No, the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is that they are literal different chemicals.
If one could 'add meth'(??) to chemicals to make them more potent, without changing the chemical, it would be the difference between (for example) citric acid and really strong citric acid, or codeine 2.5mg and codeine 5mg.
You'll note that neither of these involves changing the name of the chemical, because that is not how chemical names work.
As someone else has pointed out, the difference between 'hydrogen monoxide' and 'dihydrogen monoxide' isn't 'it's like hydrogen monoxide with added di', because that is ridiculous.
Please stop saying anything beginning with 'meth' is just meth with added bits.
It's a really odd misinterpretation of the terrible dangers of: methane, Methodists, methanol, Methaemoglobin, methicillin, etc.
Honestly this has been my main issue with the tech privacy issue for years.
I love smart gadgets. I really wanted to go all in and automate my life, and the whole 'personal data' thing seemed like a really fair trade off for what was promised.
Only, they took all the data and never really delivered the convenience.
I spent about 10 years trying to figure out why WearOS needed to collect all my data, all the time, even when I wasn't wearing a watch, and yet when it crashed every few weeks, there was no way to restore anything from a backup. Had to start again from scratch every time (or ADB). What's the point in collecting all that data when I couldn't usefully access any of it?
Same thing with Google home, more or less. I wasn't a big fan of the terms and conditions, but hey, it's super convenient just being able to announce 'ok Google I need to get out of bed soon' and have it turn on the lights, play music etc.
Only, some mornings it wouldn't do that. Wouldn't even remember that I'd set an alarm. And alarms kinda need to be reliable: if they work 19 times out of 20, that's not actually good enough to rely on. Dumb alarm clocks, or phones, you can be pretty sure the alarm will go off
So, not much point using Google for morning routines and alarms. So, not much point giving it full access to everything I say any time.
I would give it all my data if it could reliably remember to play preset alarms, or give a basic backup and restore option. Hell, I'd probably give Google access to all my photos if the UI wasn't so ugly.
I still don't really understand big techs reasoning here.
If data is the new gold and everyone was dying for more ways to track odds us all and harvest our data - why not just build a decent product?
If phone batteries lasted for days, people would spend more time on their phones, isn't that what the tech companies want?
If competent people worked on making Gmail efficient, light, user friendly, and not crawling with bugs more people would use it, and more data.
It's like the oligarchs trying to take over the world will do literally anything, anything to win, other than paying people to develop decent, reliable products
I think your reflexive disagreement is a testimony to the point of the article. And the fact that you didn't immediately notice what was the authors view vs what they were relaying, may be testimony to the author's good writing.
I found it to be an unexpectedly evocative piece, a kind of poetic prose style that I don't see very often in journalism, let alone tech journalism.
Each word seemed carefully chosen to make the reader almost fell like they were there, witnessing, understanding.
So, I can imagine the author being a little pleased that you reacted to that passage with a sudden skepticism. Seems like a very successful case of 'show, don't tell'.
Man, if you seriously would exclude someone from social interactions because of the colour of their speech bubble in group messages, I dread to think how m stressful it would be to interact with people who's entire bodies were different colours.
Not even joking. 'Its legit stressful if someone's messages use a different colour background' is not logically compatible with being ok having different coloured people in view. I'm not actually calling you a racist, because it would also mean you get distressed if people wear different colour clothes and have avatars that look different, and I think a social group like that would have struggled enough to realise that the solution might not be 'get the Wrongly Coloured Group Text Guy to purchase a different phone rather than, idk, stop spending so much time staring at screens.
But it was amusing to imagine how wildly conformist one would have to be to actually dislike someone because their phone number doesn't have enough 7's or their name is longer than everyone else's so it looks untidy or whatever.
'Lots of people say this, but I don't agree' really doesn't logically lead to
'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'.
Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.
Given that the esteemed Dame is almost completely blind and has never positioned herself as a tech influencer or aficionada, I feel that her (thoroughly deserved) prestige and social power might be a little wasted on the grand cause of 'the iOS keyboard could be better'.
I mean, I'd agree with her.
But it's hardly Joanna Lumley championing the gurkhas, when she's been saying for years that she can no longer recognise even loved ones standing right in front of her.
Apple could do a lot better, but I'm not sure they could improve the keyboard that much.
I also took it as a joke; I'm glad at least one person validated my sense of humour, I was getting a bit worried reading all the replies.
At this point, I assume 90% of complaints about the apple keyboard are either tongue in cheek, explicitly humorous, a detailed, qualitative study with new information, or written by someone who is very new to apple, the internet, and technology in general.
I don't see how else anybody could seriously think 'The apple keyboard is bad, and the world needs to know about it! I'll make my opinion known, and surely that will solve the issue', let alone following it with 'no more Mr Nice Guy: I'm going to threaten Apple, the company, with consequences that will force them to act. It's high time somebody held these mega-corps to account and I'm willing to put myself on the line!'
Like, even if the article was written by the United Nations or the EU, there are very few actual threats they could include that might realistically spur apple to finally sort out the keyboard.
'If Apple don't sort it out, I'm going to fine them 75% of their revenue,' might be logical but seems a little deluded: terrorism or personal violence would be... unadvisable... and 'I'll switch to android' is also comically unthreatening, while also being hugely overplayed and almost always played straight, empty, and uninspired.
Everyone knows the keyboard sucks. Everyone knows that's not going to stop people buying iOS devices. It's the equivalent of 'fast food isn't nutritious but companies pretend it is' - in the year of our lord 2026, a multi paragraph article to that effect can probably be assumed to be numerous, new, surprising, ironic, or insanely naive.
The fact that a realistic, honest assessment of one's probable future purchasing decisions reads as a joke is maybe a little dark, but hey. It's a dark world, and it won't be lightened by yet another 'I'm totally gonna boycott if they don't stop!'
Short version - OP, you've either pulled a terrifying psy-op or proven that the nearly 100-year old one is still in effect.
Either way, I need to be a hell of a lot more discerning what I read online, because if I hadn't known for sure that money has nothing to do with class in the British system, I don't know how many other parts of that article I might have absorbed before I reached the massive clangers like 'the Nazis were pretty benign'.
I don't know what everyone else on this page is talking about, really, or why. I don't even know if they're real. Maybe I'm the weirdo, freaking out because a sci-fi giant presented a skewed version of reality.
But there have been enough people in history who've created touchstone works of art intended to last through the ages to say 'this is what it looks like when ordinary people are hypnotised into bloodlust', and I'm not convinced I'd recognise any further signs in time to get off.
I really, really don't want to get off the world wide web. My life is on it, now.
But it's a web, and we must remember that webs were not built for the endless entertainment of the flies who explore it.
Guys. Look at the title of this hacker news article. Look at it again.
Then, read the article again. Look for the bits that don't add up, the way the truth shifts from one paragraph to the next. Not outrageous lies, just the little wrongnesses sprinkled here and there.
Think where you have seen that before, heard of it. Think what book is famous for tiny wrongnesses sprinkled here and there to create a world of doublespeak and wrongthink.
THINK what the article is about, and why. What the book is about and why it was written - what you know, not what you are being told. It really is that easy to deceive thinking people, if you slip the relevant details carefully into well written texts about apparently irrelevant sources.
The first sentence of 1984 is 'it was a bright, cold day in April, when the clock struck thirteen'.
The first line of that book is the most famous example of 'ok cool that's just setting the scene, onto the next... Hang on hang on, is that right? That feels off, but it's too small a detail to analyse why. I can't sanity check every innocuous sentence. It's Orwell, a serious writer, not sci-fi. My spider senses are overreacting...'
And then think why that might be relevant today.
Anybody who has read the article and commented here as if the article is straight fact, this is your wake up call.
This is how it will feel to be propoganidised into reading blatant fiction as fact, skipping past all the red flags in the text and honestly not even seeing them. This is how it will feel to read an article that hinges on the premise that 2 + 2 = 5, and agree unquestioningly, because your fact-checking mind has been slowly, subtly exhausted by countless red herring tangents.
The article has some absolutely wild, insane takes like
>"To be sure, the Nazis organised mass
meetings of delirium [anti-Semitism] that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no
permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans
surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives"
That is quite literally absolutely contradicted by EVERY reasonable interpretation of history. Not even the most fervent Hitler apologists seriously claimed that anti-Semitism was a fleeting, minor flash in the pan or that Germany surrendered at the first hint of pushback.
But people here appear to have taken the statement as fact, or at least, not important enough to question the honest veracity of the rest of the article.
How many of you are going to go the rest of your lives with the impression that Orwell was, in fact, an elitist snob who hated the proles, because you read it somewhere (this article) and it just kinda embedded itself in your mind, not important enough to challenge?
How many other things do you think or feel, because of ideas planted there even more subtly, more deliberately and pervasively, than a bloody opinion piece on the book about "The Party [convincing] you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command", linked on a site about hacking, with a title that should make any literate westerner begin with a strong sense of 'well something ain't right'?!
And you know what, it still works. The trick, the little lies mixed with the absurd ones, they still confuse you. By the time I'd clicked on the article, I'd forgotten about the 'Isaac Asimov' part enough to believe the rest.
I started writing the comment below until it occurred to me that, of all the books to be reviewed with a glaring sense of wrongness and weirdness, 1984 seemed a little too on-the-nose to be accidental. Halfway through writing, I went back and looked more at the article, read about the Nazis being benign and anti-Semitism a momentary lapse of reason, read about Orwell fighting in the Spanish civil war yet unfit to fight in WWII (presented with no further explanation), and a bunch of things that didn't add up.
Then I looked at the rest of the comments on this page, with the sinking feeling that we as a society are failing an open-book test. If we lose, it's war, all over again. The answers are all right there in front of us. In this case, there's an entire book on DO NOT BELIEVE THE SHADOWY AUTHORITIES CHANNELLING YOUR HATRED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT 2+2=5, the book has been opened and put on the table right in front of us, the title and author practically circled in red ink...
... And yet, the first thing I spotted was how silly Americans are. And everyone else appears to be lost in the debate of why we must always be vigilant to the threat of our eternal enemies, Eastasia.
My comment, abandoned when the brain ticking got a bit too loud to ignore
> However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full.
Honestly, this line broke the immersion I didn't realise we need to enjoy non fiction biographical / analytical articles as much as fiction.
It was like a scrolling ticker in red letters saying 'this is based on an American cultural transposition of a true story'.
The writing was good, informative, bite-sized without seeming shallow, but after that line it was like ... like reading a well balanced article from a trusted source on a non-controversial topic like the history of coffee, that casually mentions a region in Africa that would later be the birthplace of the US president Obama or something. Not really relevant to the rest of the article, not impossible to understand why an author could make that error. But such a jarring divergence from your culture's values and truths that your brain is slapped into the wobbly existentialism of remembering that 'truth' and 'facts' are entirely subjective and dependent not on honesty or intelligence so much as who is around you and how you were brought up.
Which is pretty unnerving when reading Kafka or deep philosophy (or the news, nowadays), and really not what I was prepared for in the middle of a benign article about a the famous author book I know very well, somehow via a technology forum, which I had only clicked on to see why said famous author had morphed from Eric Blair, to his chosen nom de plume George Orwell, to Isaac Asimov.
If your definition of success includes - nay, depends on - arrogance, overconfidence, and style over substance, then it's fair to say that your definition of success differs greatly from many societies' norm.
Sure, capitalist, hyper-individualistic societies might say the most toxic, selfish companies are the most successful.
But in huge swathes of the world - I'm inclined to say most of the world - success is defined by quality, respect, the test of time, and how well one achieves one's stated objectives.
Even in UK, which is not exactly a socialist utopia, a business or company that is self-sustaining and well -regarded counts as way more successful than, say, Elon Musk or Dyson (since they sold out).
Your definition of success is like defining beauty as 'women with full lips and unlined' and wondering why so many of the most beautiful people you see have had surgery. And pushing for other definitions of beauty won't help, either. Most people define beauty as a spectrum or confluence of various factors which only tangentially relate to the 2 most obvious, currently fashionable factors like lips and wrinkles.
Or, more succinctly: if you define success as financial gain, you don't value moral factors. So of course your most esteemed companies won't either.
Occam's razor says the sun orbits the earth, everybody dies from Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome, and the correct way to spell Occam's razor is Okams Raza (in all languages, because lavishes other than English are difficult).
It's literally a platitude. It's like the saying 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going': it's reallyemorable and descriptive and is maybe a good guideline in many situations.
But using it to evaluate the tensile strength of various metals according to their velocity would be wild, because it had never pretended to be anything like a rule. It's not like theory of gravity or 'I before e except after c', which are based on actual analysis and results.
Legit assuming that everything is as simple as it can be, that the most obvious idea to occur to any untrained observer is the most accurate, is literally a guaranteed way to go though life without understanding anything, at all. Using it to argue with people who appear to obvious what they're talking about (and there are so, so many undisputed studies on the exact reasons scammers do what they do: it's too filter people or. There is no debate, academically) is a pretty slippery slope to 'anybody who doesn't think and act exactly like me is lying, because no reasons or facts exist unless I personally hold or after with them', and it's definitely a thought process worth challenging.
Although to be fair, its best application might be re. online arguments that you don't really care that much about. So if you just meant that the previous poster had given a reason and you were going with that because it's easier, my bad.
Absolutely no way are people arguing here that being targeted for one's race, religion, sexuality etc, or being the personal victim of a targeted campaign of harassment and / or violence, is 'just as stressful and distressing' as being targeted by ads.
I don't know how it is in other countries, but in the UK using LLMs for any form of paid legal services is hugely forbidden, and would also be insanely embarrassing. Like, 'turns out nobody had any qualifications and they were sending all the work to mechanical Turks in third world countries, who they refused to pay' levels of embarrassing.
I say this as someone who once had the bright idea of sending deadline reminders, complete with full names of cases, to my smart watch. It worked great and made me much more organised until my managers had to have a little chat about data protection and confidentiality and 'sorry, what the hell were you thinking?'.
I am no stranger to embarrassing attempts to jump the technological gun, or the wonders of automation in time saving.
But absolutely nobody in any professional legal context in the UK, that I can imagine, would use LLMs with any more gusto and pride than an industrial pack of diarrhoea relief pills or something - if you ever saw it in an office, you'd just hope it was for personal use and still feel a bit funny about shaking their hands.
People keep comparing LLMs (and AI, I suppose) to specialised machines like the printing press or the harvester or something, and often throwing in a luddite comparison.
The glaring difference is that specialised machines, usually invented to do an existing task better, faster or more safely, do indeed revolutionise the world. As you pointed out, they perform necessary functions better, faster, and / or more safely.
Note that segues, that weird juice machine etc, we not built to fill a gap or to perform a task better, faster or more safely. Neither were pet rocks or see-through phones. Nobody was sitting around before the Metaverse going 'man, I wish Minecraft could be pre-made and corporate with my work colleagues", and when these things launched the sales pitches were all about "look at the awesome things this tech can do, isn't it great?!", rather than "look at the awesome things this tech will allow you / help you to do, aren't they great?!".
LLMs are really impressive tech. So are segues and those colour-changing t-shirts we had in the 80s. They looked awesome, the tech was awesome, and there were genuine practical applications for doomerist, somewhere.
But they do not allow the average poison to do anything awesome. They don't make arduous tasks faster, better or safer without heavily sacrificing quality, privacy, and sanity. They do not fill a gap in anybody's life.
That's the difference.
Most AI is currently a really cool technology that can do a bunch of things and it's very exciting to look at, just like the Segway and the Metaverse. And, really, an ant, or a furby.
They are not going to revolutionise anything, because they were more built to. They weren't built to summarise your emails or to improve your coding (there are many princes of software that were built to assist with coding, and they are pretty good) or to perform any arduous or dangerous tasks.
They were built to experiment, to push boundaries, to impress, and to sell.
So yes, I 100% agree with you and take your point a little further it's not even that LLM's are too high tech and fancy for most periods. I don't even think that they're products. They are components, or add-ons, being sold as products like extension power cables
50 years before the invention of the plug socket, or flexible silicone phone cases being sold in the era of landlines and phone boxes.
And I'm legit still baffled that so many people seem to have jobs that revolve around reading and writing emails or producing boilerplate code, who are not able to confidently do those things, but aren't just looking for a new job.
Like, it's a tough market, but if you haven't learned to skim-read an email by now, do yourself a favour and find a job that doesn't involve so much skim reading of emails. I don't get it.
I remain amazed by the lack of attention given to this.
Regardless of one's position on the 'everything online is Russian propaganda, Russian bots or misinformation - invest in sickles and hammers, comrade / wtf just use basic common sense and the internet is as safe as it ever was' continuum, such universal enthusiasm for a Russian-owned, Russian-controlled search engine should generate a little more counter-argument, at the very least.
Absolutely no mention of Google, Bing, Startpage, DDG, or even Mojeek search engines usually pass online without somebody detailing the problems, flaws, or why they're not as good as the alternatives.
Usually, at least 20% of the comments will be overtly critical, with at least 1 person passionately arguing that this search engine is going to destroy life as we know it / funds genocide / is an abomination unto God.
On open forums and spaces where a variety of users and tastes are represented, that minimum level of criticism usually applies to absolutely everything from movies to toothbrushing techniques to kids' TV to low-carb breakfasts.
If more than 3 people care enough about something to discuss it, at least 1 of those people will hate it and feel the need to enunciate why.
Except Kagi.
Kagi must enjoy the highest praise-criticism ratio of anything I've ever seen on the web, including concepts like sunshine and heaven and the eradication of polio.
Seriously. The only 'real' criticism I ever see of Kagi is like 'I personally don't like it because I don't think a search engine is worth more than $19.99' or 'unfortunately I need x feature', and it's always followed by a reply saying 'Ah, well Kagi is now available for $19.50' or 'you'll be thrilled to know that x feature can be enabled in Kagi by following these steps'.
And the occasional 'I don't use it because it seemed a bit wierd and wasn't worth it' comment languishing on the outskirts of the discussion.
So yeah. I do not expect this comment to stir much discussion, mainly because it's like 24 hours after the main debate and is on a pretty low-impact thread on hacker news from an uninspiring new ish account.
But also because Kagi critical comments are written in sand, whatever the discussion or authority or audience.
> recently the best AI models are veering into not sucking territory
I agree with your assessment.
I find it absolutely wild that 'it almost doesn't entirely suck, if you squint' is suddenly an acceptable benchmark for a technology to be unleashed upon the public.
We have standards for cars, speakers, clothing, furniture, make up, even literature.
Someone can't just type up a few pages of dross and put it though 100 letterboxes without being liable for littering and nuisance. The EU and UK don't allow someone to still phones with a pre-imstalled app that almost performs a function that some users might theoretically want. The public domain has quality standards.
Or rather, it had quality standards. But it's apparently legal to put semi-functioning data-collectors in technologies where nobody asked for them, why isn't it legal to sell chairs that collapse unless you hold them a specific way, clothes that don't actually function as clothes but could be used to make actual clothes by a competent tailor, headphones that can be coaxed into sporadically producing round for minutes at a time?
Either something works too a professional standard or it doesn't.
If it doesn't, it is/was not legal to include it in consumer products.
This is why people are more angry than is justified by a single unreliable program.
I don't care that much whether LLM's perform the functions that are advertised (and they don't, half the time).
I care that after many decades of living in a first world country with consumer protection and minimum standards, all of that seems to have been washed away in the AI wave. When it receeds, we will be left paying first world prices for third world enquiring, now the acceptable quality standard for everything seems to have dropped to 'it can almost certainly be used for its intended purpose at least some times, by some people, with a little effort'.
Just to be clear, are you asserting that every opinion in this thread that you don't agree with is due to the poster hallucinating, or only specific ones?
Do you have any evidence or well established theory to back up this rather extraordinary claim?
Because if you are honestly positing that numerous people around the world are literally hallucinating despise (statistically) not being under medical supervision, presumably continuing to drive, work, and make decisions, that would be a pretty urgent global health phenomenon that you really should be chasing up.
And at some point, the authorities best placed to deal with this hitherto unseen mass incapacitation might reasonably ask: what are the chances that multiple unrelated people around the world are experiencing such localised, hugely specific breaks from reality causing them to express reasonably common opinions on an internet forum, rather than the inconsistency being on the end of this one person who doesn't agree with them?
If one could 'add meth'(??) to chemicals to make them more potent, without changing the chemical, it would be the difference between (for example) citric acid and really strong citric acid, or codeine 2.5mg and codeine 5mg.
You'll note that neither of these involves changing the name of the chemical, because that is not how chemical names work.
As someone else has pointed out, the difference between 'hydrogen monoxide' and 'dihydrogen monoxide' isn't 'it's like hydrogen monoxide with added di', because that is ridiculous.
Please stop saying anything beginning with 'meth' is just meth with added bits.
It's a really odd misinterpretation of the terrible dangers of: methane, Methodists, methanol, Methaemoglobin, methicillin, etc.