bityard

Running 32-bit software isn't going away, just running a 32-bit kernel.

UI designers think that an interface should look like an art project rather than a tool, and that discoverability and information density are bugs to be squashed.

On most forums, ending up with power-tripping asshat moderators is purely accidental.

In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.

What is your favorite book on emergency appendectomies?

There are a fair number of people who seem to believe that LLMs contain "world knowledge" and are blissfully unaware of how inaccurate an ungrounded chatbot can be. They ask it questions, it gives them confident and plausible (sometimes even correct!) answers, and they leap to the conclusion that these are useful tools for end-of-civilization knowledge bases. I fought this battle countless times on HN and Reddit, generally unsuccessfully.

This project at least attempts to ground its answers with (presumably) human-vetted sources. That will make it much, MUCH more accurate and truthful than a bare model. But there is still a non-zero chance for it to hallucinate answers, especially when posed a question that it doesn't have any source material in its database.

As for why bother hooking up an LLM instead of a simple search engine, search engines don't synthesize data from multiple sources into a coherent answer for you, but LLMs are (mostly) great at that.

That said, while I like this pattern (LLM + knowledge base) for lots of things, this isn't necessarily something I'd trust with my own (or my family's) survival.

Once you learn how an LLM works, you can likely _begin_ to contribute meaningfully to numerous open-source AI projects: inference engines, training frameworks, etc. Or try to find an area of AI that is lacking research and start your own experiments. Or (potentially) go to work for a company doing similar or adjacent work.

Opportunity knocks, but you have to build the door first.

There are lots of reasons Chinese AI companies will always be cheaper than Western AI companies, but chief among them is that China is pouring ludicrous amounts of money into new energy generation projects.

Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, they are building it all, as we speak, at least 10x more than the US. They are aiming to not just be energy independent, but energy dominant.

You can't now (and certainly won't in the future) be able to run an AI provider in the West as profitably as you can in China.

You see it as money spent, others might see it as an investment. OP doesn't necessarily say exactly what they use it for, but if education is the goal, $25k and spending your evenings learning about AI theory and tooling is way cheaper than a university degree and can easily result in millions more dollars in lifetime earnings given the current early state of the technology.

Besides, I regularly see people here in HN spend a LOT more than that on hobbies and depreciating assets. A few years back, people with coastal salaries and tech jobs were tripping over themselves to spend $100k on a certain brand of trendy electric car.

I've been hearing people talk negatively about vocal fry for ages now with no idea what it meant. But this comment was finally the one that made me go look it up. And today I learned that I speak almost entirely in vocal fry.

I get irrationally angry when actual people interrupt me while I'm talking, I'll start throwing chairs when AI tech support agents start doing it.

Not bad, but I guess I lack the imagination to envision the use cases for such casual conversation. Other than... I suppose a certain demographic would be lining up to use this as the voice for their AI girlfriend.

Also I seem to be missing where/how they are selling this.

Last night I found a 3TB external USB 3.0 drive at the bottom of my "computer junk" drawer that I had completely forgotten I owned. It felt like winning the lottery.

Delicious irony that the site this is being reported on pops up a dialog over the content as you scroll down, with the following disclaimer:

> We use your personal data for interest-based advertising, as outlined in our Privacy Notice.

Sigh, this isn't the timeline I was hoping to end up in.