great_tankard

gg

eh, there are plenty of AI researchers on there. Also a handy "AI haters" labeler you can subscribe to to filter out people who just want to yell.

The labeler thing is cool; I really like ATproto because you can do interesting things with it. If I'm honest, though, I mainly like Bluesky because I don't get called slurs on there.

It really is. Inspired me to be a biologist.

>The only way to break the system is to overload it until it doesn't work, so I can only hope for this.

This is a joke, right?

This feels like a retcon of OpenAI. Their vision from back then is unrecognizable because they had to completely pivot after they saw the value of transformers. They kicked off the LLM arms race in 2022 because they thought they were competing with Google.

i completely agree with this. it's a very cool idea and also i hope nobody uses it in actual writing

The question is about how much permanent damage the administration will have done by 2029. They're obviously trying very hard to kill academia in this country, and the answer is not going to be zero, but I don't understand who else is going to put up the resources to really compete with us. There are midwestern state universities with research budgets that rival those of Cambridge and Oxford.

Here's another example: I regularly read quality publications in my field from researchers at the University of North Texas. In 2024, UNT ranked 170th in the country by R&D expenditure. Until I start seeing excellent work from other countries' 170th-ranked universities, I'm not worried about them poaching a few researchers from us now.

We don't appreciate how good the research ecosystem is in the U.S. The arsonists in power are trying to set fire to the house, and everyone will be poorer for it in the future, but we can still mitigate the damage.

Bought my wife a pair of Klein bottle earrings. They arrived with pictures Cliff had taken of them in his garden. Lovely man.

I would think that repeatedly having to launch millions of pounds of infrastructure into low earth orbit counts as extra build-out cost. This is a literal physical constraint keeping this business from scaling like others, and I don't understand where this notion that Starlink is an acceptable alternative to fiber comes from.

Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.

This is an absurdly irresponsible way to report this work. Doesn't think to mention that they're working with phage (viruses that infect bacteria, NOT humans) until halfway down the story.

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all?

"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

Yes, but the HN crowd isn't Zitron's main audience. He appeals to smart people who don't understand anything about computing or business. I do not mean this in a disparaging way; it's a curious audience that has somewhat justifiable moral and aesthetic objections to LLMs and especially the companies peddling them.

The problem is that Zitron has charm, an authoritative voice and a very aggressive online presence. That's a difficult combination to compete against.

This is exactly how I feel about him too. I also find his "number big" approach to writing ("check out my 18,000 word blog about something I'm learning about in real time") off-putting, so I've completely stopped engaging with it.

We need better critics of the industry.

This is a really strange, deterministic view on something we collectively have influence over. That thing about "unintended consequences that [may be] materially worse?" We've actually just quietly folded the materially worse consequences of our behavior into the cost of doing business. Hurricanes are stronger, flooding is worse in coastal cities, fires are worse in arid areas. Fish don't magically make mercury; a significant portion of that comes from burning coal and mining activities.

All of these things are firmly within our control.