piokoch

Well, this was discovered long time ago, by Vilfredo Pareto, this is exemplification of his 90/10 rule. Having said that... We should be more honest here when we talk about wealth.

If one asks "how much, say, Elon Musk, is worth" we see some crazy numbers with kirjillions of zeros. But those are not "his" money, this is how much his companies are estimated to have. Yes, he has large personal fortune, but it is nowhere near those huge billions of billions amounts.

Second, staying with Elon example, his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people, so there is huge army of people who have food in the fridge because of Elon Musk (I've seen some estimates around ~1 million people overall). Again, they are nowhere near to be as wealthy as Elon, but still, they have a decent live thanks to his companies.

Key finding is:

"The findings don't prove whether structural brain differences are the cause or effect of birdwatching expertise."

Not a big surprise that this observation proves exactly nothing as there are thousands of other factors they could not control for (and apparently didn't want).

"Her team's findings have prompted German health insurance companies – who, among others, initially funded the research project – to invest in setting up bird feeders and viewing areas in more than 400 nursing homes across Bavaria. "

This is kind of hilarious and I would not believe that if it weren't Germany, a country that intentionally destroyed its nuclear plants capabilities in order to burn Russian gas and emit CO2. Obviously in the name of reducing CO2 emission.

Redoing is almost free today, you can try to redo a lot of stuff, try to gain traction/publicity and maybe that will be your solution that will stick. People were trying this strategy with a lot of stuff (think smartphone cases) but in case of software this is soo easy and dead cheap.

I see the outbreak of PDF readers, AI TUI harnesses, etc.

Politicians were never honest (never like since Minoan civilization and earlier probably too). You can have an honest, successful politician, as you can have short, successful volleyball player, but that would be an extremely rare case (like Muggsy Bogues).

And that's not really politicians fault, they say what electorate expects, and electorate likes to be cheated.

Pre Google internet problem was not about the quality but about spam in headers and keywords, which were used by the pre-google search engines.

Google came and worked wonderfully for a year or two, until people learned to game page rank algorithm. Soon first google pages were just SEO spam and now half of the google is just spam, big corp websites, etc.

All of that precious stuff from small hobby websites about cool things to blogs that used to be wonderful read like https://www.joelonsoftware.com.

AI were not hurt that much by spam, I guess there were at least some curation done, the question is if this curation will work and for how long. It seems we are throwing the towel here as in case of search.

Yup, but you need to be aware that all information are passed to the security services of the Communistic Party of China and could be used against you. E.g. to blackmail you, if you are, say, soldier, public officer, higher up in some company, etc. Or to steal your data & money.

Despite China having really great PR this is still a country which has exactly zero free speech, controls 100% of media and internet, keeps people in concentration camps.

So this particular move does not surprise me, in fact, I am surprised that European governments does not get how much sensitive information is leaked through AI and they give all of that freely to third parties from China and also from USA...

It seems that all AI can do, it can just "replace the average". Write an average quality software, do good enough business analysis, prepare mediocre report, do a bearable, but not so great translation, give you some basic medical advice, which is accurate 80% of time (but what if you are not lucky to have typical conditions?). It can also solve average difficulty level problems in math or physics.

That what it cannot do is to invent new drugs, cannot figure out cheap energy sources, find something better than Standard Model in physics, and anything that would contribute to overall human progress.

The result is that it can replace a lot of jobs, it will efficiently killed any research done and the level of master/PhDs, because majority of those can be done now with the help of AI (we already see this, the burst in new scientific articles - nothing groundbreaking, but publishable).

As a results we will have soon a gap, as only very determined people would go into science, analytical jobs, etc.

In one way, this is OK, we had too much science research that was done only for the sake of producing more "papers", we also had a lot of people in the companies doing "bullshit jobs".

But on the other hand, we might face soon situation in which there will be almost no people in Academia, so who will teach people, in addition, science worked often by doing wrong, unreasonable, crazy things, testing vague ideas and come up with something new and great. This required a lot of people doing science without any good results coming out, a lot of seemingly wasted effort just to hit several great ideas (a bit like Venture Capitals work).

This might also lead to decreasing number of white collar jobs. We can have a new "rust belt", the one for blue collar fall happened because of jobs offshoring, now we are "offshoring" white collar jobs to a few companies who offer AI models.

This all will affect badly society without any huge, visible benefits for it as a whole.

So others will write their PhD thesis faster, will publish more, you will not publish so you will perish. The rules of the game in this business are brutal. One can count on inventing something entirely new that AI will not be able to figure out, but this is a really high bet.

Why the space? We have plenty of deserts on the Earth, they are inhabited but still much friendlier than the space. What makes the space more attractive?

But here you are in the text generating industry, the worst that can happen is bad grade because AI will mess up John Keats with John Cleese or your React application will have bugs. Inconvenient, but mostly harmless.

Yup, this is "inclusive education" effects, predicted long time ago by education experts. Kids with special needs (from handicapped to criminals) are thrown into regular schools and classes, making education totally inefficient. In Poland one of the best on the World system of special education is being demolished in the name of this absurdity. But this is what people voted for.

One more marketing stunt. We are so good, AI is so powerful so we need to use AI to fight with it. The message is: if you don't buy from us, your competitor will purchase all of this amazing power...

I understand that investors are buying this, after all they believed in all of other crap that led to the 2008 crisis, but please...

That's why I like Lenovo, you can just buy version without OS.

Sorry, but what? EU literally destroyed its economy by forcing "green energy", so manufacturing was moved to Asia (who cannot care less about climate and uses whatever cheap energy source thy have so this was a rather stupid move), ETS and ETS-2 systems are putting huge taxes on EU citizens for any kind of emission, including building a house or having non-zero emission flat or house.

The "little" problem here is that all of this does not matter at all, as EU is emitting insignificant amount of CO2, comparing to Asia or USA.

"Typst instead of LaTeX"

Is this really an alternative? I would never replace battle proved TeX with consistent syntax, build for processing text, with great fonts, thousands of plugins for some Markdown mess, which is, in addition, paid.

Only because it is written in Rust, not in C.

In the times when everyone was installing Apache + PHP + "Some database" stack, the easy path was to use MySQL for a very simple reason: it had ready to use MS Windows installer.

Another thing: those were times when web applications were practically 99% reads, and not so great ACID was a non-issue.

Postgres is OK, but it has really a lot of quirks that are not that obvious.

Why not MySQL/MariaDB? DuckDB and Quack might be new and flashy, but sooner or later you will need things like connection pooling, data retention, backups, replication. In a real setup there is nothing lightweight about DuckDB as it will have to answer the same issues other DB-s do.

If you want to go with something less mainstream, why not trying Firebird DB, a very solid solution.

"I just don't see how you justify a trillion valuation for US AI"

- military applications - financial applications - medical - applied science

In all those cases it is achievable for those who have needed training data, and Chinese are not going to get them easily. US AI Labs are showing: give us the data, we will do wonders, promising "singularity"-level future achievements.

Great story, I am wondering if nowadays this kind of being hooked on in any kind of technology is possible. Kids have ipad style computers or smartphones which are not really hackable. There are things like Scratch, which provide kind of easy access to programming, but that's not the same thing (or maybe I am just old and miss the old times with Atari ST and IBM PC clone with 486DX processor).

The question is: is such policy even enforceable? If someone is "clever" enough to drop em-dashes and some bold highlights how one would know if something is AI generated or not?

There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.

BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.

Interesting, especially in view of several millions of illegal emigrants that were "legalized" recently by the Spanish government.

"How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?" - It will be worst, as this will not be idiomatic Rust. That's kind of interesting, BTW, as in next iteration LLM will be trained on tones of crappy code, created as some random rewrites, AI slops, etc., I am curious if someone will be able to curate this or it will be the same process of crapification experienced by Google Search that finally lost the battle with SEO spammers.

Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff.

People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month.

Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff.

So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone.

We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.

Yup, that is called progress. One freedom to live in a cave with his 6 spouses and hunting animals all day was indeed taken away. In exchange you don't need to hunt all day, you can go to groceries, you don't need six spouses and 20 kids, as kids death rate is not 80% but 0.001%.

One can, obviously, romanticize the times of cave live, that's fine with me, but I doubt that would be a common choice.

No surprise, I've noticed that "agents", not only CC (I am using Copilot) are trying to be "clever", searching for a lot of data. This is good for LLM providers as this eats a lot of tokens.

Sadly, European Union that could be really useful (all-EU, flagship AI model anyone? But no, better restrict AI development, what can go wrong?) so people would genuinely like it, chosen to fight the people and try to gag criticism.

Think of 90 y.o. lonely people who can't care less about some company seeing the interior of their house. Surely, it is a risk, but being without any help and assistance.

That worries me a bit. ArXiv was and is great and so useful to humanity, giving access to otherwise closed knowledge, hold by publishers cartel, that I would not like to see it is turning into a "non-profit" of OpenAI kind...

You don't need to. Just sample 1% of data, let the model do the feature engineering, ask model model to replicate everything in Pandas (or R, or whatever else), so you can run it for a full dataset.