gxs

Yes exactly

Math isn’t necessarily hard, but it’s incredibly dense

A simple statement like let f(x) be a continuous function can carry a lot of definitions

In that statement, if you missed the day in class where they covered continuous functions it might not even register that it’s a well defined term

And that’s the most over simplistic example I could think of

As a math major, I remember that being one of the first lessons I learned, that every single word could be carrying a lot of weight so to look things up in detail if I was ever struggling on a problem. One of the oldest entries in my memory.md file

How unfortunate - I’d rather work with a lesser model than put up with bullshit ads

I finally freed myself from Google using Kagi instead

I don’t currently use OpenAI but if Claude pulls this shit too I’ll have a problem on my hands

The open weights vs frontier models is reminding me more and more of the Linux vs Windows I grew up with (slashdot randomly popped into my head saying that)

I have a feeling this is the next…frontier of that fight

One can only hope it eventually does as well as Linux

Or just shitty developers that never give things a second - just sayin

Can you explain here without an LLM?

Really curious to hear more about this

Unless all of congress is included in that 100k, I’d love to hear a plausible scenario where this is actually achievable and not merely some clever edge case you found

I didn’t know this but it’s the kind of stuff our tax dollars pay for and ultimately why I’m so disgruntled about the high taxes we pay - especially in the middle class

No problem paying taxes - my entire gripe is with what what the moneys spent on

Because this kind of stuff is used for way beyond this

It’s used for surveillance in the truest sense

Heaven forbid you are on someone’s watchlist, they will just track your movement across the city

This isn’t some fake CSI pop dream - this kind of tech isn’t used to catch the people breaking into your house

The sad thing is that the knee jerk reaction here is going to be “omg just vote with your wallet, don’t buy”

But the truth is it’s bullshit and this attitude that companies should be able to do whatever they want because it’s a free market is getting so tiresome

Clearly there is agreement that things can be taken too far - as soon as one single consumer protection/anti competitive/monopoly preventing law exists, you’ve admitted those types of laws are needed

So then you’re only arguing about degrees and companies shouldn’t be allowed to do shit that harms consumers this way

On the surface this seems reasonable - it’s inevitable - discs aren’t going to hang around forever

But this goes back to what it means to own something and we’re all being relegated to serfs who don’t own shit

You wanna get rid of discs? Fine, but give me an alternative so that I still own what I buy and can resell it at will

What a terrible take

First of all, who said this is a disaster?

Second of all, OP never even said anything about no regulation - they specifically said they wanted transparency which is 100% valid and better than a world where the government baby proofs everything for you

Models are already censored - and who they are or aren't uncensored for has a lot of implications which are way worse

And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation

iCloud itself does this for you if you bring your own domain fyi

This sucks

On the one hand - you’re happy for the entrepreneurs

On the other, every single thing I hate as a consumer happens because of lack of competition and these acquisitions that old dinosaurs use to prop themselves up

Every single one - I don’t think I’m exaggerating

Not particularly heart broken about Roku at this point, but still bugs me to see

If you like this I highly recommend you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations if you haven’t

An easy read that dives into stoicism, a similar mindset, within the context of running the Roman Empire.

Great read.

And then I started realizing: all the knowledge I have accumulated over the years: the trade-offs between implementations, how acquiring works, how to structure idempotency to prevent double-charges, everything, was becoming useless.

It’s not useless, at least not yet. And the fact that you recognize this puts you way ahead of the typical HN user constantly crying about how AI could never

What’s going to make you a good AI-augmented engineer is going to be treating AI like a good partner

Not like a genius, not like an idiot - these are extremes where all the memes on LinkedIn are generated

Like any partnership you will see it comes with bad ideas and good ideas - that it will challenge your own ideas and be sometimes wrong and sometimes right

Approaching it this way, I think my learnings only accelerated - the conversation is of much higher value because it’s a fast back and forth where I can take a moment to learn on those occasions where its ideas beat mine

You are feeling a little insecure, paranoid is not the word, and that’s a good thing

Tackle the problem for what it is: I have this sidekick now that can help me bang shit out in a fraction of the time it used to

Use the the brain that got you here to figure that out - don’t waste your time on these debating whether ai is good or not or listening to stories about how it’s stupid because one time it suggested something that wrong

You’re going to be fine, put AI to work for you

Ask me again in a few months but for now you’re fine

He tweeted this a while ago

It’s hard for me not to be cynical

When the city of San Francisco is handing out tax breaks to companies for forcing RTO in shitty Bay Area infrastructure and Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism, it’s hard to not take these findings with a grain of salt

Even if true, I am positive the solution isn’t to stuff people back into offices and rob them of the little leverage they got during covid

Right there with you - this has been my experience as well, to a tee

I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple

And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between

On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game

On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s my own doing

Yeah I purposely didn’t get into the right or not - it’s just how I’m seeing things evolve in “real time”

A big part of it is that people feel like they are drinking from a firehouse having to learn to use ai (which is not always just a prompt) and having to leverage it effectively at the same time for real product/business work

I suspect this will settle down at some point too

One other observation I’ve seen: the makeup of a team that can leverage ai is turning out to be different than the make up of the usual high performing Eng team we think about

One of the things missed with AI is that it’s enabled people to do more - either by augmenting skill sets or augmenting bandwidth

In my own circles this has led to more work not less

Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold

Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around

Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again

I don’t disagree with the general principle that people will lose jobs, I just a) don’t think it will be as accelerated as people claim and b) more obviously the disruption will be felt in roles that are more rote and mechanical in nature - e.g. peoples whose job is in the family of summarizing data or compiling metrics, generating simple content (slide decks), etc and slowly creep up from there

AI is one of those garbage in garbage out things and so far the quality out when the input quality has been great from what I’ve seen. Just a note preemptively to the nay sayers

I grew up on construction sites with my dad. If i've done well in my career, it was from watching him operate - managing huge construction crews, how he figured out who to put on what tasks, handling suprises, setbacks, all that stuff

My dad (now retired) was always super practical about stuff. He'd tell me pretty nonchalantly things like "yeah we're dealing with xyz constraint, we may have to cut a corner over here, but that's ok", when I asked him about it he gave me a little spiel that you can be thoughtful about how you do things, including when you can cut a corner and more importantly, what corners are ok to cut.

I really took that to heart - especially the "be thoughtful about the corners you cut"

If an LLM has consistently one shotted certain tasks and they are rote/mechanical - not reviewing that code is probably ok.

Are you getting lazy and not reviewing stuff that should be reviewed even if a human wrote it? That's probably not ok

I can live with some basic code that broke because it used outdated syntax somewhere (provided the code isn't part of a mission critical application), but I can't live with it fucking JWT signing etc

This is gross

It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close

Let the enshitification begin, I guess

You could just always buy a cheap one on Amazon and then make a real investment if you like

If you look at the past 3-4 decades, China has just played their cards so well

If/when they overtake the US, all things aside, they deserve it. There is no world where the US overtakes China but there’s a world where China overtakes the US. Best outcome for the US atm is parity.

Just remarkable the things they’ve accomplished in the time they’ve accomplished them.

Always makes me wonder how people use their machine when I read comments like this

I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software

The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch

It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out

The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond

So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?

The difference is you can make full use of Google without logging in

Even with a throw away, no chance I use OpenAI now - if/when Anthropocene does this I’ll be in a tough spot

This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions

I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer

Wow that was your takeaway?

“2025 was the year when AI really started being useful for many different tasks,” said Terence Tao

I think I’ll go out on a limb and agree with Terrence Tao, I think the dude is well known in the math community, or something

If I had to wager a lazy, armchair guess, I think it forces it to think harder/longer

The answer is probably more straightforward than we think, e.g. “the user thinks I can do this so I better make sure I didn’t miss anything”

I had a similar thought, though not as extreme, the second they started nerfing and filtering models

Their intensions were good, they always are, but the minute you decide to nerf something powerful for someone, it means someone out there has access to the full blown, unnerfed version

Which means there are powerful people out there using AI in ways or for activities in which you will never be allowed to anyway

So yeah, this is just more of the same

Ha so well known it has a name, Cunningham’s law

So many. The Dropbox comment on HN

Funny enough about the Dropbox comment, it caught so much flak that it’s gone full circle and I’ve often found people defending it saying what the guy said made sense at the time etc

I guess Reddit is just less empathetic than HN