api

31 ms·

631.
by api 7mo ago
I worry that blaming AI at all actually incentivizes humans to offload things to AI that should not be offloaded, since it lets them escape blame.
632.
by api 7mo ago
It's not an AI error. It's a human error in mis-using AI in this way. Saying it's an AI error is like saying a hole in your drywall is a hammer error. Unfortunately we'll probably see a trend of people using AI and then
633.
by api 7mo ago
Metal with data streamed to cloud and cloud as hot backup is something some people already do. If the metal dies in a catastrophic way (multiple nodes at once and loss of quorum, catastrophic DC outage, etc.) you spin it up in AWS.
634.
by api 7mo ago
Those benefits are at least partly lies though. The tooling — K8S with all its YAML, Terraform, Docker, cloud CLI tools, etc. — is pretty hideously ugly and complicated. I watch people struggle to beat it into shape just like they did with
635.
by api 7mo ago
Yeah, this is really about how ludicrously overpriced big cloud is. I’ve got a first gen M1 Max and it destroys all but the largest cloud instances (that cost its entire current market value per month!), at least in compute. It’s a laptop!
636.
by api 7mo ago
This is called the AI effect: we stop calling it AI when it works. Its goal post moving to keep the sci-fi term sci-fi. There’s a similar thing with transhumanist “enhancement” or “life extension” stuff. When it actually works we call it me
637.
by api 7mo ago
Seems like you could get a very similar phenomenon in lavishly funded hot startups. The company's stock is the product. The product only has to be good enough to look plausible. Growth can be bought by selling $1 bills for $1.50 and by
638.
by api 7mo ago
My take, unfortunately, is that Zig might be a more modern C but that gives us little we don’t already have. Rust gives us memory safety by default and some awesome ML-ish type system features among other things, which are things we didn’t
639.
by api 7mo ago
A pattern I've noticed for a very long time: A lot of times the path to the highest performing CPU seems to be to optimize for power first , then speed, then repeat. That's because power and heat are a major design constraint tha
640.
by api 7mo ago
Replacing all coal for electricity and leaving industry alone would be a gigantic dent in carbon emissions. Just that. Even if some of that replacement is with gas it still helps. Gas emits about half the carbon per kWh.
641.
by api 7mo ago
AI has the potential to level the playing field somewhat between open source and commercial software and SaaS that can afford armies of expensive paid developers. Time consuming work can be done quickly at a fraction of the cost or even alm
642.
by api 7mo ago
It also erodes copyright. A decent amount of commercial software can be AI cloned with no copyright violation. A lot of SaaS too, especially if AI can run a simple deploy. We might be approaching a huge deflationary catastrophe in the cost
643.
by api 7mo ago
Steel is also a small percentage of coal use. The vast majority of coal is used for electricity generation.
644.
by api 7mo ago
“How can you have an economy with no customers?” We are getting there. Real estate grows without bound. Wages are stagnant in real terms. Job losses. Inflation. I suppose a few mega corps and rich dudes could buy stuff from each other.
645.
by api 7mo ago
If you like good indie sci-fi make sure you see Sleep Dealer, Primer, Banshee Chapter, and Moon. Going back further I’d add Pi. This one’s not quite sci-fi but if you like indie and very weird and cultural references that are really deep cu
646.
by api 7mo ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a valid point. This neuron chip stuff is far less problematic than a lot of animal testing where you clearly have a whole organism that experiences something. Factory farming too. The way we treat
647.
by api 7mo ago
It’ll take longer for two reasons. One is that it’s a more complicated part with tougher fab requirements. Two is that it’s not a commodity. AMD can’t make nVidia GPUs. They have to design their own. Everyone has patents and trade secrets a
648.
by api 7mo ago
That’s a great point, though I would add the caveat that I do find moral complexity interesting. But that doesn’t require grey or outright antiheroes. A hero can be complex, or can be someone who was once more grey or even a villain and i
649.
by api 7mo ago
Cloud has done a truly epically awesome job at this. People are now afraid to set stuff up.
650.
by api 7mo ago
I’ve been in tech for a long time and have seen RAM shortages and price spikes before. This one’s fairly bad but they resolve in 1-3 years.
651.
by api 7mo ago
Big cloud is ludicrously expensive. It’s truly amazing. Bandwidth is even worse. It’s like a 10000X markup.
652.
by api 7mo ago
The prevailing narrative is that the optimism collapsed because the real future didn't turn out like we hoped, but I don't think that's it. A lot of very optimistic sci-fi was written right after two world wars. I think it&#x
653.
by api 7mo ago
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future. It&
654.
by api 7mo ago
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre
655.
by api 7mo ago
Isn’t that a proxy for aging and lower birth rates?
656.
by api 7mo ago
That’s the economy in general. Labor saving innovations increase productivity but do not usually reduce work very much, though they can shift it around pretty dramatically. There are game theoretic reasons for this, as well as phenomena lik
657.
by api 7mo ago
These apparatchiks have to know they mostly exist to be speed bumps for the bus.
658.
by api 7mo ago
This was true until the advent of nuclear energy, and became very much less true after the addition of solar PV, industrial-scale wind, and Li-Ion (and now Na-Ion) batteries. I'd say this statement has been almost entirely false since
659.
by api 7mo ago
This is honestly much, much scarier than climate change. We can adapt to a changing climate but not if we're losing IQ and focus.
660.
by api 7mo ago
I've been wondering how long it would take for tobacco to make a comeback given that we seem to be in a weird era where it's some kind of flex to embrace idiotic ideas. Nicotine (without tobacco e.g. Zyn or gum) does seem to have

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