So the TechCrunch headline should be "Waymo hits child better than a human driver would"? Not sure if the details reflect how the general public actually interprets this story (see the actual TC headline for exhibit A).
That’s why they purchase goods and services (from others) and then cry about things they don’t and probably never will understand.
And why they can be ignored and just fed some slop to feel better.
I could lie but that’s the cold truth.
Edit: I'm not sure if the repliers are being dense (highly likely), or you just skipped over context (you can click the "context" link if you're new here)
> So the TechCrunch headline should be "Waymo hits child better than a human driver would"? Not sure if the details reflect how the general public actually interprets this story (see the actual TC headline for exhibit A).
That is the general public sentiment I was referring to.
So if they were 100% self-sufficient and understood everything they'd be smart enough to interpret a child being hit at 6 mph as progress? Fun how "general public" is always a "they" vs "you".
Your comment sounds like subconsciously you're trying to come off as stronger than the general public, which begs the question: Why? Why do you need to prove your strength over the populace?
are you being dense on purpose, or you just don't understand how context works? hint, check out the "context" link
look at what I was replying to. if you still don't get it, then yeah I'm just proving my point and you can keep crying about it.
> So the TechCrunch headline should be "Waymo hits child better than a human driver would"? Not sure if the details reflect how the general public actually interprets this story (see the actual TC headline for exhibit A).
That is the general public sentiment I was referring to.
The fact that you go around asking dumb questions in bad faith to people is enough for me, last time I engage with you.
I think this is part of their circular financing "magic". The "customers" are likely OpenAI and Anthropic, who Microsoft is paying to use their infrastructure (so the "customer" who is paying for the AI capacity is Microsoft).
I have absolutely no idea what the current frontline treatment drugs are for literally any form of cancer, and would bet the same is true for almost everyone else here. Most of the exceptions are people who know the frontline treatment drugs for one or two forms of cancer that impacted them personally. "And then you never hear about it again" is subtly implying that the drugs behind headlines never proceed beyond that point, but I didn't hear about it when the current frontline became the frontline treatment for any form of cancer. Most people just aren't in the loop about the evolution of the field of oncology, beyond pop-sci headlines.
And yes, most headlines like this don't result in changes to the care provided to anybody outside of clinical trials, but some do, and you and I probably won't hear about those either.
It's not funny how people make judgments like this without any factchecking, just by their gut.
Talk to any actual healthcare worker from an oncology ward. (A nurse will do.) With most cancers, your chances of survival are non-trivially better now than even in 2010. Immunotherapy absolutely exploded in the meantime. For example, the vast majority of monoclonal antibodies (not just for treatment of cancer) were only approved in the last 15 years.
There are some notable holdouts like glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, and these tend to draw attention. But there is real progress.
The stories are written for a general audience and often lack detail or nuance. "Promising" doesn't mean "likely". "Possible breakthrough" is not a breakthrough. And it may just mean we learn something that we don't know today.
I lost my wife to metastatic melanoma a few years ago. Words used in reference to cancer are often terms of art that have a distinct meaning from the general meaning. Her particular cancer was pretty awful and lacked mutations that allowed for the use of targeted therapy that buy time. Even still, her chances of survival were about 65% in 2023 as compared to 0% in 2013. Unfortunately, the odds didn't end in her favor, despite the incredible efforts of a team of doctors at a national cancer center.
Anything with cancer research and treatment is an testament to standing on the shoulders of those who came before. Many people suffered to give my Molly those odds - she had hope where many others had nothing. And today, we have trials of custom vaccines that will offer others more hope and perhaps safer treatment. Perhaps in some small way her journey and ideal helped those or other developments. That's all we have.
I think this is one of the expected outcomes of "Science by Press Release" (universities motivated to maximize their grants and IP), combined with media/press that wants clicks (articles that talk about cures for cancer get clicks).
As a rule of thumb, if you’re not a researcher in the area ignore any media reports of a study that include the words “in mice”.
Also, there’s a tendency on HN for commenters (mostly software engineers) to think that they are smarter than the scientists who work on this stuff day in, day out. Let me tell you, you, random HN reader are not smarter than random biomedical scientists.
It's interesting that the AI is taking job story is so prevalent in these sorts of posts even though there's zero indication of it in any financial analysis. Amazon and big tech companies like it are using AI as the smoke screen to cover up the obvious, which is these companies have lost their ability to grow exponentially. Since their stock price and debt demands this impossible growth, they are now starting the dying process. It will probably take years and maybe even decades, but they will continue to cut costs until they become the next Sears.
I agree and I also think a lot of what used to require the cloud is now becoming local and private.
Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.
P/E isn't a future projection. There is literally no analysis that asserts Amazon will achieve the same growth rate in the future that it achieved in the past. It will retain stock value by eating itself for a while (could be a long time), then die.
Relative to their competitors who also have comparable models, Anthropic's design choices in effectively managing context with a very well thought out and coherent design, makes them stand out.
If you enjoy working out of the terminal and CLI/TUI's then it's not even close. Gemini, Codex, CoPilot, and every other CLI I can think of are awful. Stumbling, bumbling and you'd be lucky to keep your file tree in tact even with tight permissions (short of a sandbox).
Claude Code feels like my early days when pair programming was all the rage.
If you have the time OpenCode comes the closest and lets you work across providers seamless.
(i.e. competitors can still use Claude models but haven’t achieved the same DevEx as CC so far, at least in my opinion and many others)
also while I was initially on the “they should open source” boat, and I’m happy Codex CLI did, there are a ton of benefits to keeping to closed source. just look at how much spam and dumb community drama OpenAI employees now have to deal with on GitHub. I increasingly think it’s a smart moved to keep it closed source and iterate without as direct community involvement on the codebase for now
They could open source it and not even have a Github project associated. Just provide a read-only git repo on anthropic.com or drop a source tarball every release.
Then a ton of vibe-coded Claude Code forks out of their control would pop up on GitHub and people would be even more frustrated at Anthropic for not fixing their issues.
Honestly this got me to subscribe. The back catalog is pretty stellar with pretty much every major writer of the twentieth century making a contribution. Zooming in on PDFs just wasn't how you wanted to read them.
AI is pretty much killing social media in the long term. Even pre-AI, a good chunk of posts/comment sections on sites were bots/paid. Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT. I guess there's still the Onion-verse.
as a black box, a 4k context LLM AI (text in, text out) is no different than a highly effective search engine indexing all possible 4k bodies of text (also - text in, text out)
I'm not convinced you can have an impromptu global conversation to any positive end. Humans are not well suited to this task and an unsupervised mostly anonymous forum plays to those weaknesses and provides no support to generate positive outcomes.
It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.
The demographics of who was online before the internet went mainstream matter a lot, here. It wasn't exactly a representative slice of the general population.
Forums were still going strong a decade after the Internet went mainstream. They only started to fade after smartphones took off and many forums took years to introduce mobile themes. For sports teams however, forums never faded, there tens of millions of users on team-specific soccer forums for example.
That's a good point. I think a lot of forums were less vulnerable for a number of reasons. They typically don't have a large audience (not all, but most), which makes them less of a target. They're also organized around niche interests that don't intersect much with politics and cultural issues, off-topic forums aside. And they're probably more heavily moderated than social media and blog comments.
I think the general point stands when considering large-scale platforms.
Were they global or local? I made that distinction intentionally.
Either or both, depending on the SYSOP's resources. I ran a BBS that did store-and-forward between the U.S. and Europe.
The ones with global connections could take a day to a week to forward messages, but that turned out to be a feature. We went outside in the real world instead of staying online arguing with strangers.
Usenet was US-centric but somewhat global and certainly not local. Even dialup BBS's were sometimes nationwide despite long distance phone charges. I wasn't into the BBS thing though.
Absolutely not. From almost day 1 Reddit has been plagued with jokey meme-speak, which is partially why specialist forums are still thriving (audio/video stuff, XDA-developers, European soccer teams, SomethingAwful boards and up until a few years ago, Notebook-Review).
Reddit has been an absolute dumpster fire from the get-go. Its Wikipedia page has one of the largest “controversies” sections of any publicly listed company. Many of the controversies are so significant they have their own Wikipedia page.
Not wanting to particularly defend Reddit but a controversies section on a wikipedia page is hardly a good metric, in my opinion. Wikipedia is often used to malign various entities (and protect others).
I have the opposite experience. While these anonymous groups tend to be high on vulgarity and directness, there are much more peaceful examples than the other way around. Propaganda got strong when we began to restrict content on social media by the companies themselves or external actors.
This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.
Interestingly, you can still use `author:username` to search for posts. For my part, if something seems suspicious and the profile is private then I assume it's a bot.
Yeah, I saw some posts on there the other day that felt a bit suspect, went to look at their profile, and nothing. I'd already become an infrequent user of reddit since some earlier changes, but that makes me even less likely to go back.
I thought the same. I'm still 90% of the same mindset. But it does worry me how much people like slop. But is it because it's novel? and will people get tired of it?
> Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT.
Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.
My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.
Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.
I mean, yes and no. The default Reddit experience is absolutely overrun by fake content. Or, there are tens of thousands of real people who have nothing else to do in their life but to go to /r/news or other "front page" subreddits and post the same political talking points multiple times a day, whether the story warrants it or not. Frankly, the AI / paid-shill explanation is greatly preferable in my book.
The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.
HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.
I'm glad you approve of "most of the investment", unfortunately "productive companies" don't do as well as various financial instruments which operate largely on symbolic capital. Private equity, which is only accessible by "rich people", doesn't exactly worry too much about productivity vs leveraged buyouts. It's interesting that you feel so strongly about other people succeeding though. It might seem strange but other people want to succeed too (weirdly it seems all this "productivity" doesn't actually benefit those outside the privileged circles).
1. if we are talking about billionaire's wealth like Bezos, Musk etc - all their wealth is in their own company. you can decide for yourself as to whether these companies are productive or not
2. private equity is a necessary evil that tries to make something out of companies that never had a good future anyway. not a lot of billionaire wealth is in PE. in fact pension firms are one of the largest stakeholders in PE which means the common people have stake in them too. what is your take on that?
3. i want other people to succeed too - our society is built such that any rando can convince YC and get funding.
The problem isn’t necessarily the wealth itself, it’s the power feedback loop that comes with it. It’s the ability to influence the government to pass laws which maintain or amplify your existing wealth, which then increases your influence, etc.
There is nothing “free market” about this. There is no equitable or efficient destitution of resources when this kind of thing happens - and it will always happen, because it is an inevitability.
Government funding for public services does very much improve peoples lives and you cant ignore the current wealth distribution, when you want to tap into "new" sources of income/taxation.
Yes I’m aware but can you describe how redistribution can work in this case? Where does the new money come from? If poor people are spending more now then someone has to spend less. Who is it?
Okok, i am explaining it all as good as i can but i wished you did the work yourself, because you are in the best spot intellectual challenge your believes, so i am giving you one last chance.
What is money and where does it come from today?
You often see talking heads, arguing about future policies and the, usually conservative guy, argues against social spending with "where the money should come from." This implies that money must be earned before you can spend it. This take is not just blatantly false, when you look at the private sector (eg. big mergers entirely financed by credit), its even more false for states that have a special/privileged role in the economic system.
Other, usually conservative, political projects barely get publicly challenged on the financial level. I am asking you again, what happens, when a giant bill, eg. for the iraq/afghan war, has to be paid, what does a state do? How does it work? Budget bills enforce what, where?
... they force a financial gov.dept. (dont know which one in the US) to just spend that money for a project, that budget bill authorizes. To do so they manage their own assets (taxpayer money) but they are also capable of taking on debt from private lenders via bonds or from banks as credits. So, by the brush of a pencil, there can be enough money to finance anything you wish for! There really is no upper bound when your country has monetary autonomy and/or has good credit rating, but where does this debt come from?
In the case of bonds, the answer is easy, private buyers spent their existing money and hand it over to you. The case for banks is much more interesting and systemicly relevant, because banks also have a privileged position.
Private banks have the ability to *create* debt/money from nothing (so does the central bank), since there is no backing of gold anymore. Private banks are required by law to hold maybe 10% of their credit activas as own capital reserve, but once their credit is out there it might become another banks asset, that now can lend out 9x of that value again. You can repeat that process indefinitely to get an infinite money supply.
This is the current world we live in. Money is debt, created by privileged institutions, handed out to privileged lenders. (And on all of it ticks interest!) When ever i hear someone like you, bringing the "government printing press" argument, i cringe internally, because private banks have the same ecomically vital ability and with the exception of banking/market laws and profitability, totally unchecked.
The scarcity of money only applies to the unprivileged/poor. And only corrupt or clueless politicans consider their countries finances as the finances of a regular low-income household. The ever increasing private wealth is enabled by ever increasing state debt, which is not a bad thing in and off itself! Rich people are not really the problem, unless unjustly earned, the development of wealth is!
I want to challenge your zero-sum thinking, of that classical monetaristic theory, that doesnt really capture the true nature of money. Modern monetary theroy, MMT, tries to do just that.
In MMT you have money sources and sinks. Ideally, a state or central bank is in control of how much money is created as debt and how much of it is paid back and vanishes *via taxation*. This creation and annihilation of money is out of balance for decades now!
Your question
> Where does the new money come from?
focuses on the source-side, which i explained broadly above, but is pretty much irrelevant today, because we have created enough money already in the past. The sink-side is politically and societally much more pressing, because having this gigantic wealth concentration, almost totally detached from and without any proportion to the real economy, with ticking interests and outside of public control, is like a hostage sitation. We need ever more money to keep our society up, but fiscal hawks keep reminding us, that we are not in charge of it.
Traders call it a "correction", when expectations meet reality and the stocks fall and technically and in the case of the US (as other countries too), such a correction is long overdue. GDP and stock markets go up while public spending and quality of live for the many go down. All enabled by banking deregulation and public/gov. retreat out of that domain of power, so the parasites can keep their unsustainable party rolling by throwing around funny money. And all the while, right-wing internet brainlets throw up something like "governments cant be responsible with money" or "we have no money for that very-needed-thing". This bullshit reaches back to reagan/thatcher, where this imo deliberate attack on fiscal public souvereignity originated. MMT is highly controversial in economic academia because this acadmic field is an exceptional joke (see their "nobel" price or that they still have no reliant model for crashes) and because MMT flips the existing power structure upside down, simply by highlighting the dynamic nature of uncapped money and the importance of proportional sinks/taxation.
> If poor people are spending more now then someone has to spend less. Who is it?
This implies that heavy taxation on the super rich will impact their spending behavior. I dont think this will be the case but even if, it will be totally worth it to keep the social fabric alive.
My depiction is probably grossly inaccurate but i think the broad strokes are true.
Then don't make claims about facts. You sound like someone trying to say the law treats everyone equally because both Elon Musk and Crazy Joe the homeless guy, are both barred from stealing bread.
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