D13Fd

Oh, this is a great point. HN really needs a dark mode.

I loved Snow Crash, and I still think about Diamond Age fairly often, 20+ years later. The ideas in Diamond Age were really just incredible.

I even enjoyed his first book, the Big U.

But I also agree about Cryptonomicon. After eating up Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I've tried to make it through Cryptonomicon twice and failed. I just can't seem to finish that book.

I actually don't mind it. They did the work of generating the font files from the public domain works, and you're paying them for that work.

A big part of the problem, in my view, is that the process of creating the art/graphic design/writing was to think and be creative. Having to do the work itself led to a wide variety of outputs that were interesting. Now that's often gone.

And if the work is an ad, a flyer, etc., the quality of the output used to signal something about the event or product. Not so much any more.

There is nothing to be done about it, but it's still a real tradeoff.

The problem is not that people aren't doing work, it's that everything starts to look and feel the same.

With code, that doesn't matter so much. We are using it to achieve real-world objectives. The creativity of the programmer is rarely at issue -- from the user's perspective, a programmer is more akin to a plumber or an electrician. What matters is the result, not the creativity of the code.

But it does matter when part of the point of an in-person event is to see and appreciate someone else's creativity and skill. There is a real difference when that creativity and artisanship is replaced with AI output.

If I want to see AI art, I can prompt a model all day long and see whatever art I want, customized to my preferences. It's freely available and easy to get, so it doesn't have a lot of value.

I have to disagree here. I don't have a bias against AI art, but I've noticed some real effects with public events:

1. You can no longer judge what an event will be like by its materials

2. Everything starts to look the same, and you feel like you've seen it all before

Maybe these effect will attenuate as people start getting more adept with AI. But I think we're in for a least a few years of this.

It felt wrong to me when they split iOS in two to make the iPad OS, and now it feels super wrong.

The whole selling point of this is that it’s an iPad mini in your pocket, IMO. It’s really a shame they couldn’t give it all of the iPad’s best features.

Just grade it like law school (in the US). Homework means nothing, and only the final exam counts. The final exam is administered in a room where you have no access to AI.

So much this. I’m using these models primarily for dumb hobby projects and I’ve still hit this a lot - although much less so in Opus 5.5.

That's what I'm finding too. Opus 5.5 feels both consistently better than Fable and faster.

I just hope they sell off the IP rather than letting it stagnate further. There are other game studios out there who could do a lot with it.

Honestly I bet Obsidian is next, and I'm not sure I'll mind. I still love them for the great games they've made in the past, and still I buy their new releases, but they haven't been able to pull off a compelling game since Pillars of Eternity 2. That was 8 years ago.

Copyright is grossly overbroad. Corporations should not get to own our collective culture for life of the author + 70 years. It's insane. It's hard to feel pity for them.

The aggressive moderation on StackOverflow was so annoying. I still remember multiple times where I found a question about my exact issue, but it had been closed as a duplicate, and the "duplicate" was basically irrelevant.

There are a few different types of Markdown apps. Many of them work like Notational Velocity/nvAlt/Obsidian where it's a folder of plain text files, you type in Markdown primarily, and the editor just applies some formatting after the fact, akin to syntax highlighting. IMO its much nicer than looking at just the Markdown, but it also has the advantage of remaining 100% portable text.

I’m running 27B on a 5090 as well, and the results have been really strong. It does almost as well as, and sometimes better than, a 121gb DS4 model running on an M5 Max 128gb. 27B also flies on the 5090, and at medium think it returns results many times faster than my DS4 setup (the default xhigh is basically broken, though).

For the kinds of things I use a local model for (legal document review), it’s just spectacular. It also has good vision support. I’ve been using 27B more and more over DS4.