So funny how a site called "Hacker News," once vibrant with the ethos of lighthearted disobedience and an inquisitive spirit, finds itself almost religiously in opposition to those who decry a (horrendously incompetent) dystopia and panopticon forced upon the population by the very forces this website's (former, I'm assuming) users claimed to hate so much.
I thought bronyism sort of died out and that the furry community sort of subsumed it.
I'd also add that I think the increased self-ID of young people in the LGBTQ community is in and of itself sort of a means to access a sort of alternative lifestyle. Many of these people live somewhat hedonistic, bohemian, artsy lifestyles that disregard traditional notions of success or traditional standards and mores in relationships and love.
Uber used the classic triple-E philosophy of Microsoft and entered a market that was ripe for disruption -- many cities lacked reliable taxi service entirely, others were cartels that fixed prices. They undercut prices to an extreme degree, subsidized fares, and when it either drove local taxi companies out of business and spurred widespread adoption as the default, it had a captive market and duopoly with Lyft which allowed them to raise fares without losing any market share whatsoever.
It's a pretty classic business strategy, and not directly comparable to any of the AI companies. There's a reason people compare the current situation to the dotcom era and not Uber. Also, don't take Uber as an example of a slam-dunk VC success story and leave it at that -- plenty of dumb ideas get pitched and funded and go bankrupt for every Uber.
Yeah no worries, apart from the facetiousness I'm a pretty YIMBY person un-ironically. But it is infuriating that people adopt YIMBY rhetoric to try and defend data centers and other harmful industrial uses in areas with high land value. It's not only completely counter to the ideals of YIMBYism but also insulting as YIMBY has always been about lowering housing and commercial use costs through heavily relaxed zoning, NOT pushing through anything that anyone wants to develop in some sort of libertarian wet dream.
Academics aren't infallible at all. The studies showing tobacco as non-harmful had the collaboration of a great many cooperative scientists. Generally speaking, many academics are amoral and will do very unscrupulous things for grant funding and exposure. It is a business.
> AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".
Again, this is a misapprehension of the technology itself and its most ideal use cases. Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation. If you do this, you will expend valuable resources verifying the output that would be better spent just verifying the inputs in the first place. I'm no Luddite and I do think AI is cool and incredible technology. If you reframed that sentence as "AI could get better at taking the busywork and tedium out of fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> leveraging human strengths with AI's super-human strengths at assorting and analyzing information will lead to major scientific breakthroughs" then I would have absolutely no issue with it. But the marketing copy never says that and instead frames it as "AI can do anything a human can do and better," which is a) patently untrue, and b) suggests a very troubling agenda that the big corporations will have to answer for at some point or another.
Probably. Although I feel more inclined to forgive Ed in this case because it's sort of fighting fire with fire, the insanely hyperbolic and obscenely misleading drivel that's coming out of the most ardent AI boosters is continually unchallenged in the public eye. In a world where we had a more realistic view of AI/ML/LLMs, the limits to its capabilities, and the negative externalities of its widespread adoption in places where it quite frankly does not belong, then I'd be more critical of the Chicken Little sort of writing style
This has been my issue this whole time. Why isn't it just framed as a useful software tool that helps you automate tasks and write code? Use cases beyond this have exceedingly high social cost and negative externalities, and it's arguable that besides highly specialized local models with very specific training data, AI is not reliable enough nor deterministic enough to truly "replace" humans in the vast majority of roles outside of tech.
Obviously the answer is $$$ and the fact that this admin's economic policy has further encouraged the market to go all-in on AI as it's the only thing that's trending in the black for the economy right now. I don't think you'll find many people on HN who won't readily admit that even if they're anti-AI, LLMs are genuinely amazing pieces of software that can be transformative and useful in many different environments, and it's mindblowing how they work. The issue comes from the very harmful way it's currently being commercialized and marketed.
Thanks for taking feedback into account but $20 per license is still a bit absurd. StartAllBack for Windows does almost everything your product does and costs $5 for a lifetime license.
There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
The reason why no one cares is because most well-adjusted adults have never interacted with the web or its many tendrils as much as the patrons of this website (and others like it) have.
I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?
Only the T and X series benefit from the Japanese design studios though and have the build quality to match. The E and L series are indistinguishable from a myriad of bargain bin business laptops, including Lenovo's own ideapads.
It's not just AI-generated articles -- it's the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It's what it means to be human, and honestly? That's rare.
> ... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
This seems to be a recent phenomenon. A lot of electronic music production uses the Macintosh and Logic/Ableton workflow, to say nothing about how many of the best DSPs were Apple-exclusive until about a decade ago. I don't really think music production, at least in the EDM and hip-hop world, got popular on the PC until the rise of Fruity Loops and FL Studio, but that's available on the Mac now too.
It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)