Kurtz79

"So I just asked Astra if it thinks it could do this and it said no, it can't." Same. Then I asked it to check the article and it said something like, "uh, it looks I was wrong...".

It's a trend that is pretty much inevitable for a country where birth rates have been dropping starkly for decades, so that less people generating the taxable income that pays for those pensions enters the workforce, than those who leave it.

At the same time, medical advances make it so that retirees live longer than before: https://relojpublico.es/poblacion/esperanza-de-vida

If someone has solutions that would not cause widespread riots, I'm sure most goverments of countries in a similar situation would be all ears.

The graph makes it clear; the question I have though, between the start of SO decline and up to when AI became able to answer SO-like questions (or remove the need for them altogether), where did people go to find an answer?

"In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's."

That's patently false, as Spain has the largest High-speed rail network in the world after China and it has seen constant expansion for the last 30 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Spain

It's a weird way to express that concept, in fact I don't think it ever appeared like this in the book (it has been a while).

It would be something like "nine women cannot deliver a baby in one month", which can be more easily transposed to "adding resources to a SW project does not make it faster".

The agrument is that adding people increase coordination and communication overhead, which gets bigger as the team grows. Moreover, some tasks cannot be parallelized that easily and create dependencies.

I have only worked with agents for personal projects, but I cannot say that explicity dividing the work between multiple agents and asking them to coordinate is inherently faster than having a single agent work on it (of course the single agent will spawn subagents in rencent harnesses.)

I hear this kind of comment a lot, but is there is any proof of it?

People used to come to comment on HN (sub for Reddit or any other forum) because they want to and find it enjoyable/useful. Assuming you are human, YOU came to this site to comment because you wanted to and find it enjoyable/useful.

What makes you think that this is not true for other people? At the very least, such comments add nothing to the discussion.

Artificial Analysis recently released a dedicated 3D benchmark, where Astra lags behind both Opus and Sonnet 5.5 (and yes, open weight models seem to be quite far behind).

https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/aa-3d

Don't give Sony ideas...

I still haven’t tried the new game, but I did feel like that about The Witness.

I loved the beginning, the art style, the Myst vibes, discovering new areas and a specific “WTF” moment.

But I really didn’t understand the need of piling up similar puzzles with minimal variation.

You could have slashed 2/3 of the puzzles and the game would have been tighter and more satisfying imho.

Brevity is be the soul of wit (not of the Witness).

Reading that is a “500 hours game” instantly drains any interest I might have for Order of the Sinking Star, heck, there are not many pleasant activities I can think of I would like to do for 500 hours.

I'm not offended or anything similar, but such open statements look to me as cheap virtue signalling.

If you are convinced that AI content is inferior and less engaging to human-generated one (and I fully agree with that) then simply enforcing that rule without advertising it should already be effective.

I think it is safe to say that Muse models are not pelican-benchmaxxed.

"Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software; see Microsoft Teams and what they've done to Windows 11."

Uh, what is your positive comparison point?

I have been using MS apps since MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 (including doozies like Windows Millennium and Vista) and Teams and W11 are some of most stable, "it just works" pieces of software coming from them I can think of...

Ah, the hours spent tweaking CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run a MS-DOS game that squeezed every last byte of those 640K, good times.

"One of the dumbest sayings ever."

I agree, as my time is much more valuable than money.

"You could say that you prefer to do something else during that time and would happily pay to free it up."

Correct, it is applicable to just about everything you pay money for.

Do you need the $200 sub to use the credits?

As soon as I received them and realized they expire this year, I switched to a $20 membership (billing cycle starts tomorrow), assuming you don't.

After consuming them, I will decide to whom subscribe next.

I'm talking about videogames specifically, as it is the topic I'more familiar/invested in.

I definitely don't think they will disappear, or the current dynamics will change substantially, only their scale will.

As someone that is not artistically inclined, I have the same chance of producing appealing art and assets with AI than I have with pre-AI tools (yes, I tried).

But for people that ARE artistically inclined, skilled at using composition, color palettes, have strong fundamentals, etc... AI will be just another tool in their belt, and if they are able to integrate it with their own sensibilities and existing tools, there is little reason to think they won't be able to come up with art that it at least as compelling as that created with "old" tools, especially as now it is increasingly possible to exert a level of control on what is being generated.

Tools available to digital artists have evolved from having to paint pixel by pixel in the 80s to advanced layer and filter editing in photoshop (not to mention all the advanced tools available for 3D), this is "just" another evolution.

And yes, regardless of that, the market will be flooded by AI-generated slop, as the barriers of entry have lowered significantly; but the market was oversaturated already, and low-effort and asset flip games were a large part of daily releases.

Users still reward appealing, high-effort games, and they will likely keep doing so; the top of the iceberg will remain the same, and the ignored, forgotten bottom, augmented by the slop releases, will just get 10 times bigger.

Except it's not "free", you are using a fraction of your time, arguably your most precious finite resource.

Even if you spend just 10 minutes of it, I would say $0.50 it's not a bad deal.

This. I have an old 2012 Intel Retina Macbook Pro which is already several MacOS versions behind and I’m unable to update it through normal means any longer. It works fine and it still has the best looking screen of any laptop I ever owned.

I keep it at my parents’ house and I maybe use it 3/4 times per year, but it’s enough for my needs when I’m visiting and it feels wasteful to throw it away or store it for good. I fully understand that it is a 14yo machine and it is unreasonable for a company to support old hardware indefinitely, but still, it does feel like a waste.

The period in my life when I hosted parties was when I was a mostly broke college student and flatsharing (you can get a surprising mileage out of cheap Sangria and snacks).

For most people posting on HN, I would guess, money would not be even in the top-3 of reasons.

I never understood exactly who is the target audience.

If I were a vegan/vegetarian for ethical or religious reasons I don’t think I would want food that reminds me of meat.

As an occasional meat eater that also enjoys the many natural options for plant-based protein, why would I want something that replicates taste/texture of something I can already eat?

“Also, in the past Italy already voted twice against nuclear. I doubt the popular opinion has changed meanwhile in any significant way.”

Public opinion can change very quickly, and it usually it does not need to change significantly to have a big impact (see Brexit).

40 years ago public opinion was heavily influenced by the Chernobyl disaster, the last major nuclear accident (Fukushima) happened 15 years ago and it is quite far from memory.

Much more pressing matters today are energy costs and independence, so I expect a new referendum would have at the very least a much closer outcome.

Heh. Pelican-benchmaxxing is real.

A sentence that I would not have expected to read on HN as recently as last year, but that makes perfect sense today.

Jokes asides, @simonw any plan to include a 3D model version (make a 3D model of a Pelican riding a bicycle in Blender)?

Given that Astra seems to have improved a lot in 3D modeling capabilities (and that matches my experience) I'm actually quite interested to see if/when other models catch up and how they stack against it.

Or if anyone knows what would be a useful existing benchmark for that skill.

Also, English localizations of even super-obscure foreign retro games.

Most of those might be not as good as fan translations from dedicated people with good knowledge of English and the original language (especially for very context-dependent languages like Japanese) but they are definitely good enough to follow the story and play through the game.

I think we all expect the heavy subsidized subscriptions to end or significantly increase in price at some point, but it could be years from now and I'd rather spend a similar figure on an hypotetical Mac Studio M8 Ultra, or whatever more advanced competitor that will have likley appeared by that time.

A more apples-to-apples comparison would be with API cost in OpenRouter at the same tok/s rate for the same models that you can run locally, maybe.

I was going to ask if the inspiration for System One name came from Kahneman's and Tversky's research, then I read the FAQ.

I listened to "Thinking fast and slow" recently and I was surprised how closely in behavior a LLM approaches the "System One" as defined there.

I approve of the clever branding!

There is definitely a separate "Fast" mode that the app claims to yield a x1.5 speed increase (I have not tested it) with more token consumption.

I believe you refer to the "Ultra" mode that does what you say and it is also mentioned in the blog post, but I don't think the two modes are related.

I admit that I don't know who Tyler Cowen is, but millions (billions?) of people have drunk coffee daily for centuries and if there were ill effects in the same ballpark as opioids or tobacco by now we would certainly know?

Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s.

Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/