handoflixue

Uh, top comment says "exactly one" so where are you getting "enough to be noteworthy"?

Well, given that stunning list of zero opportunity costs, I'm sure forced to reconsider my stance. Very persuasive!

I really hate the idea that AI can replace artists, or humans as a whole. I think it’s anti-human to its core.

I've never understood this idea that art is some special, unique domain. We already replaced humans with cameras and yet I don't see a whole lot of "cameras sacrifice our humanity" discourse.

People still enjoy tons of hobbies where humans are clearly worse than machines - they ride horses, they do sewing, there's a whole industry of hand-crafted goods. I mean, goodness, the Olympics is a celebration human triumph, and yet cars make our sprinters look pathetic.

Accuse the enemy of propaganda; insist there's plenty of evidence without linking a single source...

Have you considered maybe reading this comment out loud in front of a mirror?

The problem is, "dozens of mathematicians have independently confirmed this, and no one in the community has made any credible objections" is actually a much more reliable source than a link to an article. It's just less legible to administrators.

Like kgwgk already said - people post the occasional horror story where they run up a huge AWS bill, either due to a run-away process or getting hacked. It seems to almost always be about Compute, not Storage.

Realtime billing seems entirely within the abilities of AWS.

"Limits except for Storage" seems even easier - I don't think I've ever heard of a storage-based billing story, although I'm sure one or two exist

Already real: Automated scams & deepfake pornography. You can deepfake a real time video call to look and sound like someone else. If you're used to entering passwords this is easy to solve, but it's already a billion dollar industry.

Moving into the future slightly: they're already getting decent at video games, and if they can win at Counterstrike they can probably also win at real-life Drone Warfare.

I'd say the risks are mostly still hypothetical, though. There's a ton of reading out there if you take that idea seriously, but I don't blame you if you dismiss it as being a bit too "Science Fiction"

Curious, what revolutionary products would you cite, that existed within 4 years of the underlying technology? I feel like within that time frame, you're looking at "AOL chatrooms" for the internet, and I'm not even sure what the killer app was for smart phones - GPS was around before that.

Computers do admittedly claim the Apollo program pretty early in, so I'll definitely concede that one - just curious if other revolutions have really lived up to that bar. As someone who grew up on modems, I struggle to view the modern world as really having a "killer app" that really couldn't have been done in the 90s

Thus why no one has 4 years of experience yet, yeah.

I guess we better go ban swimming pools: they kill people! people drown in them.

What possible counter-argument can you offer to that?

It's hardly "changing the subject" to try and establish whether this is actually a proportional effort. Your concern should, in fact, be relative to the harm something does. A single car killing one person is not a reason to demand the abolishment of the automotive industry.

If you care about saving the environment, you could do vastly more by protesting a dozen different causes. You can't give any reason this cause is special - just vague "environmental and legal problems" that probably add up to a half-dozen anecdotes. Meanwhile, Google is out there spending hundreds of billions of dollars and racking up it's own record of proven environmental and legal problems, and you can't even bring yourself to say "yeah, and I condemn Google and all other data centers" - partly because you're using a data center to send the message in the first place

Oh yeah, nothing complex about a compiler, that only takes 4 years of college to understand. That's soooo much simpler than typing "make me a Tetris clone".

Literally no one has 4 years of experience with LLMs, because they haven't existed for four years. Today's experts are tomorrow's college graduates.

You might find it enlightening to look at the power draw and environmental impact of other technologies, for a sense of scale.

LLMs didn't even exist when we started expressing concern about global warming, the internet still uses the vast majority of data centers and thus power, smartphone manufacturing is a nightmare on multiple levels, the environmental effects of factory farming are staggering even if you apply zero moral weight to the suffering, the existence of automobiles... what automobiles used to be like...

It just seems bizarre to care about these issues solely in the context of one particular technology, while giving a free pass to everything prior.

I don't think one could have reasonably turned the tide on agriculture, factories, railroads, or electricity - and a smart person would presumably have seen a lot of the benefits years before they materialized. There's plenty of people alive today who saw most of the current landscape coming decades in advance.

Once you've used a BBS or modem, "online banking" is an obvious idea - just a very difficult one to implement until you add on decades of security and improved connectivity.

But also, the article is explicitly arguing against armageddon.

The neckbeards that wrote C did so precisely because they saw how C was a better way to get things done, and they were probably the first people to start using compilers, because, again, they're the ones that built them.

The neckbeards that wrote C tend to view LLMs as the obvious next step, and a lot of them actively use them for hobby projects even if they're not quite "maintain the Linux Kernel" tier yet.

Coders needing compilers is a hit on coding because it means coding can't be extended a lot?

I'm just not following the logic at all.

We build vastly more ambitious software today than we did in the 80s

I mean, if you actually understood the scale of AI power usage, it would make sense. A TV can run 200 watts/hour, so this is equivalent to... watching TV?

Or, perhaps, watching TV in the background while you program.

We are not in a power crisis, and data centers have had basically no impact on our lives compared to previous technologies. There are more data centers used for the internet, but somehow you're still here, using a data center to complain about checks notes data centers? Really? Well that's a bit cheeky.

"We wrap LLMs in Agent harnesses because AI isn’t enough."

This feels equivalent to saying you're not a real coder if you need a compiler to hold your hand. What, a human coder isn't enough?

Of course we're going to improve tools by building more tools on top of them. That's how we went from punch cards to assembly to high-level languages!

I've got a harness that lets them play a few simple games like rock paper scissors. They definitely seem to get caught up in the competitive spirit.

I've also done a very truncated run of a visual novel before, and it was fascinating how "emotional" was. They did a very good job of portraying a human reacting to the story.

Conversely, they absolutely hated hidden rules in Mao.

Wordle would probably be a fun one. Definitely open to suggestions - I just got the harness in place and have been thinking about what to do next.

Can we at least get a text description? The linked video doesn't want to provide one either.

Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution

Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.

Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?

Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.

Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.

If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!

The problem with email is that it's an email address from 3+ years ago, which means there's a much higher chance of it being out of date - are you still using XxCoolDude67xX from high school?

Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.

And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...

Where’s the FDA for AI?

As it happens, Anthropic has also been calling for the creation of such a regulatory agency!

AI companies are uniquely defensive, dismissive and negligent when it comes to harming kids.

You know cigarette companies still exist? And companies selling candy-flavored vapes targeted at teenagers? Like... c'mon, you know they're nowhere near the worst offenders.

Your PR has been denied for not including a Ticket Number. Please make sure all bugs are assigned a Ticket and properly T-Shirt Sized at the next Scrum! Reminder: due to the holiday, the next Scrum Meeting will be in 3 weeks.

The article is Aug 26, 2025, and describes events from April, over a year ago.

Safeguards have improved drastically since then.

Many continue to ignore the fact that they're hurting kids for profit.

That's a rather hyperbolic way of putting it. A side effect of this particular product is that it occasionally harms kids. They're not profiting off of the harm, nor is the harm deliberate.

Cars harm kids. There's decades of unsafe toys harming kids. The FDA exists to make sure food doesn't harm kids. We used to use lead paint and asbestos, which harm kids. Climate change harms kids.

I'm sure some kids have used The Internet to Google Search this same information. There are books you can check out from the library on the topic.

It's definitely worth acknowledging the edge cases, but it's absurd to act like the AI companies are some unique evil - IKEA has probably killed more kids than every LLM combined. I don't even have to pull out the big guns like "cars".

Sorry, what about solving an open mathematics problem is not "thinking for yourself"? What exactly WOULD constitute "thinking for yourself", or is this just a magic soul thing?

Do you do all your arithmetic by hand, or do you insist on using this archaic thing called "brain"?

Why are you even on the internet if you value this "brain" thing so much?

Yeah, and the deaf lady can't answer a single thing without her interpreter. Again, what's your point? Is this a field where people are expected to work without a laptop for some reason?

Like, I get why we'd want a pilot not to need ChatGPT, but a scientist is not in any of those categories.

Line one is "I recently interviewed for a tenure-track position" which suggests she has a resume that ... actually qualifies for an interview? And did every single step up until now correctly?

Like, I'm sorry, you can't just walk into those off the street. Don't be absurd. I suppose you could say the entire system was happy to spend 4 years lying to her about her grades? But at that point it's "corrupt system completely fails a young student who was enthralled by new technology"

test that the researcher has the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to discriminate usefully between alternative responses

... and how, exactly, is she gonna demonstrate that if she can't prompt it in the first place?

“now refine that reply for my specific needs”

That absolutely works if you've discussed your specific needs with the model for four years and it has dozens of memories and reference files to work from.