>before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
What makes you think Israel cares about a label more than conquest via genocide? Did the Nazis care about being called genocidal? If you want to stop IL you need to do it via force.
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.
You're right of course. I hadn't thought of the negatives when this self-restraint is absent.
I only sent one letter to one team because I was a fan. The restraining factor was being a fan. Remove that, and it can indeed rapidly go out of hands....
5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
it's a great marketing platform, if anything. Strong brand loyalty going forward and costs you not much to do well, not to mention you can brighten a day or few for thousands of kids in all sorts of life situations.
You're severely mistaken if you think that's how businesses operate. Companies penny pinch on staff even for recruiting, they're not gonna increase headcount just to answer mail form kids just because you think it makes good marketing.
You can spin up any idea and claim it increases brand loyalty, but you have to have actual evidence that that either happens or actually matters in some way, and in this case it probably doesn't and isn't worth the expense once the scale exceeds >1 employee spending more than a few minutes a day. If you've got the data to prove otherwise so that you can actually make someone money, go ahead and sell people on the idea.
I don't have to - it's called image branding and is a well-known and established marketing discipline. Not direct ROI like hard sell techniques, but it lands you with higher margins, lower customer acqusition costs, longer customer lifetime value, etc. Apple was a master at that, Nike, and in this particular example LEGO regularly responds to children mail, Nintendo built a whole business channel around it with Nintendo Power and I'm sure I could pull out many more examples. Not everything is a hard sell technique.
I think firstly is the FOSS obsession and backdoor paranoia from evangelists, and secondly and the more practical one is that the proprietary IBM BIOS is full of bugs and anti-consumer blacklists and whitelists designed to limit repairability and upgradeability, which stil boggle my mind on how those laptops got such a good image on that front.
Yes, if you live and organize your life around things that are unlikely to happen to you, but only because they've happened ONCE to someone else, typically a high value target by state actors, that's called paranoia.
Most people are not gonna be targeted via BIOS hacks. From state actors to online scammers they all have easier ways to getting your data remotely.
If you're on Intel integrated graphics, it's a free potential upgrade that makes use of existing silicon, and you don't have to turn it on. I don't get the hate. Just don't turn it on if you don't want it.
I get that people want more real frames rather than more "fake" frames, but in that case you wouldn't be buying integrated graphics, or if you did end up with iGPU, you'd be aware of the limits and be happy for any improvements arriving via software.
It's like people let their hate of AI and LLM bubble blind them, and their brains can't compartmentalize good from bad news anymore.
> It's like people let their hate of AI and LLM bubble blind them, and their brains can't compartmentalize good from bad news anymore.
DLSS is also AI and people like it.
People don't like framegen because the manufacturers are not being honest about it and using it for deceptive hype marketing. Anyone with a brain knows that it introduces latency and is only useful if you're already 40+ FPS, we also know that companies will use it to pad benchmarks. NVIDIA themselves said that the 5070 had 4090 performance because it supports framegen.
>Famously, it took many years for the internet itself to show up in significant productivity gains
Yeah but the actual productivity gains that the internet and software tools introduced has had diminishing returns after a while.
Like, are people more productive today when they use Outlook and Slack than they were 20 years ago when using IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Sametime? I'm not. Are people more productive with the Excel of today than with Excel 2003/2007? I'm not. Is Windows 11 and MacOS Tahoe making people more productive than Windows 7 and Snow Leopard? Not me. Are IDEs of today offering so much more productivity boost than what Visual Studio, CodeWarrior and Borland Delphi did back in the day? Don't think so.
To me it seems that at least on the productivity side, we've mostly been reinventing the wheel "but in Rust/Electron" for the last 15 or so years, and the biggest productivity gains came IMHO from increased compute power due to semiconductor advancement, so that the same tasks finished faster today than 20 years ago, but not that the SW or the internet got so much more capable since then.
I think the biggest productivity improvements in software development over the last ~20 years came from open source (NPM install X / pip install Y save so much time constantly reinventing wheels) and automated tests.
If only it would actually work that easy for democracy(people's will) to control the actual important things of society that fuck us, like housing, money printing, immigration, tax % and where that money goes to, healthcare, foreign aid, jailing epstein clients, etc.
AI bubble won't last forever when a lot of compute is burned at a loss just so people can generate AI videos of sharks driving cars for social media shorts. It will burst at some point, at which HW manufacturing will have to lower prices if they still want to have enough sales to stay in business, since most of their current sales boom comes from HW they haven't even made yet.
OpenAI can't keep losing investor money forever with nothing to show for, at some point the first domino will fall, then the rest of the industry will go too from investor panic.
I mean it will be the employers of those programmers and at $5000/dev/month I expect a businesses will start demanding very tangible returns from this spend. And as much as I love the tools I don't think it's generating that much direct business value. It's very obviously not turning $140k devs into $200k devs.
>All it'll take is one company to go bust, oracle for example, for the whole thing to deflate
Provided that of course, the US administration will be incorruptible enough to not bail out these tech companies with taxpayer money when they do eventually fail.
But when you see the connection between Larry Ellison and Trump, you realize the whole "free market competition" is a scam for suckers. Always has been, just that now they don't even bother to hide it via some complex facades and shell games to garner a veneer of legitimacy, it's straight up banana republic style of corruption.
> Provided that of course, the US administration will be incorruptible enough to not bail out these tech companies with taxpayer money when they do eventually fail.
I'd love them to try that because virtually no one on any part of the political spectrum would get behind that besides the most corrupted and soulless ghouls masquerading as politicians
I'd love them to try getting caught on audio asking a governor to find votes, and campaign on pardoning people convicted of treason because virtually no one on any part of the political spectrum would get behind that besides the most corrupted and soulless ghouls masquerading as politicians.
I could have substituted many other things up there. I was very naive when I thought getting caught on audio talking about grabbing women by the pussy and being able to do whatever you want to them because you’re a celebrity was one of those things too.
I dunno between following the party king and "we must bail them out to avoid total economic collapse" (real or imagined), I wouldn't be betting against bailouts.
I really don't think so. I feel like we're at a takeoff.
Senior engineers using AI coding are 10x more productive. My output has jumped dramatically. I'm a senior engineer and built six nines, active-active systems that moved billions of dollars a day. I am absolutely a beast with these models. I can replace an entire team just by myself. I'm literally shipping an entire week of features in half a day. I'm reviewing the code and planning the architecture - I am not dialing this in.
Video editors using video models can replace entire studio production departments. Writer-directors who know how to direct are essentially now Hollywood studios in their own right. I know a lot about this in particular because I've been making films as a hobby for 15+ years and work with a lot of industry professionals.
You'll see a lot of slop, but that's the same thing we got when we gave the masses cell phones with cameras attached to them. We still have plenty of amazing photographers in the world, and the means of creation are only getting cheaper/easier and the scope of creation for any individual is growing and growing and growing.
So prices will need to increase -- if it makes a senior engineer 10x more productive then coding assistants could easily cost 20x-100x more then what they cost today. Same for video generation.
Given that 10x engineers cost in the millions and that movies cost in the hundreds of millions - this is okay!
Edit: HN rate limit won't let me reply, so here -
I'm saying that hiring ten senior engineer costs millions. (Not a single 10xer - that's such a debated thing anyway, Fabrice Bellard or not.)
AI companies will make bank when they've hooked us all on the tools and raise prices.
Companies would likely rather pay $500k/yr to Anthropic and $750k/yr to engineers than $2M/yr to an uneven team of humans with HR, taxes, and other expenses, attrition, etc.
How many 10x engineers paid millions are out there? How can you stay in business as an AI company by only charging those 10x engineers 200/month?
Edit: Fabrice Bellard is a 10x engineers because he invents cool and innovative tools that didn't exist, not because he can bang out code 10x faster. AI can't replace fabrice Ballard.
The price of tools isn't determined by how much money they make or save the user. That's just the price cap. The price floor (in the long run) is the cost of making the tool. The actual price will be somewhere in between depending on competition.
If you are able now to create 10 products instead of 1 in the same time frame you will have to plan, review and maintain 10 things instead of 1. How can this work? I mean to double your productivity is a huge jump but 10x sounds unsustainable.
Well, AI fanatics aren't about longevity or maintaining things. The fact that the LLM spit out a bunch of code is good enough for them. Drive-by PRs and vaporware are their bread & butter.
Yea but are you paying a profitable amount of money to your service provider for you to do it? I find it hard to believe that Anthropic is profiting off of my $100/mo subscription based on how active I keep my machines running.
The numbers mentioned by Ed Zitron in his podcast Better Offline recently suggested that a $200/mo Claude subscription allows you to spend $2300 - $2700 worth of Anthropic tokens. That's pretty bad, but better than I expected.
I don't see it being unreasonable that models and infrastructure could improve enough to bridge the cost gap within five to ten years. It's just that the AI companies already spend so much money that it might not matter.
> I can replace an entire team just by myself. I'm literally shipping an entire week of features in half a day. I'm reviewing the code and planning the architecture - I am not dialing this in.
So you can review so much code so fast? Are you sure?
In many companies code reviews (properly) are the bottleneck. This was the case without AI. Now you're saying AI is giving you 10x more code reviews and you're even faster.
What am I missing?
p.s. I agree AI can make you and things faster just not suddenly god mode.
10x AI speed up only happens when you stop reading the code (or start skimming it, etc). This is pretty obvious to anyone that uses the tools and many vibe coding proponents have said as much.
Sacrificing quality for quantity makes these tools much less impressive. I say this as I tab over to my bug ridden memory hog CC tmux tab.
Video editors using video models can replace entire studio production departments. Writer-directors who know how to direct are essentially now Hollywood studios in their own right. I know a lot about this in particular because I've been making films as a hobby for 15+ years and work with a lot of industry professionals.
This is soul destroying. Literally made my day worse thinking about this.
The video models aren’t that good yet but for coding the utility is clear, yes. To be fair Darren Aronofsky also overestimates their quality.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but generating video is also much more resource intensive than equivalently productive text-only model use. It seems the industry could save itself a lot of hassle and infamy by simply avoiding artistic fields.
What people mostly see is the illusion of productivity. But the measure should be outcomes, not the amount of stuff made. If a factory produces 10x the product but it is only 1/3rd the quality of what it was before that is long term unsustainable and leaves the door open for a competitor to attack them on quality.
This is the key driver behind all those 'enshittification' problems that we see. Quantity over quality is almost always a balance and not a binary, if you start treating it as if one should always trump at the expense of the other then sooner or later it will catch up with you.
>Senior engineers using AI coding are 10x more productive.
Are the subscriptions of those engineers enough to make their use-case profitable and on top to also be subsidizing the cost of AI video slop generation and keep the company profitable?
>Video editors using video models can replace entire studio production departments.
Then why is OpenAI losing more an more money?
>This is the next industrial revolution.
I'm not saying it isn't, but we did have the .com bubble burst even though that was also revolution. Something can be a bubble and a revolution simultaneously. The internet didn't go away after the .com bubble burst, just the crazy speculations did, which is what I was saying will happen with the AI bauble. The bubble will burst and only the profit generating parts of AI will remain.
>Why can't I pay to express my consumer preferences?
Cool, I'll start a HW-FOSS robo-vac company in California tailored to your consumer preferences, that will be profitable without selling your data. Buy one for only $4,999. Orders start now.
...fast forward 12 months ...
Damn, why did we already go out of business, I thought according to consumer preferences, people would pay 10x markup for privacy compared to spyware Chinese models?
You'd deserve to go out of business for charging customers $4,999.
You could make a healthy profit selling a robot vacuum for under $200 although you'd probably want models that cost a bit more for customers who wanted something more fancy (https://cookierobotics.com/060/)
What makes you think Israel cares about a label more than conquest via genocide? Did the Nazis care about being called genocidal? If you want to stop IL you need to do it via force.
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