esalman

My favorite laptop is a $90 Samsung Chromebook I bought around 7 years ago from Walmart clearance section during Black Friday.

I used it to remotely connect to hpc cluster to monitor my machine learning experiments.

It was unused for a while, then we had a baby. He used it to watch videos, absolutely battered it. This thing is indestructible. He grew older and started practicing IXL on it too.

These days we use it for doing monthly finances, viewing camera feeds and SD card contents. Son is now in kinder, at some point he might start using it for school work.

Astra editing qwen is not really surprising. What is insane is how powerful the medium of language is, and how we humans under-appreciate it.

I have frequently commented here and there in the past that, with the proliferation of AI generated content on the Internet, curated, authentic human generated contents and recommendations like this will become increasingly more valuable. Definitely feels like a step in that direction.

Not everyone uses LLM to think.

I will frequently ask LLM to do research. But I do that because I'm looking to learn from the process LLM implements, as well.

This became a problem recently when I started using Opus 5.5 for a project. It is able to take hundreds of step to (apparently) flawlessly execute a large/complex part of spec. But very recent updates to VScode has really made it hard to observe the process - by obscuring the reasoning blocks and file diffs.

Believe it or not, some of us enjoy reading human-generated grammatically incorrect stuff more than correctly generated slop.

You can create a project on vibes, but you cannot maintain one on vibes.

Mark Benioff is also struggling with fake AI-generated videos- https://x.com/Benioff/status/2116658212640604297?a=SNDwXOvrG...

Its terrible to have a few people have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of wealth instead of shoving it all in everyone's bank account.

I made the mistake of using "ice" and "illegal" in one sentence and got shadow banned.

There's a lot of chatter about how AI is advancing mathematics at the expense of human understanding. This is going to be true for software industry also at some point. The main gripe of mathematicians is how AI is discouraging young people from persevering. Right now job market is rough for junior SWE and unlike mathematics professors, nobody gives a damn. A few years down the line we'll see a real shortage of software engineers who "understands" and it will come back to bite the industry.

And Tesla will be the pioneer.

You can't. The guy who posted about bloating in his Samsung TV already got his account by OpenAI.

DOGE was created to kill brown babies.

I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.

Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.

I'll also add, which law said create DOGE?

I have a completely different perspective on this.

During the day, I am using Opus 5.5 to develop solutions our team would never think was possible two years ago.

Ar night I am watching my 5yo learn how to read and do math. The sense of accomplishment he shows being able to add double digits is contagious.

Nothing is mundane. One man's basic work is another man's magic. When we have appreciation for each other, we advance more as a species.

Apart from transformer architecture, pretty much every other discovery that makes large language models viable today happened in universities.

That means there's no crisis in mathematics after all, right?

Working with academic communities lol.

I looked over the announcement for any substantial contribution, and found they're donating $5 million to a research foundation.

$5 million might sustain 5-10 PhD students for 5 years.

Maybe it's just me but I think they should contribute more in exchange for forcing the scientific community into paying for tokens to generate slop and then pouring their time into verifying or falsifying the slop.

Access to the study requires $17,500 per year, just fyi.

I think OP meant to say raising the West Papuan flag.

Thanks for sharing this!

Yes there are. Some of the clothes you wear might be from there.

The only way to force common people to do something is to create scarcity.

If resources are scarce, people automatically start rationing. I lived in third world developing county for 30 years. There were many times when I had running water available for 1 hour a day and electricity available for 12 hours a day. So I did what I had to do and saved the climate.

In the West obviously you can't cut off water and electricity. So they impose taxes and such to create artificial scarcity. Like $1.5 gas tax is California forces people to go electric or take public transportation (not).

The problem is some "people" with more money, resources and influence game the system and do multiplicatively more damage. These are called corporations.

Touche. People who voted owned themselves.

To me programming does not feel less valuable. I'm building custom harnesses at a financial institution and I'm thriving. Same me was building actionscript animations for a car dealer twenty years back.

Schools have not changed because young kids are biologically wired to get the best out of reading patterns and texts, and writing using tools like pencils. The level of brain stimulation these activities generate is nowhere close to what you get looking at screens and typing on keyboards when you chat with an agent.

I have a five year old. It's almost breathtaking to see him figure out addition and substraction, sometimes in double digits. Do I need to teach to how to program or build agent harnesses like me? Not really. The tech will change when he's 20. The important thing is to let him develop critical thinking skills so that he can adapt and survive, just like I have.

Congrats, programmer dad. Don't stress it, sometimes even try to be Bohemian and enjoy the kid.

I appreciate it. One overlooked part of education is that it is supposed to teach these values.

When I was going to primary school, we'd take oath every day before the classes started - first line were to the effect of - "I swear that I will occupy myself with serving the humanity".

I guess that's why I refused when one of my longest serving freelance web development client inquired if I was interested in developing a "naughty" website.

One of the most spectacular pieces of self-own for the current administration. Restructuring/deleting the directorate for biodefense during the previous administration (of the same color) would be up there.

Humans are. Not the cars. The humans are also comparatively more efficient and less risky than full self driving.

I am one of those. I'll also say I never felt the kind of emotion in software building that I did when working on PhD problems.

Hacker news is not really a good place to talk about nuances involving academia. I don't expect VC minded hackers comprehend how someone can devote years of their lives working minimum wage trying to answer questions which earn them a fancy title on a piece of paper, for that matter.