senordevnyc
Imagine if we had some kind of really intelligent AI model that we could pose problems like this to. It's obviously not the kind of thing an open weight model running on your local machine could do, but if we had some kind of really large, closed source model running in the cloud that could solve really difficult problems like this, I wonder if there'd be a market for it...
But to hear HN, AI is useless, all the demand is fake, the valuations are based on nothing, it's all just a few companies investing in each other, they're dangerous and reckless, they want to control everything, they want regulatory capture, it's all a marketing stunt, the open weight models are about to catch up, soon everyone will run their own models on their own hardware, on and on.
It's all bullshit. None of it makes any sense, none of it can be backed up by the data, little of it is even internally coherent, and these skeptics and haters have been consistently wrong for the last few years, with apparently zero self-reflection or awareness.
But sure, let's pass a grandstanding resolution that has no teeth to oppose a bailout that no one is asking for, for a collapse that isn't coming. Makes sense.
To be honest, if this is what you consider to be a form of “brain damage”, I suspect you might be using reasoning here motivated more by your skepticism (fear? hatred?) of AI than by your colleagues truly going off the deep end.
And then there are people like me, who work for ourselves and aren’t being threatened by job loss. I have many friends in this category too.
That said, I’m sure there are also entrepreneurs who would rather not use AI but feel forced to in order to keep up with their competition or customer expectations. I don’t know, I haven’t heard from any of those.
The vapid knee jerk cynicism and lack of critical thinking on HN of all places has been really disappointing to see over the last few years. It turns out many hackers don’t actually care about what’s possible now with this crazy new tech as much as they’re scared for their own jobs and status, which is very understandable, but they’ve let their fear drive their response, and it shows. Just like the mathematicians.
Turns out really smart people are still just people, just as capable of letting their emotions override their cognition as anyone else.
Sounds like their actual customers don't agree with you at all...
And no, you didn't specifically say effective tax rate, but you did say that western countries effectively had a cap on how much you could earn (presumably that's what you meant, even though we're talking about a wealth tax here, not an income tax, but I digress), given a top marginal rate near 100%, but that's simply false, given that the effective tax rate even for the absolute most wealthy Americans was closer to 50%.
It's a little like complaining that university has gotten so expensive by just looking at the sticker price, while ignoring the fact that few people actually pay that, and the median price actually paid is much lower. That doesn't mean the effective price is where it should be either, but you do your position no favors with falsehoods.
That said, you're right that the gains over the past fifty years have been disproportionately captured by the people at the very top of the distribution, and we should address that with policy changes, including taxation. But we can do so without tossing the facts aside.
They're great servers, though, I have a whole fleet of them.
I genuinely do not understand what is "confusing" about this. Like, at all. Annoying maybe? But what is confusing?
Bill Gates has had a major role in more than 120 million extremely poor children not dying of horrible diseases in some of the most destitute places on earth.
But he bundled a browser with his OS thirty years ago, so fuck all that, right?
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...
I found this footnote particularly interesting:
It is worth noting that, per the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data, the tax rates of the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of taxpayers have dropped substantially since the 1950s. The average tax rate on the 0.1 percent highest-income Americans was 50.6 percent in the 1950s, compared to 39.8 percent today. The average tax rate on the top 0.01 percent was 55.3 percent in the 1950s, compared to 40.8 percent today.
Note that those percentages include Federal, state, and local taxes.
I also personally am not experiencing burnout from AI, although I do have to be careful to take breaks and stuff, but I've always been like that when engaged in stuff I find super enjoyable.
No, it’s not, you just made that up. Why doesn’t this match your previous definition?
The rest of your long AI-written comment has nothing to do with the principle of economic rent seeking.
Not sure why I’ve been wasting my time, but I’m out. Peace!
Why would models “start to decay”? I keep hearing people on here extolling that open weight models are now “good enough”. Where do they go in this future?
Also, you can just…wait a little longer until all the models for the version number you want are available? You don’t lose anything, so how is not “sane” to do so?