weevil

What does an LLM-first macOS look like?

Like a product I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

I think most people just assume it's magic, and are too awestruck by the hype to think critically.

Financially this feels similar to Uber's business plan in the 2010s; undercut the market with unsound pricing propped up by venture capital (PE was literally subsidising taxi fares; they admitted this and their intention to readjust, but no one seemed to care) then stop manipulating the market and allow fares to even out at (gasp) what it cost to get a cab before Uber.

The difference here is that the LLM market is human productivity; enormous subsidies are afforded to Anthropic, OpenAI etc. in the form of VC or compute credit, but eventually those debts will be called in, the free-to-use aspect will vanish because it's simply not profitable, and we'll be left with several premium products that only a few people will actually pay for, and even then that may not be enough to cover their costs. That's when the bubble will burst.

I don’t know any more about AI than most generalist investors.

This statement is redundant; the article screams with the author's ignorance.

Anyone calling anything an anti-pattern without evidence always sounds to me like 'I don't like how you do this, but I need to find a more cerebral way of describing that so I don't sound like a child.'

whoosh

Don't you mean 'Gaulling'

I feel like you're giving certain entities too much credit there. Yes text is generated to do _something_, but it may not be to communicate in good-faith; it could be keyword-dense gibberish designed to attract unsuspecting search engine users for click revenue, or generate political misinformation disseminated to a network of independent-looking "news" websites, or pump certain areas with so much noise and nonsense information that those spaces cannot sustain any kind of meaningful human conversation.

The issue with generative 'AI' isn't that they generate text, it's that they can (and are) used to generate high-volume low-cost nonsense at a scale no human could ever achieve without them.

Life’s too short to go through it hating others

Only when they don't deserve it. I have my doubts about Google, but I've no love for OpenAI.

Plagiarism has a particular definition ... no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read

Of course they aren't, because we rightly treat humans learning to communicate differently from training computer code to predict words in a sentence and pass it off as natural language with intent behind it. Musicians usually pay royalties to those whose songs they sample, but authors don't pay royalties to other authors whose work inspired them to construct their own stories maybe using similar concepts. There's a line there somewhere; falsely equating plagiarism and inspiration (or natural language learning in humans) misses the point.

ChromeOS is a good idea if all they do is surf; security risks are pretty low. iPhones are also fairly safe, but the older they get, the slower they'll get and the more you have to support them. I've had to explain to my dad that eventually the software on the phone will be so old that new apps can't go on it. He looks at me in confusion and aggression and asks why, as though I'm responsible for Apple's planned obsolescence.

My family was ultimately able to convince my grandmother to get rid of her computers altogether, when her dementia really kicked in. I think we were lucky as she never really got on with computers, and would tell anyone who'd listen how computers 'came in' to her office the year she retired (in the 90s) and so never needed to learn.

Gah that is frustrating.

The replies you're getting are a bit reminiscent of the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" defense of firearms - like, yes that's true, but the gun makes it a lot easier to do.

The story isn't about LLMs doing LLM stuff. It's about lawyers using LLMs as a shortcut for proper legal work, laboring under the delusion that it is entirely accurate, honest and 'intelligent', and the ramifications for the legal system.

This will be laundered by anti-climate-crisis psychos as 'look how bad solar is for the planet! Better maintain the status quo.'

Of all the questionable things Musk has done in the last few years, trying to sell a stainless steel electric truck doesn't even make the top 25.

Personal liberty arguments and all that aside, this comes across like the NZ government actually wanting people to smoke, so the tax income can fund tax cuts elsewhere. Quite sinister.

Sssh don't tell anyone that's our secret!

Just another option.

My partner and I specifically avoided diamonds (and ultimately all gemstones) for our engagement rings. We went for unobtrusive silver rings, then shelled out for good quality gold wedding rings from a craftsperson we both knew. I think we spent about $1500 on rings in total and, can you believe it, our marriage has not fallen apart because we didn't spend thousands of dollars getting shiny rocks for our fingers.

Interesting that you (presumably) read the article and came to this conclusion.

social equality ego theme du jour

Labour actively avoid doing anything the Tories can spin to weaponise the electorate against them. They don't feel bold enough to reverse anything the Tories have done, because the Tories will spin it as Labour taking away our freedoms or charging us too much tax whatever nonsense.

I'm honestly at a loss as to why some people (and organizations) are hell-bent on hampering attempts to decarbonize, and amplifying whatever tiny negatives they can whether they're real or not, as though nothing less than 100% perfect is worth replacing the awful status quo.

Both services gain from not actually enforcing this policy.

I've noticed this too, including the increasingly indefensible position that billionaires are somehow inate geniuses and will solve all our problems.

This is the most infuriating attitude, and the reason you can't reason cryptobros out of their delusion.

These are the guys making the actual money. A few mil in VC is fun but will only get you so far; finding a boring, useful niche to sit in and supply a market long-term is so underrated these days.

The interesting difference here is the emotions involved in the marketing and public perception; crypto was largely about hope, NFTs were greed and a quick buck, AI seems to be a mix of embracing the future and fear of the future.

Almost all the software engineers I know are sceptical of this wave of AI at best, or openly dismissive at worst.

The people I know buying into the hope and/or fear are people with no actual hands on experience, or no technical knowledge beyond the 10,000ft view their engineers describe to them.

Generalising, of course, but this has been my observation as the dust settled from the AI boom late last year.

There are legitimate and serious concerns about AGI as a concept, but I agree with you. Even earlier in the year, each time a new GPT model came out, people on here predicted the end of the world with increasingly manic fervour. Not done with HN, but I'm going to be avoiding AI links like the plague.

The author would disagree with you; I think they think it's more like:

Node engineers: "lEt'S bUiLd SoMe MiCrOsErViCeS!!!!! YAY I'M CODING!!"

Chad UNIX architect who won't code in any language that doesn't give you the tools to blow your own foot off just printing a string to stdout: "No let's keep adding functionality to this one codebase until it's as complex as a suite of microservices."

(According to the author, at least.)

This post reads like a cry for help. I don't really know what they're arguing for. Sure the broad-strokes 'microservices bad monolith good' is something I can get behind in some cases, but the slightly unhinged tirades against Node developers and the 'bloated farce' of the modern tech industry might as well be satire for all the value it contributes to debate.

They argue that Node tricks frontenders into thinking they can do server-side, then says they 'huff and puff' when this is pointed out to them. It's an incredibly patronizing argument to make.

Maybe, but people have learned to value their lives outside of work more than they once did; spending time with family and living outside of a big city (if that's what you want) is a huge draw for people like me.

Sample size of one, but I've thought about this a lot, and I decided I would hand in my notice if my company unilaterally demanded I physically present myself in a building for several days per week. I've never worked on-site in this job, and been consistently ranked highly in terms of productivity and responsibility.

The reason I find it interesting as a prompt is precisely that; it's a statement where the statement and the subject of the statement are the same thing. A human can easily make that logical jump, but without being told how to do that (as your prompt does), it confuses the transformer in interesting ways.