short_sells_poo

And one day AI might use this complex math to eradicate humans and you will still be "it's all completely fine"?

The fundamental argument boils down to: "who is all this being made for"? And the answer should be "us, humans". A lot of people here seem to breathlessly fawn over AI as some sort of value in itself, but this is incorrect. There is no absolute value in the universe (as far as we know), the only value to us as humans is subjective.

If AI is not generating value for humans, it isn't generating value, full stop.

Hence the question: "what's the point if we can't understand it?" is perfectly valid and should be discussed. The broader question of "what's the point of AI if not for improving human lives" gets lost in breathless adoration of a technology where nobody knows the outcome.

I'm not saying we need to abandon the pursuit of AI, but we must ask difficult questions at every step because if the technology ends up being as ground-breaking as many here think, it could just as well precipitate a dystopia.

All good, I was just trying to point out what parent was trying to get at, perhaps too bluntly.

I'm not trying to diss anything you do, kudos for trying!

I generally found that the HN crowd is difficult to please and perhaps a better avenue of getting feedback (and support) is to tailor material specifically for HN.

E.g. if you had a blog post talking about what you are trying to do, the problems you encountered and interesting solutions you are looking at, you'd get a much more interesting response? We get continuously assaulted by "the next big business idea" all the time, both here and in our professional lives. It's difficult to stand out in that deluge. Talking about the technical side can be an easier way to engage people in constructive discussions.

Well, the parent poster has a point. They are asking: why are you notable? Neither your company, nor you seem to have any track record, references, an indication that you know what you are doing or some prior art that'd be indicative of future performance.

That is not to say that your idea or company are bad, but there's very little substance that would indicate that I should care.

I don't care that you trained your own deepseek derivative or that you got contracts. What you are proposing to do is interesting, but a mission to Mars is also interesting. If it's some random person proposing a mission to Mars, I don't care because they have no chance to actually achieve anything meaningful. If it's a person who has credible support and a plan, sure, now I'm listening.

Why should I care about you doing it? How are you proposing to solve the hard problems, which are in the robotics space?

I agree that it isn't an unavoidable tradeoff in principle, but looking back at our (as in humanity) track record, it is 99% likely to be.

99.99% of finance is freshman level math if at that. Then 99.99% of the remaining 0.01% is somewhat more complicated but still not frontier level.

There are very-very few cases where you need truly advanced math in finance. The problems that need solving are generally vastly more pedestrian.

You need to deal with terrible data quality, terrible formats, noise in every aspect of your work, disruptions, lack of standards, inability to generate new data (and repeat experiments), conflicting and often opaque incentives, technical problems ranging from shitty APIs to having to squeeze nanoseconds out of your network stack, etc.

These are all difficult problems, but they are crucially not frontier math problems (by and large).

Yeah, the issue is that it takes one disgusting degenerate who doesn't know how to use a toilet and pisses all over the seat or worse.

I'm purposefully not calling these people uneducated, because I routinely encounter it in an environment full of highly paid and educated people with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, etc... kind of education. These people come from money, earn money and are supposedly educated. And yet, they will happily piss all over the toilet seat and not even bother to clean it.

Shows also that money doesn't buy class.

There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.

FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.

It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".

No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.

If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.

I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.

That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.

I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.

> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client

But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.

Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.

> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.

You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.

100% inheritance tax would be ideal, but it's never going to happen in practice.

Recognizing the gaps in your wisdom is a sign of wisdom :D

What do you mean by consciousness here? Ie in what way do you think LLMs are conscious?

OK this sounds fantastic, but is it going to be another case of an expert dropping in on this thread and going "Ah, 100s of these come out every month. It's promising but nowhere near human trials yet."

Yes and the human would say: "your photos are ass, it's impossible to price the necklaces"

I was always wondering about this as well. How much more manoeuvrable can an unmanned drone be given that it doesn't need to lug around life support systems and avoid any G forces that would kill the expensive squishy mammal inside? To your point, it can be indistinguishable from a missile.

Or maybe have a slower but still very nimble carrier drone platform with loitering capabilities that launches very fast and nimble drones/missiles?

Going even further, do these even need to be as nimble and fast as fighter jets? Once you completely remove humans from the equation and replace super expensive and nimble fighter jets with swarms of cheap drones, the loss of a drone or even a carrier becomes much less costly and they won't need to overemphasize survival to the degree that expensive human piloted jets do.