I get so confused on this. I play around, test, and mess with LLMs all the time and they are miraculous. Just amazing, doing things we dreamed about for decades. I mean, I can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me.
And people just sit around, unimpressed, and complain that ... what ... it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly? This is the most amazing technology I've experienced as a 50+ year old nerd that has been sitting deep in tech for basically my whole life. This is the stuff of science fiction, and while there totally are limitations, the speed at which it is progressing is insane. And people are like, "Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience!"
In similar news: my left hand acquired my right hand today in an all stock deal valuing the combined hands at $1T. Praising the announcement my arms noted on the deal: “With these two hands now together, there’s nothing our combined fist of might can’t do.” Competitors, my left and right feet, declined to comment on the merger but are said to be in their own separate talks about a deal.
> my husband Tyler and I wanted that sense of community that feels like it’s only possible in the suburbs, but we believed we could achieve this while living in San Francisco.
This genuinely threw me because in my experience the suburbs are the antithesis of this, just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other.
Still, a heartwarming story all the same. And yes, this is _exactly_ what city living should enable.
He has done this move before with Tesla buying Solar City. When you do a deal with yourself you can assign any value you want to assets, it isn’t a competitive process. In the previous case Solar City was dying but its acquisition by Tesla was pitched as a great synergy.
So he just sold himself a company he already owns for a valuation that he himself assigned to that company but that was less than what he paid for it, and he paid entirely using “money” that has a made up value and which he issues himself?
I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
I began my career in a classified environment working on government satellite programs.
In my first week on the job, I was told, explicitly, that if I shared Classified or Controlled Unclassified information over unapproved channels, I would be reprimanded—likely fired, or less likely, prosecuted.
It was also made clear that safeguarding the nation's secrets from the carelessness of others was my responsibility, too.
It is mind-boggling that 18 people were on this thread, and none of them ever suggested that this discussion would be better served in a SCIF. To say nothing of SecDef starting the thread on Signal in the first place.
How many other such threads are active at the highest levels of government right now?
Does Chinese intelligence know?
I'm not suggesting punishment, or even prosecution, for the people involved. But the idea that this breach can occur with no accountability, consequences, or operational changes is unacceptable.
There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased.
It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and moved on (taoofmac.com, my blog, was started when I wrote a few very popular switcher guides, and even though I kept using the same domain name I see myself as a UNIX guy, not "just" a Mac user).
For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage).
Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_).
Here are the achievements of the Wrights with the 1903 Flyer:
1. First 3-axis flight controls
2. First propellor theory that was twice the efficiency of other airscrews
3. First aircraft engine that had twice the power/weight of other engines
4. First design that used a wind tunnel to get an efficient wing shape
5. First directed research and development program to identify the problems and solve them one by one, with the results culminating in the 1903 Flyer
6. Properly documented everything with photographs, notebooks and witnesses
7. The Flyer is hanging in a museum today, and exacting replicas have been built and flown exhibiting the same documented flight characteristics as the Flyer.
If you look at other contenders, they were all lacking these points. For example, with the Wright propellor, engine, and airfoil their craft had an enormous advantage over other designs that were trial and error.
All modern aircraft can trace their lineage back to the 1903 Flyer, and no other claimant. The others were all developmental dead ends.
P.S. About the catapult thing - are airplanes launched from aircraft carriers not airplanes? Besides, the 1903 Flyer did not use a catapult.
I'm an external individual to the US, but I must admit that some of the sentiments being expressed here in this thread and elsewhere about the lack of accountability deeply concern me, it reminds me of many things I saw growing up and still see today in south asia.
Independent of anything else, I do see the overton window shifting in the US, the most subtle of which are norms and expectations around acts of corruption.
Every nation has it's minor acts of corruption, small favours between friends, which I've always thought of as being functionally impossible to remove as they also allow for a flexible environment which allows things to get done.
However the norms seem to be shifting more towards the idea that those in power can act as they will, and in fact the expected thing is they will act to enrich themselves. I hope this does not happen, because this is death to entrepreneurship, this is one of those things that will poison the economy, when people no longer trust that what they make can be theirs, that others can look on in envy at the work they have built on their blood and sweat and can take it as their due because they have power.
That will create a chilling effect for anyone who wishes to create and will make them wonder as myself and many others have considered, whether it's better to create their life's work elsewhere.
I sincerely hope this doesn't happen here, once this mindset becomes a norm, it's incredibly hard thing to stamp out.
I ran into the same situation. I specifically told the salesperson I didn't want wifi, and they told me it's only if you want it to operate from your phone.
I was done installing it and got rid of the packaging by the time I read that it needs to use their website for some functions.
Beside the fact that I doubt the store would take it back after using it for a week or two and havi go no packaging, I had no time nor energy to remove it and return it.
I tried to contact Bosch who keep redirecting me to some other I ternal department and eventually stop responding.
Do NOT buy a Bosch diswashe, even though you pay full price upfront you cannot use all the functions without creating an account on their website and have them run those functions for you.
> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.
I suspect that this was the point of their using Signal, to avoid preservation of records.
Anyone who has ever dealt with the US justice system as just some regular bloke knows it is broken. 90% of it is about extorting the population for funding for the courts and cops. If you can't afford a lawyer, they will provide you with a joke. And if you can afford a lawyer, now its just a question if you are willing to spend more on your lawyer than the state is hoping to extort from you. If you are, you will get off no problem, if you aren't or can't, most courts are going to try and screw you over. Oh whats that, you want to actually fight your charges in court? Now you better not lose because you are on the hook for all of the money the court wants to believe it cost them to prosecute you. Oh you don't want to risk that and just settle for whatever minor fine the law says you might owe? Don't worry, the courts will still fuck you with the addition in mandatory minimum court fees, additional fees and fines not stipulated under the law you broke, inflated "programs" that they get kickbacks from, and an even better excuse for cops in the future to try and screw you over by painting you as some wanton criminal.
Just like healthcare, US justice is only for people with money.
As soon as he realizes (or a reasonable person would realize) that the group chat is not a hoax, and that he is getting confidential military information over that channel, his continued membership in the channel demonstrates intent to receive the information, which makes anything he writes about it in the future legally problematic. It's complicated and it's not like just receiving classified information from a source is intrinsically criminal, but it'll be the entire fact pattern he'd be confronted with by prosecutors.
So many strong opinions here from commenters who aren’t actually from Botswana. Let me tell you how we actually feel about it here.
We think it’s awesome! The establishment of a university of science and technology in Botswana has been a long hard road, and many mistakes have been made along the way. But the fact that Botswana now has the local skill to deploy a satellite and make use of the data it provides to inform decisions blows my mind.
I grew up in the village that now hosts the university. We were so isolated back then that I’d listen to the Voice of America and marvel at the things that were being done in the developed world, and wonder if we would ever be able to participate in that level. The fact that a smart kid can grow up to attend a local university and end up launching a SATELLITE INTO SPACE is incredible!
This also lets all of his co-investors in X, who were likely pissed that their shares tanked, exchange their shares at an inflated value (but one that still sees them losing 25% of their original investment) for shares in a trendy yet likely overvalued AI company that they consider to have more upside.
The other part of this is that if TSLA stock drops to $100-ish he'll be at risk of being margin called on the loans he took against his holdings to buy X. I wouldn't be surprised if this deal involves some X shares being sold for cash (that was raised from VCs) to pay down those loans, and/or the lenders agreeing to take xAI stock in lieu of cash.
This whole thing seems like a big pyramid scheme. I don't think this is the last time we've seen this type of move: he'll keep starting companies that are at the forefront of whatever the current hype cycle is, then leverage the extremely inflated valuations to benefit himself.
What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.
> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.
> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening.
In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small.
Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process.
Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it.
Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there.
I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems.
I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups.
Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes.
Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources.
Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.
This "practice-first, theory-later" pattern has been the norm rather than the exception. The steam engine predated thermodynamics. People bred plants and animals for thousands of years before Darwin or Mendel.
The few "top-down" examples where theory preceded application (like nuclear energy or certain modern pharmaceuticals) are relatively recent historical anomalies.
If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value.
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
I’ve only skimmed the paper - a long and dense read - but it’s already clear it’ll become a classic. What’s fascinating is that engineering is transforming into a science, trying to understand precisely how its own creations work
This shift is more profound than many realize. Engineering traditionally applied our understanding of the physical world, mathematics, and logic to build predictable things. But now, especially in fields like AI, we’ve built systems so complex we no longer fully understand them. We must now use scientific methods - originally designed to understand nature - to comprehend our own engineered creations. Mindblowing.
Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly among societies poorest. Therefore, due to fluoridation in water some people are less sick and have more money and therefore are more free.
The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent. It is the government forcing you to take a medication. It is coercive and therefore an attack on your freedom to not take medication. It is the government interfering in your life.
The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now. Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it. People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority. This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
I feel Jeff should have bit the bullet and just returned it. I know it's a waste of time, but these products have to be rejected at retail. Retailers will eventually get tired of the extra support burden and demand manufacturers drop stuff like this.
They should all get hit with the open box problem from the returns.
"AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias.”
We have no evidence that Wang "was" disappeared. We know that he's nowhere to be found, that the university put him on leave weeks ago [0], and that the FBI recently searched his home. Notably, the university put him on leave weeks before the FBI searched his home.
That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that they found in the aftermath. (Note that that's still pure speculation, but it's speculation that better accounts for all known facts.)
I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.
Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond.
I think that there are two kinds of people who use AI: people who are looking for the ways in which AIs fail (of which there are still many) and people who are looking for the ways in which AIs succeed (of which there are also many).
A lot of what I do is relatively simple one off scripting. Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases, won't be widely deployed, and whose outputs are very quickly and easily verifiable.
LLMs are almost perfect for this. It's generally faster than me looking up syntax/documentation, when it's wrong it's easy to tell and correct.
Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air.
Not every use case is like this, but there are many.
-edit- Also, when she says "none of my students has ever invented references that just don't exist"...all I can say is "press X to doubt"
And people just sit around, unimpressed, and complain that ... what ... it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly? This is the most amazing technology I've experienced as a 50+ year old nerd that has been sitting deep in tech for basically my whole life. This is the stuff of science fiction, and while there totally are limitations, the speed at which it is progressing is insane. And people are like, "Wah, it can't write code like a Senior engineer with 20 years of experience!"
Crazy.