xigency

This happened to me and I tried to recover the last licensed version I had used but mixed up my shortcuts or something and, after the 100th time I saw the nagware screen, I gave up and uninstalled and went with something simple and free: Notepad++.

Troll / flamebait

I used to be at Amazon on the B2B retail side and at the tail end we got automated A.I. spamming our TT's with completely wrong summaries. Some great "progress." Internal search had similar "improvements" that tipped the balance of 'good enough' toward 'non-functional.'

That's a nice thought but I've only had one physical in the last 15 years. I'm sure others are sitting in the same boat.

So that's why they dropped "Don't Be Evil."

The problem I see with A.I. research is that its spearheaded by individuals who think that intelligence is a total order. In all my experience, intelligence and creativity are partial orders at best; there is no uniquely "smartest" person, there are a variety of people who are better at different things in different ways.

Have you tried creating your own programming language? How about solving unsolved frontier problems in mathematics? Ever written a book that won a Pulitzer prize? How many languages do you know?

As someone who was born ambitious I find this technology tepid at best.

Oh for sure, I've gone as far as trying to get people to change their votes to avoid what we're currently putting up with. But you can't argue that each party paves the way for the other's abuses. Consider the average age of congress and the amount of power the executive branch now holds.

I agree. As someone with libertarian ideals I dislike both of these parties (almost) equally.

Yeah, that's a very good question. I kind of doubt it since we've moved beyond a world of common sense.

If this ruling holds the best thing would have been to have never paid the tariffs.

You're trading correctness for speed.

That's AI in a nutshell.

Schrodinger's HN: LLM's are really great. No don't make me read it!

That's not quite a valid point considering the article's conclusion: sowing dissent in the sciences allows companies to more easily package and sell carcinogens like asbestos, lead paint, and tobacco products.

I understand his diction is a bit impenetrable but I believe the intention is to promote literacy and specificity, not just to be a smarty-pants.

Sure but only because I'm unemployed, in debt, and behind on child support payments.

I understand your point however no one forced Microsoft to buy GitHub and use it as a Trojan horse for A.I. And for that matter, they have all the power in the world to put gates around their repo's and the repo's comment threads.

Right? Within 30 minutes of the first film you have a military tribunal discussing the dissolution of the senate. People who are triggered by politics in Star Wars have very low media literacy. (Sorry.)

67% of the time it works all the time?

Taking a wild guess, was this at Fog Creek / Stack Overflow?

Indeed I was playing with a local model and thought I might work on a difficult project I've been putting off which is a new programming language. As I described the task, the model attempted to convince me this was a foolish endeavour that I wasn't equipped to do -- so naturally I included documentation from my most recent PL project as a counterpoint, then suggested starting from there. Llama responded (ironically) by claiming I was attempting copyright infringement.

Which is to say, in the long and short of it, an LLM is completely useless for anything so ambitious as to be intellectually challenging, because the median user has no use for such cases. If I were to pay a subscription fee for something more cutting edge, I would not only be giving up the copyright on the project but also any and all trade secrets, which would end up feeding the next version of GPT or Claude or what have you.

At least while I'm unemployed and underinsured, I'm not in the business of giving away my remaining talents to multinational billion dollar corporations (and paying for the privilege). Instead I've signed up to be a volunteer developer for a non-profit.

My consolation prize against AGI optimists and Singularity doomerists is the film "Slumdog Millionaire." Our individual experiences feel worthless until the opportunities present themselves where they become invaluable. The exponential space of creative problem solving ensures that (some) winning combinations will always come out of left-field.

Humans are social creatures. The existence of a tool that can replace humans is not nearly so depressing as the realization that a loud and powerful group of people are zealous and joyful to use it to such ends. The assumption that people come first is rapidly becoming a logical fallacy in a world that seeks to optimize paperclips first.

Anyway, the pendulum will swing the other way eventually, but it's a rough ride hanging on until then.

Glad to see stimulating discussion here falling on both sides.

Not really, only when looking back at the 60's and 70's when most of the important algorithms I use were invented. For example, LR parsing and A*.

Just wait until the MBA's and politicians learn about this Adam Smith guy. A pipedream now, but maybe in the future schools will be inspired to teach about dialectical reasoning and rediscover Socrates.

[end of snark]

Sorry, I'm getting tired of ad-fueled corporations trying to get me to outsource critical thinking.

Note that this article uses A.I. somewhat interchangeably with the concept of recommendation algorithms in general. It's a long read (admittedly, I had not finished reading on submission) but well thought out with a number of really strong quotes, along with citations.

Previously submitted a few months ago without comments; I'd be interested in HN's thoughts, however counter-productive that might be to the thesis [feeding the next LLM scraper].

I've applied to multiple A.I. companies now with the value proposition that I am grounded and skeptical (along with being a tenured technologist with a background in risk management) and they weren't having it.

Free lunch for the long view thinkers, whenever they decide to show up.

Unironically it's a form of occult divination. I know it sounds crazy but it really is the synthesis of humans' collective works combined with some dice rolls. I'm quite honestly surprised someone more superstitious than I am hasn't raised this point yet (that I've seen).

One trillion atoms of the heaviest element is less than a nanogram. I get your point it's just that we can't even simulate all the blades of grass on a one acre lawn with every shortcut we have.

Really I think it would be cool to explore -- I've been working on a procedural game engine (conceptually at least) for a long time and want to incorporate even "basic" things like chemistry. I think it's still decades away for that, not even considering quantum phenomena.

It's a less well-known fact that criminals love chaos and grifters/scammers love the poorly educated.

I believe the future of such simulation is to start from the lowest level - ie. schrodinger's equation, and get the simulator to derive all higher level stuff.

I do hate to burst your bubble here but I've been doing real-time simulation (in the form of games, 2D, 3D, VR) for enough decades to know this is only a pipe-dream.

Maybe at the point when we have a Dyson sphere and have all universally agreed upon the principles that cause an airfoil to generate lift this would be possible, otherwise it's orders of magnitude beyond all of the terrestrial compute that we have now.

To quote Han Solo, the way we do effective and convincing science and simulation now is ... "a lot of simple tricks and nonsense."

I think you misunderstand what 'dumping' means in this market context. Sure, free software like Linux is great. But if you didn't have that preconceived notion, a competitor dumping free software on the market to make others' initiatives unprofitable would look like an anti-trust violation, rather than a charitable act of community.

Well, I guess democracy has spoken. And so has the market as the do-nothing people continue to get paychecks and I collect unemployment.

Not only that, but the people working in this space still aren't reading the room, which is not encouraging.