mechagodzilla

10 ms·

91.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
This feels like a (paper) straw man - there's probably a lot of overlap between people that intentionally reduce or eliminate meat consumption and also worry about plastic waste/pollution. Similarly there is probably a lot of over
92.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
I would look at this somewhat differently - I think very 'narrow' jobs (with lots of people doing the same, very specific job) were previously more common. Think of the rooms of people replaced by 'mail-merge', for insta
93.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
My town did this, and I immediately went from picking up 1-2 plastic bags from my yard every week to basically zero in the last 4 years. I have no idea what the net impact on carbon emissions or other factors was, but the reduction in visib
94.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Ha, I was thinking of that when I typed it. I agree though - I think many of the AGI boosters on HN would be very surprised by how little economic productivity increased thanks to computers and the Internet.
95.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
What do you mean? It did continue to develop (right up to the latest 3nm process!), it’s just inherently lower density due to its structure.
96.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
It's interesting to think about some of the earliest machines we could have run a pretty great LLM on. A Cray XMP-EA from 1986 could address up to 2GW, which would have been 16GB. The XMP or earlier Cray-1 lines could also use multiple
97.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
@gitfan86 - You would measure that the same way productivity is always measured - The company's overall economic output would be unchanged, and their labor inputs would have decreased, so the total factor productivity would have increa
98.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
It's not difficult to measure though - we've been tracking total factor productivity of our economy for decades. Steam power, electrification, computers - all of these things had huge, measurable impacts on the amount of economi
99.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
I think for us to say it's "beginning to have a significant impact on the economy", there needs to be an actual measurable increase in productivity due to AI-enabled automation, which so far has been elusive. It might be impa
100.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Alphafold was largely trained on the structures in the Protein Data Bank, which includes lots of important protein targets. Just by virtue of evolutionary biology, many proteins are variants of one another, so if you're doing somethi
101.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
I just think the impact of such a device would be on the order of "a marginally better youtube for DIYers" rather than "put all the trade workers out of business." I'm not even convinced a lot of the more recent AI
102.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Even in that very optimistic vision of the future: * You don't have the tools or supplies on hand (just let that pipe keep flooding your basement until an amazon delivery arrives!), and many of them are expensive and sufficiently spe
103.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Given the lifetime of the equipment and the relatively rapid transformation our power grid is undergoing, there are probably few places in the US where a heat pump doesn’t come out significantly on top emissions-wise. With an entirely natur
104.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom) a lot in recent years. To me it is an extremely fun, human-
105.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Those look far more like typos by an adult than how a 5-6 year old would write, especially with the long stretches of perfectly spelled text. Children learning to write usually make phonetic guesses about the spelling.
106.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
I think the past twenty or so years of technology development has mostly pointed to relentless consolidation and re-centralization.
107.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
It probably affects what the pack considers 'hard' or 'easy' more than anything else
108.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
This sort of reminds me of all of the 'high-level' hardware languages that have mostly failed to catch on. As an ASIC designer, you're pretty much never limited by your typing speed (and much more frequently limited by tool r
109.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
No, the density of the object is less than water, not the density of the material. The Duck is made of plastic, and it traps air. Similarly, you can make a boat that floats in water out of concrete or metal. It is an important distinction w
110.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
An obvious concern seems like any LLM-style 'agent' that can use your credentials to act on your behalf (financial, email, file access, etc.)
111.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Right - as the biggest consumer of petroleum, gasoline subsidizes a lot of other uses that would be much less attractive otherwise.
112.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
In terms of impact, think of it this way - As long as you sell your ICE car to someone else, it's still being driven and maybe it's displacing the purchase of a new ICE car, which is what we really want to prevent. Ideally we wo
113.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
The availability of the auto-text-firehose of LLMs will almost certainly make google search worse as it just gets overwhelmed with spam.
114.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
I love this project! My kid plays ClassiCube on an old 400 MHz G3 iMac and it's perfectly adequate performance-wise.
115.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
You can choose to place a high value on spending time with one's family, and that's fine, but that's very different than making the "incredibly short-sighted" economic decision to quit your job because of very tem
116.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Even if you were actually at a pure breakeven for the stay-at-home partner for the first year: * Childcare costs decrease with age, and decrease substantially when your child reaches school age. Full-time childcare costs are typically only
117.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
That would be option 1 - I could easily see insurance companies saying that insuring a shingle roof costs 2-3x what insuring a metal roof costs, but then it's a question of who pays to replace an existing shingle roof with a much more
118.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
It's more that those states are becoming the most expensive to maintain intact houses in , with the increased insurance a side effect of that. I know someone in TX that has needed a new roof like 6-7 times in 10 years because of hail
119.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
Electricity from solar panels on your roof is in the range of 16-23% efficient, but there are no distribution losses. Electricity from a coal plant or single-cycle natural gas plant is ~30-40% efficient, and a combined-cycle natural gas pla
120.
by mechagodzilla 3y ago
But it didn’t really “replace” anyone in this case - you started a new company that might never have existed, and it might only be economically viable because you didn’t need to hire those people. Voila! We have a net increase in employme

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