HN user

seu

839 karma
Posts7
Comments148
View on HN

This is generally driven by people’s desire for a new device, including for the functionalities provided by new models.

So people are to blame, not the companies shoveling ads, offering promotions to buy new phones, and in general creating the huge demand that they later, "are forced to satisfy".

The article is great and very informative. But I feel there's a general vibe of "privatizations are great". For example, they do mention that privatizations didn't work in Argentina (they were a total mess and the total railway went from something like 50k kilometers to two thirds of that - if) but they don't mention enough of it - or other cases - to understand which regulations and why worked the way they did. It feels too much like it's all about integrating corporations, and that's it.

I was dual booting Linux Mint (work) and Windows 11 (games). A month ago, Windows started trying to push an update, which I resisted. A week ago, they just force fed it to my computer. I deleted the partitions without a second thought, tried CachyOS, realized that the games I play worked perfectly out of the box, and now I'm using it as my main OS. I'm never again installing windows on a computer I own.

I think there should be less "how to solve friendship" posts, which see our social interactions as "problems" to be solved, and more reflection about how this is a consequence of a market oriented, inequality driving system. If the problem is that friendships need time, we should demand less working time and more free time to establish friendships.

Sometimes it looks like the purpose of those hundreds of billions of parameters and those apparent feats of engineering, is to get others to tell you how clever you are. Now we have even automated that.

There's a very interesting critique of Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow" from German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzen: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397923694_The_Legac...

I suggest everyone interested in learning how these theories emerge, and how the social sciences work, to give it a read. Also, it kind of dismantles the whole idea of System 1 and 2, which then I guess would question the theoretical foundations of this paper too.

I'm a bit surprised to see those examples, because there's nothing really new here. These are typical beginner pitfalls and have been there for at least a decade or more. Or maybe it's because I learned java in the late 90s and later used it for J2ME, and then using things like StringBuilder (StringBuffer in the old days) were almost mandatory, and you would be very careful trying to avoid unnecessary object allocations.

Looks great! It could be nice to have an integrated temperature control solution that keeps your servers cool and your plants warm.

Not exactly governments, but I work with NGOs in Germany, and plenty of them use Teams and other MS products, just because they receive them for free and don't have the budget to pay someone to install open source alternatives. Training is especially costly and in these environments people are not really "digital native". It's not even about age, but about culture: people here will do what they are trained to do and fear doing something they don't know, because they might "do something wrong". I was responsible for a platform that gives free online storage, chat functions and videocalls (BBB) for NGOs, and had to hear these arguments over and over when discussing migrations. So unless there is a political drive, together with good trainings and support, the transition is very very difficult.

also completely unfazed by the premise that it has been 'hacked into' a late-90's computer game. This was surprising, but fits with Claude's playful personality and flexible disposition.

When I read things like this, I wonder if it's just me not understanding this brave new world, or half of AI developers are delusional and really believe that they are dealing with a sentient being.

I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech. I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it. These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs. It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.

And I've vibe coded entire ephemeral apps just to find a single bug because why not - code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use. Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions.

I'm not super up-to-date on all that's happening in AI-land, but in this quote I can find something that most techno-enthusiast seem to have decided to ignore: no, code is not free. There are immense resources (energy, water, materials) that go into these data centers in order to produce this "free" code. And the material consequences are terribly damaging to thousands of people. With the further construction of data centers to feed this free video coding style, we're further destroying parts of the world. Well done, AGI loverboys.

Can we please stop saying "AI is doing this", "AI is doing that", and instead point out at the companies and individuals that are shoveling AI down our throats as the ones that are decimating industries or destroying jobs, almost exclusively for their own economical benefit?

Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.