xtracto

I think for profit Health Insurance is a straight 100% scam. The only service where you pay a company for a service and when you need that service they spend as much money as possible to avoid giving you that service.

But... I've come to realize that it is impossible to make people understand it or change it.

So, I've been proposing a lesser change: In theory Insurance companies business model is to hedge against the risk of people getting sick ok? Well, let's make the bet fair and remove them the ability to decide who gets covered and who doesn't. In the case of the original article: Let a neutral third party panel of professionals be the ones that decide whether the Health Insurer has to cover or not the case.

Otherwise, Insurers are behaving like Casinos that decide to pay or not to pay to people who win a game.

. In this case AI will be responsible for building better models, making people who own datacenters the winners.

We need SETI@home for Open Weight models yesterday...

I dream of some kind of "adjustable" ASIC layers, that have the most "computation demanding" layers as ASICs plus a bunch of configurable R+W circuits (FPGAs?) that can be written to upgrade the models to some extent.

What's fascinating is that we are pushing the state of the art of hardware at this point.

Too bad the things that really matter don't make "sense" (mostly people talk about economic sense when talking about this).

Increasing the temperature of the earth , and water usage are two things that using Space data centers will excel vs the alternatives. However society has just not been able to price that directly into these huge buildings.

Funny that I agree with EM idea on this, but the reasons are so far away.

I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned. In the end, that's how normal clickes of friends/interest groups form (or formed 30 years ago in real life.)

If you got into my group of death metal people, and suddenly started talking about Oasis... we would invite you to get out haha.

Same with patriots.win . They may be a group of right wing biggots, but hey, they did their platform and are happy talking there.

Oh but it really is. An LLM is no magic wand. It's a model as its name rigthly indicates.

Those of us who have worked in modeling and simulations know two principles of models:

- garbage in, garbage out

- all models are wrong, some are useful.

Point being, usually when "the model is wrong" it's because we put the wrong input (too complicated prompt for the model?) or something similar. Its just a machine, like a meat grinder that we turn then cogs.

It's also, frankly, quite lonely. Programming with an LLM is an intensely solitary activity. You and the machine, going back and forth, refining and prompting and reviewing.

I just want to comment on this. Maybe im part of some spectrum, but building stuff with AI in that "solitary mode" ive found it really enjoyable. It takes me too the times 30 years ago when I was a 14 year old writing my own games on Basic and C++ with Allegro.

I had nobody but tutorials and books. And the hky of building, compiling and seeing the result for myself was very enticing.

Maybe it's because I found peers my age uninteresting. I lived in a small Mexican town where 14 year olds where thinking in bullying someone, and unfortunately that someone was usually me.

If someone remembers The Hackers Manifesto (The Conscience of a Hacker) I feel that again after so many years, with AI. Edit: particularly this part:

---

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...

Or feels threatened by me...

Or thinks I'm a smart ass...

Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Come on, ALL companies are psychopaths in their behavior.

Their only objective is to make money to shareholders. So anything that gets in their way is fair game. They are relentless optimizers.

After all, most people holding GOOG, MSFT, META, or others don't care how I happens, they just want their 401k fund going up. It's like that by design.

I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture"

Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.

Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .

I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .

But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .

The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.

This is when I wish Jobs was still in charge of Apple. I never quite liked him, but I like Altman way less. And Jobs would CRUCIFY the whole openAI team for this. It would be beautiful to watch.

Have you seen the clown they elected in the US? Also, ive heard in Ukraine they elected a comedian as president.

Isn't the US famous for not even signing a lot of world treaties like climate accords and others?

This is an interesting subject and conversation, but it's moot having it in these culture-centric forums. I wonder if there are Russians discussing plausible scenarios in Vkontakte groups, or Chinese doing the same in whatever Alibaba group sites they use.

The problem is that we are all skewed by our media, our ideas and our culture. These type of discussions need the highest kind of political interactions.

It's fascinating, specially for someone who lives in a "third world" country, non-aligned to any of these 3 superpowers. Whatever transpires, we are at tge mercy of these (and no, US hasn't treated us "better").

My opinion is that there's no turning back on AGI development. I dont think current governments are capable of getting into an agreement of that size. Specially given the Isolationist stage in the cycle we live in. (In contrast with for example the CFC and Ozone layer issue we had in the 1990s, when the planet was in a globalist kind of stage)

I wonder how would a RAID0 array of either disks or even nvme improve the performance of this.

This is something that would benefit from Intel Optane memory. Too bad it was killed at the time.

I will be delighted to try. I have a 128gb macbookpro m4 waiting for this.

I remember around 2 years ago give or take, we used it at a company for A/B testing. The UI was sensible enough. But fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, I opened an account and I just could not understand what I saw. I remember it being pretty good, too bad the UI got crappified with AI.

I'm currently watching Better Call Saul for the first time with my wife. The fact that they used old ladies for the Ad, and that it is evident they are reading from a prompt (fake-ish feeling) gives me strong James McGill vibes haha. Hopefully the actresses were paid handsomely.

Good, hopefully in 10-15 years we will have mostly self-driving cars for most ground transportation requirements.

They definitely havent. Tech side of companies is a Cost Center. And the main question the CEO/CFO makes to the CTO every week is "how can we reduce our AWS bill?" , even before the how was your weekend ? One.

Reminds me of an American guy who I met in the UK around 2005 when I was doing my PhD (he was doing his 2nd PhD!!!). He refused to open a "cloud" email account (Google, Hotmail, etc). At the time when I asked why, he mentioned something that has stuck with me for all these years:

"It's not about what they are doing NOW with the data, but what they could do in the future" . Back then I thought he was a bit paranoid. These days... not so much.

So, regarding owning/buying stuff, im glad I have a collection of CDs and ibe bought most of my games in physical There are some which are actually hard to get in pirate sites.

I read these type of posts and wonder why someone would move away from such a deal. Maybe is a matter of age, as at 45 years old, I am very happy going to work in a monotone job, checkout at 5 and live my life.

Ive achieved everything I dreamt in my professional life: Got a PhD, got to be CTO, got to be Principal Engineer, got to build several products and companies from 0 to 1. I just want to be left alone.

Nowadays I enjoy being advisor of 3 or 4 early startups at a time. I love seeing the stamina and drive of the young 20+ folks that want to eat the world. I spent 25 years doing the same; but at 45, it's my priorities have changed a lot.

Has anyone experimented with Batch Processing? According to https://claude.com/pricing#api using Batch processing cuts the price 50%. So I wonder if any of the harnesses like OpenCode/Pi or similar could be made to use that for planning or similar.

If buying is not owning, piracy is not theft.

You reminded me of my Univ. Math's class (on integrals). The test was basically get one integral equation randomly and solve it in the blackboard only with the teacher present.

Because you didnt know which type of integral you will.get, we had to learn to solve all of them. We made.hundreds of exercises with a small group of close friends (the teacher gave us a book that's infamous in Mexico from an author Schaumm).

Watch out, ive read that the US government has incarcerated people for about 50 years for doing that.

This. KeePassXC plus Google Drive client is all you need.

we need this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516751

distributed LLM inference. We are at a point where no single person can setup a rig to run a SOTA model, it is just too expensive. So we must build and adopt frameworks that allow individuals to share resources to run SOTA models in a distributed manner. That way they will also be non-censorable by governments.

Also The only way to prevent that one entity weaponizes it, is by giving EVERYONE access to it.

Read the GP comment again. I don't know if Ethereum has, is or will ever get to whatever grandiose goal they have. But the one thing that I love has done is provide intelligent people with funds to research things like ZKSNARKs and similar cryptographic constructs.

It's like war: We don't like war, we don't like people being killed, but man, the amount of technology progress made during war is good.

So, even if you hate crypto; the fact that it is enabling research in cryptographic theory (even if for stupid goals) is good.

I've built my own PC several times and am a hardcore Linux enthusiast.

However at this point in my life, the best gaming experience i get is from XBox live/online subscription. I got to the browser, click on a game and start playing without caring for anything else. The most complicated thing i have to do is connect an Xbox gamepad for games that require it (I prefer keyboard +mouse whenever possible).

I wish Steam had something like that for the games I've bought. I've got several games in the library, I cant play some of them because currently I have a Mac m4.

Pretty good, and I think I could definitely use it. One thing that I immediately missed is syntax coloring. For Markdown and other known extensions. I am sure it will be trivial to add it.

Another possible useful feature would be to add "open in system" or similar in the right-click menu for a file, to open the file with whatever application the OS has bound to it.

EDIT: I see there's a plugin thing that when clicked installs the highlighting. Cool!

EDIT: Also missing is selectively staging lines of a changed file to commit. I would actually change the behaviour of the Git UI so that it matches the VSCode one, to reduce the learning curve. Most people already know how that works, no need to make them learn a new UX.