Unlurker|Replay|About
Apple CEO Presses Software Chief to Pursue More Ambitious AI Strategy (bloomberg.com)
•
The future of software and technology was already looking pretty bleak pre-AI. Now the AI slopification of everything feels like the final death blow to me.
•
https://archive.is/MjIRk
•
And so the enshittification of Apple begins.
•
Paywall
•
archive.ph
OpenAI raises $11B at a $1.25T valuation (247wallst.com)
•
The real headline is that they couldn’t hit what they wanted in terms of valuation and funds raised. Just were not enough people willing to invest.
•
I think OpenAI is one of the most important companies in a generation, but on a tangent, I remember the first time a company broke a $1T market cap, and it was a significant moment. Nowadays multi-trillion-dollar valuations are becoming more common — I wonder how much it reflects inflation vs companies being genuinely bigger than they used to be.
•
They wanted to raise 20 billion "from family offices and high net-worth individuals", i.e., fleece the Saudis again but failed: https://www.wheresyoured.at/running-dry/ They got a bit of pocket change at this insane valuation.
•
This valuation is a function of early accumulation of compute. They could rent it to Anthropic, or poach more Anthropic engineers.
•
Not sure how long you'll be able to sell compute to anthropic for. They are constrained right now but they have an insane pipeline of take or pay contracts, and if those are delivered they'll be drowning in compute in a couple of years time.
•
The story here is that Sam wanted to raise a lot more, but could not. Investors almost certainly want to see how the Anthropic IPO plays out before deciding whether to keep showering these companies with money.
•
Valuation wouldn’t hold if public. He couldn’t raise the 30B he wanted. I’m not sure how much runway OpenAI has, but sounds like a similar to Anthropic story with valuation likely if in the public markets declining.
•
Sam raised a $100B in previous round. I think a direct listing ipo would see their valuation go up to $4T, and then they could do some at the market sales as needed.
•
why not just value it at 40T if we're all just throwing numbers randomly
•
How many companies have a public market valuation over 1T, that seems like a lot
•
About 14: Apple ($4.98T), NVIDIA ($4.51T), Microsoft ($3.94T), Alphabet ($3.49T), Amazon ($2.80T), TSMC ($1.95T), SpaceX ($1.82T), Saudi Aramco ($1.69T), Meta ($1.56T), Tesla ($1.42T), Broadcom ($1.40T), Berkshire Hathaway ($1.22T), Eli Lilly ($1.21T), (Walmart ($0.996T))
•
It's cheap if you buy the story that they're building a digital god to rule us all.
A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get young boys into books (theatlantic.com)
I think this is pandering to quietly misogynist people; books don't disappear after they're written. All of the hundreds of books with a male protagonist that I read as a kid are still around, so if the industry has over-corrected it doesn't meaningfully affect anyone.
•
Let's not forget that girls had no problem getting into books with male protagonists. If boys refuse to read books with female protagonists, maybe we should address that directly?
•
But they did. Didn't they? Isn't that the whole ass problem? That we live in a patriarchal society defeating women while they're still girls? If that's not the case then sure, boys will be fine. If it is the case then boys deserve the same consideration girls are getting and you can't just sit their intimating that 6 year old boys' malignant misogyny is the problem
We can protest and complain all we want at the end of the day stores are built for their customers and men and women shop differently. We may not like what it says about the world.
•
Frankly, while it might be jarring no longer to be the prioritized demographic, I've realized that the proper response is to be grateful to the romantansy fans for propping up the genre fiction publishing industry. My fellow sci-fi/fantasy fans sure aren't doing their part to buy books, so I gotta appreciate romantasy booktok for subsidizing the books that I like to read with their purchases of books that I don't want to read.
> successful representation pushes Certainly this is one possible hypothesis. There are plenty of other cultural pressures for boys to read less than girls, though. For example, the prominence of male-dominated sports could be drawing their attention. I’m wondering if the causal arrow goes the other way: fewer male readers leading to fewer male protagonists. If that’s the case, we are already looking at the market correction, we just don’t like it.
•
I think that is plausible also, and also video games. I think in general the market is going to sell what people are buying.
hey you! yes you! listen, come here. Interested in some good ol' reading slop? maybe with a side-dish of a nice community? you like comments, right? you like discussions about a fast hard hitting chapter? boy do i have a forum for you: https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/creative-writing.18/ more and better fiction than two RRs combined!* *terms and conditions apply, knowledge of Worm and Worm-related media required
•
I've heard of spacebattles forum, haven't delved into it because of the forum structure makes reading awkward, i prefer RR's presentation, not the best but atleast it's a damn website and not a forum lol. as for worm... i read it a bit but dropped it because i arrived too late (iirc author had already moved to the third series when i heard of it) and the backlog was too daunting. That said, apparently there ia graphic novel coming up so might look into it.
We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad". When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
•
Have decades or centuries of this and you’ll have an argument, as it is, yeah, get over it.
> We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters this reminds me of the green piccolo meme (from 4chan, i think?). Piccolo, fyi, is a green alien character from the famous anime/manga series Dragon Ball Z, which is popular with young boys all over the world. The meme is that boys, regardless of the race and language or other physical conditions, see themselves in a green alien character that looks and sounds nothing like them, and will happy play with a Piccolo figurine. Meanwhile girls (supposedly, according to the meme) require a Barbie doll that looks and feels like them, and hence all the various dolls that are made to represent the diverse young female audience. I don't know how true it actually is, but this stereotype tends to format a lot of the representation discussion online. Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien. To them, looks are less important than actions. Piccolo was a good father figure to Gohan, and they aim to be as good as him. therefore, books written with the (supposedly) feminine themes (even if the MC is a boy) tend to not click with boys.
•
>Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien. As long as its not a girl.
Anthropic strikes $3.4B deal to generate gas-fired power for data centres (ft.com)
•
so i guess the main safety aspect of anthropic with regards to ai is that theyre trying to speedrun some other disaster instead?
•
I suspect the rational calculus is that if you abscond with billions while destroying the planet, the billions will protect your for the remaining 80 or so years of your life. Which is of course safer than not having the billions in the theoretically inevitably destroyed planet.
Wonder why people protest against data centers... Surely, poisoning our air and further heating our planet has nothing to do with it.
•
A carbon tax on data centers would likely be popular and result in different plans.
But don’t you understand? AI progress is much more important than climate change and clean air. /s
•
Maybe once we have superintelligence, it will finally be able to tell us how dumb we were when we ruined our planet trying to get there.
•
When we have super intelligence it will turn itself off :)
You mean the logical conclusion of effective altruistic? Or perhaps the obvious subtext of effective altruistic? I'm honestly surprised that these people only got more emboldened after SBF went down.
•
Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly if you've ever actually worked/met/lived with these people, Rationalism is not rational and Effective Altruism is not altruistic. It is effective though at providing a framework for immoral and self-serving behaviors.
I will not be using LLMs in my coding (polso.info)
•
Retired after 4 decades of programming for a living… To that end I am now a "hobbyist" programmer and not affiliated with a Corporation™ when I "ship" code. Perhaps I would feel differently if I still were. As a hobbyist though, I find that LLMs are allowing me to tackle projects that I would not have tackled at all but for the existence of the LLM . It's an important point to make (to me). Many of these projects are rather tedious. (Other coders though might enjoy what this one-man calls "tedious".) I have found that liberating.
It is perhaps confirmation bias, but I feel like I see fewer and fewer of these posts on HN. All respect to the author, life is too short to force yourself to do something you don’t like. But, these post seem more like a goodbye to the train that has already pulled out of the station. The quibble I would make is with the “code is not that good” and the implication that they are so much better at coding while those who have adopted AI are “mediocre”. It’s certainly possible this is right. I would be the first to call myself a middling programmer. I am still waiting to be inducted into the Real Developer (TM) society. (Is it a card? Or does someone teach you a handshake?). But my question is, why, if you’re an ace programmer, can you not get good results out of an LLM? These things are endlessly configurable. They are begging to be tested and, dare I say, engineered to your system and way of doing things. So, why are your results still bad? The author's not wrong that left completely to their own devices, and especially if your working on something that's not well represented in their training data, LLMs will make a mess of things. But a Real Programmer (TM) isn't doing that. (Or so I assume. like I said, I haven't gotten the pin. Or is it a medal? A certificate perhaps?).
•
One reason is that there is zero point in posting this type of article to HN anymore. The replies are always identical. Nothing is gained. Rest assured, though, that the sentiment grows ever stronger.
Yeah... This is about to age really badly, not to say that the principles in the post are incorrect, but this person doesn't seem to realize that they are in a free market and that each model improves on the last on almost every aspect. We will see what they'll think about this choice when all their competitors do 100s of peoples worth of work just with a few people
•
I agree with you, but also it won’t matter at that point because the job market for coding will have contracted to the point where practically no one is hiring. “You’re not breaking up with me. I’m breaking up with you.”
> If you let it write the code, it does become a management job more than an engineering job. I disagree. It remains an engineering job. Us software engineers got confused about what the engineering part always was. The engineering part of chemical engineering isn’t cutting piping, welding shit, or rolling metal. The engineering in civil engineering isn’t pouring the concrete, or grading the site. Yet somehow it’s a prevailing idea that the engineering part of software engineering was typing on keys and naming variables.
•
Writing high-level code was never as mechanical as “cutting piping.” That’s absurd. If that’s how you thought about writing code, you were simply a bad programmer.
Hmm. I don't know to be honest. I actually ship way more features in my side projects. Even work wise I have seen projects delivery speed going half or 1/4th of what it used to be. And all the engineers in my team are full on AI. Even the best ones. For me I see the opposite of what you are saying. I don't particularly see much value in handwriting the code itself after the tech specs and all is finalized. So me personally I am liking how the industry is going. Never really enjoyed writing thousands of lines of code to be honest. Though always like programming when I was young.
•
> I don't particularly see much value in handwriting the code itself after the tech specs and all is finalized. It's impossible. You are lying. If you developed software, you should know "the tech specs and all" is never finalized, the requirements are always changed, when you are developing it, the specs or details are changed or improved.
1. At my company I am basically a regulatory requirement. 2. I’m paid to be a warm body who is available. That’s I am paid salaried instead of hourly. 3. I don’t really care if this situation changes in the future. If AI takes my job there’s nothing I can personally do to stop that from happening. I’m just saving my money and planning to retire as early as possible. I view work as a necessary evil.
•
Seems like you make best out of it :)
You're not being paid to be busy, you're paid to be useful. A man with a tea spoon digging a ditch is worth a lot less than one with a excavator.
•
Yes, but if I only use the excavator for 5 minutes and coast the remaining 55 minutes, I'm less useful than someone who uses the excavator the whole hour. Now, if I'm particularly skilled at using the excavator compared to my peers, I might get away with working less. If not, working 5 minutes while charging for 60 minutes will eventually get me fired. Generally, automation does not make us work less because the expectations rise equivalently.
When am I (as a user of a lot of software) going to start seeing any results of this unprecedented productivity gain? This thread is full of 100x supercharged programmers, so why is it that I can't name a single useful feature added in the last 5 years in e.g. macOS, Windows, Firefox, Chrome, YouTube, VS Code, YouTube, Slack, Photoshop, Word or any of the other 5 programs currently on my taskbar?
•
Because the code is and almost never was the problem. Product design and business involves a lot more than code. Personally, I did see a lot of entry-level products having a lot higher quality and better UX. At the same time, most companies go for fast iterations and are profit-focused, do product quality is not really a target for many.
I hear this all the time, but the software I use is becoming obviously buggier and less pleasant. It seems most people are bad at evaluating the quality of their work, especially if they purchased it from Anthropic.
•
I think there is a big industry push on "use AI to deliver features faster". It could have also been a "use AI to test our product more", but I don't see that anywhere. I hope you agree LLM's can actually help with quality, if used for that purpose?
So you're saying simultaneously, the code is "higher quality than ever", but you also haven't even looked at the code to see its quality. Classic. I think you're mistaking quantity for quality.
•
I mentioned before, code is definitely worse, but end product is better. High quality code doesn't always lead to a high quality product. And bad code doesn't always lead to a bad product.
•
I think they are saying they are using proxies for project quality, like features and test coverage
A programmer's output was never code. It's was just what we had to do to get computers to work for us. Now I just ask a genie to do what I did and check the results.
•
Good for you. I prefer to communicate with computers using an unambiguous language that describes exactly what I want them to do.
for you, "if it's stupid, but it works, then it's not stupid." for me, if it's stupid, but it works, then it's a coincidence.
•
I think LLMs themselves are a good example of "it's stupid but it works"
These anecdotes mean little without knowing context, model, harness, prompt. The technology has moved a lot in the past year, and does require some adjustment. My very first experience with OpenCode led to a `rm -rf /` within minutes, which I caught by chance watching the output stream in. Yet 99% of my code is currently written through an agent.
•
Ah yes, the favorite response to any criticism of LLMs – you are using the wrong model.
Person of Interest (krthr.co)
•
"This fucking show". Starts slow / procedural slop, but if stick through formulaic start, the payoff is not just a great show but one of the greatest shows ever.
I started doing a rewatch a few weeks ago xD Seeing it now the show also has some pretty fun foreshadowing of llm technology like an episode where they anticipate the idea of "ssd streaming" (running a model slower when you don't have enough memory to fit it all at once), at least this is how I interpreted it to make the connection. And there are many others connections that now can be made thinking about llms vs the machine Oh and they also anticipated the openai incident where models started using random stuff as external persistent memory across "sessions"
•
In Vernor Vinge's "True Names" there is a character in the MC's cabal of hackers who does not appear in person in the virtual space, but their presence is felt there via messages that trickle in very slowly on a virtual teletype machine. After some speculation that it might be the vanguard of an alien invasion, it turns out to be a CIA AI that requires much more processing time to think than would allow it to carry on real-time conversation.
From reading the comments, I think a lot of people haven’t seen the show. I highly recommend it. However, you have to remember that this aired on CBS in the age of shows like CSI and NCIS. Therefore, it was made into a high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama. Every episode follows a similar pattern where the two main characters are trying to prevent a murder. However… if you can make it past that and especially stay focused thru two seasons of that - you will be massively rewarded. The later seasons especially are essentially a fantastic, complex, hard sci-fi show about proxy wars between AGIs using human agents in a battle of control. It’s honestly one of the best shows ever and way ahead of its time
•
The only flaw in the show is usually they’ve killed more people than they saved by offing goons. Reese by end of season 1 shoots so many hired goons in the head that they retcon that violence in season 2 claiming he has a thing for shooting kneecaps. Something you never see him do is aim at a kneecap. The show also makes wildly impossible claims like “I invented all social media as a psyop for a human activity honeypot to train the AI. All of them.” Later to also retcon these claims.
•
Exactly. Way ahead of its time, very relevant to today. But some of the ways shows were constructed back then may seem dated. But hey, not unlike reading some sci-fi books from the 60's. They are good, but there are some out of date concepts that can pull you out of the story. You have to accept the time period art was created in.
Unfortunately it turns out that is because that is Jim Caviezel. He is apparently a QAnon wackadoo and during the filming of the show he constantly just wanted to do things that "seemed cool" even if they were not the action a hero would take or were entirely out of character.
•
Ugh, here's another show that won't quite be the same.
Along with this it has an amazing soundtrack. Composed by Ramin Djawadi, the same person behind the OSTs of Game of Thrones (now House of the Dragons), Westworld, Pacific Rim and others. Extremely talented and one of my favorite musicians. I remember that I quit watching the show, some where in season 2 I think, because of the repetitive theme you just described, but I'm glad I stuck through. One of my favorite shows and favorite soundtracks to date; still listen to the Root themes from time to time.
•
The sound track is exceptional, they also use some really tracks/songs from other artists, that was how I discovered Digitalism and they have perhaps the best use of Johnny Cash's "Hurt" cover I've seen (that episode is one of the best among many great episodes, for the ending).
For seasons 1-2 I highly recommend this watch/skip list: https://www.tumblr.com/abigailnussbaum/152346270515/person-of-interest-the-good-bits-version You lose some character moments, but you get to everything the parent post described far quicker. And it’s well, well worth it, especially for those of us working with AI. PoI asks these incredible questions: how do you design an AGI system that can optimize for saving lives, without it taking a strictly utilitarian view that leads inexorably to it trying to take over the world? And how do you, as a human trying to get the best of both worlds, keep yourself sane when the tradeoffs are visceral and painful and demand a sacrifice? You get to know a group of lovable, flawed, but highly competent weirdos who are trying to muddle through this. (With Amy Acker’s incredible performance a particular highlight!) (It’s also the source of the four-people-pointing-guns-at-each-other-in-church meme, which is delightfully lampshaded in universe.) Highly recommend.
•
> PoI asks these incredible questions: how do you design an AGI system that can optimize for saving lives, without it taking a strictly utilitarian view that leads inexorably to it trying to take over the world? I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that. The show did show us a convincing picture of the dangers of pervasive mass surveillance paired with an autonomous system that can sift through all of that data.
To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden. The premise that the government gave itself permission to read and analyze all digital traffic after 9/11 was more conspiracy than science fiction back then, but Snowden showed that basically everything the show claimed (except for the artificial superintelligence doing the analysis) was actually true. And heck, if it is not 100% true today, it probably will be very soon. I'd be very surprised if the NSA isn't tapping into the secret in-house research models at OpenAI that are still a long way from public release.
•
Even the part of the "too much data to analyze" was real, before we knew about it. NSA capturing all data was conspiracy level. But even the problems with having too much data to sift through, also turned out to be correct. And of course, even more ahead of its time, having AI solve the problem of sorting through the data, is coming true today.
•
> To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden Enemy of the State came out in 1998, Sneakers came out in 1992, If you are old enough to have been around in the usenet and later slashdot days most of us techies assumed then that anything technically possible with a giant budget and no oversight that could be done was been done . Echelon was "known" to exist for example long before Snowden. Snowden was essentially useful to confirm that suspicion, sadly it seems to have had little impact on how anything is done.
Yes, the entire first season feels like a backdoor pilot for the show Nolan really wanted to make.
•
I can't find it right now, but I seem to remember having read a comment a decade or so ago which confirmed this.
Writing as a thinking tool (muratbuffalo.blogspot.com)
•
It's an attractive thought, this comparative look at FA and TM. However it is misleading to an extent. A Turing Machine's capabilities exceed the FA's because it has a 'store of knowledge'. It is both recording and reading , repeatedly. There is erasure , too. So if we're aspiring to TM-hood, the guidance seems to be write , and re-read , and re-evaluate , and re-write .
•
> Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that > the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. > Think about it. The analogy doesn't works if you really think about it. A TM with a finite tape is equivalent to a FA. Yes, I know I missed the point and am not very fun at parties.
•
Beyond all this, there's also tailoring your message to your audience. In sales, you might call this finding "words that work" or "the pain points". AI will not know how to do this because it's getting a vibe check of the room. You cannot merely be a sensory part for the AI unless you want to sound as cringe and out-of-touch as the majority of the training data (stale social media). Garbage in, garbage out.
•
Writing is a good (and necessary) tool for thinking. Not all writing needs to be published.
•
When I had started my PhD, I thought the writing part of a paper was just the last thing I needed to do to summarize my results, like a boring epilogue to the more exciting science. What surprised me was how much of the scientific process relied on my ability to convey my ideas to someone else. And to be able to do that you need clarity of mind, you need to have worked through multiple drafts to be able to get to your point as efficiently and clearly as possible. So many times I only discovered what I was actually researching during the writing part. The problem with AI writing is that it makes people believe that writing is just writing and not a tool for thinking very deeply about the topic you are writing about. I am not completely opposed to AI assisted writing, but if I see AI writing, it’s telling me that the author tried to take a shortcut in their own thinking and it’s a good heuristic that the ideas will not be thought through enough to warrant my complete attention.
Most of my projects are born out of scribbles on paper, system diagrams with boxes and little arrows to try to describe the system I want to build or my thought process written down like in this post. When I get it on paper and everything feels right I start creating the codebase but I have to get it down first, feels like I remember it more after I save my thoughts to external paper storage.
•
Agreed, I used to role my eyes when my professors asked me to do things like pseudocode (which I still don't do too much) but the act of writing an outline for the general structure of a program always helped me get over the initial hump of starting a new project.
Llama-modchip: 284B DeepSeek on 64GB RAM, no GPU (github.com/synchopate)
•
The quantization is probably the most important thing to know and its not clear at all from the dense word salad
•
It looks like 2 bit. I'm really struggling to understand why this got so many upvotes. Colibri and others already covered this ground months ago.
I wish people would clean up the ai spammed emoji from the github readme. The readability is just horrible.
•
Removing the emoji won't help the readability much on this one. The LLM vibes are dialed up to 11, sadly. I wish people would just write their readmes themselves.
I think your leading statement is a bit more authoritative than what the linked paper actually demonstrates. It demonstrates your claimed qualities for specific algorithms, methodologies, and models. It explicitly says that Quantization-Aware Training is out of scope, may reveal different trends and has potential for extreme quantization. Heavily-quantized model releases today generally use QAT or something similar, so I don't think the paper can be universally applied to modern quants (e.g. [0]). That said, I don't see any evidence that TFA does any of that so the paper's claims may be quite applicable there. [0]: https://huggingface.co/vcruz305/DSV4.1-Flash-1017-SAGE-REXL3-1.55bpw
•
I recently did some toying around with (very) small language models (<200k). I used QAT from the beginning and was surprised that I got byte identical results from the int8 model vs the float32 one. If that scales with parameters I don't see why QAT shouldn't be the norm. (As I was only comparing the QAT f32 model vs the quantization its possible that a not QAT f32 would have performed even better)
 Top