rembal · HackerLangs

vor 26 Tagendiscuss

It's maybe much easier to create code, but it's still hard to create good software, and for the next few years we have a monumental challenge of figuring out how does one create good software when cost of code is approaching zero. It will be harder to decide what to build (or what to not build), increase the velocity, even if only for infosec patching, make use of increased velocity for features, massively increase experimenting capacity, and close the biggest loop. Even the best teams now are barely scratching the surface of what tomorrow brings, and it's super exciting, interesting and definitely not easy. It will be hard, but not in the part that was hard before.

rembal

letzten Monatdiscuss

And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).

rembal

letzten Monatdiscuss

A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living with 3 kids in studio apartments, playing with a lot of kids while waiting in mile long-lines for totally mundane rationed foodstuffs, school classes starting at 2 pm and ending at 8pm (too many kids), and my parents reaching out via their network to a director of orthopedic shoe factory because even money couldn't get you that kind of stuff. And in the 40 years since we had sustained growth rates comparable only to China or South Korea, and similar problems with childbirths. I don't buy any economic arguments.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

It's a well known movie, I'm pretty sure that Elon was either inspired by the movie or by the British code breaking computer from WWII. Frankly, I forgot about the movie (saw it in late 2000s), and assumed the inspiration came from the UK :)

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

+1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model problem.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I'm pretty sure I got prescribed an antibiotic at least once :) Also, my father has been through 5 cancer "journeys", all successfully treated via public healthcare, last few caught "too early to operate" due to early detection PET scan programs. I don't know much about 19th century medicine, but it seems off.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Not much I think. I had long discussions about it with my Ukrainian friends: we came to the conclusion that it was mostly the fact that Ukraine was part of the USSR (much harder crackdowns on opposition, actually including the church) - and that also built stronger ties with Russia. A lot of people forget that USSR really was a multicultural empire: you had families where in the 90s siblings abruptly woke up in different countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Post-2022 some of those families stopped talking to each other, the propaganda is stronger than the family ties. Before the situation got clarified by falling bombs, the east/west choice was much harder.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

They have been indicating it constantly for last 12 years, regardless of who is in power...

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I don't know. I have to admit that things might have been better, we could have been more active in international politics or trade, but we are a sort of low key, and maybe the money and effort is better spent on improving life of citizens. Would I like more Polish footprint in the world? Yeah. Do I prefer clean streets, nice infrastructure and safety? Hell yeah.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Most Ukrainians (and Belarusians) settled in major cities, starting with Warsaw. In 2022 I had a Belarusian girlfriend, and at some point I tried convincing people coming here to target smaller towns, to no avail. Still, most of them stayed here, work hard and make it, despite rents literally doubling since when the war started.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

So, who elected Stalin? He was the head of the USSR after all.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

15%? With some legal footwork you can get to 10 or 5%, depending if you count general medical I surance as a tax or not.

rembal

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Many countries in Europe have free universities: avoiding a few hundred thousands in debt maybe be worth moving in the long run.

rembal

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

That could work if the actors were rational. Unfortunately, they are largely ideological.

rembal

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I'm too lazy to double check the numbers, but as far as I remember, Germany in order to increase it's average generation by 10% had to expand capacity by 70% in solar plus wind. With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste. And all this while we have nuclear. (How the world really works, Vaclav smil if anybody is less lazy than me)

rembal

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I love the water/ice metaphor, but the author tends to completely ignore the physical world. Example with cardiologist - we all know what happened to the radiologist prediction. Example with defence (or war) becoming mostly a case of having a better AI model: well, try to win without a solid, distributed production capabilities, energy access and safe supply chains, in a geographical disadvantage. Embodiment is coming, but it will require moving a lot of atoms. Also, even in text heavy domains, a lot of knowledge is not written down, often of purpose (especially in legal), and that's the juicy part...

rembal

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

For a normal person, the only real words in this sentence are "get", "with", and "image", but the last one does not mean what they would think it means.

Even WIX needs some level of tech savviness, usually beyond 90% small business owners. And Instagram? Well, one of the main points of having a restaurant is to tell your friends about it, so the Instagram profile is more important than actually having a real restaurant.

rembal

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Goons work MUCH better than rockets for intimidation, and actually scale much better.

Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.

A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.

Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?

And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.

If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .

rembal

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

The pyramids in the article are missing "energy" and "capital": in the world where intelligence becomes a commodity only those two matter. Capital to buy the hardware and install it, and energy to run it. Models already are a commodity, and "physical is the new king".

As a side note, if you believe that because of the agents doing most of the work we will face the problem of what do we do with the all the free time (with presumably UBI in place), please contact me, I have a bridge to sell you.

rembal

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It's not certain this is the future: the obvious trade off is lack of flexibility: not only when a new model comes out, but also varying demand in the data centers - one day people want more LLM queries, another day more diffusion queries. Aaand, this blocks the holly grail of self improving models, beyond in-context learning. A realistic use case? More efficient vision based drone targeting in Ukraine/Taiwan/ whatevers next. That's the place where energy efficiency, processing speed, and also weight is most critical. Not sure how heavy ASICS are though, bit they should be proportional to the model size. I heard many complaints about onboard AI 'not being there yet', and this may change it. Not listing middle east as there is no serious jamming problem there.

comments