I don’t think it’s any more facile to use the term “intelligence” to describe the synthesis engines that we call “AI” when we use the same word to describe the gradient-seeking behaviors of slime molds.
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
I very much agree with this position. And it didn’t even have to be AI.
It’s possible that sufficiently advanced “dumb” compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - that’s happened in other professions. We always joked about how we’re automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity.
When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.
If filling those boxes was so easy, you won't have issues filling up republican boxes with content they want to hear to get funding, right?
That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.
It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.
You’re inventing an argument I didn’t make. OpenBSD doesn’t own “open”. Literally no one is saying that. What I did say is that openrsync is named that because the OpenBSD team names their projects that way. The “open” in this project means that it came from OpenBSD, not that that it’s in contrast to rsync being proprietary (which it isn’t).
My thought upon reading this is why would Apple or Android bother including rsync? I've noticed that I've needed to install it manually on fresh installs of Debian, FreeBSD...
But then, I just checked a recent Mac that I don't use much and haven't put much on, and it's installed.
I was reluctant to try progressive lenses at first as well. Ended up loving them. Look ahead to see far, look down to see the car dashboard or your phone.
Of course, being a programmer I have another pair of glasses just for monitors. If your work doesn't involve reading a lot maybe you can get away with just progressives, but this is HN so not likely.
I keep seeing this argument in various places on HN that usage implies a positive opinion, when it very much does not. AI has put most people in prisoner's dilemma, and in prisoner's dilemma you can simultaneously play the game and hate the game. To go through a few of your examples:
> Students using AI to do homework
Either you don't use AI, where you have to spend a lot of time studying or graduate bottom of your class, or you do and get on with your life. You can acknowledge that the studying is the valuable part (most students do in my experience) yet skip it for whatever reason (procrastination / life issues / etc).
> Teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students
We've added an extra step to their already overloaded schedules. If they don't do this they're basically encouraging students to cheat this way.
> Translations
You can now easily get a translation with much better accuracy than before (presumably, I'm a monolingual English speaker), but now you aren't talking to any other human beings for this information. This goes for a lot of other knowledge-value work / hobbies too where asking questions is valuable.
I started going down the path of building a ripple carry adder already (which seems to work fine). Then I was going to try for a full on ALU, then some sort of ISA that sits on top of it all.
I have no idea what the end result will look like if it all comes together. Hopefully I'll find some weird primitives along the way. :D
It's very hand-wavy, but I'm kinda hoping I can somehow have a machine manually constructed out of neurons that can naturally interact with one built with looser hebbian learning rules.
I started using Claude web with sonnet over chatgpt before any of the coding tools came out and noticed other founders were using it too and the reason was pretty simple - it was much less likely to hallucinate non existing APIs than ChatGPT
> And running `zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe` takes a couple seconds on my computer.
What kind of computer are you on? I just ran that test (latest master build, first run):
~ % time zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe
file.zig:1:17: error: expected type expression, found '{'
if (2 * 2 != 5) { @panic("fail"); }
^
zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe 0.03s user 0.44s system 505% cpu 0.094 total
Granted I'm on an M4 Mac but I wouldn't expect another system to be 20x slower.
Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books.
If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.
Programs helping vulnerable groups, domestic violence survivors, children, the elderly, non-white people etc. (in other words, "woke" social programs) are usually the first to get gutted by a Republican administration looking to "tighten their belts."
And I assume given the current political atmosphere in the US that this was made even easier by the fear that children might be exposed to wrongthink. Libraries are a known vector for exposure to un-Christian propaganda the "gay agenda," and we can't have that.
Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
Sure but theres a level of uncertainty being expressed for a paid service that you don't see elsewhere.
Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
