I think we are reaching a point where some kind of solid attestation that things are not AI generated would be very valuable, for all kinds of different media (printed word, photo, video, etc).
I'm not sure how you would actually do any of that attestation, if it's even possible. Text seems especially difficult. Maybe photo/video could be achieved with specialized hardware and cryptographic signing though I don't know much about either so I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe all that attestation would also tie in to some kind of universal personal identifier online, so that bad actors can be tracked or excluded and can't repeatedly spin up new accounts.
It might mean a big reduction in privacy for certain online spaces that opt in to such a system... but the alternative of all trust being eroded and voices drowned out by a sea of bots or generated content seems potentially worse.
There are definitely many open questions around things like what tasks is AI appropriate for, how involved should you be in the process (fully automated agent swarms, or planning steps back and forth with human input on every decision), at what level of usage might you hit diminishing or negative returns, will we be able to continue to use it at this rate / price, will it get cheaper or will energy use continue to rise, how much will AI improve in the future, how will AI use affect people's development or temperament, will skills atrophy, will people no longer learn critical skills, how will we deal with AI spam or a loss of "proof of work" in producing a lengthy written artifact.... in sum there is no shortage of AI related topics worth exploring and thinking deeply about.
Some people still suggest that AI flat out isn't useful though, and that angle to me doesn't hold much water. I was a slow AI adopter, but I have found plenty of benefit from using AI in various applications recently. I haven't come close to using on the level of some people who orchestrate agents and rarely read or touch the code they are writing, but there have been clear times when I popped into Claude and had it help me very successfully with something that would have taken longer to do without that help. So increasingly I am skeptical of anyone positing that there is no potential benefit to appropriately using AI assistance. I think the author could rewrite around the angle of their perceived negative externalities outweighing potential advantages, but to deny or ignore those potential benefits ultimately distracts or actively takes away from a serious discussion of said negative externalities.
I don't put much stock in the very very frequently cited study about AI productivity included in this blog. It's a single study. The study itself cites multiple other studies that did find a productivity boost in writing software with AI assistance. I don't see the methodology as being very sound, the sample size isn't very big, some of those developers had likely never used AI before so of course they were slower as they explored using a new tool for the first time (which the study more or less writes off as a non-factor). They also used "Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet", which is not the strongest model. I personally find the Sonnet family of models not that useful and much more inaccurate than something like Opus or Fable.
In my experience there is little you can do to "mitigate" that kind of thing outside of running the game completely server-side, which usually makes a tiny project into a much larger undertaking.
The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.
I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.
Added up all the free market enterprise section completed deals where the purchaser was indicated as US based
Obama era:
2009: 6,
2010: 1,
2011: 4,
2012: 1,
2013: 4,
2014: 5,
2015: 7,
2016: 6
Trump term 1:
2017: 4,
2018: 8,
2019: 13,
2020: 7
Biden term:
2021: 4,
2022: 4,
2023: 7,
2024: 4
Trump term 2 so far:
2025: 11*,
2026: 9*
Obama average: 4.25 / year
Biden average: 4.75 / year
Trump term 1 average: 8 / year
*Most of the last two years are indicated as still pending, so not sure if they will go through or not.
Not exactly the most scientific data gathering or study. But it does suggest that large mergers and acquisitions have generally been made more frequently under Trump.
I think the idea that AI leads to some kind of universal basic income or frees us up for leisure is misguided.
There was a point in time when the majority of people were basically required to work on producing bare necessities like food. But we have already come far past that, where we could easily produce more than enough food for everyone on earth with a relatively small amount of workers.
There is some work that is still more or less essential to a healthy society that humans must perform, but many many people are doing something non-essential (and those doing essential work are often not rewarded proportionally to the "essentialness" of that work). We invent different kinds of "work" to fit into the capitalist machine that we have built, not because it is required for human sustainability or enriching our lives in any way. Some work might be actively harmful to society in every way other than keeping capital flowing around in some circle, and more and more of that capital is being captured/hoarded by some ultra wealthy individuals or corporations and not recirculating at all.
The problem is allocation. We allocate everything via capital, which I recognize has had some very positive outcomes at certain points in history, but may be reaching a point of making less and less sense for the modern world. The work I do honestly does not contribute much of anything to anyone. I do it because I am paid to, and I use that money to pay for my families needs. If my job was automated I would not be freed up for leisure, I would need to find some other work or service to be paid for to survive, regardless of how "important" that work is.
AI eliminating a swath of non-essential work does nothing to help with that allocation issue, in fact it probably ends in a worse overall allocation. AI may legitimately assist with some slice of "essential".work, but probably not that much of it.
This reads to me as AI generated. Apparently it's still good enough to the general audience to be the #1 post on HN right now though. Which is honestly a troubling signal for the state of the world...
I have a PlayStation and I exclusively buy my games via discs. On the other hand, these days I exclusively buy computer games via digital download (mostly via Steam). I have more consumer confidence that digital games on my computer will remain accessible vs games on my console, maybe because Sony controls the entire console ecosystem.
Interesting timing to announce this at around the same time as the PS3 digital store is discontinued signaling that digital only doesn't last as long as physical.
My old Nintendo Wii is modified with homebrew software that keeps alive some otherwise inaccessible features since Nintendo shut off their servers. I hope the community can do similar for newer consoles when they reach the end of their life.
There's a popular quote: "good artists copy, great artists steal". I've always interpreted "steal" in that context as taking a technique or an inspiration from something, but making it fully your own in your execution (in contrast to direct copying, where you have just made a reproduction).
Given that interpretation, taking someone else's website and changing 3% of it feels more like copying than stealing, even more so when you see the side by side comparison image and it looks completely the same. I love to take inspiration from all over the place, but I like to think I transform it more into my own vision than the author here. I think making a direct copy of something can sometimes be a good learning exercise in the right context, but I would follow it up with your own novel work that maybe uses some concepts you learned from that copying exercise.
As an aside: the current Mintlify marketing site, not the one copied in the article, reads to me as heavily inspired by Stripe's marketing website. Not as direct a copy as the article here though.
I don't think we will in the HN snark sense of "this react site or electron app uses way too much memory". Those companies will continue to work in the same way, maybe even less efficiently as people chase modern UIs with extra animations or videos or effects, or with some AI code generation tacking on too many features or tech debt.
In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.
Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.
Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
I think it's not uncommon for good animations to cheat a bit while in motion, rather than look perfect on every frame. Like how cartoons can use smear frames that look bizarre when paused at the wrong time but when viewed as part of a larger animation help sell the motion visually.
I had built out a custom level editor and some other fun features, but never really polished off the UI enough to release those. Someday I should really finish / update it.
I think starlink made intuitive sense; we already use satellites to transfer data for phone service and TV channels, a satellite can "see" a large area to service, the technology was there already, etc. Starlink provides a service you can't really get without going to space (coverage in remote areas).
The space data center doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Why put it in space? Wouldn't it be better just... on the ground? The technology doesn't feel like it's there either, and there would be significant competition from existing or new data centers that don't have all the drawbacks of orbiting the planet.
I'm in Oakland with a three year old and I'm looking to either move to a better school district or pay for an expensive private school. I used to be a substitute teacher for the Oakland unified school district and I straight up refuse to send my son there. I have seen firsthand that these kids are not being taught well and the shortcomings compound year over year until you end with high school level students that are unequipped to learn at the high school level, often only barely able to read. Completely unequipped to read critically at the level needed for a proper high school education. Students get passed on to the next level no matter what, even if they lack the basic skills needed to succeed at that level.
It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.
I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain literacy programs.
Some kind of vouching or scoring might make sense to help qualify contributions and many people have suggested similar recently. If by "ELO-based system" you meant "some kind of scoring system (not based on Elo)".
The Elo rating system doesn't make sense in this context; it's designed around collecting zero sum game results for a given community of players and building a model around it.
The main use I see from people is watching netflix or youtube. There are lots of ipads that are basically just expensive youtube machines. So in that sense a cheap ipad might be seen by some as an upgraded larger screen vs watching TV on their phone screen... but there are already a lot of existing cheap tablets that can do that. Someone gifted my son an Amazon one that I think was around $50 and works fine for that purpose.
You can read ebooks, but e-ink is a lot more pleasant to read I think.
You could get a stylus and draw... but I think that's a more niche use that not as many people are into, and I think professional artists are more likely to buy an art focused product over the generalized tablet / ipad.
For serious work, you're probably better off with a small laptop and keyboard. I know you can get a keyboard for a tablet, but at that point why not just have a laptop?
Yeah I flat out don't believe the 2% thing. It's possible that I was the 1 out of 50 who checked the page and saw that Claude code was removed... but it really seems like everyone I shared it with saw the same thing which is incredibly unlikely. Also I am an existing subscriber and checked the price page while logged in, so I shouldn't be counted in "2% of new subscribers" at all...
Seems like a pretty bad business move if it's really what they're doing. They should want devs using the product on a cheaper subscription to see the value with profitable limits on usage.
I think the only reason to do this would be that they just can't scale up to service the volume they have and need to cut down significantly on the total number of users. Seems also like a rough business proposition. Most of the pro plan users would probably migrate to a competitor at a similar price point (I know I will).
The only other possibility would be if they are losing too much money on the compute power and just can't offer it at that price anymore. But then upgrading the plan gives you more compute per dollar, so maybe they're just banking on people not actually using all of what they pay for?
I had previously thought that the inference cost of using a trained model was relatively low and that most costs went into training new models, but maybe that is less true with the more powerful newer models.
If it costs a ton more to serve Opus vs serving something like Kimi or Qwen, then I think most people just won't use the more expensive version for most things.
I'm not sure how you would actually do any of that attestation, if it's even possible. Text seems especially difficult. Maybe photo/video could be achieved with specialized hardware and cryptographic signing though I don't know much about either so I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe all that attestation would also tie in to some kind of universal personal identifier online, so that bad actors can be tracked or excluded and can't repeatedly spin up new accounts.
It might mean a big reduction in privacy for certain online spaces that opt in to such a system... but the alternative of all trust being eroded and voices drowned out by a sea of bots or generated content seems potentially worse.