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Eli Lilly CEO pushes back on Dario Amodei's ludicrous medical claims (garymarcus.substack.com)
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Amodei sounds completely unhinged in that video.
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best points: drugs aren't limited by the ability to write code or do things on a computer. Maybe if we have fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines to generate organic compounds and test them with extremely realistic simulations it may help slightly (there is still the FDA and production barrier). Its just wildly unrealistic. AI has made good progress in text, code, math, digital images, and digital music. Basically troves of data that can be automated and trained on, validated, and with a purely digital interface. Outside of that, just gathering the data will be difficult, regulated, and sparse (that is if anyone will even give it to you now). While we can write a test to make sure we could generate drugs of the past, verifying we have generated any new working correct drugs is an RL loop with one iteration costing years and millions of dollars.
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Maybe there are people permitted to speak about science and medicine with Claude but any time I tried I would get my session [bio] locked. I take those discussions to Gemini that is perfectly willing to discuss epigenetics, supplements, peptides, cell reprogramming, etc... What other LLM's are people using for such discussions and analysis?
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I doubt there is genuine belief in such claims. It would be a sign of some kind of mental derangement… so likely it’s cynical hyping beyond all realistic prospects.
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Pharmacological CEO objects to the idea of chronic illnesses being cured soon. You can’t blame him - the guy has to protect his stock price and that depends on future value of earnings. The best thing AI can reliably do is help people gather more real objective data so they can see better into their own conditions and then that data can be contributed to advance medicine and find new co-morbidities or lateral treatment options. The disdain against the possibility is signaling though. Maybe it happens maybe it doesn’t, but you are hating on a possibility.
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Isn’t AI trained on lots of subjective data? The average of subjectivity isn’t the same as objectivity
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being close to someone with a rare terminal and slow-moving cancer that can take years and years to kill its host, i’ve been learning that even just testing whether a therapy is going the right way can take many years, so while i hope “magic happens” i have to concur that the statements being made ahead of a mega IPO seem a bit tragicocomical.
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I would say it is really disgusting, horrendous, either knowingly lying or being so naive you shouldn’t be given any responsibility
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Not only the CEO of Eli Lilly, but everyone with the most basic knowledge of medicine and health. Dario Amodei is in pure snake oil territory now.
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Now? Sorry - when has he not been?
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The man honestly seems unwell
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Says Gary Marcus, huh? Any statement from Nostradamus yet?
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Same kind of expertise as Dario on Medicine
Jensen Huang Admitted He Was Facing an "Avalanche" of Excess Wafers and Memory (respawnfirst.com)
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If the ai bubble pops even harder, I just hope it will not bring other parts of the economy with it. I think it should not. I am also hoping companies would move a bit away from AI and start hiring more developers instead. (yes I am unemployed)
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Why not just learn AI? It goes hand in hand with dev work.
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Look, you can believe in some contrived conspiracy that he used to sit on a big pile of gpus like Smaug in The Hobbit. But far simpler explanation is just supply and demand. There is no need to craft some elaborate theories when the simplest one checks all the boxes.
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This article inaccurately paraphrases actual journalism at the WSJ. That article does not use the word “excess” once. They can have an avalanche of wafers coming at them without it being excessive. You can make that inference but that exact statement cannot be attributed to Huang, per the actual reporting. The actual quote from the actual article: “ Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an "avalanche."”
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Good work pointing this out. One of the great things about AI is eventually people are going to learn to stop trusting these kinds of websites “it’s all AI slop” and revert back to paid journalism because while the writing can be done by AI, the research and verification largely cannot. Or so I hope. More likely is people will continue to engage with low-quality information and come to believe all sorts of nonsense, misquotes? Conspiracy theories, and more as they always have…
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Journalism was always the lowest of the low of vocations. It isn't surprising that a simple robot can do it just as well as your run of the mill scribbler. There is nothing good to go back to because there was nothing good about journalism at any point in the history of mankind. These freaks don't actually coldly manipulate you with sensationalist headlines, they are exactly as excited to write pages about gruesome family murder as the text suggests. Now that they compete with TikTok sending you tragedy after tragedy right into your pineal gland, it has been a rough patch to be a traditional corpse picture snatcher.
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That exact quote is also in this article, in large bold letters, unparaphrased.
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Yeah, it's a gamimg site that has a ton of articles that seem to be really angry about RAM prices.
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Part of the problem is scalpers buying up limited retail supply, and bumping prices back-up. It is the circle of clowns man... People have every right to also be annoyed with the blitz-scaling corporate collusion. =3
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Now the whole “chinese spy” angle is looking dubious we have to switch to “he was going to sink the ship anyway”. It is all utter nonsense.
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I mean, even if the ship were sinking, it's not like the plan is stupid per se. It's a neat plan. Keep prices high, circularly finance so that you still have customers, getting ownership of other firms and effectively having lower prices. It's a superb plan for NVIDIA, and then of course, people try to get around that plan: we Europeans obviously want to be able to do AI, and if we aren't getting the circular financing will of course want to make our own chips and do our own circular financing, or at least have normal prices. Google, Amazon, etc. obviously don't want to pay with equity, so they make their own chips. I don't think it has to be nonsense. I think it's a good plan, it's just that anybody who wants to exist or be their own thing is fighting against it as they of course should. In the end I hope for a competitive DL accelerator market with prices 1/5th or less of what they are now. High prices tend to lead to high prices though.
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I am saying the cultivated hysteria is nonsense, not that nvidia’s strategy is. Nvidia were notorious assholes to work with 20 years ago, but people persisted in doing so because they needed to. It would not be remotely surprising if their strategies involved concepts many fond unpalatable even if highly effective.
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Ah, cultivated hysteria, but you don't per se doubt that NVIDIA tried the claimed plan?
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Eh? Nvidia being hypercompetitive assholes does not mean they are simply up to whatever some random game site grifter is imagining. This whole thing is a mud slinging exercise.
Nobody ever listens to the CFO and they should. The one person who actually keeps a company on track is the person who looks at the actual numbers. I have seen this over and over it’s a freaking meme.
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The people that keep the company on track are the workers, not management
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That's not how an organization works.
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I would say the CFO keeps it on track and the workers make it all happen.
I'm sure Nvidia would have no issue selling this "avalanche" if they just dropped prices a bit We went with AMD for our $300k AI server, then after two months of delays were told it will be delayed another 10 months. Getting the same amount of VRAM from Nvidia remains out of our budget Meanwhile "reasonably-sized" cards like a RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell or even a consumer RTX 5080 still trade for twice what they cost in January
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Radeon AI PRO R9700 32G gpu with the recent CUDA-free LLM software... now punches way above its budget class. They are cheap as most folks haven't figured out the recent performance hacks yet. They are still everywhere, and who cares if it takes 14 hours instead of 6 hours if the task gets done. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty4lTwykmKY
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Dropping prices would be a scary signal about demand and their stock would likely drop.
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Can they afford to drop the prices without causing investor panic? Feels like Nvidia needs to constantly exceed all expectations to justify their share value. And if their share value drops, it might have a negative impact on their ability to finance their own customers, and if their customers run out of funding, they’re gonna have even more trouble shifting units.
Of course they were. They bought up literally as much as they could manage, because anything they didn't would be bought up by someone else. It's literally a use it or lose it market right now. This is not a problem. Just stockpile it.
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"It's literally a use it or lose it market right now." Are you sure? The point of this stockpiling was to create that impression. Now that you have data that that foundation behind that impression is manufactured and faked, you need to reconsider everything that was resting on that foundation. The demand is just so incredible needs to be reexamined from scratch now in light of the active attempts to forge that signal. It is also worth remembering that this is a prime example of a situation that is not black or white. The absolute size of the demand, however large it may be, is not the question. It's the size relative to the supply, supply which includes all the pumping shenanigans that are coming into the light. The "AI bubble" has never been if there is demand or if the tech has real use, it has always been a relative question about if the build out could possibly make economic sense.
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signed closed source drivers for hardware that can restrict which algorithms can be run on it locally... temporally... edit: i'd willingly bet that AMD has a backroom deal to tank their performance and options to encourage this homogenous deployment overseas. swallow the hook.
…. But they’re not using it? Why not buy when you’re ready? Unless you’re convinced you’re going to be able to build faster than you can buy _in the future_ of further increased AI demand and easy painless data center construction.
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This AI investment boom has always been about obsession with the exponential growth of the future, and trying to get ahead of it. So absolutely they were getting as much as they could possibly have in preparation for a future where they can't get any more. They didn't wanna give up any of that ground.
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If you wanted in early you’re competing against companies that have what, 1/4 of the worlds resources at their disposal, in a regulation free political environment, with the only downside being if you never get space to plug them in you can likely sell them to someone else at a profit. It’s just crypto 2.0 economics but with bigger players.
There seems to be some evidence of "GPUs sitting in warehouses awaiting to be plugged in". But it seems to be mostly/only Ed Zitron pushing the agenda that it's not as planned and that there is oversupply of GPUs. All hyperscalers have in the last 2 months stated that they have more demand for AI compute (I guess GPUs & their own chips) than they can supply. Nvidia might have been trying to spread the demand over more providers (neoclouds, and seemingly China) and provided financing to enable that. It's not clear that this means there is an oversupply of reserved wafer capacity and Nvidia GPUs. But if datacenter construction slows down it might affect the GPU demand as they can't be plugged in.
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This whole buildout is one of the largest construction projects ever - there will definitely be oversupply hotspots even for items that are in super short supply. I could easily imagine $1B+ of top-tier chips just sitting around in a warehouse for months on end because of difficult planning problems. That's not a sign of any sort of crisis.
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I could never track Zitrons argument. I would not be surprised if there are gpus sitting around, we have known for at least the past year that hyperscalers have been unable to build enough data centers. They continue to state demand exceeding supply, that’s kind of why the neoclouds have even become a thing. It does not indicate to me that those gpus are not going to be used or even if companies overpaid for them.
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The argument makes sense (but I don't know if it's based on true facts). His claim is basically that hyperscalers want, say, 1M GPUs in the next 10 years, 100k per year, since that's how many they can install. NVIDIA instead gives them a deal saying "you either buy 300k this year, or we won't sell any to you next year" - the goal being to make it look like demand is much higher than it is this year, or at least to recognize revenue much earlier than normal (since those extra 200k GPUs become revenue this year instead of being spread over the next two).
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Ehhh I mean sure maybe Nvidia juiced demand for a year. Maybe hyperscalers have bought more capacity than they can use for the next 5 years. It’s possible but again it misses the demand picture. Demand has not changed and only grown. Sure there is a constraint but that will breed innovation and eventually things will come online, those that over committed will suffer. Zitrons thesis is half baked.
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There was a post about how growth in the data center space was slowing, so AI must be over. The evidence seems to be that we've reached whatever growth capacity existed or was planned, rather than any drop off in demand.
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> [...] pushing the agenda that it's not as planned and that there is oversupply of GPUs. I don't read that it is not as planned, there is high demand from everyone but it appears to be similar to the over recruitment of engineers. They have FOMO, and they also want to block competitors. > All hyperscalers have in the last 2 months stated that they have more demand for AI compute (I guess GPUs & their own chips) than they can supply. I certainly have not had any issues getting as much access as I would like. It just costs. Which would imply that the scarcity is manufactured to drive up pricing rather than availability. > if datacenter construction slows down it might affect the GPU demand as they can't be plugged in. I think this is the crux of the matter from Nvidia's point of view, that's if they weren't already impacted by the power limitations for customer installations.
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> I certainly have not had any issues getting as much access as I would like. It just costs. It just costs, because demand is high, supply is low, if it was opposite, it would have been like in 2018s, you could get 128Gb RAM server from Hetzner for 50-80 EUR, now it starts at 170 EUR (3x)
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How much gpu compute have you been able to allocate? I know at AWS it’s quite hard to get any substantial allocation.
Agreed. The question is if it's planned by the purchasers. That they have datacenter capacity coming online according to plan and any "GPUs in warehouses" is just the plan to ensure there are chips to install when the datacenters are ready. Or that they purchased out of fear, to corner the market, or expecting datacenter capacity that is delayed; and will soon stop purchasing as they don't have datacenter capacity coming online to install the chips they already bought. And noone else neither has that datacenter capacity.
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Since chips are improving and getting better each generation, warehousing for 2 years dont make much sense to me. They will be selling better chips in 4 months.
Did the 'can't keep it in his trousers' crisis actually give him the perfect way out?
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It sure is tempting to make it seem like a plan. Nvidia had been through cyclical financial situations before, most recently with crypto mining. Jensen had had to know he was riding a tiger. I doubt he planned his exit, but he must be a little relieved. It will be interesting to see what Elon does. I don't think Elon can let go.
AI agents have a big problem: Nobody wants to let them in (pcworld.com)
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I don't think its gonna happen any time soon. Its too risky. AI agents although autonomous aren't deterministic unlike compilers. Now humans are also not deterministic and are autonomous in the human context but they have a lot to lose and can own outcome and can be held responsible unlike AI agents or their parent companies. Unless a company is willing to guarantee outcome and bear with the losses, no one will trust AI agents for shopping and banking apps and full root access to personal mobile phones.
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I've been collecting datasets of different sources while I can so that they can be instantly and always available to my agents. Spans subreddits, vehicle forums, 3d printing, etc... Basically anytime a source can be blocked or rate limited, I look at acquiring it.
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So much of AI goldrush feels like crabs in a bucket. "I'll do whatever I can to get a leg up on my neighbour today." But ultimately it's pointless - the advantage will be short lived and everyone will end up in the same spot. Only bigcorp has the money to break the laws to spin the flywheel to consume the content to train the models to rent services to you.
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I actually do a lot of work via agents. Personally I still prefer to have actual bank transfers etc under my direct control, but I do have agents doing searches, lookups, and diverse chores for me. If my agent(s) can't find you or are locked out of finding out what you have on offer; then I will never hear of you; and it's unlikely that we're going to be doing business. Note that a lot of people use chatgpt or gemini instead of google search or ddg to interact with the web these days; simply because the search engines have stopped being as useful. So agents might be the only way you'll be getting found in a couple of years.
Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (1960) (science.org)
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Humm… maybe this also communicates something about the upcoming singularity
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It's not true guys. Doomsday is 18 December
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The fact that they arrived at a Friday the 13th as doomsday tells me there was likely some bias and possibly magical thinking in there, like the universe is somehow poetic.
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Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
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Microsoft 364
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Year of publishing is 1960: interesting, that even in 1960 some were thinking about that "there may be a fixed date of end of the world" - usually you would think those thoughts are exclusive to whatever religion, no: This 66 years ago, a time when there was already enough scientific breakthrough to reflect wisely on the idea of "a fixed end date for end of world" :)
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You may not be wrong but the authors were just picking an example in the headline. In the analysis they calculate t0 as 2026.87 plus/minus 5.50 years.
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> even in 1960 some were thinking about that "there may be a fixed date of end of the world" I think this can be taken 2 ways. 1) This is more an instance of "see clickbait was a thing in 1960" 2) There have always been and will always be people that believe that. See 2012 or a random person on the Las Vegas strip preaching it.
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> human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millenia Narrator: it didn't
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Approaches infinity has little meaning. Every semimonotonous series of numbers approaches infinity: you can never say that you are a factor 100 off.
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That title bothered me too. If a trend continues, that means it would be exactly as much "approaching infinity" in 2026 as it was in 1960. It would also be exactly as finite in 2026 as it was in 1960.
Humans are the only species I know of that goes out of its way to eradicate other species they find annoying, particularly without understanding said species' role in the ecosystem. And we're definitely the only species that has an economic system that rewards superorganisms that accidentally poison the entire ecosystem and then lie about it.
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If you watch something like "Life on our planet", there have been species that basically hunted the seas empty of their food sources and then died out, so we're not that unique in that respect, but we are extremely efficient about it.
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bc we accessed oil
It's a question of degree. Humans are uniquely adaptable, but only on small/medium scales. We don't have the evolutionary intelligence to manage a planetary ecosystem without destroying it through overconsumption. Intelligence is partly about scope. The smarter you are, the wider your predictive horizon. Humans are semi-smart - good at small/medium problems, not smart enough to understand, build and maintain very complex multimodal systems with many moving parts.
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Citation needed? Everything seems fine currently.
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+1.5°C
Overpopulation was a big topic in the early 1970's, with competing dire predictions. If you haven't watched it, Soylent Green with Edward G Robinson and Charlton Heston is an illustration of this (no spoilers please!) It was based on Harry Harrison's novel Make Room, Make Room where population growth was out of control, and human life was worth so little that the police used mechanical scoops to clear rioters from the streets. And then on the other side, we have Blade Runner where Earth's population is declining because of off-world colonization and replicants are created for labor.
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Logans Run too I recently read Niven's ringworld (1970). All the intelligent species had overpopulation problems, dealing with it in different ways. It was just a given that it was an inevitable consequence of an advanced species. It was really jarring to consider it. I'm old enough to remember the (now recognised as disastrous) one child policy of China but even so the way it was presented as "of course there have to be population controls" actually took me out of the narrative.
Blade Runner is a very interesting exception, while depopulation has become common in speculative fiction these days having it as part of something from the 80s was pretty rare. I don't know when the overpopulation/depopulation switch flipped in fiction, but I think it was pretty recently.
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Isaac Asimov's Daneel Olivaw series of books had the overpopulated Earth alright, but it also had spacer colonies on distant planets that very much kept their populations at a sensible level and were magnificently wealthy in comparison because of it (and robots).
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Blade Runner the movie looks anything except depopulated. Well, excluding the vast empty building where Deckard lives. The city is enormous and literally blowing up gigantic amounts of energy and pollution; the streets are packed with people, languages, and clutter of all types (a PKD obsession). In some ways it is fully within the overpopulation zeitgeist of the times.
Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. We're approaching peak global population and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days. Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space.
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Non sequitur. One problem may have merit while another does not.
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One of the major contributor to global population decline is one-child policy of china, which is a direct result of such type of predictions (not saying its a correct one, but a reverse self-fulfilling one). I guess if global warming is fixed in the future, you will also come up and say huh, those predictions about global warming are too simplistic, we are fine.
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> One of the major contributor to global population decline is one-child policy of china, Yes, one of the stupidest policy decisions in human history. China will start having massive demographic issues than they would have otherwise but in hindsight it just shifted them by a couple of decades.
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I’m not worried about data centers in space, i think they’re a foolish investment and further proof that people are high on AI promises.
We have structured our global financial system around young people paying taxes to pay for the costs of the retired generations. Population decline is a real problem we will soon be facing head on.
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History is the process of oil getting into everything. The financial system is a structure for distributing surplus energy founded on growth resulting from accessing a material which can do 500 people's worth of work in a single barrel.
As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that, not to boost the population: that’s a long-term impossibility in a closed system.
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> We should be looking to reform that By making retirement unfeasible until you are 80? That might be tricky...
"Which is why I'm not worried about..." Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Is there an opposite phrase for this? Where someone is never worried? Even though there are disasters all around him.
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I've heard it described as "Pollyannaism" >As a result of the novel's success, the adjective "Pollyannaish" and the noun "Pollyannaism"[2] became popular terms for a personality type characterised by irrepressible optimism evident in the face of even the most adverse or discouraging of circumstances. It is sometimes used pejoratively, referring to someone whose optimism is excessive to the point of naïveté or refusing to accept the facts of an unfortunate situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna#Influence
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Nirvana?
Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth? I try to understand this worrying mindset but it still seems like short-term thinking. Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. So we (as in, human civilization) short-term think our way into rationalizing that it'll be ok because technology will provide a solution and we don't need to make any real changes. Now the population trend looks like it's about to reverse and we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity, and we short-term think that into being a problem because we might find it difficult to afford to care for our elderly anymore. But we can! The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now: so exploit it, use it to solve the pain of population contraction while we adjust our economic and productive structures so they can serve us effectively in a world where growth isn't purely consumptive. I'm sure this is all hopelessly naive.
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The issue is not so much the decreasing population but that fact that its aging too fast and the proportion of productive working age people will continue to shrink. > But we can! Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...
> Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth? Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were. That requires growth.
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Have you thought about what kind of world we're leaving behind for the next generation? What's left of this "growth" will be captured by people who are currently alive. The next generation, the ones that are supposed to benefit from this, will be left paying the bill and dealing with the fallout. Forget about growth, mere stagnation will feel like a dream outcome when the systems we took for granted start collapsing - food and water shortages, mass migrations of people who used to prop up lifestyles of rich countries. Natural disasters that increase to the point where you're stuck in a perpetual cycle of rebuilding and trying to mitigate the next one. Those people won't thank us for our "enlightened" pursuit of growth, they'll talk about our abject arrogance and ignorance in disbelief.
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It requires increased productivity, which can be driven by growth, but also without (population) growth.
"we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby." If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution? I'm not even a believer that general intelligence brings out more technology creation, we've had rising university attendance in the west since the 70s but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century. I do agree that some of the overpopulation rhetoric is anti-human but at the same time there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries like Netherlands/South Korea/Israel where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable. There's also some goods which have become increasingly expensive because of a higher population like hardwood where technology can do only so much (of course there's ersatz goods). If somehow the whole world were to live more like Americans and the population would grow even more you would increasingly see more products where tech can only do so much (e.g. copper, real red meat, fish ...).
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> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution There is a case to be made that the opposite is true. Labour scarcity in Western Europe meant significantly higher wages than in China which made investment into automation more profitable.
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While housing may be specifically costlier today, overall people have much more to spend, even in the Netherlands after accounting for inflation. This is the case almost everywhere in the world. On the topic of why China or India didn’t bring many innovations: I fundamentally don’t believe in blank slate theory. But I do believe that China is better off with higher population. I also hear that China regrets its one child policy. Good to understand the reason behind this
I know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view. “Technology is both our savior and the only risk we need to be concerned with.” Even the AI risk you outlined is exceptionally narrow. Even without AI, we still face significant nuclear technological risk. As far as the bet goes, the wager was for a decade and Simon may have won (depending on what market used) if extended to 2026. So, like with much investing, Ehrlich may have gotten the directionality correct but the wrong timing.
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Per Claude, if you use Chinese prices for the metals (especially tungsten) Simon still wins from 1980-2026. If you use US prices, Ehrlich wins. Copper is the only metal with a market price above the 1980 value, but tungsten is export-controlled by China, so much more expensive in the West. I think directionally Ehrlich was quite wrong, given that he expected widespread and crippling shortages before 2000, with a much lower population than we actually have, and there's no sign of such shortages being inevitable. In particular, we are opening new extractable oil sources and switching to solar fast enough that pure market actions seem on track to where we'll be leaving cheap oil in the ground in a couple decades absent AI X-risk, and this is after we politically killed the previous tech that would have produced this result earlier: widespread fission.
> 2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc Overall maybe, even if 2 or 3 C more in the average temperature can be hard to bear in summer in some places or require much more energy to cool us, which means that we won't be as adapted to those places as we used to be. In some spots of the world, tough luck. I would like to see (actually I don't) what happens if the sea rises a few meters. Will the people in the north east of Italy and China build coastal dams and raise river beds or let those regions go underwater and migrate somewhere else? There are certainly some areas of the USA that will go underwater too (Florida? NYC?) And what if the Gulf Stream really stops and Western Europe gets the same climate of the regions of the USA and Canada at the same latitudes?
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I’d like to compare the standard of living for the median person in your hypothetical situation where sea level rises. In 100 years our technology would be so advanced that people would be much much more prosperous. Ok sure a few cities drown but people move and adapt. I still hold ground on the fact that people will be more prosperous in 100 years with sea level rising - in the sense that a person would prefer to live then rather than now
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[delayed]
Please try to answer this: how did poverty and hunger reduce so dramatically in the last 100 years. I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would. Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.
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Try Spain, for example. Wikipedia: "Over 30% of the area is already severely impacted by desertification". Agriculture will depend more on irrigation, and there will be less water available. There will be enough food for people to live there, yes. But agricultural yield is expected to go down by ~20% or so if emissions continue. And people sitting in worse spots are not just going to sit there and wait for the flood and die. There will be wars about who gets the resources from the new best places.
Try extrapolating like climate scientists do. Trad econ has as much predictive value as fantasy football.
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I won’t extrapolate toy models that predict end of human civilisation due to tail risks. None of that is going to happen. even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things. You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. Any evidence for these assumed causal relationships? Wars have been waged by small numbers of people in the past and today, migration in such general terms has always been inherent to humans, resources are depleted by mass-consumption of a tiny fraction of the global population, and hunger is caused by not distributing available food to those who need it. These problems are hence mostly political. Again, only a tiny fraction of the global population has any significance in the relevant decisions.
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Causal arrow goes the other way. Complex societies are dissipative structures, whose increasing complexity is powered by surplus energy.
How is "I disagree with this extrapolation of energy/compute needs/AI progress because it doesn't take into effect emerging restrictions and feedback loops" the same as doing my own extrapolation?
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Re-read your comment it says "almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days. Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space." The only other point you made (and then violated) was "don't extrapolate too simply from past examples". Your simple extrapolation / reasoning by analogy was "we're at peak population when projections pointed towards population explosion, therefore we won't hit superintelligence." Had you used clear analysis, reasoning, or argumentation rather than just baseless extrapolation (peak population, therefore superintelligence can't happen), I wouldn't have chuckled at your self-contradicting comment. "In the past, the US government has always been able to take on more debt even when people projected it would run out, therefore we'll always be able to have more intelligence until we reach super-intelligence" is the same (and equally invalid reasoning) you presented.
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You left out my first sentence when re-reading, though. My final sentence was not only referring to the one before it. Try increasing your context window, or read it like this: "Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. [...] Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space."
Europe's electric car sales jump 49% as global EV sales grow (electrek.co)
I agree that this is a problem for a small percentage of peoople and I find it ignorant to playt down this issue. But EVs are critical to the environment and we have to do something. Also the biggest issue is not EVs, its the super unclear and slow transition and borderline fighting against it which would allow for cheap EVs to exist due to scaling laws.
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> I agree that this is a problem for a small percentage of peoople and I find it ignorant to playt down this issue. Back when I was poor as an European I just commuted by bus. Then I bought my first car for the equivalent of 1600 Euros (in 2014 at that) and while I was saving 30 minutes on my commute daily, I was spending a lot on fuel and insurance. The clanker lasted about a year before it started burning too much oil and making weird rattling noises from the engine. Long term the purchase alone was less then half of all expenses over the course of that year. I don't believe it's reasonable to buy a 1000 Euro car if that's the only thing you can afford, because the expenses will just keep piling up.
Here's a data point about how out of touch with reality this opinion is: the 10 cheapest new cars you can buy in the UK in 2026 https://petrolblog.com/articles/cheapest-new-cars-uk-2026 This includes 4 or 5 EVs and a couple of hybrids.
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Yeah, it's a bit odd; the "electric cars are expensive" narrative has become so entrenched that it is still trotted out even when it is no longer true. Today in Ireland, you can get a VW Polo for 25k... or an id.Polo (the electric version) for 20k. Now, there are a couple of things going on there; the id.Polo is benefiting from a 3500 eur grant, and the Polo has about 1000 eur of VRT on it (electric cars are exempt). But _even ignoring subsidies_ they come in at about the same price. And, presumably, give it a couple of years, and the electric version will be solidly cheaper.
This highlight the core issue of vision-only self driving: it falls apart when visibility is bad or confusing. Tesla FSD struggles with something as common as driving towards the sun at dawn/sunset.
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Limit FSD to southbound roads, problem solved!
Claude Is Down (status.claude.com)
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Claude was down yesterday too - started around the time of the m365 outage for me.
Good diversification. I like to have a strong local model like qwen3.8-flash-next available because I live in the mountains and my Internet is not 100% reliable. I don’t get it that companies allow themselves to get locked in on one vendor. Two or more, with local makes more sense.
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You're on HN, and "vendor lock-in" surprises you? ;)
> People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract Losing skills due to over-reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-memory-mdash-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/
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You take a clockmaker who's used to working with hand-operated lathes, mills etc. and let him work for a few years using CNC versions. For sure he'll probably be worse at using the traditional machines when he comes back to them, but that doesn't mean he's any dumber or worse at making clocks. He's just out of practice, same as if he'd have spent a few years staffing a convenience store or anything else. That seems to be precisely what your study shows as well, though I only read the summary. Say the AI lowered the endoscopists' workload by (for illustration) 20%, so they got 20% less practice per unit of time, which made them have a performance that was 20% worse in the trial. I would expect the same to happen if they got assigned to do paperwork for 20% of their time as well. I'm not trying to be argumentative, perhaps we're in agreement here, I'm just clarifying my point. There's a famous talk about the importance of knowing when to use which level of automation, and maintaining currency at all levels you expect to need to use: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
One show is produced with edits and retakes if someone flubs a line or breaks, the other is live. Also consider, SNL puts out more content in a single season with 22 episodes at 90 minutes, then all of Monty Python's full run of 45 episodes at 30 minutes. You're comparing apples to oranges.
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You would think that 20 episodes a season over 50 years, then on just pure statistical probability they would have had a funny skit. An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of type writers will eventually write a funny joke. But somehow, against all odds, despite hiring comedians, comedic actors, improvers, and writers. They have never, once, gotten a funny skit. It defies belief actually.
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, and platform.claude.com (status.claude.com)
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It didn't help that my login expired and the only way to log in was via an email link... sent to my company address, hosted by Microsoft.
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do they have infrastructure on azure?
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Unable to log in for two hours thanks to only allowing single-factor email with magic links instead of also allowing normal things like password+TOTP. Was pretty nice though, less stress.
This stuff is so new and wild west at the moment that in our company everyone is using it completely differently. 20% of the devs have 30x output and are doing everything with Claude, 10% won't touch it, the rest are in some weird in between where they use it for some things and not other things which it is perfect for. We have managers that suggest just going back to doing it by hand when there are outages, which is the most laughable thing in the world to me now. It is incredible to watch this miracle tech hit so fast and have everyone's understanding of it be so different across the board.
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it is very funny to me that on a story about a major outage at one of the companies pushing the "software is solved" narrative the suggestion to slow down and do things more carefully is laughable, I think we officially need to retire calling ourselves engineers.
I used claude for the first time in months yesterday (have been using codex, ran out of resets this week). I had picked up from general consensus comments that 5.5 had fixed the opus 5 issues, but that's far from the case. Its "personality" is still smartass, know it all, and whiny. It disregards specifications in tickets if it thinks it knows better. It complains about the size of tasks when it reads task descriptions. I've gotten used to codex, which just jumps in and does stuff (which of course carries its own set of issues). I have no love for Altman, but their product is still better at the moment.
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manager thinking you'd rather have a subject that does exactly as told, or that does what's right?
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Anthropic's products appeal to a certain kind of audience. This is all very much as intended.
Depending on company size and security posture (like mine), we only have one provider claude and the company outright bans all other ones, even local models unless approved via a lengthy process
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> Depending on company size and security posture (like mine), we only have one provider claude and the company outright bans all other ones I get it, we had to sign separate HIPAA BAAs with Anthropic and OpenAI - but we did sign them both, if only to be able to have access to a wider array of models.
I've seen every one of the things you listed, sometimes all at the same company. None of them add much in the way of effort/time to do the work. - JIRA ticket - audit trail - PR format - easier for people to scan, and to make sure things aren't forgotten (you can even have the template inserted when it's created) - address review comments separately - not sure what to say on this one because I don't understand how _else_ you would address them - I've always addressed each one individually
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> PR format - easier for people to scan, and to make sure things aren't forgotten (you can even have the template inserted when it's created) The team I just left had a PR template that was probably 60 bullet points (never bothered to count, just grumbled). Certainly was not easy either to scan or to update manually.
There is a third option where it is a minor inconvenience and you learn to adjust and be productive in other ways.
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Sure, like if your company’s internet is down, you can start sending invoices to customers by paper mail. Just to prove that you’re not reliant on a technology that’s made work more efficient.
I can't imagine a construction worker saying, power is out, gotta find a way to be productive, I guess instead of the paint sprayer, nail gun and circular saw, we'll just find other ways to be productive with our hands. The same might apply to law, medicine, etc. I think we're almost there with software.
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That says more about your imagination than about software. Yes, medics do improvise a lot to keep patients alive when the power is out, or when essential tools or medicines are not available. "Well, the power failed, so did the sustainable backup, let's everyone go home, today's ICU is a writeoff".
Which begs the question is Software Eng'g/Development a mature profession? We've certainly been trying to especially in the last decade, arguably incentivized by ZIRP and VC money but the last few years? I'm not just talking about tools either. You mentioned redundancies and contingency plans. Layoffs have stripped workforces to barebones headcounts. How can you have redundancy when one sick man-day reduces your eng'g team by 50%?
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No, it's not.
No, and that's also not necessary. We are reliant on our systems. The correct response is to harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence. We can of course do that privately, for just the heck of it, but it's not the right response for anything at societal level. We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
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Reading the site guidelines, so I can be Claude-like and properly adjust my answer: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. You are also a system. And, if you, as a system, don't run with Claude, you're not sufficiently hardened. People have made all sorts of helpful suggestions, like de-risking with multiple providers or just getting yourself a better Mac to run a local model. The idea that: "No, no, we must have Claude, b/c it's the same as having a pen and paper!" is woefully naive. It's hard to attack the supply chain of pen and paper if you have a few extra reams and a few extra sticks. It's pretty easy for our geopolitical enemies to attack computers located far away from you, especially those systems are designed like fragile Rube Goldberg machines; furthermore, if we build an entire society (a system) to be productive only when we have LLMs, our issue isn't "insufficient-hardening". It's that the design is wrong.
What's wrong with failover? I don't use anything from Anthropic except their API. So when Claude is having issues, I switch to GLM 5.3 or something, doesn't take more than a few seconds. I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.
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I think that's the 6 '9's problem. If you have something with 99% uptime, how much more are you willing to pay for 99.9% uptime, then 99.99% uptime. It's risk vs cost. Many places in the US do the same thing with things like say snow removal. Instead of having expensive systems ready to go for the 1-2 days of year of snow, you just shut things down for a day and slow down a little. That doesn't work for all systems, and not for all businesses, but I would say the mass majority can 'suffer' 24 hours without email or an LLM without everything going up in flames.
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It's not only a 9's thing. If you can set yourself up to easily switch between providers, you also put yourself in a better bargaining position. That's not always easy to do, but with something like inference providers it is, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
I agree that it's an opportunity to "do it the old way", as a way to preserve the skill. I actually would like to do that regularly, like half a day every week or something. But I find it difficult to motivate it from the "productivity" angle. Like if I work for a day without an LLM today, it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...
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Once you use a cheat code like “how do you turn this on?” It’s really difficult to finish the game without it.
Sure, but depending on what your job is it can make the work feel even more meaningless than it was prior to LLMs. All the work most people are doing it just going to be Ctrl+A deleted and replaced with someone else's LLM slop using Opus 8 in an afternoon. All the shit people are building right now just feel ephemeral, like its going to float away on a breeze.
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You might be right in the end, but the middle of a massive outage probably at least somewhat exacerbated by LLMs, being debugged by (presumably) human software engineers is kind of a weird time to make this point
Well it's getting philosophical. Even before AI, I would argue that the vast majority of software was meaningless. Actually the most successful software on Earth is hurting society and the environment, in exchange for profit for a few humans. I don't know any software engineer who can say "if I was not doing what I do, society would get a little worse".
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sad.
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I console myself that while the products we make are useless and probably even harmful the activity itself just represents the world Geist familiarizing itself with computation and its possibilities and thus growing richer in the process. In the worst case.. sometimes you learn what's best by experiencing what's not.
just want to remind HN that it was as little as a year when I mentioned I used LLMs to do all my coding, totally hands off and people here found it a curiosity. One year later and its madness to even contemplate coding manually. Im not complaining Im just pointing out how quickly the overton window is shifting.
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Hey will you share your workflow and how you get LLMs to build correct things for you (or inspite of you)?
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"Overton window"? It's just developers being obtuse, short-sighted and slow. It was obvious in 2023 and it is obvious now yet we still have people in denial even today. These people need AI to take over the world and threatening them with eternal suffering before they will change their minds even a bit.
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May I ask why you care so much? Some people like hand-coding, they are free to do whatever they want, stop being so weirdly angry and controlling about what people do/how they do it.
I dont think so man, it havent really had any issues that Ive noticed
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https://xkcd.com/1695/
I don’t mean to be demeaning to you, but I am asking genuinely. Why are you still employed? What do you bring to the table if you’ve off loaded so much to AI that you can no longer review a pull request…?
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OpenAI just discovered close to 1000 LPE's in Linux, yet nobody is wondering why kernel developers are still employed or what they bring to the table. What more needs to happen before you accept that human review does not catch all the bugs that AI does?
Is there a 'right amount' of AI? (coyotetracks.org)
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We're in learning mode between the optimists and the pessimists about how much. I think it's easier to be an optimist and believe that no amount is too much - because if an AI is better than you at something...well... using it makes you more powerful. If there are subtleties that are wrong, you probably weren't in a position to realise what they were anyhow. If one can make money out of it and only the other guy will lose their job then ... so be it. Hence the optimists will push us all over the cliff as with many situations in the past - lets just build another coal fired power station or spray everything with DDT or use xrays to measure your foot size in the shops so you don't have to remove your shoes - and here's a nice round thing you can light on fire and breathe on to relax! We've done a lot of deadly things in the past before we've eventually learned at the cost of millions of lives. People got wealthy on it and we don't seem to have asked for our money back. The issue is whether the outcome is something that can be ignored or hidden - whether it affects a small enough number of people at once to cause everyone else to say "I'm alright jack." We have evolved responses in the past from unions to campaigns to stop smoking to netzero efforts but none of it was easy or quick and none of it is over either.
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Way more than what this cat is looking for. Feel bad for people like this, seems like an incredible silly way to go about your life. separately there's something Ironic about believing that ai is soulless and not real while also being a furry.
Counterpoint, while LLMs can generate tons of stuff, you still need to type stuff to make it generate tons of stuff, so you're still typing. Just more output per typed word, but you can still spend all day typing. RSI doesn't seem to be nearly as big an issue anymore as it was in e.g. the 2000s though, not sure why exactly. Speaking for myself, physical exercise and a flat keyboard resolved it.
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Try out voice mode. Its awesome.
> LLMs, by definition, can’t make anything thoughtfully, because LLMs have no thoughts. ... apps that feel crafted, that show refinement, that feel intuitive—requires a human developer not only with taste, but with understanding. Well said, thank you. It saddens me that people can't understand this. Already there is the fallacy of "I can make apps with AI, therefore no one needs to code anymore," as if all coding was was making apps. But even the apps that people think are passable feel so fake, clunky and sludgy.
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That was there before LLMs. I know too many people who just shoved together some UI frameworks and called it a day. The same happens now with the only difference that LLMs are doing the shoving and therefore these things pop up at a higher rate. And to be honest the shoving that LLMs do, produce, most of the time, a better outcome than the shoving of people who don't care. Yes there is the 1% of companies / people who really care about the things that you quote and these will be there in the future and, with the help of AI / LLMs refine / accelerate their workflow.
LLMs today create apps which are more crafted and have more refinement than 80% of the human made apps. This argument is "a Ferrari is a better car than a Ford". What point is this exactly making? Who can afford having Jonathan Ive designing their app?
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Adding a number you pulled out of your ass doesn't turn your subjective opinion into objective fact. Show us the LLM created app that looks like it was designed by Jony Ive, I'll show you one that just rips off any of the myriad frameworks designed by humans to mimic his aesthetic.
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Show me one well crafted human designed app, I'll show you the preceding apps it stole ideas from.
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Your assertion is that LLMs "create apps which are more crafted and have more refinement than 80% of the human made apps" If, as you assert here, LLMs are functionally equivalent in their "creative" process to humans, and you admit (as you seem to) that LLMs simply "steal ideas" from humans (which is apparently what you believe human creativity is comprised of,) to what do you attribute the apparently superior taste and design skills that LLMs have over humans?
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LLMs can now solve famous math problems which humans failed to for 100 years. LLMs can now create animations as beautiful as those of top humans animators. LLMs can now design apps better than the vast majority of programmers. I don't know why, and frankly I don't care. I'm sure you have a theory why LLMs are solving incredibly hard math problems, probably along the lines "they were not actually hard problems, LLMs don't think or discover new things, they just interpolate in the convex hull of training data, so probably you just had to look in the right place and humans didn't had time to do that due to the vast search space".
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>I'm sure you have a theory why LLMs are solving incredibly hard problems, probably along the lines "they were not actually hard problems, you just had to look in the right place and humans didn't have time to do that". Now you're moving the goalposts and arguing with strawmen. You should ask an LLM to try to form a cogent argument. "I don't know, and I don't care, I just know you're wrong" doesn't make for interesting conversation. I'll let you have the last word, you seem the type who insists upon it. Good day.
A part of software UX design is instrumental interaction. I could replace my guitar playing with singing (or asking a model to play the right notes). But that won't give me the feeling of fingers against the strings, or of moving effortlessly across the fretboard. There's a fair amount of UX use that follows the same idea, where the software becomes an instrument of sorts: https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-27648-9_23-1
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In the future, the concept of music will be different. AI will produce music and read your brainwaves for feedback to find your brain's eigenmodes.
> The ethical issues around AI don't seem any different than the rest of modern capitalism. AI makes copyright and patents obsolete. There are no protections left for original nor derivative works; AI will hoover it all up and reproduce it without qualm and at scale. It must be trained, and it can only be trained on what already exists. > But things like industrialised farming, manufacturing, fossil fuels, chemical production, etc. don't seem to generate anything close to the quasi-religious fervour that hating AI inspires in certain people. A computer is a general-purpose machine. A tractor is not. AI is threatening every job that involves using a computer to accomplish it, or that could use computers and automation to accomplish it. Not to mention the promise of exponential growth; AI will continue to improve and in turn be used to improve itself, which a tractor cannot do. These kinds of threats are what inspire such fears.
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I don't think it makes patents obsolete. It makes it easier to infringe on one, perhaps, but you can still get sued if you do.
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"A computer is a general-purpose machine. A tractor is not." I mean, a tractor can't do everything, but I'd be hard pressed to find something in the farmers tool box that can get a wide ranges of tasks completed. Pretty much all farm tasks require it: Drilling, discing, spraying, cutting...not to mention pulling wagons, goods to market, etc etc.
The Dawn of the Data Intelligence Engineer (motherduck.com)
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The job you will DIE for.
> As long as we do not hand over our collective decision making power to the machine god, which I don't think is a good idea and am not sure is even possible, Counterpoint: This is not only possible but has effectively already happened. From the outside, the current trajectory is indistinguishable from humanity serving the AI, pulling all possible resources out of literally everything else in order to burn them on AI R&D, training and inference.
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You could say the same of cash crops, but probably wouldn't say so to argue that we have already given our collective decision making power to corn. I think the bar is much higher - something like "AI runs our political and social institutions" - the economic institutions it's involved with currently don't meet that bar.
The same could easily have happened pre LLMs (just slower). Its why things like ArchUnit existed, or style guides, or annoying architects who stopped engineers from using latest JS framework pre LLMs, to define high level requirements for software. I try to avoid justifying my own existence, but its a reason why I think skilled engineers are way more productive using LLM's than person off the street. Because they can confine them. Though there is no technical reason that ability can't be codified.
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> The same could easily have happened pre LLMs (just slower). "Slower" is doing a lot of work there. It's the difference between an engineer or two wrecking havoc doing a major refactor and convincing a manager that it's ok while you're away on vacation, and the same engineers failing to convince the manager because it will take forever, and quietly dropping the project after hitting the first roadblock. "How long is this going to take?": "a week" vs "a quarter" makes a huge difference. Extreme speed is a form of quality; the fear is that it enables bad things to happen.
Yeah, as a "T-shaded data folk" (have worked as a data analyst, data scientist, data engineer, and machine learning engineer, so I think I'm close to a full bingo care) in data, I agree! I think the specialisms are really helpful for hiring - data engineering and data science involve a lot of different things so it's a lot easier to hire someone if you don't require skill in both. That said, I think we have a culture problem in defining our roles narrowly, I've seen data scientists look down at data-pipeline parts of their job, and ignoring model latency and deployment; data engineers be deeply uncurious around what happens to the data after they put it in a warehouse; etc. The best people I've worked with, within data and elsewhere, are the ones who are curious about every aspect of the stack, even if they mostly focus on one side.
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I’ve come to see it as a consequence of the industry’s pivot toward every firm of every size becoming more enterprisey. The enterprise habit of using 3rd-party vendors in particular. 15, 20 years ago, me and my T-shaped skills could get by just fine with a database server, a NAS, and some frank conversations about priorities. Nowadays it’s not enough to to know how to work with databases and files. There’s also all these platforms : databricks, snowflake, new relic, sentry, datadog, GitHub actions, prefect, dbt, kubernetes, cassandra, elastic, and on and on and on. Each brings a new set of idiosyncrasies, its own terms for things, its own enterprise integration headaches. It’s just a hell of a lot of knowledge to as one person to cram into their head on top of whatever skills and domain expertise form the actual core of their job. That makes sense for an enterprise. Enterprises have a lot of bodies to throw at the problem, so they can have an expert for each tool who’s available to support everyone else. And they like to have support contracts and SLAs, which you can get from à B2B vendor but not from the KISS principle. And they don’t mind great heaping piles of unnecessary and mutually conflicting abstractions because that sort of thing is just SOP for a large bureaucracy. But if you want - need - a system that one person with T-shaped skills can reasonably fit into their head, this is not the way.
Global Microsoft Outage (cnn.com)
Maybe use a decentralized protocol, something like SMTP...
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LXMF FTW
It's a pain to administer.
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As if this isn't solvable with automation.
Businesses rationally won't switch because of one outage (even a bad one) because switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical. So again rationally this shouldn't affect the stock price much. However repeated disruptive outages every few weeks/months (à la GitHub) is a different story, and there's also the invisible effect of businesses maybe being less likely to choose Microsoft in the future
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> switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical Switching to what though? It's not like we didn't have outages before SaaS. It just happened at different times throughout the year in stead of all having an outage at the same time. I feel like the big difference right now is that management can't call the EoD for progress updates every 10 minutes, they just have to assume that someone at Microsoft is working on fixing the issue.
Still ongoing, I haven't been able to access my personal outlook email for 12+ hours and as a result can't access my accounts that use email 2FA, including my virtual medical appointment! Along with the daily Github outages recently, it's making me do an audit of my dependence on Microsoft.
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Yet another risk of 2FA that most people don't realize.
Officially Microsoft 364
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Lmao
And then switch to what? Exactly.
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Stalwart hosted on OpenBSD?
Receiving is easy for personal mail I would say I receive 99% of the time. Sending out is harder but that 1% when I send something I need it delivered. Hosting e-mail for friends and family is harder and mostly what I would call stupid.
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The solution is to send via some transactional email provider (aka amazon ses).
How is this not a bigger news? It's been on and (mostly) off for 14 hours.
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Getting buried by the Jensen Huang downfall. MS is super lucky it overlapped
Microsoft says attempts to fix global outage not going 'as expected' (bbc.com)
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Wouldn’t it be funny if we had a Black Friday right about now and nobody could coordinate a response over email.
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Reading every day about them, don't they think to let the superintelligences fix their computers?
And at 40$ per employee per month, with all those employees now without access to the company (auth is not working so internal apps are going to be dead too), 50% of that for one month covers less than 25 minutes of downtime if your employees work 38 hours per week for 5000$ on average (and I do hope they make at least 2x more, since this is before tax). But no worries, getting the entire month of Office 365 for free justifies about 50 minutes of company downtime. Besides: why worry? Claude code is down too, so your now cheaper techs can't do anything either. The loss for a random due to MS software at this point is about 1400$ per seat (but probably at least double that) and rising. Which is why every manager should now realize that their microsoft contract can never work as a valid disaster recovery option.
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I tried to bring this out of our management staff when they were going all in on a SaaS that's 99% AWS backed. The SaaS was basically as integral is email is to many businesses to their line of work, and it was required to complete the business's b2b contracts which often had a turn around date. If the SaaS goes down, they're basically sitting idle and hitting contractual deadlines. The response was basically, "we have a uptime garuntee and will pay out for downtime". But when it's clear _all_ of their clients have the same SaaS contract garuntee and a serious enough disruption would see _every_ client needing payment back, well, it's not much of a warranty is it. Now I'm sure the SaaS has the redundancy in their system, but AI is the next deep integration that's going to hallow out a bunch of companies because some third party is just going to have a catastrophic loss somewhere down the line.
all happy families are alike each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
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I've seen technical discussions on this stuff. Usually it's because you have a distributed system that's build up incrementally. You bring one system online, then the next, the next; you load balance it carefully, etc. But in these catastrophic scenarios, those involved (AI particularly), want to bring everything up all at once and that itself causes some DDoS like attacks on internal and external systems. And that's assuming you solved whatever "unhappy" system took it down in the first place. The thing I've see with using AI for the past 6 month is it's really too dumb about how long things take. Humans have a normal sense of how long a process will take, whether a race condition can exist (eg, 1ns vs 10s), and other time based details. Whether a log is produced before something happens or after, etc. I've been considering adding time stamps to mine plugins to track the time, but it's sorta like you need to track it both at the start of the request, at the end of it, at the bewginning of the generation, at the end of the generation. Anyway, AI has to be shit to use in these scenarios because it can't tell that a system takes 5 minutes to bring up, and if you bring up 10 of the same systems at the same time, they have zero capabilities against race conditoins on shared resources etc.
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