I’d like to understand AI research better and I recall some posts a while back where someone collected all the key papers that one should read, but I don’t remember enough to be able to find it. Does anyone know what I’m talking about and could link me to that post?
This might sound paradoxical -- but any decent LLM will be happy to explain all the papers to you at great depth, and read new ones, and translate the math into simpler concepts and such. It'll also happily recommend relevant math to study, or give training problems, or whatever you want.
He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected.
Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
"A fragment of Solon’s poetry describes a situation in which many of the poor “have arrived in foreign lands/sold into slavery, bound in shameful fetters.”"
"In 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon of Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery."
> or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs
Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life."
(The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)
> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.
Thats catagorically wrong on both levels.
Common land was regulated and had a ton of bylaws to make sure that people didn't take the piss. There was lots of work done to improve the soil, (leaving fallow, crop rotation, fertilising, etc etc)
As for anti-slavery, there was a whole multi century effort to fight against surfdom.
The Quakers and other more radical religious types condemned it as unchristian,
Well a lot of Eastern religions do talk about sustainability 1000s of years back. Just because it was never part of Abrahamic faiths and their offshoot cultures which took over the world, does not mean that humans did not think this way
I think that is too little credit to previous humans: people objecting to slavery were around four hundred and more years ago. Similarly, concerns about environmental destruction are also old.
> If you interpret these examples to mean that any person can write down any list of requirements along with any user interface specs, and the AI will consistently produce a satisfactory product, then I’d agree programmers are toast.
I think the road to this is pretty clear now. It’s all about building the harness now such that the AI can write something and get feedback from type checks, automated tests, runtime errors, logs, and other observability tools. The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs.
I am also of this opinion that a lot of this can be solved in time with a harness. And whole heartedly agree that there is a class of webapp that has been trivialized that can make a mom and pop shop up to 'enterprise' (80% of our architecture seems to center around the same pattern at my $DAYJOB) run just fine if they accept some of the vibes.
This type of works seems to be happening as a lot of orchestrator projects that pop up here every once in a while, and I've just been waiting for one with a pipeline 'language' malleable enough to work for me that I can then make generic enough for a big class of solutions. I feel doomed to make my own, but I feel like I should do my due diligence.
> The majority of software is fairly standardized UI forms running CRUD operations against some backend or data store and interacting with APIs.
Have you ever look at Debian’s package list?
Most CRUD apps are just a step above forms and reports. But there’s a lot of specific processing that requires careful design. The whole system may be tricky to get right as well. But CRUD UI coding was never an issue.
DDD and various other architecture books and talks are not about CRUD.
I get it — it can be frustrating to encounter so much low effort AI content these days. But I think it’s worth looking at the bright side here: the increase in our production of entropy from GPU consumption will hasten the heat death of the universe.
Would you like me to suggest some AI summarizer tools you could use to more efficiently read AI generated content in the meantime?
Isn't it capitalism? Adobe fucks you, Microsoft will "upgrade" your Office^W Copilot 365 license to 25-seats(1) if you don't notice, Tesla promises self-driving but drives you into the back of the trucks (what, you didn't read the disclaimer?), even the "leader of the free world" is now a crypto-huckster selling you bibles with his name on it... and is killing civilians in the Middle East and making profit by saying "Oh I'll stop soon!".
at least the 3-card Monty guy is dealing with you one on one. These companies hire lobbyist to make the illegal, immoral sh*t legal. Easy to keep winning the game when you write the rules.
The fear is that regulations ossify industries and that's why heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years. If you mandate that all electronic devices must have USB-C cables, how can anyone invent something better than a USB-C cable? And for what, so people don't have to have multiple cables? That's not even in the top 100 problems that a government body as large as the EU should be concerned about.
> Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit.
Healthcare, education, transportation, and housing would all be counterexamples depending on how you want to frame "benefit."
> It seems like the Macbook Neo has a lot of those properties as well for a very inexpensive device that is extremely easy to repair.
This is counter to your point, no one regulated that Apple make the MacBook Neo easy to repair. Apple is incentivized to follow the market.
> If you mandate that all electronic devices must have USB-C cables, how can anyone invent something better than a USB-C cable?
That already happened with Micro USB. The EU initially mandated that manufacturers agree on a standard socket, because the absolute zoo of charging ports back then was counter-productive and only generated e-waste. Ultimately they agreed to use Micro USB, but obviously that's not what's used today.
These regulations are not just dumped on the manufacturers - there's a period of consultation and a grace period to implement them. If something actually better came up, you'd eventually see it mandated.
> If something actually better came up, you'd eventually see it mandated.
While I generally am quite content with that particular mandate and it does more good than bad, I would have to disagree on this. Something better doesn't come from nowhere - hell, USB itself has gone through a long and arduous path until it came to the (messy) standard it is today. This is essentially banning any other standard to grow and be improved upon with feedback and iteration.
I don't believe other paths would yield better results.
It took Apple a looong time to adapt USB-C, which was already running circles around Lightning five years after the introduction of the latter. Ironically Apple participated in the development of the standard. They just couldn't be arsed to implement it.
Multinationals don't do anything unless they absolutely have to. Apple notably all but threatened to move out of the EU due to USB-C regulations. They were actively preventing their users from having a better standard because it hurt their bottom line in the field of accessories.
The argument about ossified connectors is obviously made in bad faith, since it obviously didn’t happen. USB-C isn’t the first mandated connector, that was micro-usb. And when the time came to upgrade, the mandate was changed. None of that imagined ossification happened back then, and it won’t happen when we go from USB-C to USB-D or whatever.
> and that's why heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years.
Not to get distracted, but aren't these three all incredible examples of innovation over time? Healthcare alone is significantly better than it was 50 years ago and it's not really close. 50 years ago, this hip new treatment called electroshock therapy was being used to "treat" being gay. It was also within touching distance of getting a lobotomy for depression or anything else your husband thought was a problem.
The rates of depression in the US are at an all time high [1]. The primary theory behind the cause of depression and mechanism of most antidepressants has been abandoned [2]. Not treating homosexuality as a disease isn't an innovation, it's a cultural change.
You could maybe argue mRNA vaccines or semaglutides are big innovations, I think we've made a ton of progress against HIV, and it seems like we've made progress against cancer, but when you factor in how much government money goes into this research and compare it against the advancements we've seen in computational technology it's a lot less impressive. You could buy a raspberry pi for like $50 today that outperforms every computer made 50 years ago, whereas the cost of most medical imaging has actually increased [3]. Likewise the inflation adjusted cost of college degrees and building new rail lines or really any infrastructure has increased precipitously since 1970.
There's a bizarre trend, especially on HN, of unjustified criticism against Apple. There are so many YC companies committing outright fraud, Palantir is building a surveillance state, a bunch of well known founders and VCs openly promote white supremacist ideology, but you'll never see more vitriol on this forum than someone complaining about the liquid glass UI or app store take rate.
Macbooks are standard fare for tech workers. Having reached the top of the mountain it should not be a surprise that there are heavy winds. Instead of behaving like custodians of the cathedral we get fast movement with breakage and an emphasis on pursuit of bold aesthetic novelty. If there is any bizarre trend here it is Apple burning billions to give people features they do not want while letting core functionality weaken and fail.
that's because those other things mentioned are quite irrelevant in every day life, but the apple products' quality or bad appstore practices are directly affecting the said complainer on HN.
Personally, I gave Apple many thousands of dollars, and then I had updates forced on me by Apple which made every Apple device I own worse.
One can be angry about things which directly and immediately make their life worse while also being angry about the other evils in the world.
This is surely not a trend, I am sure humans around the world throughout history have been able to criticize one thing even while something far worse is happening.
Internet memes and terminal Holy Wars take nearly zero thought, effort or intelligence to post about. Just emotion and hot takes, and you're almost guaranteed a response.
reply