matherial

5 ms·

1.
by matherial 3d ago
That "for now" has been going on for ~10 months. That was enough for some startups to make a splash in the pre-AI era; now that they can move 10x faster, shouldn't we be seeing evidence left and right? All the contenders stea
2.
by matherial 3d ago
Again, I've heard that countless times on HN. Every time you ask, everyone is 10xing it and building amazing things that will go to market very soon now. But it's been a while; where is it? Somehow, everyone is just sitting on all
3.
by matherial 4d ago
I really don't think this needs so many words, or forced parallels to human behavior. It's simple: in their nascent state, LLMs are aimless token generators that have no special compulsion to be helpful or truthful. So we beat the
4.
by matherial 4d ago
It might feel that way, but I'll ask again: where's the payoff? Where's all the amazing software that everyone is now supposedly shipping 10x faster than before? If I look at the software I'm actually using day-to-day, o
5.
by matherial 5d ago
Selfishly, I hate these things. No one in the 1980s and early 1990s expected the internet to become what it did. I discovered it as a dumb teenager and posted some frankly idiotic stuff. I also put my real address and phone number in the si
6.
by matherial 5d ago
It doesn't, that's the whole point. You can produce output that passes the smell test with naive buyers in a matter of hours. If you want to write good LLM books, then you gotta work closer to human speed - weeks, months - which
7.
by matherial 5d ago
I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators"). Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavo
8.
by matherial 5d ago
Yeah. My other favorite example are books. Why do nonfiction books exist? There are some pathologies and corner cases, but fundamentally: to develop and share new ideas. Downstream from that, if it reads well and if you're lucky, you m
9.
by matherial 6d ago
Similarly to many other countries, the US has a concept of "adhesion contracts" - essentially, contracts where you have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms, and your rights are constrained much more than the rights of
10.
by matherial 6d ago
Are you saying that mathematicians are the bad actors here? Compared to Sam Altman spending ungodly amounts of money to upstage them ahead of IPO? I care about paying my bills and job security and peer recognition. That's a normal huma
11.
by matherial 7d ago
"Discovery" is not a goal in itself. I could launch a project to find out how many people in the United States have names such that if you assign numbers to every character and then sum the values, the sum works out to 72. It&#x27
12.
by matherial 7d ago
LLM writing is optimized, at a great expense, for that specific parameter. They literally have human raters fine-tuning "favorability" - general appeal - as a part of post-training. So yes, the conclusion here doesn't surpris
13.
by matherial 7d ago
> I'm not sure the low cost of living of the guy who kicks off the AI generation still makes much of a difference? ... In any case, why do we care about the cost of living of the author? It seems like you're trying to catch me
14.
by matherial 8d ago
I agree with you in principle, but I think this ignores the reality. Many nonfiction categories are overrun by self-published AI slop generated at an industrial scale by hustlers in low-CoL countries, never as much as proofread by a human.
15.
by matherial 8d ago
As I noted, there's plenty of things to worry about, and your example fits that mold. But it has nothing to do with the "AI will kill us all in 10 years" claim of the rapid self-improvement doomer crowd.
16.
by matherial 8d ago
Yeah, frankly, this doesn't make sense to me. Has the author checked any nonfiction categories on Amazon recently? In many categories, 80-90% of all new releases are obvious AI slop. And even for non-self-published releases, about 20-3
17.
by matherial 8d ago
I'm going to charitably assume that you forgot to include quotes around the names in your query, because that's absolutely not what Google Trends shows. Stop 100 people on the street in NYC or Berlin or Tokyo and I bet none of the
18.
by matherial 8d ago
Unlike most other commenters, I applaud him for acting on his principles. If you sincerely believe that, of course you should act. You might not succeed, but your voice might be the one that tips the scales and starts a broader movement.
19.
by matherial 8d ago
Pure math is practiced mostly for the intellectual thrills and recognition among a very small group of peers. There's little else to it. You don't become rich, you don't become a celebrity. You teach students, write papers, a
20.
by matherial 8d ago
I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care". And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police s
21.
by matherial 9d ago
Because it's a risk most people intuitively understand, but most of them also don't know how difficult it is to "build a bomb" or "make a bioweapon". In reality, the skills needed are pretty basic, but they ove
22.
by matherial 9d ago
If I showed up at your place and painted some tactful ads on the walls, would you have an issue with it? Or, if you bought a mattress and discovered that it hums some well-targeted, inoffensive jingle at 11pm every night, would that be fine
23.
by matherial 12d ago
Old textbooks. They love 741 op-amps, etc.
24.
by matherial 13d ago
It might, but if there's one thing that hasn't changed since 2022, it's that the models tend to ace the tasks where you have gobs of training data and where verification loops are fast and cheap... and they are not nearly as
25.
by matherial 13d ago
This appears to be a completely AI-generated article, in which AI is telling us how to protect ourselves against AI. I don't know what's going over at IEEE, but every article from them that I've seen in the past year is like
26.
by matherial 13d ago
It's pretty close to how we measure IQ. The standard test is basically a series of spatial puzzles. I know there's a lot of people who complain that we're moving goalposts, but I think that the progress in LLMs really just sh
27.
by matherial 14d ago
I don't think there are successful examples of unions being able to fight major technological shifts in the long haul. At best, they can force the management to accept a suicide pact - we're all slowly going down together. That ma
28.
by matherial 14d ago
Setting a swarm of agents loose for hours to look for software vulnerabilities is far more compute-expensive than fuzzing. The industry has never thrown this kind of compute resources at pure fuzzing, in part because you can't get muc
29.
by matherial 15d ago
> I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. By that metric, so was Nostradamus. The apocalypse is coming for sure, we're just quibbling about the timeline. Realistically, timing is everything. You don't
30.
by matherial 15d ago
If the parent knows electronics, that's already a pretty good predictor that the kid will learn it too. But in the absence of that, the kit itself doesn't teach much. The instructions don't really explain the circuits, they j

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