Won't expound on my life story, but this is massively overlooked. You can't just prioritize money without taking into account the massive sacrifices it will require in your life. I spent a long, long time becoming successful in careers that I hated, only to burn out and do the career I knew I wanted to do since I was old enough to think and remember. Except now I have wasted decades of my life that I will never get back.
The majority of your life is spent working so you absolutely MUST find it fulfilling or you will burn out (at best) or destroy your body and mind as a sacrifice to the insatiable Mammon.
They also block Brave browsers entirely. I tried reading into it, but it appears to be one of those "programmer personality quirks". The fellow that runs the site appears to think Brave is a scam of some sort, and just decided to block the entire browser.
Bit of a boomer statement here but maybe this will encourage devs such as yourself to contribute more to open source passion projects that will help dethrone the monopolies. Looking at Valve's investment into Linux via Proton as a great example.
It would be so nice to have a productivity Linux OS that just works on all my devices without tinkering. I want to stop supporting the closed source monopolies, but the alternatives aren't up to par yet. I am extremely hopeful that they will be once mega corps inevitably decay and people tire of the boom-bust cycle.
As technologists, we all want beautifully designed tools, and I'm increasingly seeing that these are only created by passionate and talented people who truly care about tech, unlike megacorps that only care about enriching their board and elite shareholders.
"We are in the midst of a group delusion — a consequence of an economy ruled by people that do not participate in labor of any kind outside of sending and receiving emails and going to lunches that last several hours — where the people with the money do not understand or care about human beings."
Regardless of the hostile tone of the article, this stuck out to me as an incredibly poignant description of the current tech/finance elites' mindset.
As most of us who have tried LLMs can attest, they are indeed stochastic parrots with no capacity for knowledge or understanding. This is best exemplified by their non-deterministic outputs, wherein they give different answers to the same question if asked enough times. This is not how a human brain works. Perhaps it is a small building block, but the systemic architecture required to reach brain level is currently not in sight based on what I'm seeing.
You forgot to add that the majority of climate scientists agree on climate change.
This is important because science, like America, is a democracy. And we know democracy is the best thing ever. Period. Therefore, when groups of people agree on something (DEMOCRACY!!), it becomes an inviolable law of the universe. It wasn't until America became the world's greatest nation (thanks to democracy) that we discovered this natural phenomenon, however.
Does anyone know why Nvidia chose to re-use the 4N process for their Blackwell series? From everything I've read, 3N is mature and is already in full production, yet Nvidia chose to just reuse 4N. It seems very much unlike Nvidia to leave performance on the table.
Indeed. If the DNC had allowed Bernie Sanders to run against Trump, Sanders would very likely have beaten him and Trump would have remained a reality TV star. Instead, they pushed Clinton on Democrats just like they pushed Harris this cycle. The corruption within the DNC is very much to blame for Trump.
I refuse to accept the childish assertion that the majority of American voters are card carrying members of a radical political system that was defeated last century. This is just an emotional response to a reality that one does not want to accept.
Americans are desperate. May not be felt among the HN crowd, but standards of living in the US have been declining consistently for a long time [1]. Remember that Trump was not re-elected to a second term initially specifically because he failed to deliver on his promise of "MAGA". He instead did a Jeb Bush presidency, complete with Wall Street (Mnuchin) and the CIA (Pompeo) running the country exactly as would have occurred had Bush won. So Americans tried Biden, in the hopes of a return to Obama era America. This obviously didn't happen, as standard of living continued to decline. So they tried Trump again, in sheer desperation.
I don't see a positive future for the US, as it is so clearly a declining empire, exhibiting every textbook symptom. The startup/tech crowd loves talking about cheap phones and "services", but the reality is bleak outside of this narrow tech bubble.
All well and good, but Commonwealth Fusion and Tokamak Energy are building large test reactors are we speak in hopes of answering these exact questions. These aren't science projects, but tech demonstrators designed as a stepping stone to commercial fusion. The points raised in the article are valid, but can only be tested by building reactors, which is currently happening in the above companies.
This outcome is exactly what I fear most. Paul Graham described Altman as the type of individual who would become the chief of a cannibal tribe after he was parachuted onto their island. I call this type the inverse of the effective altruist: the efficient psychopath. This is the type of person that would have first access to an AGI. I don't think I'm being an alarmist when I say that this type of individual having sole access to AGI would likely produce hell on earth for the rest of us. All wrapped up in very altruistic language of "safety" and "flourishing" of course.
Unfortunately, we seem to be on this exact trajectory. If open source AGI does not keep up with the billionaires, we risk sliding into an inescapable hellscape.
Can your corner store credit be used to pay taxes? How long will your corner store survive if the IRS found out you were processing transactions in your own currency?
No one is disrupting banks because the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air, and no upstart fintech company has this power. To gain this power requires the creation of a bank, which as you can imagine, is probably the most gate-kept activity on earth.
Andreesen talked about this in his Rogan appearance. The banks and gov brought the hammer down on crypto because it was a legitimate threat to the banking cabal which runs the American Empire.
If you read the article, he explains that there are multiple scaling paths now, whereas before it was just parameter scaling. I think it's reasonable to estimate faster progress as a result of that observation.
I like that the HN crowd wants to believe AI is hype (as do I), but it's starting to look like wishful thinking. What is useful to consider is that once we do get AGI, the entirety of society will be upended. Not just programming jobs or other niches, but everything all at once. As such, it's pointless to resist the reality that AGI is a near term possibility.
It would be wise from a fulfillment perspective to make shorter term plans and make sure to get the most out of each day, rather than make 30-40 year plans by sacrificing your daily tranquility. We could be entering a very dark era for humanity, from which there is no escape. There is also a small chance that we could get the tech utopia our billionaire overlords constantly harp on about, but I wouldn't bet on it.
This crapification of tech is just a microcosm of where America is headed as a whole. I found a blog recently that talks about it in depth, and I find it hard to argue with any of the analysis or conclusions [1].
Hard to ignore the signs that the US is an empire in decline, heading towards collapse.
Synthetic chemistry has overall been a disaster for humanity, particularly since chemists employed the hacker ethos of "move fast and break things". Except in this case the things they broke were other people's bodies and the environment.
Tragic to see the crazed promethean spirit possessing scientists to push forward without a single inkling of the negative consequences. Perhaps Icarus' fate is our inescapable destiny.