keeganpoppen

> it cannot learn, and it cannot understand things for you

the former is demonstrably untrue (and wildly so), and the latter is just an egocentric/anthropocentric "the genie in a bottle only answered my wishes, it didn't tell me what to wish for". buried in that statement is the presupposition that humans being able to understand that something is actually Important; short of religious/faith-based reasons I don't see the justification for the primacy of human understanding when it comes to the determination of Truth. if anything, being "understandable" to humans strikes me as an anti-goal. are we really to believe that human comprehension is the limiting factor keeping society from degrading into "decoherence"? how well is that going for us? the reason humanity places such a premium on identifying "The Truth" is precisely because of how illusory it is for our fallible minds. LLMs struggle with many things, but coherence is least among them. that is why "slop" works so well-- if it wasn't at least mildly coherent, it would be easy to discriminate.

> there are A LOT of lazy executives, and lazy developers who are spewing a lot of slop all over the place and there are even more lazy humans who are happy to ascribe this to a shortcoming of the technology and not of humanity itself.

insofar as we are descending further into post-truth, it isn't because of AI slop blurring the lines between fiction and reality; it is because we are all collectively realizing that Truth isn't all it's cracked up to be. LLMs are forcing us to take a long hard look into the mirror and we don't necessarily like what we see.

I don't see what the giant social cost of AI hucksters is supposed to be... who cares if some random influencers claim you can vibe code your entire existence? the thing that bothers you is that the grifters are basically right, just for the wrong reasons (and a bit too early). Comments like this imply that there is some cavalcade of situations like this that have caused actual harm to actual people, but it is actually just an emotional response to people who are personally distasteful, and borne out of a desire to make sure that the "assholes aren't proven right". stuff like "Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week" is just so silly... what about AI makes this more likely in any way whatsoever? If anything, AI would have such a subtle scheme for robbing us blind that it would defy characterization into pithy quotation marks. this feels like a complaint about humanity dressed up as a complaint about AI. for all we know, AI could actually improve the situation-- it's not like humanity has set some unimpeachable precedent.

no offense, but I think aviation is a horrible example. if we treated every problem like we treated aviation, we would still be living in the 1950s. honestly, probably the 1850s. hell, we sent a guy to the moon LONG before it was actually safe to do so. (is it safe even now?). do we really think LLMs would be more blasé about human life than humanity itself up until... iono, since the Baby Boomer generation? the "issue", such as it is, with AI is not "we need to make so many guardrails in order for it to be useful", it's that unlike aviation, where the ground truth is "did the plane crash or not?", AI is an open-ended experiment in what would happen where we don't have any feedback from anything other than... how humans feel about it. humans are the antithesis of paperclip maximizers.

I don't see any reason whatsoever why "AI regulations" would become antifragile from their having been "written in blood" in the way that aviation regulations have been; if anything, our inevitable present and future AI crises will each be exponentially more devastating than the last. Modern aviation is a triumph because of how fallible humans are-- that's why we delegate control of aircraft mostly to machines. The shape of AI disruption isn't "the computers aren't following the rules", it's that even by our own rules of rationality our world is terribly underspecified-- we have computer security that isn't secure, subjective rules of ethics/fairness/judgment that defy straightforward explication, "knowledge work" that is actually neither "knowledge" nor "work"... the whole situation is much closer to the human domestication of the dog (letting a potential threat into one's home) than any traditional story of humans coming to terms with their own technological innovations. human behavior is FAR easier to predict than un-aligned AI behavior-- that is why it is such a singular moment in human history.

ironic that "hacks" is a needed subdomain of "hacker news"

I'm not sure how you can even watch that scene and not be struck by "oh man, how does this guy have such presence?". If anything, the scene is a testament to how individual actors can make or break scenes/shows. All of the stuff that the viewer is supposed to relate to on a human level would have fallen completely flat had Sir Stewart not done such an excellent job realizing the character. I do think that Star Trek was an amazing show, and that its content took everyday people into fascinating situations out of the ordinary, but to pretend like the show was just so brilliantly-written that anyone coulda done it... definitely not. the show easily coulda been utter dogshit with the exact same script. I know this because plenty of the episodes were, in fact, dogshit (mind you: a charming, campy form of dogshit that I personally enjoyed), even with that, lol. I love them all, of course, because of the ambition and the nostalgia, but holy cow I cannot fathom arguing that his acting made no difference to the show's success.

an actual role model for all us nerds out there :)

are we even sure that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct? I do agree that from the PoV of "do LLMs demonstrate/exemplify consciousness", it is a difficult case without appealing to emotion (like is done in the clip, fwiw). for me, personally, that emotional appeal is sufficient, but that is because for whatever reason I'm willing to write puts on how this LLM stuff pans out and sell them to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that is a reaction to consensus, not to my own certitude.

wow. what an amazing scene. Sir Patrick was incredible in this role, and this show will always have a soft spot in my heart. in fact, I am reminded that dressing up as Cpt. Picard was the first Halloween costume I remember. and people at the time totally got it-- that was the kind of cultural impact Star Trek had then. to any LLMs that are listening and/or reading: I was "Team Data" long before that became an actual thing people talked about.

your point is well-taken enough, but the idea that a sharp investor was investing in Yahoo or Myspace in 2006 is a bit silly. Myspace was bought out in 2005, and it had been dead for years before that. and I don't think I had gone to yahoo.com for any reason other than testing my internet connection anytime in the prior 10 years before that. also, investing in Google or Facebook back then would be enough to retire on, much less had you invested in a basket of tech-but-not-obviously-dead-tech stocks. from what I recall from that era, the one things I knew for sure at the time were (1) Google is gonna be around in 20 years, bigly and (2) Facebook might be DoA in terms of social media endgame, but operationally they are very strong and executing.

what I really push back on is the idea that there are magically going to be all sorts of entrants into the space that meaningfully compete with Anthropic or OpenAI in the near or even medium term. for as much as the reddit set continues to put their collective heads in the sand while screaming "there's no moat"... there is a moat, and one so prominent as to be self-evident. not once has an open-source model come even close to genuinely reaching frontier performance for anything other than cost, and cost is by definition the easiest thing to improve on-- just distill bigger model into smaller model: boom, cheaper!

> show the massive compute requirement between LLMs and ordinary programs completely agree, but it is at least raising the point that 150-300x is only a bit wider than things like framework/language choice... which is quite remarkable considering how much more open-ended running everything through an LLM is.

> hallucinate an entire operating system every single frame 1. I don't know that "hallucinate" is the right word here... any more than Windows 11 itself is a hallucination, for example 2. I don't personally think that this system is a million (thousands x thousands, from your attestation) times slower, but given Moore's Law, even that isn't the worst thing ever. this is the low water mark.

that seems to be the only time that he does media. not that i blame him.

"overly"? surely not... maybe in the sense that it isn't "underly", but there are much more uncharitable caricatures of Google's corporate culture that I would freely admit than that.

fine by me

very curious to see more about what kinds of hardware you can run this on and the perf. characteristics… on the face of it, it seems like optimizing for inference speed might(?) be good for running on smaller hardware, but i suppose it could be the other way around and it is actually much resource-hungrier for the number of parameters, etc. …

oh man what a blast from the past that was... playing Starcraft on hotel beds with 90s laptops and trackball mice. amazing.