15 ms·

Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

650 points by signa11 5mo ago

rebekkamikkoa 5mo ago
I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.
- ramon156 5mo ago
  Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
  - block_dagger 5mo ago
    Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
  - sweetheart 5mo ago
    They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
    - muddi900 5mo ago
      Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
      - sweetheart 5mo ago
        I think it’s possible.
      - darkwater 5mo ago
        Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
    - mherkender 5mo ago
      If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
    - globalnode 5mo ago
      Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
      - sweetheart 5mo ago
        Okay!
        globalnode 5mo ago
        found the prompt "engineer"
  - jappgar 5mo ago
    They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
    - aduwah 5mo ago
      There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
      - coffeefirst 5mo ago
        We are about to test that theory.
      - master-lincoln 5mo ago
        not even Bernie Sanders?
        mythrwy 5mo ago
        probably not
    - maratc 5mo ago
      In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
      - jappgar 5mo ago
        They don't need money they just need votes. If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate. You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
        maratc 5mo ago
        > If money can buy votes It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks." Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place. Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
  - limflick 5mo ago
    I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
    - master-lincoln 5mo ago
      This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
      - bayindirh 5mo ago
        Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron. ...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
  - SecretDreams 5mo ago
    Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
    - Jtarii 5mo ago
      The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
      - SecretDreams 5mo ago
        By what metrics? Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable. But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad. Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
- limflick 5mo ago
  I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit. On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ. I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy. Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
  - porknbeans00 5mo ago
    no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
  - cheschire 5mo ago
    His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
  - simonh 5mo ago
    It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI. Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'. Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings. Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
damnitbuilds 5mo ago
[flagged]
- juanani 5mo ago
  [dead]
- gambiting 5mo ago
  >>In between going on Jew-hating Propal marches Just reminder that being against Israel or its actions in Gaza is neither antisemitic nor Jew-hating.
  - dijit 5mo ago
    It's a valid reminder, but there are plenty of people who despise Jews who are currently operating with total indemnity with this as their defensive line. And even if you call them out, there are people who will openly defend them. I do think that this topic is much too disgusting for anyone to think that there are hero's in the conflict. I'm not Jewish, nor am I Arab, I have no skin in the game. But I don't like how readily we accept that cililians, women, children: are totally acceptable casualties as long as it's "$otherSide, they deserve it, $ourSide is just defending themselves". Gazans supporting Hamas and Israeli's defending the IDFs worst actions are all guilty in my mind and playing games implying one is worse is subtly letting the other side off the hook. If there is a god, Allah or Yaweh- the people who defend child murderers and rapists no matter the "side" are going to have defend their reasoning, I hope they're comfortable with that.
    - keybored 5mo ago
      Both-sides nonsense. We’re decades past assuming good faith from people who equate criticizing Israel with racism.
      - dijit 5mo ago
        There's so much documented evidence of people attacking jewish people who they call zionists without cause that I find this line of reasoning stupid. In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish and has visited Israel but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish. I'd totally buy your argument, criticising Hamas isn't the same as being racist to Muslims, and criticising the actions of Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic. I also buy the fact that Israel will defend themselves by claiming racism, something I've seen Muslims do in the UK too. I'm absolutely saying both sides, because ultimately both sides seem to think it's ok to murder children, or to use people as pawns to be be killed to further their expansionist efforts. But It's absolutely true that people are just abusing random jews under the mistaken belief that all jews are zionists, or all jews support israel. Fuck, even people who live in Israel will condemn IDF actions.. There exists nuance of people on the Palestinian side online, yet that affordance is not afforded to Jews. I find that quite ironic, and I'm personally not very chill with hypocrites. Anyone defending rape or child murder is a fucking monster. There is never valid justification, not even if the kid is carrying a suicide vest.
porknbeans00 5mo ago
good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.
- LatencyKills 5mo ago
  I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time. He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- pera 5mo ago
  It's a real shame there are no many people like Woz in the bay area
mustaphah 5mo ago
Can't locate the link to the actual speech
- mplanchard 5mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234320
namenotrequired 5mo ago
The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title
- weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
  Not to me... Maybe a ESL thing
  - master-lincoln 5mo ago
    "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence " Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker. The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know. Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific. How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
    - robrain 5mo ago
      Could also mean that he was cheered by the response to his comments and his disposition improved. There are layers of ambiguity in this headline.
    - rjh29 5mo ago
      While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines. For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..." Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
feverzsj 5mo ago
He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.
- konschubert 5mo ago
  I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?
  - psvv 5mo ago
    I see it as more iterative than revolutionary. I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this. And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search. The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
  - 65 5mo ago
    No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary. Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - hackable_sand 5mo ago
    How so? What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
    - deleted 5mo ago
dchftcs 5mo ago
Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
- bayindirh 5mo ago
  Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it. AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder. "Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently. We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
  - limflick 5mo ago
    Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
    - holtkam2 5mo ago
      The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
      - roenxi 5mo ago
        > I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception. You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
lnsru 5mo ago
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
- Oras 5mo ago
  It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers. I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
  - bayindirh 5mo ago
    Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly. ...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
  - acdha 5mo ago
    It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
  - throwatdem12311 5mo ago
    Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management. AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse. That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper. Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
vasco 5mo ago
Actual link to the quote video: https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA
- ripe 5mo ago
  The entire commencement program is here. Woz speaks at around the 42-minute mark. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40
  - phyzix5761 5mo ago
    This one looks completely different from the short as well. There are now 3 known versions of this same line and all are different. Is it possible he gave the same speech to multiple audiences on that day?
    - jumpyfrog 5mo ago
      There're like 3 commencements 1st of May, 7pm - https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757 https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757 2nd of May, 10am - https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586 https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586 2nd of May, 3pm - https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855 https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855
- phyzix5761 5mo ago
  There's a live version of this video but it looks completely different: https://www.youtube.com/live/LHEW8Da5550?si=ZBEesfArnK4HSD1R&t=3601 https://www.youtube.com/live/LHEW8Da5550?si=ZBEesfArnK4HSD1R... Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.
Aboutplants 5mo ago
Finally someone smart enough to read the room!
theow838484jj 5mo ago
There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!
- irishcoffee 5mo ago
  Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce. At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world. Give it a bit more effort next time.
  - theow838484jj 5mo ago
    20k tokens is about 40 pages of text. Weekly i do about 1000x that. (I am very low lever user) I really do not think there is a point to argue here. Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
    - irishcoffee 5mo ago
      > I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn! Yes, I can tell.
- limflick 5mo ago
  I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.
  - theow838484jj 5mo ago
    Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.
- 5mo ago
jdmoreira 5mo ago
It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore. I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen. And yet, here we are. Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away. You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology? What have we done? People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
- dmacj 5mo ago
  Are you seriously going to compare AI with shoes?
  - jdmoreira 5mo ago
    did I compare AI to shoes anywhere in my text? They also used to teach comprehension when I went to school.
    - NichoPaolucci 5mo ago
      You chose shoes as your comparison point. Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials) You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
      - jdmoreira 5mo ago
        No I wasn't. This is the whole paragraph: > People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today. I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty). This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
rpastuszak 5mo ago
Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligence, Artificial Intelligentsia - I’d argue that one of them is not real.
testfrequency 5mo ago
I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.
- evilduck 5mo ago
  How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.
  - testfrequency 5mo ago
    A lot. Apple has pretty impressive retention, more than everywhere else I’ve worked in the Bay Area. Many people work there to retire, so the age demographic skews older. I worked there close to 20 years and that’s not even in the longer end comparatively. Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
    - 2b3a51 5mo ago
      Very successful large company retains staff until retirement. I find that vaguely reassuring. Hope the trend catches on. Thanks for posting this observation. Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
- datakan 5mo ago
  I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.
alsetmusic 5mo ago
The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
- StilesCrisis 5mo ago
  I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
  - kevinsync 5mo ago
    Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so take that for what it is, just tossing my own pointless internet comment into the mix!
    - blanched 5mo ago
      I've only been to the low tens of graduations, but in my experience this is pretty common for a speaker. A couple highlights and otherwise a little boring :) Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
    - StilesCrisis 5mo ago
      In my case, I was not even graduating, I just heard that Woz was speaking and decided to attend. I don't regret attending, as I managed to get a picture with Woz after the ceremony and thank him for his amazing work, but the speech itself was extremely forgettable.
anonyfox 5mo ago
Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas. so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
aubanel 5mo ago
This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.
- jcgrillo 5mo ago
  > Cope bias is powerful. Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.
  - aubanel 5mo ago
    With what would I be coping? I'd much prefer (probably like most people) if AI were not that powerful. The harsh reality, and the stuff of cope, is that it's (too) powerful.
    - jcgrillo 5mo ago
      The trouble with this narrative is the evidence doesn't actually support it. If it is so powerful where are the results? If it was actually all that powerful it would be obvious. There wouldn't be any question. Nobody says "nuclear explosions aren't really all that much bigger than conventional explosions" because it's measurable and absolutely obvious just looking at one that they are. I don't believe you when you say "AI is powerful". Show me a convincing demonstration--like a Trinity type test. Show me a company that is wildly exceeding what all the other companies can, or what any company could before AI. It doesn't have to be a hydrogen bomb, a low yield conventional test would suffice. But until you have that demonstration ready, all the talk is just noise.
      - cheevly 5mo ago
        What would you even need to see? I struggle to find things that I cant do at scale with AI, and it’s dumbfounding to read posts about people that are unconvinced.
thinkingemote 5mo ago
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI". My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning? (Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
- InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
  If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
- limflick 5mo ago
  I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.
- kartoffelsaft 5mo ago
  As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things: 1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality. 2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore. The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
- 5mo ago
rognjen 5mo ago
This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange. Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
  If they did use it then maybe in hindsight they regret it, realize they didn't learn much, realize the temptation to cheat yourself will always be there and that's not a good thing.
- kartoffelsaft 5mo ago
  I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to: > And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it? They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
- m0llusk 5mo ago
  Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.
- recursive 5mo ago
  Don't hate the player.
lenerdenator 5mo ago
Man... it's gonna absolutely suck when that guy dies.
cm2012 5mo ago
Real "plutonians cheering being told that Pluto is a real planet" energy.
- dude250711 5mo ago
  Plutonians are busy making circular stock deals with ceresians.
akudha 5mo ago
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
- tmp10423288442 5mo ago
  Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.
  - jjulius 5mo ago
    It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it. How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
- glaslong 5mo ago
  Having heroes is always risky, but I'm willing to take the risk on Woz alone. "I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good."
- kneel25 5mo ago
  So why’d he put his name onto a pump and dump crypto coin then
Aboutplants 5mo ago
This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids. Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
- kaffekaka 5mo ago
  The kids are smarter than many of us think. We owe to them a world where they can feel hope and see a future. But much of the AI hype is built around declaring how dangerous and futile everything is. The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
- morkalork 5mo ago
  This is positive compared to the college students I overheard lamenting that chatgpt ruined everything because now every evaluation is an in-class essay rather than something they could do at home at their leisure. And by lamenting, I mean loudly swearing about the bar and cursing their instructors.
noIdeaTheSecond 5mo ago
One perhaps unpopular opinion: Could it be that the current AI is beneficial for young people in the sense that it is making them stop looking at their phone for a bit, and realize that certain tech is not that important for human well beeing? The change is in their/our hands after all, we just need to become aware, believe and vote with our wallet and the whole society will change in the blink of an eye. The hard part is the awareness and believing.
- Tade0 5mo ago
  My experience as a parent is that gen alpha took note of the fact that their parents being on their phones means less attention, so it's possible they'll have a more sober view of the entire thing.
martythemaniak 5mo ago
There's been a massive mask-off shift amongst elites* the last few years where displaying open contempt and hatred towards normal people - employees, students, public servants, etc. You can see this most clearly near the epicentre of the SV executive class where layoffs are celebrated and the life of the remaining employees is made as shitty as possible (ie, Meta's keyloggers), but it is everywhere. Speakers gleefully mocking and chiding graduates about how fucked they are due to AI, opinion columns from oligarch-owned mass media about how ungrateful everyone is towards the president, democratic senators (!!) mocking their constituents for wanting health insurance, just absolute disgust and hatred dripping everywhere. * Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
onfir3 5mo ago
I always thought it means "authentic Italian"
- Ylpertnodi 5mo ago
  A greeting in Northern UK.
dedRtheGods 5mo ago
I actually disagree with Steve here. This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect. Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them. I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
casey2 5mo ago
These students? They are the worst students in decades if there is any generation that could be replaced by machines it's the latest.
yodsanklai 5mo ago
He seems to be a nice guy and this contrasts with big tech CEOs, but this is pretty demagogical. AI is going to causing disruption but is here to stay, so what should be done about it? "Think different", "you have actual intelligence" may be comforting and enough to be cheered but is not a very actionable advice.
passionfruit18 5mo ago
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passionfruit18 5mo ago
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firefoxd 5mo ago
I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.
maxdo 5mo ago
Populist , let’s invent Make intelligence great again :)
mspgrunt 5mo ago
Since no one here has linked the full speech, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbO7oFmEhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbO7oFmEhg
lousclues 5mo ago
I have been seeing so many bad commencement speeches that it's good to see someone actually deliver a nuanced and grounded approach that speaks to the issues of our time. Woz has definitely improved a lot in his public speaking over the years. Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
racl101 5mo ago
Wozniak is a man of the people.
stonecharioteer 5mo ago
This title makes me feel he cheered, not that he was cheered at.
charcircuit 5mo ago
>have AI actual intelligence AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone. >Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts. AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works. This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
throwatdem12311 5mo ago
Out of all of the OG “pirates of Silicon Valley” - Woz was always the coolest to me.
SingeDeakins 5mo ago
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imagetic 5mo ago
Wiz is the shit. The end.
wolvoleo 5mo ago
Haha this is a totally Woz thing to do <3 He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
oxag3n 5mo ago
Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI. Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers. Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting. Back then changes happened more gradually. It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison. > Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI. Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different. AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not. Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
  - Cabal 5mo ago
deferredgrant 5mo ago
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keeda 5mo ago
Personally, I think Jensen Huang had the most relevant message in his 2024 graduation speech; it transcends AI or any other contemporary issues, and it is simultaneously something people might not want to hear yet something they need to: "I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
gnarlouse 5mo ago
Woz rizz, Jobs dead

650 points by signa11 5mo ago

I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.

ramon156 5mo ago
Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
- block_dagger 5mo ago
  Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
- sweetheart 5mo ago
  They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
  - muddi900 5mo ago
    Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
    - sweetheart 5mo ago
      I think it’s possible.
    - darkwater 5mo ago
      Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
  - mherkender 5mo ago
    If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
  - globalnode 5mo ago
    Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
    - sweetheart 5mo ago
      Okay!
      - globalnode 5mo ago
        found the prompt "engineer"
- jappgar 5mo ago
  They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
  - aduwah 5mo ago
    There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
    - coffeefirst 5mo ago
      We are about to test that theory.
    - master-lincoln 5mo ago
      not even Bernie Sanders?
      - mythrwy 5mo ago
        probably not
  - maratc 5mo ago
    In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
    - jappgar 5mo ago
      They don't need money they just need votes. If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate. You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
      - maratc 5mo ago
        > If money can buy votes It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks." Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place. Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
- limflick 5mo ago
  I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
  - master-lincoln 5mo ago
    This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
    - bayindirh 5mo ago
      Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron. ...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
  - Jtarii 5mo ago
    The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
    - SecretDreams 5mo ago
      By what metrics? Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable. But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad. Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
limflick 5mo ago
I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit. On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ. I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy. Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
- porknbeans00 5mo ago
  no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
- cheschire 5mo ago
  His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
- simonh 5mo ago
  It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI. Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'. Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
embedding-shape 5mo ago
There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings. Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.

damnitbuilds 5mo ago

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juanani 5mo ago
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gambiting 5mo ago
>>In between going on Jew-hating Propal marches Just reminder that being against Israel or its actions in Gaza is neither antisemitic nor Jew-hating.
- dijit 5mo ago
  It's a valid reminder, but there are plenty of people who despise Jews who are currently operating with total indemnity with this as their defensive line. And even if you call them out, there are people who will openly defend them. I do think that this topic is much too disgusting for anyone to think that there are hero's in the conflict. I'm not Jewish, nor am I Arab, I have no skin in the game. But I don't like how readily we accept that cililians, women, children: are totally acceptable casualties as long as it's "$otherSide, they deserve it, $ourSide is just defending themselves". Gazans supporting Hamas and Israeli's defending the IDFs worst actions are all guilty in my mind and playing games implying one is worse is subtly letting the other side off the hook. If there is a god, Allah or Yaweh- the people who defend child murderers and rapists no matter the "side" are going to have defend their reasoning, I hope they're comfortable with that.
  - keybored 5mo ago
    Both-sides nonsense. We’re decades past assuming good faith from people who equate criticizing Israel with racism.
    - dijit 5mo ago
      There's so much documented evidence of people attacking jewish people who they call zionists without cause that I find this line of reasoning stupid. In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish and has visited Israel but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish. I'd totally buy your argument, criticising Hamas isn't the same as being racist to Muslims, and criticising the actions of Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic. I also buy the fact that Israel will defend themselves by claiming racism, something I've seen Muslims do in the UK too. I'm absolutely saying both sides, because ultimately both sides seem to think it's ok to murder children, or to use people as pawns to be be killed to further their expansionist efforts. But It's absolutely true that people are just abusing random jews under the mistaken belief that all jews are zionists, or all jews support israel. Fuck, even people who live in Israel will condemn IDF actions.. There exists nuance of people on the Palestinian side online, yet that affordance is not afforded to Jews. I find that quite ironic, and I'm personally not very chill with hypocrites. Anyone defending rape or child murder is a fucking monster. There is never valid justification, not even if the kid is carrying a suicide vest.

porknbeans00 5mo ago

good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.

LatencyKills 5mo ago
I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time. He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
deleted 5mo ago
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pera 5mo ago
It's a real shame there are no many people like Woz in the bay area

mustaphah 5mo ago

Can't locate the link to the actual speech

mplanchard 5mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234320

namenotrequired 5mo ago

The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title

weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
Not to me... Maybe a ESL thing
- master-lincoln 5mo ago
  "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence " Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker. The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know. Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific. How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
  - robrain 5mo ago
    Could also mean that he was cheered by the response to his comments and his disposition improved. There are layers of ambiguity in this headline.
  - rjh29 5mo ago
    While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines. For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..." Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.

feverzsj 5mo ago

He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.

konschubert 5mo ago
I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?
- psvv 5mo ago
  I see it as more iterative than revolutionary. I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this. And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search. The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
- 65 5mo ago
  No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary. Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- hackable_sand 5mo ago
  How so? What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
  - deleted 5mo ago

dchftcs 5mo ago

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

bayindirh 5mo ago
Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it. AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder. "Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently. We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
- limflick 5mo ago
  Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
  - holtkam2 5mo ago
    The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
    - roenxi 5mo ago
      > I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception. You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.

lnsru 5mo ago

Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.

Oras 5mo ago
It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers. I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
- bayindirh 5mo ago
  Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly. ...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
- acdha 5mo ago
  It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
- throwatdem12311 5mo ago
  Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management. AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse. That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper. Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.

vasco 5mo ago

Actual link to the quote video: https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA

ripe 5mo ago
The entire commencement program is here. Woz speaks at around the 42-minute mark. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40
- phyzix5761 5mo ago
  This one looks completely different from the short as well. There are now 3 known versions of this same line and all are different. Is it possible he gave the same speech to multiple audiences on that day?
  - jumpyfrog 5mo ago
    There're like 3 commencements 1st of May, 7pm - https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757 https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757 2nd of May, 10am - https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586 https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586 2nd of May, 3pm - https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855 https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855
phyzix5761 5mo ago
There's a live version of this video but it looks completely different: https://www.youtube.com/live/LHEW8Da5550?si=ZBEesfArnK4HSD1R&t=3601 https://www.youtube.com/live/LHEW8Da5550?si=ZBEesfArnK4HSD1R... Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.

Aboutplants 5mo ago

Finally someone smart enough to read the room!

theow838484jj 5mo ago

There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!

irishcoffee 5mo ago
Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce. At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world. Give it a bit more effort next time.
- theow838484jj 5mo ago
  20k tokens is about 40 pages of text. Weekly i do about 1000x that. (I am very low lever user) I really do not think there is a point to argue here. Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
  - irishcoffee 5mo ago
    > I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn! Yes, I can tell.
limflick 5mo ago
I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.
- theow838484jj 5mo ago
  Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.
5mo ago

jdmoreira 5mo ago

It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore. I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen. And yet, here we are. Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away. You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology? What have we done? People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.

dmacj 5mo ago
Are you seriously going to compare AI with shoes?
- jdmoreira 5mo ago
  did I compare AI to shoes anywhere in my text? They also used to teach comprehension when I went to school.
  - NichoPaolucci 5mo ago
    You chose shoes as your comparison point. Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials) You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
    - jdmoreira 5mo ago
      No I wasn't. This is the whole paragraph: > People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today. I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty). This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.

rpastuszak 5mo ago

Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligence, Artificial Intelligentsia - I’d argue that one of them is not real.

testfrequency 5mo ago

I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.

evilduck 5mo ago
How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.
- testfrequency 5mo ago
  A lot. Apple has pretty impressive retention, more than everywhere else I’ve worked in the Bay Area. Many people work there to retire, so the age demographic skews older. I worked there close to 20 years and that’s not even in the longer end comparatively. Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
  - 2b3a51 5mo ago
    Very successful large company retains staff until retirement. I find that vaguely reassuring. Hope the trend catches on. Thanks for posting this observation. Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
datakan 5mo ago
I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.

alsetmusic 5mo ago

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.

StilesCrisis 5mo ago
I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
- kevinsync 5mo ago
  Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so take that for what it is, just tossing my own pointless internet comment into the mix!
  - blanched 5mo ago
    I've only been to the low tens of graduations, but in my experience this is pretty common for a speaker. A couple highlights and otherwise a little boring :) Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
  - StilesCrisis 5mo ago
    In my case, I was not even graduating, I just heard that Woz was speaking and decided to attend. I don't regret attending, as I managed to get a picture with Woz after the ceremony and thank him for his amazing work, but the speech itself was extremely forgettable.

anonyfox 5mo ago

Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas. so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.

aubanel 5mo ago

This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.

jcgrillo 5mo ago
> Cope bias is powerful. Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.
- aubanel 5mo ago
  With what would I be coping? I'd much prefer (probably like most people) if AI were not that powerful. The harsh reality, and the stuff of cope, is that it's (too) powerful.
  - jcgrillo 5mo ago
    The trouble with this narrative is the evidence doesn't actually support it. If it is so powerful where are the results? If it was actually all that powerful it would be obvious. There wouldn't be any question. Nobody says "nuclear explosions aren't really all that much bigger than conventional explosions" because it's measurable and absolutely obvious just looking at one that they are. I don't believe you when you say "AI is powerful". Show me a convincing demonstration--like a Trinity type test. Show me a company that is wildly exceeding what all the other companies can, or what any company could before AI. It doesn't have to be a hydrogen bomb, a low yield conventional test would suffice. But until you have that demonstration ready, all the talk is just noise.
    - cheevly 5mo ago
      What would you even need to see? I struggle to find things that I cant do at scale with AI, and it’s dumbfounding to read posts about people that are unconvinced.

thinkingemote 5mo ago

Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI". My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning? (Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)

InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
limflick 5mo ago
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.
kartoffelsaft 5mo ago
As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things: 1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality. 2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore. The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
5mo ago

rognjen 5mo ago

This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange. Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
If they did use it then maybe in hindsight they regret it, realize they didn't learn much, realize the temptation to cheat yourself will always be there and that's not a good thing.
kartoffelsaft 5mo ago
I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to: > And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it? They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
m0llusk 5mo ago
Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.
recursive 5mo ago
Don't hate the player.

lenerdenator 5mo ago

Man... it's gonna absolutely suck when that guy dies.

cm2012 5mo ago

Real "plutonians cheering being told that Pluto is a real planet" energy.

dude250711 5mo ago
Plutonians are busy making circular stock deals with ceresians.

akudha 5mo ago

Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak Stark contrast to other tech leaders...

tmp10423288442 5mo ago
Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.
- jjulius 5mo ago
  It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it. How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
glaslong 5mo ago
Having heroes is always risky, but I'm willing to take the risk on Woz alone. "I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good."
kneel25 5mo ago
So why’d he put his name onto a pump and dump crypto coin then

Aboutplants 5mo ago

This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids. Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.

kaffekaka 5mo ago
The kids are smarter than many of us think. We owe to them a world where they can feel hope and see a future. But much of the AI hype is built around declaring how dangerous and futile everything is. The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
morkalork 5mo ago
This is positive compared to the college students I overheard lamenting that chatgpt ruined everything because now every evaluation is an in-class essay rather than something they could do at home at their leisure. And by lamenting, I mean loudly swearing about the bar and cursing their instructors.

noIdeaTheSecond 5mo ago

One perhaps unpopular opinion: Could it be that the current AI is beneficial for young people in the sense that it is making them stop looking at their phone for a bit, and realize that certain tech is not that important for human well beeing? The change is in their/our hands after all, we just need to become aware, believe and vote with our wallet and the whole society will change in the blink of an eye. The hard part is the awareness and believing.

Tade0 5mo ago
My experience as a parent is that gen alpha took note of the fact that their parents being on their phones means less attention, so it's possible they'll have a more sober view of the entire thing.

martythemaniak 5mo ago

There's been a massive mask-off shift amongst elites* the last few years where displaying open contempt and hatred towards normal people - employees, students, public servants, etc. You can see this most clearly near the epicentre of the SV executive class where layoffs are celebrated and the life of the remaining employees is made as shitty as possible (ie, Meta's keyloggers), but it is everywhere. Speakers gleefully mocking and chiding graduates about how fucked they are due to AI, opinion columns from oligarch-owned mass media about how ungrateful everyone is towards the president, democratic senators (!!) mocking their constituents for wanting health insurance, just absolute disgust and hatred dripping everywhere. * Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".

onfir3 5mo ago

I always thought it means "authentic Italian"

Ylpertnodi 5mo ago
A greeting in Northern UK.

dedRtheGods 5mo ago

I actually disagree with Steve here. This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect. Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them. I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).

casey2 5mo ago

These students? They are the worst students in decades if there is any generation that could be replaced by machines it's the latest.

yodsanklai 5mo ago

He seems to be a nice guy and this contrasts with big tech CEOs, but this is pretty demagogical. AI is going to causing disruption but is here to stay, so what should be done about it? "Think different", "you have actual intelligence" may be comforting and enough to be cheered but is not a very actionable advice.

passionfruit18 5mo ago

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passionfruit18 5mo ago

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firefoxd 5mo ago

I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.

maxdo 5mo ago

Populist , let’s invent Make intelligence great again :)

mspgrunt 5mo ago

Since no one here has linked the full speech, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbO7oFmEhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbO7oFmEhg

lousclues 5mo ago

I have been seeing so many bad commencement speeches that it's good to see someone actually deliver a nuanced and grounded approach that speaks to the issues of our time. Woz has definitely improved a lot in his public speaking over the years. Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.

racl101 5mo ago

Wozniak is a man of the people.

stonecharioteer 5mo ago

This title makes me feel he cheered, not that he was cheered at.

charcircuit 5mo ago

>have AI actual intelligence AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone. >Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts. AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works. This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.

throwatdem12311 5mo ago

Out of all of the OG “pirates of Silicon Valley” - Woz was always the coolest to me.

SingeDeakins 5mo ago

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imagetic 5mo ago

Wiz is the shit. The end.

wolvoleo 5mo ago

Haha this is a totally Woz thing to do <3 He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.

oxag3n 5mo ago

Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI. Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers. Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.

Aurornis 5mo ago
> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting. Back then changes happened more gradually. It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison. > Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI. Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different. AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not. Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
- Cabal 5mo ago

deferredgrant 5mo ago

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keeda 5mo ago

Personally, I think Jensen Huang had the most relevant message in his 2024 graduation speech; it transcends AI or any other contemporary issues, and it is simultaneously something people might not want to hear yet something they need to: "I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."

gnarlouse 5mo ago

Woz rizz, Jobs dead