alun

It was clear that Reddit had an astroturfing problem, even pre-ChatGPT.

Funnily enough, Reddit got so bad that I stopped appending "reddit" to my queries and I often find myself appending "hackernews" instead (or more commonly, I ask the LLM to find HN discussions on the topic), just because the signal is much higher.

It also makes me think about how much of HN might be astroturfing. Less than reddit for sure, but certainly not 0%.

The one thing I can't wrap my head around with Jev is why they're trying to create that "System One" narrative.

In real life, a human doesn't do classification tasks with the System One part of their brain, they use System Two. So by definition what Jev does isn't System One thinking.

If anything, regular programming that automatically executes based on logic, without requiring "thinking" would be "System One".

Awesome. To make the device even smaller, I would probably get rid of the physical keyboard

This is pretty cool. Number of humans in space feels like a good proxy for space progress.

So it would be interesting to have a metrics dashboard view of it.

For example a daily / weekly / monthly graph of how many people are in space during each timeframe.

Filters by company, nationality, age, etc.

Would be an interesting way to see how space progress is being made and where it's mostly coming from.

Japan has a 55% top marginal inheritance tax rate.

I wonder how many of these centenarians aren't actually alive and their just deaths haven't been reported so that the family can avoid paying that.

The Cornucopia looks like the cybertruck of urinals.

Not to advocate for the diamond cartels, but your logic that equal diamond quality implies equal price feels wrong.

Otherwise, a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa would cost the same as the original.

How ironic

It would have been cool if they had made the bird resemble a phoenix.

I think his idea of taxing AI tokens would do more harm than good. It would only make AI more expensive, which would create the exact inequality effect that he is trying to prevent.

I had the same thought as PG (although I'm considerably older than 17). The playing field in software development has been leveled by AI, which led me to wonder how you can get ahead of the curve. My current answer is to understand both AI and data intensive systems at a deeper level than 90%+ of people.

For the AI part, I recently started working through this CMU course on Modern AI which teaches you how to build an LLM from scratch. It was posted on HN a few months ago and has been great: https://modernaicourse.org/

If anyone has other recommendations for beginners, please share them!

Very fun read. Thanks for posting it!

Obviously a lot of depression is genetic or due to some unfortunate life circumstance. It's got nothing to do with intelligence.

But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed.

For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc.

Someone with that lifestyle is much more likely to become depressed compared to someone who sleeps 8 hours a night, wakes up at a reasonable time every morning (i.e. 5am - 8am), has a stable job, and exercises regularly.

Humans are built for routine. Drifting away from that is unnatural.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is whether being open source is good or bad for security.

Open source obviously makes software more auditable, but in an age of LLMs whose intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate, it also makes it much easier to find and exploit vulnerabilities.

For example, had ColdCard (the other hardware wallet that got hacked) been closed source, it would have been much more difficult to exploit the randomized number vulnerability that the attacker used to get the private keys.

Maybe the answer (at least in this case) is somewhere in between where most of the thing is open source, but the parts that deal with creating the sensitive data are kept closed source.

Agreed. It's not just a reduction in size, but a reduction in general quality. For example, my preferred NIVEA roll-on deodorant used to come in a glass bottle and now it comes in a plastic one.

I suspect shrinkflation has a lot to do with inflation. Companies degrade the quality of their products to preserve their margins which are being eaten up by inflation.

The author misses one potential future of AI software where people use use their own subscriptions / API keys for their AI usage.

In this scenario the user would either sign into the platform via their Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini account or use their API keys, and any of their usage would be billed to them directly.

The company then doesn't have to worry about the increasing costs from the AI usage.

Of course, in this future, AI providers become the new "Facebooks" of the world.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't actually feel any discomfort while sitting for 3 minutes doing nothing. Do most people actually struggle with that like the article says?

I love the author's attitude. In my writing, I'll probably consider using en dashes ("-") in place of em dashes ("—") in the way he describes.

While it technically won't be grammatically correct, it'll get the benefits he describes in the article while also not being accused of being AI-generated.

I disagree. It's a high signal article that can create great discussions on what people on HN have reverse-engineered with AI.

For example, just yesterday I reverse engineered the internal API of a SAAS tool we use and it allowed me to gain programmatic access to data that was only available in their slow clunky UI.

Fun. I could see myself playing this while on the train, etc.

Aside from the fact that they're judging you based on who you were as a minor, it's interesting how it was a startup that asked for this and not a large corporation, given that modern US public schooling is more optimized towards getting you to work in an large institution than a startup.

Same schedule every single day, you get a lunch break, exams are designed in a way that there's only one single correct answer, outside of the box thinking is wrong, and you'll get at least a B+ if you just do your homework everyday.

I kind of like how it breaks the layout, since it's such a ridiculous word

Nice! Some feedback: The score it shows doesn't really mean anything to me. I think it would be more interesting for the user to know how they rank (perhaps in percentile terms) relative to the overall english-speaking population and/or relative to other users on the site

Anecdotally, when it comes to talking to strangers I've often felt it's easier to converse with older people than those my own age. For example, the conversations feel more genuine and less "forced" on both sides, and overall I feel more comfortable being myself.

The reason might be because they grew up in a world where social media was non-existent, so interacting with strangers was more common. As a result, they tend to be more socially intelligent than the younger generations.

Will be thinking about this article the next time I reach for my AirPods as I'm about to leave the house.

Sending AI-generated messages can also be disrespectful to the recipient. Personally, I often just don't bother responding when I receive low-effort messages that are clearly AI-generated.

Yeah this one definitely seems like the wrong approach. I prefer the approach of the other professor who makes her students write the code by hand (with the analogy of how grade schoolers learn basic algebra by hand before they are allowed to use calculators).

Although making students write it on paper (as described) feels extreme. Why not just make them write the code manually on a regular IDE, see how it compiles, etc.?

Seems reasonable to build a cryptocurrency around this. The network could pay the cryptocurrency out to users dedicating resources. Have you thought about that?

Very interesting. Beyond ideological motivation, I’m curious what the long-term incentive is for someone to run a peer.

For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.

Sounds like it did

It's interesting how Anthropic haven't shipped their own IDE for more vertical integration.

All it would take is implementing their own forked version of VSCode (like Cursor did) and making Claude the default choice.

Obviously I'm simplifying here, but they definitely have the capability to do it.