Genuinely happy to hear you're successful here! But, why would you expect there to be no drawback to not knowing the local language when moving to a foreign country?
HN user
svara
Building microscopy analysis software at ariadne.ai (co-founder and CEO).
My username at ariadne.ai if you'd like to chat.
You are (as am I) in the 30% of Germans (40% in major cities) with a Migrationshintergrund.
At that point, it barely makes sense to call that a minority, it's just normalcy. If you find yourself in a pocket of unusual backwardness where it feels otherwise, you should probably leave.
I pass as German based on looks, but my name is weird and my wife doesn't look or sound German at all. I don't think her or I have ever noticed any adverse consequences from that.
If your German is good, you can just act and feel like you belong here and no one will challenge that.
The people saying they're having trouble getting by with just English though are weird to me. What did they expect? Different countries are different, that's sort of the point.
I do actually agree that Germany isn't the best country when you're looking for economic opportunity, but that isn't really what people are optimizing for here. You might disagree with this, but it's mostly not directed against immigrants.
Regarding your political points: Ironically, they sound very German to me. Yours is a standard left of center critique in German politics. The countries that have a long history of being targets for immigration largely don't work that way, probably because extensive social safety nets are bad for the acceptance of recent immigrants by locals.
Thanks for actually giving a great answer to this versus the other knee-jerk comments! I will definitely look into this more.
I think it's important to note that the cost of bringing a drug to market has increased a lot (about threefold) since 1990, so if the case studies are that old they might not generalize.
It's not black and white- in pharma there are notable sources for investment that are not private, e.g. for orphan diseases that would otherwise not see enough investment due to lack of profitability.
But here's a mechanism to mobilize private capital for those diseases that are. Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug.
You're asking someone to pay that money and allowing others to reap the rewards. Why wouldn't everyone want to be the one who didn't pay the money?
Generics exist for drugs that usually someone did hold a patent for that has since expired and they're much less profitable than patented drugs.
Not sure how that address the point. Again, the investment to get a drug to market is gigantic and you're saying that someone should pay for that and someone else should get the reward. It really doesn't work that way. Everyone would want to be the one who didn't pay.
No, only a small part of this is publicly funded.
You spend billions to get a drug from concept to approval - and then once you've invested all that money, someone else can just sell it too, free loading on all the studies you ran? Why would anyone invest in drug studies?
I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.
What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.
When searching Fastly it seems to match "fast".
I think one positive thing that might come of this is for AI to act as a sort of counterweight to the fragmentation of reality into different filter bubbles.
It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.
Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.
One can always hope ...
I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
Okay but if I understand correctly what you did, you measured the performance with automatically rewritten prompts on Fable vs. original on Opus? This might be where the difference in performance that you saw came from.
While I can only peripherally relate to the specifics of your story, I think it beautifully illustrates how interesting and mind expanding it is to spend time in different cultural contexts, and that different cultures can very much co-exist in the same countries or even in the same people.
Everyone should do it more, it really helps put the uncompromising convictions of people around you into perspective and see them as what they often are: a lack of understanding for the breadth of human experience.
The things is, this is almost certainly what's happening.
You can (could, maybe they 'fixed' it by now) get sota LLMs to reproduce entire novels near verbatim.
The idea of giving it parallel texts of those novels in different languages, to train it on translation, is so obvious it'd just be strange if the AI labs didn't do it.
In fact DeepL was doing basically that more than 10 y ago.
Unfortunately useless if you do anything related to biology. It doesn't try to flag dangerous queries, it just flags queries as biology-related wholesale.
It's absurd. To see how far the filter goes I asked it "Are trees a monophyletic group?" and that does trigger the filter.
This is strange to me, did you really ask like this and which model did you use?
I just tried your no. 1 and 3 verbatim and Opus gave fine answers; no. 6 I've done in the past with no issues. The other ones we can't really replicate without more details, but based on my experience with Opus I don't see what the issue would be.
The reason I'm really surprised by this is I do a lot of biology prompts and the guardrails used to be quite problematic up until some time late last year. Many legitimate prompts would trigger its biosafety filters.
But I haven't seen such filters trigger at all anymore in more than half a year.
Chess and proofs only work as comparisons to the extent that you can find parts of your job that share their key property: A solution is sought to a problem that can be stated with relatively little information.
What prompt would someone have used to get a superhuman coding agent to output the Linux kernel or GTA5?
Before you accuse me of moving the goalposts, that's not my point: The examples are there to help think about what humans would still need to do to build complex projects even if the coding itself was perfectly reliable.
Both the Linux kernel and GTA5 contain a large amount of incompressible information; humans thought long and hard about how to design them, i.e. about what that thing they were building was even supposed to be.
I had the same thought recently, I've had it happen to myself.
I've been working on something relatively large and greenfield recently.
A big chunk of my time is spent thinking about the hard parts. The raw information processing rate needed to keep up with the state of the project is high.
It feels almost like mental athleticism, whereas coding used to be a rather chill activity.
Word on HN is that you're either paying more money than you expected for temporal's managed solution or taking on substantial ops burden ultimately running their very heavy system yourself.
I wouldn't know, I've not done either, but I'd like to learn more from your or other's experience.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I think the point I was trying to make wasn't as high-flying as you and others understood it.
I'd pay a premium for even just a model that's 20% better, no ASI required, and I think a lot of people would. I wouldn't call that marginal, if it means I'm getting frustrated on 20% fewer tasks.
A recurring pattern that I've seen in myself and others is to at first be very impressed by a new model's coding capabilities, and then desensitize quickly and start being frustrated by the shortcomings.
There's still a lot of room for the best models to get better at coding .
Your argument rests on the "for marginal gains" part but it's really not clear that the gains are marginal in the foreseeable future.
The desktop client used to be just terrible. Has that changed? The Dropbox client does have its issues but it's really amazing at... Syncing files. I use it pretty creatively with large numbers of files and large volumes and it just works reliably.
So they finally have become AskJeeves?
On a more serious note, the on demand UI chrome could actually be cool UX, curious to try that out.
I see no change to look and feel so far, has this rolled out to anyone yet?
I think something like this will need to become ubiquitous, widely supported in software and understood by lay people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Credentials
I don't think the question of whether subjective phenomena are casual has any bearing on whether there's a 'hard problem' and I also don't think the term 'hard problem' is used like that by others.
Whether subjective experience is casual or not is a different, additional question.
There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:
How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?
My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are you sure maths can not prove that ice cream? Do you have empirical evidence?"
Asking for empirical evidence seems beside the point, since the issue is a logical one.
I use Claude Code quite a bit and quite enjoy it, so I'm a bit confused by how often it's mentioned that you should have CLAUDE.md.
I mean: If there was something you could add to the prompt to consistently increase performance why isn't it in the system prompt already?
If it's all about clarifying a couple of local idiosyncrasies, shouldn't it be able to quickly get them by looking through the repo?
Does anyone have an example of a CLAUDE.md that really makes a difference for them?
In general, this article would really have profited massively from examples of good applications of those patterns.
but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety
Not sure if you intended this but this is basically exactly Byung-Chul Han's point in The Burnout Society.
That's probably the submitter's friends voting.
Isn't the most likely explanation here that they needed to show in their earnings call how their bet on becoming AI infrastructure is leading to high revenue growth expectations, and that isn't happening (yet)?
The stock is currently at -17% in after hours trading.
So you need to do something that's good for your margins to show investors.