adriand

> The real question is how many people haven't figured out how to use AI to make their job easier/more productive.

I think the answer, to a reasonable approximation, is “everyone”. Outside software engineering most people aren’t using it for anything useful, and I keep encountering technical people including programmers who don’t use it either, which never fails to surprise me.

One of my projects is a transportation management system (TMS) and of course I have added a lot of features to it including a very capable chat-based UI that can automate a lot of tedious data entry and other tasks for dispatchers and accounting and so on. It gets used but really not very much. I’m starting to realize that I’ve probably taken updates as far as they can go in terms of the ability of people to absorb change. Most people just carry on doing things the way they always have.

We had one person on the admin team who started using Cowork to automate all kinds of stuff. She loved it. Then she left. It hasn’t caught on with anyone else.

This is not to say that things won’t change but I think it will take a while.

We are not helpless. We can choose to control the technology and do so in a way that is in line with democratic principles. After Hiroshima, people assumed that most nations would develop nuclear weapons and that nuclear war would be commonplace. But Nagasaki was the last nuclear attack, and 80 years on, only a dozen nations have nukes. This technology makes nuclear weapons look like toys. We either choose to control it or we will be the victims of it.

Are these cyberattackers using models they developed themselves? Or are they using models they stripped safeguards from? It’s the latter, right? And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t take steps to control the technology.

Maybe Bill Gates has a point when he says that models capable of significant cyberattacks need to run on controlled infrastructure. Is the era of open weight models you can strip safeguards from turning out to be so great? From my perspective, this kind of sucks.

> Cursor should not be shipping extensions that are branded Anthropic if Anthropic didn’t create that extension.

Well, duh. From what I can tell, that’s literally the hack. A bad actor shipped an extension on the Cursor marketplace that wasn’t made by Anthropic.

I’m of two minds on utopias. On the one hand it seems we need a positive vision for the future, where technology is used to solve our greatest problems and improve the planet. On the other hand it seems that perhaps technology is incapable of making us happier, because it isn’t clear to me that we are happier now than in past decades, despite having more advanced technology.

The deniers have transitioned to doomers. Originally they said we needn’t fight climate change because it wasn’t real. Now that’s it’s undeniable they say we can’t fight climate change because it’s too late.

> Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.

It’s so true. The only time I watch one of these movies is when I’m stressed and exhausted and want something so dumb I’ll fall asleep in 20 minutes.

When it comes to these “worlds” that are generated, there’s no there there. I’ve tried various of these and after three minutes I close the browser. Walking around my neighborhood is a million times more interesting. Whereas the creator-constrained and -designed experiences (GTA comes to mind) actually deliver something engaging.

> Both robots are magnetic and guided wirelessly by an external electromagnetic coil system

That’s so cool. It reminds me of being a kid and playing with magnets beneath a sheet of cardboard, using them to invisibly move metal objects on the surface. Is that sort of the principle here?

Here’s a link to the tools themselves:

https://getartcraft.com/

I thought the story itself was pretty interesting and the implications for software distributed as binaries are huge.

> After the LK-99 debacle

"Debacle"? That was the most fun I've had on the Internet in years. When's the last time so many people engaged in so many arguments about materials science and electromagnetism? Sometime in the 1800s?

We don’t need to regulate “computation”, we need to regulate artificial intelligence. The “proposal” you outlined is a straw man, I’m not opposed to open research, and I have no idea who you are referring to by “our former employees”. But yes, we should be regulating this technology like we regulate nuclear technology.

Jensen Huang does not want regulation, but in his interview with Ezra Klein he said AI will let us “know anything” and “do anything”. Do we actually want any random person to be able to “do anything”? I remember when the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin. Do we want doomsday cults to be able to “know anything” and “do anything” so that instead of releasing sarin, they release a genetically modified strain of smallpox?

This is not a hypothetical risk, this is an actual, present danger. And good luck trying to vaccinate yourself against an engineered superflu using a Chinese open weight model.

This completely ignores the world we are creating here. We are setting ourselves up for a massive cyber disaster. The safeguards on US models are insufficient but at least there are safeguards. The fact there are open weight models floating around that are capable of wrecking the economy is a genuine problem! One that Anthropic is doing us a service by warning us about.

When someone wielding a non-safeguarded model deletes the money in everyone’s bank account, I look forward to the HN comments claiming it’s an attempt by Anthropic to pull off regulatory capture.

Well, I've been sitting on Sequoia this whole time, because I decided to sit Tahoe out, based on what I heard on HN. Maybe I'll sit Golden Gate out too!

My friend, who is a mathematician, sent this in our group chat:

The title is a bit misleading. The variant with a smooth forcing was one of the four valid variants in the Clay formulation. It is interesting to solve it. It is still an interesting and impressive result. The no force version is also interesting and remains unsolved. It isn’t reasonable to just dismiss the proof on the grounds that 26 years later we claim it was never that interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen this attitude.

Let her rest in peace.

Ouch. Have a little compassion. It is not easy running a small business, even less so when you've got a baby FFS!

> "At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way,'" she told me. "I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping down my legs because I overflowed the pump."

Also, it's one thing to dislike AI to the point where it "kills the mood" (for you) when you see an AI-generated poster, so you stop visiting that particular coffee shop. It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.

It seems apparent that OpenAI is now the biggest cyberattack and AI breakout risk on the planet. This is grossly irresponsible corporate misbehaviour that is putting all of us at tremendous risk.

And he drew a red line wrt the Pentagon's use of Anthropic's models for autonomous weapons and surveillance of American citizens, and he stood by it, even when the government took steps to materially damage the company. This required true courage. Name me another CEO, of any major American company, that has demonstrated this much fortitude.

This is true, although it’s true for most if not all developed societies. People read less and less. We live in a post-literate, hyper-visual era. I am not sure if short form video is effective at educating people on why we have public health and food inspection agencies, but I confess I’m not optimistic.

> Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.

Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.

"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."

> it requires €2850/month

Holy crap that’s a lot of money. That’s just for the privilege of living and working there? Or do you get citizenship benefits like healthcare etc? And what about taxes?

As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable.

The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.

Plentiful, near-free energy has other uses for food production, too: vertical farming, which is quite energy intensive, becomes feasible. Now you can grow tons of food on small plots of land, as well as year-round in cold climates. Desalination also becomes much more cost-effective. Now you can stop desertification, cultivate land that was previously too arid for crops, and so on. The possibilities for what we could do if we went all-in on solar in North America are super exciting, and we need to push on that narrative because the counter-narrative is the one that is winning right now, and it makes no sense.

> If the expectation is that AI is going to replace "knowledge workers" then the limit would be a darn perfect drawing. We are nowhere close to that.

What knowledge workers do you know that have excellent drawing skills? I worked in a design agency and for a couple of years, each week me and a few other people would attempt to sketch a member of our group: one person would be the model and sit still, and everyone else would draw her/him.

Let me tell you, if producing a convincing portrait was a prerequisite for being a knowledge worker, there would be 99% fewer knowledge workers.