laterium

95% of human farmers lost their jobs because of industrial revolution. What happened then? No jobs were created and we still have 95% unemployment, right?

You generate 20k LOC in a few hours. How long will it take you to read it? One week? You just keep going instead. I don't think this works great at large scale production codebases yet, but it's an approach that will have more and more applications going forward. It doesn't have to fit every use case.

If an AI system autonomously built a rocket and went to the moon, would you call it unimpressive because it's already been done? The moving of goalposts is shocking.

You can sit down at a library or Barnes and Noble and memorize for free.

What makes you think they plateaued?

Is 75% of the country zoned SFH because of safety regulations or environmental reasons?

Why are you celebrating compute becoming more expensive? Do you actually think it will be good?

Being able to conduct monetary policy is valuable, even if it can be misused. Otherwise all other countries would just be using USD.

Some people sure, but "everyone"? Everyone's exaggerating nowadays.

The issue you're overlooking is the scarcity of experts. You're comparing the current situation to an alternative universe where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response.

That is not the reality we're living in. Doctors barely give you 5 minutes even if you get an appointment days or weeks in advance. There is just nobody to ask. The alternatives today are

1) Don't ask, rely on yourself, definitely worse than asking a doctor

2) Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

3) Google it and spend hours sifting through sponsored posts and scams, often worse than relying on yourself.

The hallucinations that happen are massively outweighed by the benefits people get by asking them. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and LLMs are good enough.

Much more important also is that LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests. Their mistakes are not intentional. They're fiduciaries in the best sense, just like doctors are, probably even more so.

Where's the argument? Or we're just asserting things?

What have politicians been doing forever?

How does this add to the discussion? Is the goal to make HN as toxic as everywhere else online? If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise this performative negativity and cynicism is boring honestly.

Why did you waste all your money on 32gb when 4gb is enough? Why did we all need 32gb?

Who declared it? Who cares what anyone declares? What do you think will actually happen? If software can be fully automated, then sure SWEs will need to find a new job. But why wouldn't it increase productivity instead and there still are developer jobs, just different.

The reason housing is extremely expensive in the US is the current old NIMBY home owners. The country has 66% home ownership rate thanks to the long term policy of US government to promote homeownership. But this has the undesirable side effect that for most Americans, their house represents all their wealth and they will fight to the bitter end to protect that from anyone else, especially newcomers.

It's nice to think of newcomers as Airbnbs, investment firms, and Chinese immigrants to justify this NIMBY stance to themselves and sleep well at night. But in fact the newcomers are their own children. Left likes environment as a reason to block construction and right neighborhood character (racism). This ensures that nothing gets built and the home prices stay high, exactly what the electorate, majority homeowner and majority old desires.

From the voter's perspective it's not a housing problem. It's a housing bonanza where it's old people complaining about a problem supposedly others created while wiping their tears with dollars. There's so many red herrings in the housing debate that they can sleep sound that it will never change thanks to the next guy blaming Airbnbs for why housing is expensive.

LLMs are garbage

That's just your opinion man.

Humans are risk averse and loss averse. You see the downsides and are fearful but can't yet see the upsides or underestimate them. Why not make the same argument for internet and computers? We would've been better off without them? If AI makes doctors more efficient would you have your child die to make the doctor's life more fulfilling?

Which tech leader said the rewards will be distributed evenly? That sounds more like a rhetorical strawman for you to dunk on to make a point. It would be similar to saying "Most HN commenters argue that all the benefits of AI will go to the billionaires, but actually they're all wrong because some of it will in fact go to average people"

It's really tiring that LLM skeptics will always talk about LLM fans every time AI comes up to strawman AI and satisfy their fragile fantasy world where everything is the sign of an AI bubble.

But, yes this is a good way to use LLMs. Just like many other mundane and not news-worthy ways that LLMs are used today. The existence of fans doesn't require a denouncement of said fans at every turn.

How do you propose we address adverse selection in insurance markets then? That's the part you're overlooking and making you go "Huh?". It's clear to everyone else.

How do you address adverse selection then? There's no private insurance where you don't address adverse selection. Either you force everyone to have coverage: ie car insurance in US or universal health insurance systems or you force them to get insured in groups (US employer based insurance), or you accept outrageously expensive rates for it.

Healthcare already being expensive doesn't make it amenable to that last option unlike insuring your laptop where you might be okay paying 2-5x the expected loss for peace of mind. Criticizing the method of addressing adverse selection is fine, but not the existence of it. You need something. There's no such thing as completely free market of health insurance. Any economist can easily explain this to you.

If we're talking trading, it means a short timeframe, let's say over a few days. The stock market doesn't really grow over a few days, it's basically zero sum. So every gain you make is balanced by someone else's loss. The issue is both the sellers and buyers are paying transaction costs and taxes, which makes it actually negative sum.

If person A waited a few days and the stock shot up, then it's basically gambling since no stock has 50% expected returns in a few days. These are the "random" fluctuations in the market. Another person made a similar bet and their stock went to $5 instead, losing money. Overall it's negative sum.

If person A waited a few years instead and their stock went up to $15, sure then it's different. But it's stock investing, not trading. They made a profit because they held stocks, not traded them. You also get dividends for holding stocks, not trading them.

You are only ever expected to make money from trading stocks since you kind of also have to hold the stocks for a bit. Stock traders accidentally invest and that's how they make any money at all compared to pure gamblers.

Note that I am talking about the vast majority of stock traders here but not the financial experts or algo trading firms that try to find inefficiencies and exploit them. They can actually help with price discovery and profit by making the markets more efficient. But even they're only making calculated bets at best much like good poker players. Most regular people have no chance.

Taxing something almost always decreases usage. By how much depends on the rate and the elasticity of demand. Gambling demand is probably very inelastic, much like cigarettes and alcohol. (Your argument supports this too) If the rate is low too I can see your point about not having much effect. But it still has an effect. Excessive sin taxes can be the sign of a nanny state, but otherwise I agree with it. All taxes are bad anyways, some are just less worse.

Yes, building houses actually solves homelessness. Housing prices are the best predictor of homelessness and of course increasing supply of a good decreases its price. Why does the law of supply and demand not apply to housing? Sometimes the solution is very very simple and not at all complicated. Just build more.

Housing prices are the strongest predictor of homelessness. Therefore, homelessness is not a moral failure of homeless individuals but of the NIMBY vetocracy that is the housing market.

Investors come out ahead, not traders. The more "trading" it is (meaning more short term), the more like gambling it is. There's even a point where you go from positive to negative sum.

Yes, it is negative sum after transaction costs and taxes.

Regressive taxes can be counterbalanced by redistributive policies. Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue. The issue is sales taxes disincentivize consumption whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling.

The thread we're in was arguing that the requirement to be AGI is to fail the exact same way humans do. I pointed out by showing these examples that failing the exact same way is not a requirement for a new technology to replace people or other technology. You're reading too much into what I said and putting words in my mouth.

What makes it tick is probably a more interesting question to me than to the AI skeptics. But they can't stop declaring a special quality (consciousness, awareness, qualia, reasoning, intelligence) that AI by their definition cannot ever have and that this quality is immeasurable, unquantifable, undefinable... This is literally a thought stopper semantic deadend that I feel the need to argue against.

Finally, it doesn't make money the same way Amazon or Uber didn't make money for a looong time, by making lots of money, reinvesting it and not caring about profit margins for a company in its growth stage. Will we seriously go through this for every startup? It's already at $10-20b a year at least as an industry and that will keep growing.