randerson

If you've ever watched a kid try to use a MacBook, they instinctively touch the screen because they were raised on iPads.

I'm not against technological advancement. But AI is unlike previous innovations. Soon, every scientific and knowledge-based breakthrough could be made by AI. And we're losing something intangible when that happens.

Think of your average Veritasium video. They know how to tell a story about a scientific breakthrough. It always centers around the human inventors. Take the humans out the story and it's less interesting, relatable, or enjoyable. Also consider: why do HNers hate AI slop? If all that matters is the outcome (getting some point in writing), AI does that. I hate slop because it has lost its human touch. I appreciate a result more when its distilled from human effort, and I'm not alone.

I'm not a mathematician so I have no skin in this particular game. I'm a software engineer though, and we've already gone through this. I can simultaneously love how easy it is to build applications with AI, and miss the days when human talent was valued and celebrated in my field. My job gave me purpose. My work team had comaraderie. A future where we all report to AI managers and we exist just to sign off on what our AI agents do, is dystopian.

Yes, I suspect there will always be human sports teams, musicians, actors, etc. My point was to illustrate that everything is less appealing when you take the humans out of the picture and I don't see why science is different. If outcomes are the only thing that matter then when robots are better at sport than humans shouldn't we should all just watch robots compete?

P.S. Do you really believe humans are going to visit any object further than Mars, let alone actually colonize them? Things would've had to go very wrong on Earth for that to happen, and that future doesn't appeal to me one bit. Call me a luddite if you want. How many people would willingly say goodbye forever to the wonders of Earth so that they can start their family on an inhospitable planet where they'll be indoors for the rest of their life? And why even bother exploring those planets? We can get all the data we need from autonomous spacecraft. Isn't that the outcome that matters?

There is more to life than outcomes.

Would sports teams have as many fans who enjoy their games, if all the humans were replaced by robots? Your team may win, so I'm sure you'll be happy with the outcome, but maybe something got lost?

I for one have always felt inspired when reading about remarkable human achievements. To think that those might be coming to an end, replaced by AI, takes the humanity out of those stories.

I recently tried to create a new Gmail account for a small app I've made. I wanted a way for users to get hold of me other than my personal email address.

They now ask for your mobile number during signup. And it wouldn't let me register any more accounts with my number. So frustrating.

If you care a lot about home network security: spend $12 and buy a domain name for your home network. Your DNS entries can still be on your local DNS server. You can have HTTPS certificates without warnings, and there's no risk of someone else registering the domain and your requests going to an outside IP.

It's not enough to simply have a IoT VLAN that you put all your IoT devices on. Because those devices can see one another. In this case, if the coffee machine can see what type of smart fridge and smart toaster you're using, they can sell that data.

I default to adding IoT devices to a 2.4g "Guest" network where they can't see each other. Exceptions are IoT devices that need to see their friends to do what I bought them for, or devices I want to integrate with HomeAssistant. In those cases I create a separate IoT device per IoT brand. Excessive but necessary.

While I mostly use Opus for coding, I use Sonnet in my actual application, because it is far cheaper at scale. I have Sonnet parse user free-text input, understand it and return the meaning as structured json. It doesn't need advanced reasoning, just a good enough understanding.

Indeed. But remember a PE firm has economies of scale because they own many vet practices. They can negotiate better rates with suppliers than you can, and better payment terms. Maybe they even own some of those suppliers. They can divide their advertising costs by all the practices they own, whereas you can't.

Even if you were willing to be as ruthless as a PE firm, raising your prices and sacking half your staff, and even if you were somehow an expert in financial engineering and business optimization, you still won't make the business as profitable as they can.

If you start your own veterinary practice, and eventually build up a steady stream of happy customers, then sooner or later the PE firms will come knocking on your door, too.

Imagine you're drowning in student debt and worrying about keeping your business afloat, when someone offers you $5M, and says you'll still get to work with animals, which you love, while they take care of the financial and business side, which you didn't enjoy. It's a no brainer for most people.

Porsche is famous for underpromising and overdelivering.

For instance they claim a 0-60 time of 2.4s for this car. Car & Driver independently tested it and achieved 2.1s. They also claim 298 miles of EPA range (mixed highway & city driving). Car & Driver worked out 300 miles at a constant 75 mph (which is harder on an EV than city driving.) On the base model, which claims 303 miles range, MotorTrend achieved 350 miles of pure highway driving.

Pick any Porsche and you'll see that they lie to make things sound worse than they really are.

In one of the videos you can see dark clouds behind the plane. I suspect the pilots knew they'd have to divert to a different airport if they couldn't land and put pressure on themselves to not have to do that.

The band Muse (who has been around 32 years) just lost their Instagram handle thanks to this..

They're old because they didn't get hit by a car.

Had this done too to cure PVCs - a irregular heartbeat that wouldn't have killed me, but it did lead to an enlarged heart and low energy.

I remember feeling great during the procedure thanks to whatever meds they gave me. I could watch them on a screen threading the wire in through my femoral artery all the way up into the inside of my heart. Then I felt the exact moment I was cured. The irregularity I'd known my whole life just changed rhythm. Then they injected some stuff to stress test the heart at high and low speeds. 24 hours later I was back home.