> This assumes that there aren't algorithmic breakthroughs which reduce training/inference costs by several OOMs.
Of course it does.
You cannot operate based on the assumption that you will hit a breakthrough in any given span of time. Breakthroughs are, by their very nature, unpredictable—both on when you will reach them, and on whether they exist to reach at all.
It's also assuming that there isn't a hardware breakthrough that will put us another several OOMs ahead on compute.
It's also assuming that there isn't a military "breakthrough" that leaves all our supply lines either bombed or hostile to us.
When you're forecasting, you can only operate based on what is known and knowable now.
Breakthroughs are unknowable. You cannot rely on them.
And if you've been relying on quality not mattering, then when it starts mattering—when you get hit by a security bug, or unexpected data loss, or your software is inexplicably displaying goatse—then you have no way to proceed without learning how to do quality.
But if these "superforecasters" can forecast just about anything accurately—which seems to be the claim—then they're not limited to any one claim, or even a small subset of them. They can place bets on everything and expect to win most of the time.
...specifically because they were forced to pre-fund pensions to an absurd degree by a Republican Congress. And the sole purpose of this was to damage the USPS so that it looked like it was doing much worse than it really is, so that they could push for privatizing it.
And if that's the case, then what it indicates is that USPS in your area is chronically understaffed and underfunded.
Like...c'mon, this is not hard stuff to understand. There's no motive for the USPS to be neglecting last-mile service in your area if they have the resources to provide it.
And this is absolutely caused by Republican efforts to destroy it. Because that's what they've been doing for decades, specifically to get people to think it's doing a bad job, specifically so that they can privatize it and farm out the contract to their big-business buddies.
The greed comes from the people running the corporation, at many levels.
They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.
In general, if you are observing a community, and you see what looks like a contradiction like this, almost every time what you're actually seeing is Two Guys: in this case, one portion of the HN userbase that hates datacenters, and another portion that has to change their underwear every time Anthropic puts out new release notes.
Very few communities like HN are genuinely monolithic, and very few people are going to hold such contradictory beliefs within the same individual.
But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.
For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?
Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.
At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)
This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"
It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.
If you wanted to do dynamic stuff in IE, you had to use ActiveX. Which was IE-only. So many sites only used ActiveX, because IE was the 900lb gorilla, so why support anything else?
> Interesting that on one hand the valuation of these AI providers is based on the assumption that all code (and everything else producing digital artefacts) will be written using AI in the near future, on the other hand almost all popular open source projects fight to keep AI contributions out. Hard to reconcile.
Oh, it's not hard to reconcile at all.
On one side, you have people trying to sell you a product claiming that the product is the most amazing, indispensable thing ever.
On the other, you have the people dealing with the product's actual use evaluating it and finding it wanting.
The only reason this even looks hard to reconcile is because the people trying to sell you the product have been given more money than God (partly by people who think the product will become God).
Ignore the hype. Pay attention to the actual results.
Then let me spell it out for you, since you seem to be unaware:
There are many, many colleges that have no grad students. Period. They are undergraduate colleges.
Expecting any college or university to just be able to scale up the amount of manpower required to grade their classes/exams by a large multiple is absurdly unrealistic. I assure you that most existing colleges do have plenty of resources to effectively evaluate individual students' outputs, if they don't have to assume that anything submitted digitally is written by LLMs.
That new requirement is a massive change to how they operate, and it's incredibly rude and short-sighted to be dismissive and contemptuous of institutions that have trouble adjusting to it.
I'm sorry, at what point in the late 1800s was the President of the US actively enriching himself at the taxpayers' expense, openly taking bribes from foreign countries, and threatening the families of members of Congress who he felt were not sufficiently supportive of his agenda?
Like, actual Nazis.
If you think Nazis should be given a seat at the political table, especially in Germany, then I don't think I can take you seriously.