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Because it's more fun?

Being serious this is a silly line of reasoning. Maybe they are both bad? It's like asking why is it bad to light a forest fire when there is a forest fire already burning.

I take issue with the cognitive dissonance too though. HN became very hostile to Bitcoin but took no issue with people gaming on PCs and consoles that were consuming more and more electricity each year. Now everyone is silent on all fronts because LLMs make their job easy and gives them something new and interesting to play with.


Exactly, people like to cherry pick. Do we need facebook, do we need instagram? Do we need on-demand always available 4k streaming?

The singularity argument makes more sense than the environmental one.

Short of all of us living like the amish, we're hypocrites for pointing out one "waste" over another.


Yeah I don’t know if I come to the same conclusion as you.

There is no probabilistic way to determine if the singularity will be a positive or negative for humanity. Climate change is a net negative for humanity.

Regardless it’s clear what course we are on.


I think it's a rebuttal against claims that LLMs are incompatible with large code bases. It's not so much a flex about the quality of the code, it's more a flex about the complexity of the code and the LLMs ability to deal with such complexity.

Whether or not that complexity is warranted is a different story.

The codebase may be bloated by a factor of 10 but if the costs associated with that are less than the costs of developing the software from a business standpoint the choice is clear.


When it translated a paragraph of one language into another flawlessly.

A tiled window manager with Qutebrowser and it's vimium style shortcuts is the closest I have come to this.

I just hit tab 1 to N times and hope for the best. I wonder if VIM style search on elements with a new HTML tag attribute would work (at least for browsers).

Wait until you hear about tab+shift.

It would be great if they built Vim style shortcuts into the spec and browser like you suggested but in the time being we have the Vimium extensions for other browsers. Personally I am not a fan of extensions unless I write them myself.


These products already do what basically everyone wants them to do.

The problem is now people are conditioned to having their privacy violated so they are still the product and they will pay to be the product.

The network effects with a product like WhatsApp are strong so that this opens the door to dark patterns for the non paying customers. After enough time the same level of effort will go into the now subscription app that went into it when it was free.

YouTube is a good example of this phenomenon.


The YouTube app on Android is terrible, even with the premium. Autoplay has been notoriously broken for years

I have premium and for over a month I couldn’t save videos to playlists in the app.

Did Microsoft ever explain why Bitlocker could be deliberately circumvented?

Part of me thinks they are welcoming this drama because if the other 0-days are genuine bugs then it muddies the water and shifts the focus away from a the fact that they shipped an intentionally backdoored security product.


If you are interested in that you might want to check out this paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00196


I would like one day to have a database which measure how strongly every food ingredient in use binds to every human smell receptors.


The sites have user submitted content but the sites decide what content they show.

In legacy media the platform is responsible for the content they present you. On new media platforms they are pushing out foreign propaganda and getting financially rewarded for it.

Repeal 230 and put all the controls of recommender system into the hands of the user. Present information chronologically by default.


The cognitive dissonance around this is astounding.

First of all define productive. Would someone using AI to build software at a startup which is likely to fail be considered productive? What if there is already similar software available that solves the same problems? What about the broad use of LLMs to draft emails or make silly memes?

It’s funny how everyone’s concerns around climate change just disappeared when they realised AI was useful to them.


I think it's worth noting that the "work" these LLMs are doing is digital. ChatGPT cannot plow fields, or construct buildings and roads, or otherwise interact with the physical world. LLMs are useful because humanity has evolved (devolved?) into so much intangible work- documents, code, powerpoint presentations... One solar flare and that's all wiped out, and then we can say definitively that LLMs were a waste of time and energy.

It’s a matter of timeframes too.

Cryptocurrency is more popular and intertwined with the financial system than it ever was so while the claim isn’t currently true it doesn’t mean it won’t be on a long enough timeframe.

If you are old enough then you would be aware that similar claims were made about email but only one country that I know of (the Netherlands) no longer processes mail. Still if we had to guess I would say that we are still early and email will replace the worlds postal systems.


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