very clearly, at the start of the piece, not at the end.

I am stunned by the beauty of these. The Tufte template is particularly unexpected and lovely

I wouldn't call this nitpicking. This is how people who are careful with money think. I learned embarrassingly late to stop justifying purchases by making predictions about future returns. I treat everything as having zero value as soon as I purchase it. Thinking otherwise is, for me, always a dangerous rationalization -- always a craving that's trying to outmaneuver sense.

Hi, Tomhow, would you mind reviewing my exchange with the user voxl?

The comment isn't a diatribe, and your experience as a teacher and advisor does not make your argument correct, let alone make your request any less a nonsequitur. If I disagree with you, I will always, I promise, say so. Asking that I 'please refrain' is just supercilious and silly.

It's also arguably a violation of Hacker News' guidelines:

Please don't sneer

Please don't post shallow dismissals

The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn. We've had MOOCs, gigantic libraries, all full of free information. You can obtain a PhD level understanding in any technical field of your choice today just by consistently going to the library and consistently applying yourself.

Not true. In every field there is guild knowledge that a person can't acquire from a library. In technical disciplines PhD-level knowledge requires experience in collaboration, research, and frequently lab work, which is impossible to acquire without access to a lab -- or just direct experience with research methods, whatever those may be. Reading papers and absorbing information aren't enough. PhD-level knowledge comes from the process of writing and doing original work.

The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn.

Also not true. We require kids to go to school partly because exposure to the environment and work inculcates skills regardless of whether kids want to do the work -- and regardless of whether they want to learn.

LLMs are damaging to students partly because they provide an escape hatch from that work and thereby prevent kids from acquiring skills.

Think of it this way: most people who want to be healthy and eat a healthy diet still find easy junk food tempting. What they want does not change the temptation, because the body and brain gravitate towards easy, cheap fulfillment of basic drives.

People facing challenging tasks, similarly, are tempted to take measures that reduce the amount of effort they require. The availability of tools that reduce the required effort also help shape a person's understanding of the value of the challenge and the work: "why should I do this hard task when I have a tool that can do it for me?" You and I know the answer to this question when we're discussing something like writing an essay or solving a problem in a math or programming class. Students frequently don't. They are by definition ignorant. Children, moreover, lack maturity. Their brains are less capable of resisting the easy path than an adult's. That's partly why parenting is important: parents provide boundaries and limits that kids need but won't and can't provide for themselves.

Sometimes people, especially kids, really do need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, through something in order to receive the benefits it offers. Being dragged through it sometimes convinces a person of its value and benefits. In a kid's case, there's a decent chance that the experience will improve executive function, shape expectations in a healthy way, inculcate grit, and become appreciation -- or at least habit.

I would not have written essays on my own as a student in secondary school. My English teachers had to provide that structure for me and impose the demand. But LLMs make it much more difficult to impose the demands, and kids are ill protected against the temptations of the cognitive equivalent of junk food, but an order of magnitude worse and more damaging.

The LLM has terrible judgment but an encyclopedic knowledge

Bingo. Claude can bang out nearly correct code when I give it an idea, but it doesn't have the idea and repeatedly misjudges both how much work remains and what kind.

On the other hand, I don't know all the ins or outs of macro expansion in yaml at compile time or when and where macros run, enabling us to conaume their results elsewhere in the yaml. Frankly, if I had time, I'd happily spend time on that and learn more about it. I don't, though. Claude knows and does the guessing and checking. So I provide the concept and it translates into a horrible soup of yaml. Clearly I'm able to press forward with ignorance, which is dangerous. There's a real risk that I'll wind up with the kinds of unhealthy work that worries the author of the tweet.

Use expensive models at high effort

Ah, that actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining. I'll try to tone it down -- and work on a more neutral brevity. Thanks!

Could you expand on this?

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Could you explain how this applies? I don't mean to be difficult -- really. I appreciate that Hacker News is a great place for discussion, and I very much appreciate that's partly because of the work you're doing.

I'd just like to think that my criticism is thoughtful and is neither rigidly nor generically negative: I pointed out specific omissions and offered an analogy to explain the immaturity and cluelessness that I see in the piece -- not just that the claims are wrong but that the perspective is delivered so badly that it's difficul to take seriously. It wasn't meant to be unkind or a swipe; I didn't call names or sneer; it wasn't a generic tangent. It was the best way I could find to characterize the ways the piece's tone and content work together, undermining it and (almost certainly) rubbing people the wrong way.

Probably just "be lucky."

Oy, yes, correct, thanks for this.

Oof, thanks for the corrections.

Extinctions followed homo sapiens across the planet millennia before the emergence of the technologies that you seem to think make the world 'complicated.' The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.

Mostly I agree with overall perspective and tenor of the piece, but there's a profound absence of (historical) awareness, paired with a weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness -- clearest in the strange insistence on using the word "we." If you've ever listened to recordings of sermons from Jamestown, you'll hear something similar: the breathless outrage and stupefaction at what "we" have become and what "we" do and "the world today." It's millenarianism and apocalypticism, and it's just goofy. It's the tone of a kid in his mid-teens who is worked up by his latest epiphany: he finally gets it and is wildly excited to make it clear, and he's performing it and acting it out for his parents, showing how serious he is -- and all the adults in the room know that he's on his way to figuring something out but doesn't grasp that he's trying on an idea and a personality to see how it feels. I hear the same cluelessness in this piece.

enable entirely new modes of interaction. AI allows 3D content to be created in more efficient ways than ever before. A perfect and novel fit for spacial hardware and software, that natural habitat for 3D.

If we're certain, and it's clear, that the technology allows for "entirely new [anything]s," why aren't you listing any of them? What are they? Why do you think you can see these so clearly, whereas the teams and engineers actually working on the technology apparently didn't or don't?

How many 3d interfaces exist in the real world, in contrast to (essentially) 2d? Can you think of any computer interfaces where adding a third dimension resulted in a better experience?

I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces

Jobs was a proponent of skeuomorphism in interfaces, which is precisely not the "next big thing" in interfaces but rather "what we already know and are comfortable with."